The Ring of Perliss Ch. 01: Queened

Orin learns magic from Abab-Baria and gains the Ring of Perliss, and the adventure of Lia's life begins with a journey into the mountains.

Author's Note: This story is set some years after my Zar series, and a few months after The Maze. Future chapters - which there will be, eventually - may even tie in loosely with Vale, but how closely I'm still uncertain. None of those are essential reading, however.

Desert Queen

I had long known about my uncle's magic ring. It was a well kept secret from the rest of the world, but I had witnessed the remarkable effect of it once as a child, and since then it had been a secret shared between us.

It was a fantastical thing. In a world where magic existed mostly in rumours and stories, to actually witness the impossible was revelatory. Magic was real and undeniable - but I could share this knowledge only with my uncle. I could not say to my friends, when they laughed at my apparent gullibility over tales of wizardry and creatures of legend, "But I know magic is real. I have seen it with my own eyes!"

And I had. My parents had died when I was young, and as an orphan boy I lived sometimes with this relative, sometimes with that, and of them all my uncle was my favourite - and I, it seemed, was his.

Uncle Bill, I called him, though others knew him as Sir William. He was wealthy and, for the most part, well respected in the community. He had never married, despite many attempts by well bred ladies to entice him to share his fortune with them, but a scandalous rumour persisted through the years that he was visited by a young woman of ill repute.

No one actually claimed to know who the young woman was, none having more than glimpsed her in the distance, but by her furtive visits the illness of her reputation was beyond question. However, since Uncle Bill was never so tasteless as to parade the young woman before them, the matter remained one of local gossip and crude speculation. After all, they said, a man in his sixties did well to keep a young woman's flame burning for him.

The young woman, for I saw her often, had a pretty face and bright blue eyes. She was tall and slender, and her long, wavy hair was blonde and easily tangled. Most remarkable, perhaps, were her breasts that threatened always to burst any shirt she wore.

No, most remarkable was that Sir William was, even at sixty, broad shouldered and muscular. Had he stood side-by-side with the young woman, he would have been like a mighty oak beside a sapling. And yet, amazingly, they were the same person.

"Call me Lia," she said, her voice sultry and feminine, the first time I witnessed the transformation. I had barged into my uncle's room, angry at some absurd gossip I had overheard in the village. He had been in the act of hurriedly wrapping a bedsheet about himself, a futile attempt to conceal the truth, and I gaped in astonishment as his masculine figure contracted before my eyes.

My uncle became a woman - that same woman that I had just heard described. "Call me Lia," she said eventually as we stared at each other in shocked silence. "Say nothing of this to anyone," she pleaded, "and I promise to explain all tomorrow."

I nodded slowly and retreated. What I had seen could be nothing other than magic. Were it not that I felt myself to be intruding in a stranger's room - a woman's bedroom, indeed - I would likely have demanded an explanation there and then, but I retreated to my own room and lay there in the dark, piecing together the rumours and gossip with what I had just seen.

Sir William was not being visited at night by a woman of ill repute. He was that same woman, magically transformed, sneaking out of and into his own home. How, and for what reason, I had no idea, but clearly it was a disguise he adopted for some secret mission.

My uncle had been in the wars. He had travelled far and seen much, and in the process had gathered a great fortune, and when asked about it his tales were so improbable and full of absurd magics that no one ever believed them. When challenged, he would laugh and wink, and admit that the truth was far less interesting.

But maybe not. After breakfast the following morning, he sat down with me in his study. "Deep in the Iskreti," he began.

"Where the dragons live," I interrupted.

"Where the dragons are born," he corrected. "It was to escape from a young wyrm that we took shelter in the ruins of an ancient palace there."

"Was it hot?" I always imagined the desert to be hot with dunes like a vast sea of shifting sand.

"No. This was in the north where it is cool but so dry the land itself is cracked and broken. There are river beds there that run with water maybe once a year."

"How does anything survive there?" I knew that caravanserais took water with them on their crossings, but there were creatures that made the desert their home.

My uncle nodded. "There is water in the Iskreti, but you have to dig deep for it. In that ruined palace we found a well that, with some effort, we made usable again. The water we found was clean and good, and without it we would not have completed our crossing. The wyrm ate many of our mules and with them our water."

