She stands beside the headboard with her back against the wall. “I’m really glad you made it back.”
Her nipples are hard through her sheer white gown, the shape of her body no secret beneath it.
“I’m glad, too.” I can smell her after two steps, her sweet perfume and musky arousal.
“Meridiana told me that each time we couple with you, it strengthens us both. The gifts we share with each other. Did you know that?” she breathes, eyes flicking over me.
“I do, and you do?”
“Or she does, or Finna. Whoever you couple with.”
My hand skims her waist, her hip. “Meridiana tells a lot of naughty tales.”
“That’s what I thought–” Her lips crush mine and our teeth clack together.
“There’s only one way to know for sure…”
Freya hikes her dress, plants one foot on the bed and rocks forward, supported by the wall. Her pussy already glistens.
“Hard. Fast.” She softly snaps her orders while I tear at my belt.
I crouch, grip her ass and work inside her with a single thrust.
Her nails bite deep in the meat of my neck. “Don’t wait...don’t-”
She slouches, raising to my cock, opening her thighs wide. The change in angle rakes the top of her pussy over my head, my shaft. I rip the shirt from her, and her heavy breasts raise, then fall, bouncing as they drop, then keep bouncing as I fuck her, my cock plunging deep inside, over and over.
She leans forward, kisses me, hard. My lip between her teeth is a promise, and she sucks it as she pulls away. Her tits are in my hands, and I roll them, push them together so her nipples brush. I roll them, and they cling to each other, gripping wetly before releasing. They’re hard as I take them both in my mouth at once, and I suck, pulling them backward until they pop from my lips.
Freya moans, takes me deeper, all the way to my root. She grinds against me, and the head of my cock against the wall of her pussy finishes me. I bury my face in the sweat of her neck and cum, and the noise that comes from me doesn’t sound entirely human. She feels so hot, inside, so good, and I slide quicker, lubricated by my cum.
Freya clings to me, and I can feel the moment she tenses, so close. I thrust once more, hard, so deep inside that I can grind her clit with the base of my cock. Her body and pussy writhe a moment before she collapses back against the wall, breathless and pink.
“Fuck me.”
Freya licks her lips and nods. Her hand flashes out and she drags her nails down my arm without restraint. This time wounds hardly form before they’ve healed.
“It works!” she gasps.
“Do you feel different?”
She closes her eyes. Her fingers flex. “I do.”
“Fuck me,” I whisper again.
Freya smooths down her dress. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for anyone.”
I feel some serious regret that it’s time to leave.
–The Tyral Wood–
Kumiko
I pass from the garden through a shallow cave set in a cliff that stretches away on both sides. The portal out shimmers into existence next to me. I ignore it and examine my surroundings. No way I’m taking the portal now.
The camp ahead is the sort weary travelers dream of on long treks. A fire crackles in a well-made pit ringed by stump stools. A weathered but sturdy field tent sits beyond. There’s a trestle table set with food, mostly roasted vegetables and greens, and bottles of what look like small beer or. Nearly all of this is housed by ruins, white pillars and crumbling walls similar to those of Finna’s city. But it feels more austere, more ancient or more long-abandoned. The ground tells a story of the history, eroded bricks assailed by weeds poked through their connective mortar.
I turn a slow circle, marveling despite all I’ve seen. This must have been a magnificent room, long ago. Like Finna’s library its broken to nearly foundations and weathered, open to the sky. Its mosaic floor is now more like a yard, plucked by grass and woven with roots.
A path runs from the camp, set by twin pillars at each side just at the place where it reaches the ruins. They tower above the forest like remnants of a Titan city, maybe the skeleton of a gate or triumphal arch. Both columns are set with a face; on the far side it appears as a gorgon mask with wide mad eyes and a tongue that curls wickedly toward the heavens. Closest to me, the face is more human, stone features twisted with anguish. Its eyes loll heavenward, mouth open in an eternal moan.
Almost touching this column stands a side wall, the only one still remotely intact. There’s something carved across its face. Six or eight lines of some long-dead language.
