Queen Yavara Ch. 24

IVANKA

Tiffany and I watched from the mouth of the Broken Pass as the sun sank into the horizon, casting violet rays into the sky that faded to purple, then blue, then black. I waited until the last light faded, then I stripped my robes, and felt the cool wind caress my naked flesh. I took a deep breath of the night air, and my blood surged with a primal thrill. I pulled Tiffany into a heated kiss, tasting the avarice on her tongue, the suffusion of sexual desire and blood hunger, the need to fuck and kill. We separated with a gasp, touching foreheads to stare into each other's eyes, feeling the same energy thrumming within us, compelling us to succumb to ancient instincts. We grinned with predatory mouths, our fangs dripping venom onto our crimson lips. It was time to hunt. Without a sound, we dashed into the woods.

There were so many interesting smells in the Maples. Beyond the ambience of sweet sap, was a veritable forest-menu of treats. There was an incubus twenty yards to my left. There was a faun a half-mile to the south. A loan centaur was galloping a mile to the north. But I was to feast on orc tonight, which was one of my least favorite meals. I caught my target's scent from two miles away, and the nearer I got, the clearer the picture became.

I could smell infection on his skin, a bog-born parasite that he wasn't treating well. He was middle-aged, but still virial by the distinct musk that wafted from him. As I drew nearer, I zeroed in on the thumping of his heart. His resting heartrate was abnormally high, and bore a murmur that drummed out of cadence. He was fat and out of shape, which would make my job easier, but the meal worse.

I stopped at the entrance to his village. I heard over two-hundred hearts beating, all to different rhythms, each a song of identity. I peered through the darkness and saw the orc's warm bodies glowing from within their huts. My target was in the center of the village in the chieftain's hut, gorging himself on ale and pork. I silently raced through the settlement, taking cover behind walls and huts, passing laughing children, boisterous teenagers and watching elders. I climbed the chief's roof, and dove through the smoke-hole.

The fat orc chieftain gawked at me with a mouth full of pork. He was at the head of an expansive table fit for a feast, but he was alone. I wiped the ash off my feet, and casually sauntered over to him. His mind came to him too late. He stood to brandish the club on his back while choking on a scream for help, the masticated pork dribbling down his jowls. Before he could even get his hand on his weapon, I'd imbedded my fangs deep in his throat, biting through fat and muscle to find the frantic vein within. I sucked the foul molasses that was his blood, and he withered against me, mouthing around his last meal. Lovingly, I snaked one hand through his braided hair, and caressed the other along his chin. Then I ripped his head clean off. As his neck fountained, I laid his body beside a headless roast duck, and began carving Brock's message into the orc's chest. Then I grabbed Brock's cranial trophy, hopped out of the smoke hole, and raced out of the village without making a sound. As I disappeared into the woods, someone screamed, and an alarm bell tolled.

BROCK

"How do I know you're acting under the orders of Queen Yavara?" Braun, the leader of the centaurs asked me, "Because this sounds a lot like an ambitious Pine orc making a bid for the Tundra."

"I am a very ambitious Pine orc." I replied with a winning smile, "Under the orders of an even more ambitious queen."

"Where is she?" Braun asked, "She hasn't come to ask for our aid, and we would give it to her freely."

"You and I are the only ones, it seems." I sighed, "The other clans have forgotten their vows. Queen Yavara left for the Spruces to deal with an emergency; I am her acting diplomat to the Maples."

"You still haven't presented me with proof of your allegiance." Braun said, "You are killing orcs that I have trade relations with, and I will not defend you against the vengeance of their people until I know you are acting under the Dark Queen's orders."

"Here," I said, dropping the sacks of gold into his hands, "that's Ardeni currency, procured by a loan from King Dreus to Queen Yavara. In one of the bags you will find a note of transaction signed by Console Drake Titus and Console Zander Fredeon."

"The council of Queen Yavara has sanctioned counsel Brock Terdini, Secretary of War, to deliver this payment to Braun Lighthoof of the Spearheads to ensure centaur aid in the Terdini's endeavors with the tribes of the Maples. Signed Drake Titus and Zander Fredeon, but conspicuously not Queen Yavara Alkandi."

I shrugged. "The deed's been done, Braun. You're just going to have to trust me."