I had never seen a dragon, except in paintings. I imagined a wyrm to be much like them, but without wings or fire. A great, coiling serpent. "Who would build a palace in the desert surrounded by wyrms?"

Uncle Bill smiled. "Long ago, when the gods walked among us, a valiant warrior queen forged an empire that spread as far as CabNaril in the south and Alba in the north. Perliss, her name was, and she was a favourite of Veshla."

Veshla was the goddess of war, so that made sense. "Perliss is a whore's name," I said - not that I knew any whores or what exactly a whore was, but I knew no one liked them.

"Not then it wasn't," my uncle said. "Perliss was a mighty queen, feared by all, and she was beautiful too. But all empires fail in time, and beauty fades too. Queen Perliss begged Veshla to grant her immortality, but the goddess rejected her."

"All empires fail," I murmured, "but Veshla stands immortal. No, the goddess would not grant such a request."

"No, so Perliss went to Derushil, the Divine Smith, and seduced him with her body. 'Make me immortal,' she whispered to him between kisses, 'so that you may enjoy my beauty for eternity.' And Derushil took up his hammer and forged for her a ring of gold."

"I love stories of Derushil's magic," I said. "But that can't have pleased Veshla."

"No, indeed, and it is said Perliss's empire crumbled swiftly in the years that followed, but it was Minarwe's wrath that spelled Perliss's doom. Remember, the queen had seduced Derushil, and with a false heart too. Minarwe, perceiving the truth of this, warned Derushil, and when he forged the ring he cursed it so that its wearer would know lust but never love."

It seemed like a rather pathetic curse to me. "So Perliss lived forever and watched her empire fall apart and be forgotten?"

"Queen Perliss remained a beautiful warrior and fought to the end, but her captains betrayed her, both desiring her and distrusting her, and in time she retreated in bitterness to her final stronghold in the desert."

"Ahh," I said.

"Ahh," he echoed. "How she died, I cannot say, but she was beautiful even in death. I took the ring from her pale finger, and she turned to sand before my eyes."

"Show me," I demanded, and with a smile he held it up for me to inspect. A gold ring, finely detailed, perfectly round.

He slipped it onto his thick finger and again I witnessed the change as my uncle transformed into a beautiful young woman. "You see me now as I saw her then," Lia said. "Am I not beautiful?"

"You are," I said, feeling awkward about the admission. This was my uncle after all... but also, her beauty was tempered with a sense of something else. At that time I wasn't sure what, but over the years I came to think of it as the subtle aroma of a plant that excites curiosity but rewards it with death.

We kept it our secret, this magic ring, and when my uncle died in the winter of my twentieth year, his house and belongings were left to me. The secret became mine alone, and for the first time in my life, I slipped the ring onto my own finger, and watched in the mirror the reshaping of my flesh.

*

Sir William's many battle scars always faded to smooth, featureless skin when he transformed into Lia, and so did mine.

In the final days before the Black Queen's disappearance, her raiders had reached as far south as our village. They killed my parents and set fire to our house. I was hiding within until the smoke forced me out, and a flaming timber crashed down onto me.

Thereafter I lived with scars and a shooting pain in my left knee that prevented any fast movement. To see others my age running around was a torment. To hear of warriors at battle was a frustration. I could not run, nor march to war. But magic...

To be a mage, or a wizard or a witch, or a sorcerer even, I had no need to run. I needed only a teacher. And the first step in finding a teacher was knowing that magic was real. And I knew.

If magic was real, then maybe the stories of Abab-Baria were true. I had heard it said that the old witch had lived over the mountains, a short journey of some several days for one with two working legs. She had been chased away, they said, and no one knew where.

How curious, therefore, that in the wake of our village's destruction and rebuilding, a withered old crone took up residence in a weathered, moss-ridden shack in the eaves of the forest. Old Mother Bary, she called herself, and a skilled healer she proved to be.

Her days were spent gathering herbs and berries, and with surprising dexterity for one whose aged frame seemed ever on the point of collapse. Without her walking stick, which she clutched with a fierce but trembling grip, surely she would have fallen. She learned every name in the village, and was never without a kind word, and though she seemed to most to be a frail and harmless creature, I saw in her eyes an iron will and sharp intelligence.