Sword drawn I move close to examine it. I paid some attention to my tutors, but the loops, dashes and diacritic marks are nothing I recognize.
I peer beyond the wall. A pond. A wooded glade. I take the place in details, not a complete picture, trying to understand what to do, how to defend.
A storm roar blows from beyond a tree line that swallows the brown ribbon of road. Its violence and force blow dust and grit from the ruin.
I squint into it and crouch behind a pile of loose bricks at the column’s base.
A crash in the thicket becomes outright destruction. The snap of wood, the terrified shiver of leaves torn free by chaos, and pounding. Furious, war-horse pounding.
What the fuck could make this noise? An ent? A forest giant?
Turns out, it’s worse than I imagined.
The beast tears along the road, aimed dead for the camp.
Its shape is right, but its size and composition are so very wrong.
A wolf. It’s half the height of a tree, like pack beasts of the Eastern rainwilds. It has the face of a nightmare, glowing green eyes against midnight fur. A long snout slavers and reveals the razor peaks of white teeth. A wolf’s body but it has the gait of an ape, paws like a steed’s that tear the ground, pulling chunks of earth that fall behind in a stone rain. It radiates menace, hunger, a machine made to rend and kill.
I almost fall over wrestling my blades free. If that thing is coming to fight me, I can almost guarantee I’m fucked. It’s closed the distance to camp faster than I could ever outrun.
It’s not until he’s a few yards away that I realize he’s not alone.
Compared to what chases her, the creature is miniature, a brown blur dwarfed as she keeps just ahead of her pursuer. She doesn’t make a sound, no cries or screams. Not even the furious padding of her long feet does more than knock up dust.
She’s a bolt of lightning racing along the old road, and she’s losing.
Before I can climb the bricks and intercept them, almost before I can think, the wolf lunges. His breath, like a gale, stumbles her. It’s enough. He rounds the predator’s hook of his head. Massive jaws close around her, snapping shut with a violence I can hear in the meeting of its teeth
Now she screams, not with pain but despair and anguish.
Her scream breaks off and she disappears, evaporates into a thousand sparkles that blow away on the wind.
The wolf stops its flinging and howls its rage into the sky. It circles, noses, and digs furrows in the road, sending up a shower of bricks that ricochet off the wall behind me. I duck too slow; one smashes my back, buckling my knees.
My sword swings around on instinct, to block, defend. Its teeth will be on me any second.
It doesn’t so much as look at me. With a last frustrated howl the wolf disappears, too. It splinters into a thousand shards of darkness that swirl across the ground, melting into the shadows of the landscape.
Fuck.
I stagger back into the camp. How was I supposed to react fast enough? There was no clue, no warning. I failed the fucking trial before I was all the way inside. How could I have stopped that thing?
I pull the astratempus from my chest piece. The hand still moves.
Something’s wrong with all this.
No artifact, no idea what happened to her, and no time. The hand’s position remin
ds me that Finna’s realm took most of my day.
I run the length of the camp, looking for clues, anything to help me understand this trial, what the hell I’m supposed to do.
From the far side of the camp I hear something.
A whinny.
The horse was not here a second ago. It stands beyond the wall, grazing at well-trod patch of grass. Its calm, tail flicking carelessly, as if there wasn’t a monster on the loose.
Bizarre.
It’s gorgeous, a palfrey built for speed, greater than any my father bred on our estate. Dark chestnut skin ripples in the faded sunlight, and it stamps muscled legs, mashing the grass. The mount is easily fourteen hands at the withers and saddled. It’s obviously trained; it doesn’t gallop away or even rear as I approach.
Do I ride it somewhere? Is it a tool for the trial? Maybe a mount for the artifact- if I find her again.
A big if. But the trial isn’t over, and I haven’t been sucked into oblivion, so there must be a way.
Or maybe…
I’m making a dangerous assumption, here. I don’t actually know who that girl was. She might be a distraction, wasting precious time. I cringe. Maybe the horse is the artifact.
