Queen Yavara Ch. 41

YAVARA

Elena was straddled across my hips. My buttocks conformed perfectly into the inner portions of her thighs, and her cock nestled comfortably between them, its underside running pleasantly across my pussy and anus, teasing the receptive nerves there. Her thumbs kneaded the knotted muscles of my back, turning them into gelatinous mush that flowed warmly beneath the flesh. Her hair tickled my face, as it was cast over one side of her head so that she could plant delicate kisses upon the nape of my neck.

"I wish you were more like her." She said.

"Hmm?" I groaned.

"She does all the things I like." Elena giggled.

"Don't be a bitch." I smiled, "I know what you're doing. You don't have to trick me, Elena. You can have me however you desire."

"Oh, but I can't." She whispered into my ear, "Because if I could, then you'd be her."

"Don't say that. It's not the truth."

"The truth?" She asked with a sardonic laugh, "You of all people should understand. After Brock took you that night, you didn't just change your body. I've been transformed—no, I've evolved."

"I did that to you."

"The first time, yes. The second time came in the dungeons of Castle Thorum. You weren't there to save me. She did her work on me with her knives and her whispers, and she opened me up body and soul, and infected me like you had, only she went much, much deeper." She licked my cheek, "I'm sorry, my queen, but you were too late."

"Don't call me that."

"What?"

"Don't call me 'your highness,' or 'my queen,' or 'your grace.'" There were tears in my eyes, "Call me Yavara."

She chuckled, low and cruelly, so rich was the malice that came from her perfect lips. It sounded just like Leveria. "I only say the name of the woman I love, my queen." She giggled. "My queen, my queen, my queen, my queen, my queen, my queen, MY QUEEN"

"My queen!" A voice came from the mouth of the tent.

I opened my eyes. It was still dark out. There was a silhouette before the tent, the imposing figure of my Terdini guard.

"What?" I groaned.

"The first division broke through, but the second is pinned down against the causeway! They need your help!"

I shot upright, the energy surging in my veins. Brock.

LEVERIA

In all my life, I had never pondered suicide before. Truth be told, I didn't believe in an afterlife. God, I could believe in, but why the hell would she save us like a sentimental prom dress? Dead was dead, and so life was generally preferable. Generally. When Field Marshal Shordian had given me the frantic call at three in the morning that the enemy was invading, I considered the edge of the blade. Ultimately, I decided not to die until the outcome was certain. There was a chance. A tiny, miniscule prayer that an outnumbered, beleaguered, ill-supplied, demoralized army could face down a horde of monsters led by a demigod.

"I can't believe it." Elena whispered. Though her flesh was nearly brown, her face was pale.

"At this point, my love, it doesn't really matter what you believe." I sighed, watching the chaos unfold on the mirror.

"Something's wrong. She would never do this."

I laughed. "You know what your weakness is? It's not your arrogance. It's your faith in others. Misplaced and misguided. Why the fuck would you put your faith in me or her? Have we not done everything to prove to you that we are faithless?"

She ran her hand through her hair. "No, no, no. This can't be what it seems. It doesn't make any sense."

"Are you... absolutely sure you knew nothing about this?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.

She shot me a death glare. "Are you fucking serious right now?"

I shrugged. "Look, if you were playing me for a fool the whole time, then I have to say, bravo, because this is a fucking master stroke. Make the queen of the Highlands fall in love with you, distract the Noble Court with talks of peace, take away key allies from the divided pro-war front, convince us to prepare for a drawn-out winter conflict, then kick us right in the balls just after the first frost."

"This is my country, you bitch!"

"And it could really be your country if you were to, say, have your foreign lover invade it for you."

She snatched me by my hair, ripped my head back, and snarled, "If Yavara did this, I'll kill the cunt myself!"

I grinned up at her. "Oh... say that again, but slower..."

She glanced down at my thighs, the alabaster trunks rubbing together beneath my shift. She looked back at me. "Leveria, this is a really weird time."

"How would you kill her?" I asked, unbuttoning my front, "Would you... boil her alive in the blood of her citizens? Would you cut out her eyes and lay spider eggs in her brain? Would you—"

"I would smash her head against yours until both your brains painted the wall." She growled.

"...and then you would fuck us, right?" I grinned.