"Good day, Master Orin," she would say to me whenever our paths crossed.

"Good day, Old Mother Bary," I would reply respectfully, wondering if I would ever dare to ask her true name. Then one day I did, or rather I dared to say, "Good day, Old Mother Baria."

At which she had laughed and said, "Come have tea with me, boy. I'm an old woman and would enjoy the company. If you've a mind to pick herbs, I've work for you too."

How could I resist? And so, while other boys my age worked the fields and trained at arms, I learned the cultivation of herbs, both culinary and medicinal. My hands plucked feverfew and nettle leaves, planted garlic, goldenseal and valerian, and learned the mixing and preparation of these and a hundred more.

Old Mother Baria never spoke of magic, but I listened carefully to the words she muttered as she mixed, and tried them myself. "Tiweri," she said once, snatching the bowl away from me. "Wash your hands before you burn the skin from them."

Indeed the mixture was growing warm, uncomfortably so, and I rushed to the basin to clean its remnants from my hands. Tiweri, tiwari, such a subtle difference in sound.

I learned well the making of common medicines, and there was a steady stream of visitors to Old Mother Baria's shack seeking cures for their ailments. Old soldiers seeking to ease the discomfort of old wounds. Young wives seeking to boost their fertility; old wives seeking to diminish theirs.

This was not the sort of magic I dreamed of wielding, my imagination being full of Derushil's legendary weapons. I'd heard it said that it was the Dawn Blade itself that brought the Black Queen's reign to an end, although everyone knew the Dawn Blade (if it existed at all) rested forever in Dar-Gratt's deathless grip.

But it was still magic, a secret shared, this time between Old Mother Baria and myself, and it was a magic of practical use. I might never be a farmer or a soldier, but I could whip up a healing salve in minutes. Perhaps, one day, I might even be famous in Saruz as a healer. Just to see Saruz would be a dream come true. I had heard so many wonderful stories about the city and its riches.

Yes, one day I would set out from the village that was my home. I would be an adventurer, a mage, a healer, and I would make my way to Saruz and beyond, perhaps even to the Iskreti where the dragons were born.

And as I put on my uncle's ring for that very first time and transformed from a limping orphan boy into a young woman with a warrior queen's body, I knew there was nothing now to keep me from that adventure.

*

As an orphan boy of nearly twenty years of age, and the inheritor of my uncle's estate and his rumoured wealth, I was actually in a position of some notable privilege. The young women of the village might no doubt prefer the interest of a handsome soldier, but their wiser parents knew the value of land.

I was still a virgin. I was not indifferent to sexual desire, nor ignorant of intimate play between married couples, and finding myself suddenly to be something of a prospect did make me consider briefly a normal life of courtship and marriage.

But the moment I put the ring on, all that became an impossibility. How could I ever choose to be ordinary when the alternative was magical strength and beauty. No woman in the village could even begin to compare with the woman I myself became.

Lia. I knew her well, and now her curves and muscles were mine. My hands caressed my magnificent breasts, and my fingers penetrated the curls between my thighs. I did not miss having a cock, for I was not a man. I was a woman and perfectly formed.

My uncle's wardrobe was full of clothes for Lia, but I chose as he always did a short dress and boots, enough to cover what needed to be covered in public and to protect what needed to be protected in the fields and forests. Appropriate, that is, for setting out on an adventure.

Joyful laughter bubbling up inside me, I let myself out the back door and set off through the woods. I had money in one pocket, and a map in another, and for the first time in years I could walk without pain.

The world was ahead of me.

I was woefully unprepared, of course. I'd had no idea how long it took to walk anywhere, or how easy it was to get lost, even with a map to guide me. I had no equipment with me to start a fire, and no equipment even for mixing and preparing medicines, should the need arise. After a cold, wet and thoroughly miserable night spent sheltered beneath a tree, I retraced my steps back to my uncle's house and returned to being Master Orin again.

I hated being Orin after the strength and freedom of being Lia, but it was a necessary guise. In the village I purchased a backpack and sought advice on what tools I might need. From Old Mother Baria I purchased the very tools I had so often used myself in helping her, and as I parted she handed me a pouch of some medicine that I recognised as a fertility suppressant for women.