Resting a hand on its flank I peek around, self-conscious. Wait, what the hell am I embarrassed for? There’s no one else here, and I’ve seen weirder things. On a quick crouch I peek between the horse’s legs.
Nope. Definitely not the artifact.
The horse snorts, and I swear he’s laughing.
“Here boy,” I run my hands down his muzzle, let him smell me. A horse has a personality all his own. I’ve ridden horses I could take home as a pet, and one sharp-hoofed bastard I wouldn’t turn my back on.
He snorts over me in a hot, wet puff of breath and bristly hairs like he already knows me. I shouldn’t feel surprised. Magical trial, horse popping into existence, already used to me. Nothing should surprise me anymore.
So...what next? “You seem to be from around here. Got any hints?” He snorts again, flicks his tail, and shuffles to greet me with his flank.
“Well if that’s all you –“
Screaming. The same scream that punctuated the wolf’s attack.
It’s so loud in my head that I clamp hands to my ears. But it seems to fade as it grows closer. An echo more than a sound. I spin in every direction. Where is it coming from?
Fragments of shadow flow over the ground like water, leaving blades of grass and cragged cliffs flat and one-dimensional.
Air warps above the path, not five yards from where I stand. The horse backs away, eyes rolling in alarm. His reins tug in my grip, a limp grip with my teeth grit against the sound of screams that only I can hear.
The shimmer becomes a flame. It sparks and there she is.
She kneels on all fours, silent and still but her scream echoes like wind in the trees.
I run to her, grab her arm ready to flee, to drag her away from shadows slithering into a pool behind us on the path.
She shies from me, then strangles my arm - far too strong for how tiny she is. When she springs to her feet, the impact of her body and the tread of her arms around my waist nearly bowls me over. She’s soft, shaking, murmuring something over and over, her breath hot against a seam in my leathers.
Hair on my neck prickles but I don’t see a thing. The only other living creature besides the girl, is the horse. It looks at me then wanders off, head down for more grass.
I feel something, but I can’t see it. “Tell me.”
She shakes her head.
I wrap my arms around her. The top of her head barely reaches my breastbone. Her hair tickles my chin. Hair and something else. A hat? I crane to see her better.
Ears. They come from sides of her head, just a little above where ears should be, but they arc from her mass of cotton-white hair and dangle softly around her face. They look exactly like…bunny ears.
They’re bunny ears.
Okay, maybe this place can still surprise me.
She’s been back for less than a minute, but she’s repeated the same phrase at least a hundred times. I lean further back, hoping space will decipher her words.
“Thank you. Thank you. Oh Gods, thank you.” Over and over.
“Hey! Hey, it’s okay...”
“So long,” she pants, and I’m glad to hear any other words from her. “It’s been so long. No aspirant ever makes it this far.”
I take shoulders in my hands, step back. Her rosy-grey eyes are beautiful, luminous, shimmering with resolve, but there’s weariness there, too.
“Does this happen for the full cycle?”
She winces, and nods.
She’s shaking like a leaf, her thick downy hair brushing her shoulders. Her clothes are made from the forest. Tan fibers woven into two pieces cover a lithe, athletic body out of necessity, leaving arms and belly bare. Her clothes and her shape are made for speed and flexibility. And her feet…they’re paws. They poke from beneath her leg wraps, short white hair spotted and sable. Her four toes are tipped in short dark claws. She bounces in place now, studying me but ready to erupt into motion at any moment.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s been so long since an aspirant made it this far. None this cycle. I thought I’d be stuck forever having my soul shredded and…” She trails off, shudders.
“Your soul? Wait...what’s your name?”
She smiles, and it’s like the sun erupting through storm clouds. She’s beautiful. Not pure seduction or angelic bravery. More grounded, earthy.
“Kumiko,” she says. “I’m Kumiko. We only have a moment.”
“Lir.” I nod to the darkness rippling now, seething on the path. “What the hell happened?”