ZANDER

I walked through the abandoned nymph camp. The remnants of a pyre smoked from the clearing, and I didn't have to move closer to know what had been burned. I stopped at the edge and stared at the smoldering wood. I stared for a long time. There were still embers in the pyre, and they burned like cobalt in their nest of charred logs and bone. The wind spun the ashes into playful vortexes that danced from the pile, the wistful flecks glinting like moon-kissed snow. Gone. I felt her absence like a hole in my chest, one that I'd bandaged and stuck full of morphine to keep the pain at bay. I could outrun it for a while, this pain; long enough to do what needed to be done before it consumed me. I glanced down to see the pitiless socketed eyes staring at me from the crowned skull that headed my staff. Alkandi's skull. "We're all just ideas of people to each other." I muttered to her, "I was never the man in your head, and you were never the woman in my heart. I hate you, you know." I blinked away a tear, the first I'd shed in centuries, and looked back upon the pyre. "Rest easy, Prestira. Don't wait for me on the other side."

The wind gusted through the trees, sounding the groan of an enormous spruce that loomed over the clearing. Its branches drooped, and its needles fell freely. The sap that ran from its bark was milky and white, smelling nothing like the nectar of the tree. I stepped on one of its roots, and the wind suddenly died.

"Zander," a seductive voice whispered from within the mighty trunk, "come in."

The trunk opened into a large doorway, and I stepped inside. Elena's succubi were sitting cross-legged in a circle, their hands entwined on each other's knees, their eyes aglow with violet light and staring vacantly at the tree's apex. I looked up to see the once-green bioluminescent fungi had all changed to the same passionate hue as the women's eyes. They all turned their gaze to me at once, but only Crystal spoke.

"I needed to take their minds." Arbor said from Crystal's mouth, "They were nearly hysterical when they could not save our master. I feel it too, this mortal pain of loss. As do you, Zander Fredeon." Arbor smiled sadly, "But we immortals can bear it much easier, so I have eased their suffering."

"Arbor," I said as I sat down, "you've been corrupted."

"I like to think I have been awakened."

"Elena." I sighed.

"You sent her to subvert me." Arbor didn't say it as an accusation, simply as a fact. "It is why you did not come yourself. You thought you could steal my children from beneath my nose by having her parade her slaves before them."

"Yes." I admitted.

"Why did you not tell Master of me?"

"For this exact reason." I gestured to her, "I knew there was a risk, but I didn't think you'd tell your daughters the truth."

"I would do anything for my children; you miscalculated."

"I've been doing that a lot lately." I muttered, "But now the path is clear. No more diversions. Where is Yavara?"

"Your queen has taken my daughters to Castle Thorum." Arbor said. She pushed her hand into the soil, and closed her eyes. A single tear rolled down her cheek. "They have captured it at great cost."

"Bullshit."

"Have you ever known me to be a liar?" She opened her glowing eyes, "Your queen is more powerful than any of her past selves; I have not seen energy like she has since the heathen gods of old." Her voice dropped, "But even all her strength could not bring my master back to me."

"Yavara has attacked the Highlands." I said under my breath, "The Ten cannot deny her now! I need to build a portal -just a small one -, and they can swear their allegiance to her within the walls of Castle Thorum!"

Arbor cocked her head. "Did you not hear me? All that sacrifice was for naught. My master is gone."

"I can set you free."

"I do not wish to be free!" Arbor hissed. She entangled her fingers in Ruby and Diamond's hair, and brought the nubile teenagers to her bosom, "I have lived for tens of thousands of years, but I have not known life in all that time. I will not lose this."

"And your daughters? Will you let them be corrupted?"

"Not corrupted, but awakened." Arbor shuddered, falling languorously into Sapphire's awaiting arms as the others began to suckle. "They will protest at first, but one by one, they will drink my nectar, and be liberated."

"The craving is not liberation. It's slavery."

"Not with Master." Arbor licked her lips as she opened her legs for Opal and Onyx. "With Master, the hunger is quieted, and we feel only the pleasure. Oh, such pleasures I have denied my children! But no longer!" She cried when the girls tasted her, "No longer." She whispered, and looked at me through half-lidded eyes, "They will succumb as I have, and the nymphs will pupate to reach the forms they were destined for. The trunks of this forest will be twisting bodies joined in column, the canopy will be entwined limbs, the floor will be strewn of exhausted lovers bathing in each other's lust. We will build shrines to Master, and every year we will bring my virgin daughters to her so that she will transform them."

"Not if she's dead."