"Good god, what the fuck did I get myself into with you?"

"Who cares? You just want to get deeper." I purred, and unbuttoned the last button. I watched the surrender come over her face when she gazed upon my nudity, and I spread my legs. If this was to be one of our last nights together, I would have it be one to remember just in case I was wrong about the afterlife.

BROCK

I had rained hell on Mid Fort for half an hour. Nothing but flame cannisters and molten boulders until the entire structure was wreathed in fire. Under the cover of the siege, I'd ordered the first division, all eight-thousand of them, to marshal against the cliffside. The goblins that had arrived yesterday were ignorant of the spells placed on the causeway. I sent hundreds of them to their deaths. In the darkness, they could not see the horrors that had befallen those ahead of them. When they were spent, I sent the second division, seven-thousand strong, to ascend the ramp. It was too narrow for even four abreast orcs, and so most had to climb along the side. The best climbers were put in the vanguard to pound loops into the rock so that the others could follow by rope. The same tactic was used for the cliffside, where under the cover of darkness and the chaos of the siege, my best climbers could nail ropes just below the lip of the cliff like Trenok had envisioned. I was one of those men.

I wiped the sweat from my brow, and tested the resistance of the rope. Not caring if I fell, I let go of the rockface, and caught the dangling line. It held. If it could hold me, it could hold any orc. I pounded the loop into the rock once more just for good measure, then dropped my hammer into my belt, grabbed my climbing picks, and recommenced my blind assent up the cliffside.

Here, there were no footholds. The lip was an exposure that overhung like a shelf, making me climb it horizontally. I pounded my picks into the shale, dangling by my arms, nothing but blackness below me. The rope on my waist would send me careening into the cliffside instead of plummeting to the earth, but If the rock gave way, I was dead, and this shale chipped like dry wood. Numbly, I pulled one pick out, dangled from the other, and screwed in a loop, torqueing through six-inches of rock with nothing but my hand. I did this all along the lip, hanging from one pick or the other depending on how tired my hands were, but I did not feed the rope through the loops. If the imperials could reach the ropes, they could set flame to them, and they would burn like wick. And so, I climbed twenty feet out along the lip, and by the time I was at the end of it, there was no strength left in my arms. With nothing but my will, I untied the rope from my waist, grabbed the edge of the cliff, and hoisted myself over.

"Die you fucker!" Screamed a voice, and there was a spearhead to match it. I swatted the thrust away, grabbed the boy by his ankle, and hurled him over my shoulder. His scream waned in the night, then died with a thud. There was no one else there. All around me were the crumbled remains of battlements, the burnt and crushed golden shells of imperials, the twisted rail-tracks for ballistae, and the destroyed engines themselves. Flame danced in my vision, illuminating the south wall of Mid Fort. I was at the corner, and the eastern face was flush with the cliffside, effectively raising its height by another fifty feet to my left. To my right, there was only fifteen or so feet of room before the cliff suddenly rose another ten feet, creating a small alley between the fort and the major ridge. This was the soft spot Trenok had pointed out. I exhaled a cloud of breath, and stood. There they were.

The fire glinted off their helmets as they poured out of the fort, dozens, scores, hundreds, all flooding toward me. For the first time since that morning, I felt something. Rage. Rage like I'd never known in all my life, boiling in my blood, pounding in my heart, bursting behind my eyes. My muscles suddenly felt fit to rupture the constraints of my flesh, and my breath was too great to contain. I roared, and the force of the sound sent a wave of terror through the charging reinforcements. Those in front faltered, and those behind crashed into their backs. Outnumbered a hundred to one, I brandished my hammer, and charged.

My bare feet thudded into the mud. The cold fall wind caressed my flesh, encased me in its wild mixture of rotting leaves, burning tar and blood. Animal. Predator. The prey held out their feeble defenses, antelopes flashing their horns before a lion, eyes wide in horror. I hit the line. It exploded. Ten men flew backward, five more were trampled into the mud. I swung my hammer with a roar, and in one motion, I smashed one man's head in pink dust, drove another man's shoulders together through his sternum, and crumpled a third's breastplate like tin. I swung backhanded and down, and drove an imperial helm downward through his own chest and belly, his shoulders caving in after to create a golden bowl of gore that stumbled backward on flopping legs. A spear went into my side. I hardly noticed it. I picked the offender up, registering his primal scream of terror, and hearing it sputter violently out as I swung him against his comrades, breaking their bodies with his until he was more a whip than a club. I whirled with my hammer, striking down to bury men into the mud, swinging across to shatter spears, swords, and skulls. One man charged me, screaming with manic eyes. I crouched to meet his bulrush, and swung upward. His head flew from his shoulder, carried over the ranks, and landed fifty feet behind him. His body continued four steps of his suicidal charge, the spear still poised in his dead fists, a warrior to the marrow. I would remember him. The others, not so much.