I gave her a startled look. Did she know?

Of course she knew. "Dead a thousand years when he plucked the ring from her finger," she said. "Dead, and dry as sand - except for her cunt. Did the old fool tell you that? There was no well in that ruined palace, but they drank deep all the same."

And cackling like an evil witch from a child's fairytale, Old Mother Baria returned into her shack.

A Woman Made

While I was preparing myself to set out, again, on the great adventure of my life - a grand and noble objective lacking entirely in detail - a train of merchant wagons passed through the village heading north from Saruz.

"Where are you heading?" I asked as the wagons pulled up at the inn and stablehands tended to the horses.

"To Benatek," they replied to my surprise. Since the Black Queen's reign, merchants heading north had preferred the coastal route, avoiding the citadel of Benatek.

"Over the mountains?" I asked. "Is it safe?"

They shrugged. "There are no safe routes north," they said, "not since the fall of Alba."

If I knew little about Saruz, I knew almost nothing about Alba. Like Saruz, it was both port and city, but Alba was older and often mentioned in tales of adventure. I had heard whispers of a great calamity there. "Is it true about the monster?" I asked.

"Aye," they said. "It crawled up from the depths with its hundred monstrous, slithering arms and smashed the city's fleet and shattered the castle walls while the citizens fled their homes. Now pirates sail the northern sea and raiders prey upon the land."

"Are you hiring?" I asked, knowing that merchant trains were always seeking men trained at arms to join them. Travelling north to Benatek and beyond to Alba would be a far greater adventure than walking to Saruz. There were monsters and magic in the north, and how better to get there than with a merchant train.

They laughed at me, although not unkindly. "Not the likes of you."

"My sister is a skilled healer," I said, "and would not slow you down."

"Is she pretty?" one asked, and the others laughed along.

And so, at the crack of dawn the following morning, I slipped the Ring of Perliss once more upon my finger, and with great pleasure and relief I transformed from Orin into Lia. Orin's story I knew well: a young orphan boy become a respectable gentleman after inheriting his uncle's land and wealth, and in time perhaps a famous healer in Saruz, but forever with a distinct limp from that old injury. Perhaps there would be a wife and children too...

... but how could any woman begin to compare with Lia. I stared adoringly at myself in the mirror, at a body both muscular and undeniably feminine. Gone were my cock and balls, but I cared not. My breasts were full and proud, and an itching heat stirred in my cunt.

The temptation to return to bed was strong, but there was no time to waste in the luxury of self-pleasure. I dressed quickly in my travelling dress and boots, and my backpack had been carefully prepared the night before. This time I even had a knife in a sheath on my belt, as if prepared for a fight, but I needed it more for digging out tubers and cutting stems. Even as Lia, with the body of a warrior queen, my skill was in the preparing of medicines, not in fighting.

"Well, am I pretty?" I asked the merchants, catching them at the point of setting out. Their whistles of appreciation were answer enough.

"You're Lia?" their leader asked. He was a tall, muscular man, a sword at his side, an old scar disfiguring one side of an otherwise handsome face.

"I am, and would be glad to join your company."

"We don't usually travel with women," he said, his gaze lingering for a moment on my breasts, "but if you can keep up with us today, I'll consider it."

It was a fair challenge, and as Orin I would have failed completely. As Lia, I found it easy to keep pace with the wagons. The road was good, the weather a mix of sun and light rain, and this region of Denkhar was a safe place to travel.

There were a dozen horse-drawn wagons in the train, each with a pair of merchants. Some were literally a couple, a husband and wife taking turns at the rein. Others were master and apprentice, old and young. The wagons themselves were a variety of colours and designs, some carrying fabrics, others carrying tools or weapons or spices or pigments.

Half a dozen men were on foot like me, their swords ready for action but their minds elsewhere. They laughed and joked with each other, and there was no mistaking their interest in me. I could hardly blame them, but also I was unused to feeling so watched all the time. I was certainly unused to being an object of desire.

I was unused to having to squat behind a bush to pee after a lifetime of having a penis to aim as I stood.