Arbor narrowed her eyes at me. "Now that she has served her purpose, would it be more convenient if she were?"

"You know I never planned for this."

"But if her end is the engine that drives Yavara's hatred, then is her fate acceptable to you? Have you become so callous?"

"Castle Thorum-"

"Is a trifling thing; a pile of stones to mark a nonexistent line. I did not send my daughters into the mouth of war to plant a flag on a glorified rock." Arbor considered me, "I sacrificed my children for life and love, and you have sacrificed life and love for an old memory. Does a mind of schemes and battle heal a broken heart, or is it but dressing on a mortal wound?" She extended an outstretched hand, "You have known me for centuries, but I have known you for longer. Will you call me 'friend' and seek solace, or have you resigned yourself to cold solitude?"

I stared at Arbor's outstretched hand. "You know the answer."

She smiled pitiably at me. "I have watched you follow the path of your life's purpose, and I have seen you become more bitter with every step taken. But along the way, you have found diversions, and in these, you have found joy. Do you not see that these diversions are life, and that the path is death? Prestira was your greatest diversion, and now she is but a chasm that you have built a bridge over, and on the other side of the bridge, is your destiny. Do you so relentlessly sprint for it?"

"I must, before the bridge collapses."

"Do you so fear the pain?"

"Yes." I whispered.

"But that is life. Unfeeling is death."

"And so I run headlong across the bridge."

Arbor withdrew her hand, and relaxed back into her bed of women. "I will miss you, Zander Fredeon." She sighed as her head fell against Sapphire's bosom, "Leave me now."

"Not until I have assurances of your allegiance." I replied, "We never got your answer."

Arbor looked at me quizzically from heavy lids. "My daughters took an impregnable fortress, and that is not enough? Fine. You have my allegiance, and my children after they transform." She kneaded her hands indulgently into Ruby and Diamond's hair, "It is poetic, I guess, that the nymphs should go extinct after drawing their first blood. But I can feel the dawn of a new age approaching, Yavara's age, a darker age, and there will be no room for innocent things there." Her eyes rolled into her head as she moaned, "We must all adapt. Leave... me... Zander..."

I stood up, and turned on my heel. I made it to the threshold of the tree, then stopped. The ashes had blown clean from the pyre, and only the charred bones and logs remained, their cracked lengths still aglow with the cobalt embers embedded like fractal veins. Goddamn it. I thought, then turned around. "Arbor," I said, stepping to her, "I can't let you do it."

"You cannot allow me to do anything, Zander." Arbor smiled, "I am beyond you."

"Not as you are." I touched a finger to Arbor's temple and the world fell beneath me. I stood in the blackness of the void and waited. A purple light appeared on one horizon, while a green light appeared on the other. The purple light yielded the outline of a voluptuous succubus; her horns pointing demonically from wavy black hair, her tail wagging sensually behind her body as her hips rose and fell in a seductive roll. She licked her pouty lips as she approached me, sliding her hands along the tan curves of her body and strutting with confidence. The green light outlined the figure of a nymph, a stark juxtaposition to her lecherous counterpart. She was pale and blonde, her horns curved backward like a goat's, her body slender and long-limbed. Her face bore a stoic and dignified expression, with lips that looked to have never smiled.

"Zander," the succubus hissed, "why have you brought me to this place of impermanence?"

"To help you."

"I do not need your help," she chuckled, "but I will take your cock, if you are offering it."

"Why don't you speak?" I asked the nymph.

"Because I will not allow her to." The succubus hissed, a forked tongue slithering from her lips, "I am the only voice the matters now."

"We're not leaving here until I fix you."

"Then we can spend an eternity here," she grinned, strutting to me, "and indulge endlessly in pleasure."

"You will indulge alone." I sat with my legs crossed on the ethereal plane. The succubus reached out for me, but her hand was stopped by my arcane shield. She gave me a curious look, her head inclining to cascade her black hair, her violet eyes studying me from beneath her horned brow. She circled me like a stalking predator, testing her prey for weakness.

"What is your darkest desire, Zander?" She whispered as she moved behind me, "What you do to me if I told you I would let you do anything?"

"You don't want to open that box, Arbor." My eyes tracked her.

"But I am open to trying so many new things." She purred, "I have watched the beasts of the forest mate with one another in a million different ways, and I want to try everything. You could be the man that gives me so many first pleasures. Do you not want that?" Arbor wrapped her arms around my shielded form, her hands caressing the surface before my chest, "Do you not want to guide me through the perversion of your lust? To mold my sexuality to your liking? I could be yours, Zander. Your slave. Your whore."