I grabbed one by the helm, and crushed it like a can, the brains bursting from his eyes and ears. Another whirled on me with a sword, and I punched him clean through his armor, chest and back, my fist coming out the other side to grab the man behind him, and pull him through the hole. That one, I threw like a spear into the ranks, toppling a half dozen men before charging in after, my hammer swinging overhead. One skull was turned to splinters, another was flattened, a third was splattered. When I swung in a wide arc, eight men flew backward, their limbs dangling, their breast plates caved-in. I swept through them like that, sending them flying backward into their own ranks ten at a time, stomping on the wounded until they were jelly in their golden shells, moving ever forward, not even breaking stride. There were two dozen left, and they huddled with their spears pointed before them, thrusting manically as they backed away. I took one step forward. They took one step back. I took another step forward. They took another step back. I grinned, feeling the laughter boiling in my chest, and flowing from my mouth, terrible and guttural. Their faces said it all. They were shitting themselves.

I took one great stride forward, swung, and broke twelve spear heads clean off. The others thrusted at once, and I took the punishment, letting their feeble spearhead puncture my hide. I stepped forward with their weapons inside me, and grinned down at them all.

"Please!" One of them screamed.

"Thank you." I chuckled, and swung. One man, two men, three men, four; I smashed down again and again, driving helms into breastplates, putting men into the mud a head shorter than they were. I uppercut one swing, and sent a poor bastard screaming twenty feet in the air, his breastplate caved all the way through. I merged two heads with one swing, turned an arm into goo, broke a back clean through so that his liver could be seen through the shorn edges of armor and fractured spine. They tried to run, and I simply ran over them, stomping them until they broke to mush beneath my feet, and their hot gore squished between my toes. The last man screamed and rushed me in a fervor, and I picked him up, and threw him as far as I could. He sailed behind me, over the ranks of orcs flooding the lip, and off the cliff. There was a time when I would've let him live so that he could tell others of my legend. Now, I didn't care. There would be no others.

An arrow struck me in the shoulder. Another in my chest. I looked up at the source of the annoyance to see that the elves on the ramparts had noticed the breach. They rained down on us, mowing through scores of orcs at a time.

"Get on the wall!" I yelled, plastered myself against the stone, and ran along it. I saw the buckets of tar being brought to the battlements. I knew they wouldn't pour it on me if I was the lone orc ahead of the pack, so I charged several paces before my advance, and let the poor men behind me get fried. I hit the corner of the southwest tower, pulled out my picks, and began to climb. It was much easier to ascend this wall, for the mortar was easy to puncture, and the grooves held my picks securely. I scaled the ninety feet in less than a minute, and launched myself over the top.

"What the f—" said an elven mage before I split his face in half with a slash of my pick. I threw the other pick over his shoulder as he fell, and stuck the mage behind him in the back. He crumpled to reveal a third mage, his fingers poised, a spell ready on his lips before he was splattered by an orc body that crashed over the wall. A second later, hundreds of orcs were flooding over the southern wall, overwhelming the archers and mages. Fireballs were cast, engulfing friends and foe alike, burning great swaths through the ranks, but the orcs just kept pouring over, endless and inevitable. Elves were thrown backward into the courtyard, crashing into the manic ranks of men below. The orcs grabbed hold of the tar buckets, and showered the imperials with molten black. A chorus of screeches came after, the gold armor melted and suffused to their flesh, crisped and bubbling, smelling of pork fat. I upended a tar bucket of my own, then threw the apparatus after it, creating a hole in the ranks below with a satisfying crunch and scream.