She bounces more urgently. “This trial is a cycle. It begins when I emerge and ends with my soul being shredded. And it repeats for as long as an aspirant remains in the temple.”
This is so fucking cruel I can’t get my head around it.
“You have to break that cycle.” Her words are flat, a script she reads from.
“The wolf?”
Her eyes widen. She looks ready to run. “Fenrir. A demigod of dominance and destruction. I am his prey, and my curse is to be taken. He does not tire and cannot be killed in his god-form.”
Great. Sounding better and better. “Why would Cocidius do this?”
“Cocidius saved me from it. It was much worse, before he added me to the temple. One god cannot break the curse of another- a curse’s conditions must be met - but Cocidius mitigated the horror, and through the aspirant, gave me many, many chances at breaking the curse. More than I had when my realm stood apart.”
Sounds like a shite gift, but Kumiko sounds grateful.
Around us, shadows gather beyond the path. They flow like dark rivers filling the pool.
Kumiko’s breath comes in tiny gasps. “I have to run now. If you are hurt, or mortally wounded, you’ll appear next run.” She rests a hand on my wrist. “Do not fight him. Study the land, the clues. I don’t know how to break the cycle, but I know there’s a way. Cocidius promised me. Her eyes are haunted. “No aspirant has ever stopped this.”
“Kumiko…”
“No time!” Her words are panicked. She grabs my hand and forces something against my palm. “See what you can do with this; it isn’t mine.”
She pecks my cheek and then she springs, disappears down the road with an arrow’s speed. This is what the horse is for. Every creature present, save for me, is impossibly fast.
I dash to it, punched in the back by Fenrir’s roar. I vault into the saddle, and the horse doesn’t shy or rear. One thing in my favor, at least.
The last shadows coalesce. They meet in a point and froth, billow into the air like smoke.
Fenrir molds from the darkness, legs, torso, and head animating as shadows stream across the ground.
All the while, I hear the echo of his rage and hunger pulsing in my head like a dark heartbeat.
With a chaos that dances my mou
nt, Fenrir becomes violently solid. His head raises to the sky, he takes a long sniff, an influx of air that sounds like a blade scraping across a gravestone.
Stalking his prey.
She said not to fight him, but how does that make sense? It goes against my every instinct so hard my gut twists.
I have to try. If I reset like she did, then all I have to worry about is time. Which admittedly is short, but not desperate. I learned with Freya that taking chances in a place like this is sometimes the only way, no matter how potentially fatal.
Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
Fenrir explodes into motion.
I spur the horse, my blades trailing at my sides ready to strike. It’s like riding at a mountain, but I’ve outwitted a succubus, defeated a poison marsh, and killed a Goddess of death. I can fucking do this.
I leap, slide across the ground in Fenrir’s path. The world is sharp animal musk and dark soil choking my breath. He can’t stop, or won’t. His claws till the earth beside my head. His taut belly hangs above me. I stab, a killing blow that should spill his entrails hot against my face.
My swords shatter, chunks of blade embedding in my face.
He doesn’t so much as stumble as he passes, but one massive back paw swipes, kicking me. I fly up, spin like a leaf and smash into one of the pillars. My spine snaps into individual vertebra, my ribs shatter, and blood oozes from my mouth on a gurgle. Blackness is immediate; it evaporates coherent thought. I slide to the ground, watch helpless as Fenrir rounds the path.
I can’t moan, can’t breathe. The simplest option is not always the best. Remember that. Remember…
Darkness.
Light.
I drop to all fours, moaning a low animal noise before I catch myself.
I stand, stretch, the memory of agony still fresh, even if I can’t feel it. My body is hale and whole but the memory...agony is fresh. Fortunately Freya’s really prepared me for this.
But I’m getting really fucking tired of almost dying.
Each trial has its own rules, and in some of them, my blades are useless. It’s hard to accept, as a warrior.
I turn to the sound behind me, lunge just in time to catch Kumiko. She falls against my chest again like a living memory but this time, she steps away.
Temple of Cocidius - Book 2 Page 6