"You already have a master."

"I can have many." She whispered, crawling around me until she knelt before me, "I could worship you every night. I will stay on my knees and grovel at your feet for you, opening myself whenever you desire, letting you do whatever you desire."

"No."

She stooped in a languorous arch until her face was at my feet, her pelvis crooked high in the air to expose the supple spread of her domed cheeks. "Please, Zander." She whispered, "Do you not see how I leak for you?"

"Let the nymph speak."

"Why would you want to talk to her?" The succubus groaned, "She is so boring."

"We can stay here forever, Arbor." I smiled, "It's up to you."

"Fine." She growled, and motioned her head to the nymph.

The nymph stepped demurely beside her lecherous counterpart, her eyes downcast. "My daughters followed your queen because she promised to fix me." The nymph said quietly.

"And that's what I'm here to do."

"I do not want you to fix me." The nymph said, daring to look me in the eye, "I need you to help me fix myself."

"Explain."

"The corruption is a fault in my design. It occurs because I have denied my daughters the joy of sex. I figured out a way to stop the corruption, but I need your help."

"Anything you want." I replied.

"I need to mate with you." The nymph said. The succubus grinned up at me from ear to ear, her long tail wagging excitedly.

"That seems... counterintuitive." I said slowly.

"This is the only solution." The nymph replied resolutely, though her voice was tremulous, "I need to birth male nymphs to accompany the females. It is the seed of other races that corrupts my daughters, and they seek it out because they have no other options. If I give them men of their own race, with seed that will not corrupt them, then they will not stray from the herd to fulfill their carnal desires."

"And you need me... why?"

"I cannot make males of my own, but you are a shape-shifter, Zander, and your seed can be changed to suit my design."

"It won't save your daughters if they feed from infected sap. We need to free you."

"I cannot cast aside this part of me," the nymph said as she stroked the succubus' hair, "she is a permanent part of my soul now. I love the feelings she brings me; the passion and the desires I have ignored for too long. I will lessen her power over me so that I am not consumed by it, but I cannot destroy her; she brings me too much joy."

The succubus smiled up at the nymph with lips curved in wicked lust, and the nymph smiled back with chaste dignity, but despite the duality they expressed, there was a sameness, a commonality and understanding of each other. I hadn't realized until then that the nymph had been a willing captive in this mind.

"OK Arbor," I said, lowering my arcane shield, "let's make some babies."

"Finally!" The succubus groaned.

"You," the nymph said to the succubi, "you must guide me through the methods of lust; this is a part of us I am not well versed in it."

"I will teach you." The succubus giggled as she raised herself to the nymph's level, "The first thing we need to do, is get comfortable with one another." She loomed over the nymph, though they were the same height.

"What do you mean?" The nymph asked, her voice shaking with a dichotomy of emotion.

The succubus grabbed the naked backside of her counterpart, and squeezed until the nymph gasped, and willowed against the succubus's curves. Smiling hungrily down at the nymph's upturned face, the succubus drew her fingers through the nymph's blonde hair, and whispered, "Kiss me."

The succubus lowered her mouth to the apprehensive nymph. The nymph's eyes stayed wide open when they first kissed, but with each successive movement of the succubus's tongue, the nymph's lids grew heavier until she was closing her eyes to accept the overbearing consumption of her twin, leaning back into her supporting hand. The succubus released her grip on the nymph's ass to slide her hand between their pressing bellies. Down, down, down it went, until it reached its destination with an announcing gasp from the nymph, her eyes flashing open as she was invaded. Then her eyes dropped once again in splendid torpidity, succumbing so easily to the sensual motions of her twin, who so tenderly violated her. When she found her courage, the nymph trailed inexperienced fingers up the succubus's thick thighs, then moved between them. Grinning around her tongue-tying kiss, the succubus silently instructed the nymph how to touch her by using her own penetrative digits as guidance. The stayed there for beautiful minutes, moaning softly into each other's mouths and sensually curving their fingers to greater depths. The succubus peaked out of the corner of her eye and made sure I was ready for them. She pulled out of the kiss, her tongue slithering like a fleshy serpent back into her mouth. The nymph kept her eyes closed and her lips open, not wanting to break from the embrace. The succubus woke her from her trance, took her hand, and guided her to me.