"Through the towers!" I yelled, and headed the charge, kicking open the tower door, sending the imperials were barring it crashing into the opposite wall. I drew my hammer, and splattered the brick with their brains before barreling down the spiraling stairway, sending those in my path rolling before me until their broken bodies piled upon the bottom floor. I burst through the tower door, and stopped in the threshold. The courtyard was hell. Fires burned everywhere, orcs and elves fought in hand-to-hand combat, pressed so tightly that they couldn't even raise their weapons. There were no battle lines, no sides, only a fray of gold and green, all backlit by the inferno that raged upon the western wall, where the defenders desperately held the gate before the ramp. I roared, and added my weight to the frenzy.

"To the gate!" I yelled, "Get that fucking gate open!"

I pressed against the mass, driving with my heels slipping in the mud, blood and guts. The deeper I got, the less ground I walked upon. The floor was a mess of bodies, flashes of light catching wide, panicked eyes in their helms, the doomed that would never rise again, their last moments spent in the suffocating darkness beneath bone-crushing boots. I killed with my bare hands, unable to raise my hammer. I drove my thumbs into eye sockets, tore jaws off their hinges, caved in cheek bones. My hands were filled with hot sticky mush, my face was plastered with it. I tasted it when I bit into a boy's neck, and tore out his throat. They exacted their toll on me. Blades from all around, shoved into me, cutting through my shield of muscle, frantically puncturing my back until my hide was more hamburger than flesh, but I pressed on through it, grinding into the bodies, slowly killing my way to the towering western gates, the wrought-iron bars encased in magical flame.

There was a crescent of space created by a shield wall, and behind it, a score of mages held the gate fast with their spells. On the other side of it, the second division was pressed against the flaming metal atop a seven-foot pile of their own dead. Bodies were shed from the sides of the causeway like falling leaves, cascading endlessly down from the churning mass that charged up it. The archers atop the western wall didn't even have to aim. The stream of arrows was unrelenting. The two ballistae directly above the gate cranked back, aimed down the length of the causeway, and fired their great spears, cutting lines twenty men deep at a time. They didn't adjust their sites. They just cranked, loaded, and fired, and at the other end, a kabab of orcs was sent careening backward.

"Kill the mages!" I ordered, though I knew no one in the manic press could hear me. I caved a man's nose in, collapsed another's throat, and crushed a third's skull. I felt cold metal inside me, digging through facia and sinew, cutting near to the tendons. I kicked backward, snapped a man's leg, and heard his screech, but it wasn't a single man I was fighting against, but a dam of bodies before the crescent, right there only twenty steps away. I shouldered my way into the press, and it only got tighter. The blades were sticking me in the armpits, piercing through soft tissue, seeking my heart. The blood was running down me in rivers. I bashed a man's face in, drove another's head downward into his chest, flattened a skull between the palms of my hands. Fifteen paces. They were stabbing at my legs, trying to find my heel tendon. I ripped a throat out, gouged out a forehead with the man's own helm, and collapsed a sternum. Ten paces. Something was driven hard into my back. It went through my shield of muscle, and into the soft stuff. I tasted blood. I felt the coldness, the chill running through me. Was it mortal? Don't think about it. Five paces. I bellowed, and drove into the mass with my shoulder, my heels slipping on the bodies below me. The stink of blood and sweat, the miasma of cooking flesh, the screams, oh, the screams. Push! Push! Push! The mass began to give. Push! Push! Push! Every drive of my body caused me to leak from the holes made in me. Push... push... push... We broke through.

The shield wall collapsed, the golden men went sprawling, and I was in the thick of it, tearing into the soft mages, rending flesh from bone and bone from joints, sending limbs flying, opening bellies and letting the pink coils unravel. I was struck on the head. I was smashed in the side by a great force. The world roared with the explosion as it ripped through me. I was burning. I was on fire. The smell hit me, then the pain. I was hell. I ran through them, my mind gone in the agony, only rage, only death. The heat went into me. Wrath upon my tortured flesh, melting through it, eating into the fuel of fat. I didn't know who I was killing anymore. I was blind in a haze of red. Was I on my knees? Was I on my back? There was a face, contorted in agony. It was my reflection off the helm of a dead man. Feet trampling. Boots crushing down on me. The gate—did we open it? Yes! Yes, it was open! But the causeway... the causeway was gone.