TRC - Lord of the Glass Desert Ch. 09

Looking at all of the people sitting and milling about his tent, Kal realized he had made an enormous mistake.

At the first sign of an approaching sandstorm, Turam halted the caravan and had everyone bed down. Kal tossed the canvas square on the ground beside his litter and said the command to assemble the magical tent. Feeling overly cocky, halfway through the process he upped its size to biggest form where it matched the inside's dimensions. The shelter immediately drew attention from others in the caravan's wealthy section. He had men and women approaching him before the door shimmered telling him it was ready to use.

Kal then made the mistake of mentioning it guaranteed his safety during the coming weather. Seconds later came the exorbitant offers of gold to sit out the sandstorm inside.

His biggest mistake, though, was telling them yes.

Now, his tent's central area was packed with well-to-do Fazalan men and women joined by their spouses or pleasure slaves. On the bright side, money was a non-issue to many of these people and the gold they gave him for a day or two of safety boggled the mind. If they ran into another sandstorm, he could break even for this trip.

Still, Kal had to say it was kind of nice to see his tent filled with life and chatter once again. It hadn't been this lively since he rescued Dax and the dog-girls from Carriston.

One of the men came over, pulling along a giggling and blushing pleasure slave. "Kind wizard, could I use that room over there for a time?" he asked, pointing at Kashka's room. She didn't use it much anymore.

The mage looked over at the cat-girl. "Do you have anything in there?"

Tight-lipped, Kashka shook her head. The feline woman enjoyed having her Master, Laika, and the space inside the tent to herself. This crowd of people was disrupting that and setting her on edge.

Laika nudged him from his other side, "Master," she said, pointing toward the entrance to his library where a guest peered in through the canvas doorway.

Shaking his head, he turned to the man in front of him, "Give me a few minutes, and I will have a room for you. It will be smaller than that one, but it's the best I can do with this many people." Looking down, he called out, "Ria."

The sprite appeared and flitted up in front of his face. Instead of giving her customary greeting, Ria looked back and forth between Kal and the crowded common area.

"What the hell is going on?" she asked finally.

"Sandstorm outside. These people are paying me for shelter. But now I need to get them all places to sleep. Can we accommodate them if we make rooms with a bed for two and a little bit of room on the sides?"

The sprite did a quick headcount and thought for a moment, "Yes, I think so. If we remove your alchemy lab and the library, we should have enough space for a few more rooms if you get some stragglers."

Kal sighed, "Okay, let's do it. But first." Kal cleared his throat and raised his voice, "Your attention please!" Bringing a finger up under the sprite's feet, he pushed her up above his head. "This lovely little lady is named Ria. She acts as my seneschal and will be making some changes to the tent so you each can have a bedroom, small as they may be. Please listen to her and honor any of her requests."

"Great, we get to listen to some bitchy bag of holding tell us what to do," someone complained, followed by low murmurs of agreement throughout the room.

The mage looked up, "Care to show them why you aren't just 'some bitchy bag of holding?'"

"I'd be happy too," she said curtly. The room went silent as she slowly descended and a stream of lights flowed out from her bag and into her avatar. As each mote struck, her body grew until the lights eventually stopped. Her final size was just a little shorter than Kashka when her feet touched the floor. Ria molded her naked body to Kal's side like a long-lost lover, looking up at him adoringly.

"As you can see, Ria is a little different from other bags of holding," said Kal to the stunned crowd. "She is also my lover, and I expect you to treat her with respect. Choose not to," he drew their attention toward the exit, "and I will happily give you your money back and escort you out, by force if necessary."

Ria stepped away from him and glanced between Laika and Kashka, "Have either of you claimed him for tonight?"

"We do not get to claim our Master," said Laika, giving him a sultry look, "though sometimes I wish we could." The pleasure slave was in her public mode, which she explained was necessary during gatherings like this. She greatly enjoyed the freedom Kal afforded her. But she also couldn't risk word getting back to Turam that she acted how she did when alone with Kal and Kashka while in the presence of other clients.

The cat-girl merely nodded. She wasn't enjoying this situation, and it showed.

"Good," said Ria, "then I'm calling dibs."

"Am I forgiven now?" Kal asked.

"No, but watching you stand up for me got me worked up, and I want to show these people just how special I am. What better way than making them listen to me moan as you fuck the hell out of me." The sprite began shedding specks of light as she floated up and kissed him on the cheek. She didn't return to her aqua color and still had the ghostly wisps of white flame rising off her body, so she kept at least a few. "I need you to ask me to pack up the rooms," she said.

"Ria, store the Library and Alchemy lab, please."

As the sprite darted off, the caravan leader, Turam, stepped into the tent, followed by his second in command and their personal slaves.

"I heard there was a party going on in here, and I've brought the wine!" bellowed the big man to cheers from the crowd.

Staring at the caravan leader as he began producing bottles of wine from his bag of holding and passing them around, Kal wondered what it might be like to have just a typical, dull day back in Telsin.

---

"Mama, I'm hungry."

Silma regarded her daughter with sadness in her eyes. "I know, Firo."

During her daughter's incubation, Silma spent much of her time wrapped protectively around her little girl's shell, imparting some of her knowledge to the growing child necessary for the life ahead of her.

It had been just over a year since Firo hatched from her egg. By human standards, the child grew shockingly fast, reaching the size of a human five-year-old in such a short time. Though small, as a fire salamander, she was already one of the deadliest creatures in the region, second only to her mother.

She was also ravenous. Silma and Firo needed to range further down the river of molten rock to sate the child's hunger. Soon, they would need to venture out from their river and into the gigantic magma pocket where the leviathans roamed. Firo could sense the massive creatures from further away, could swim faster, and more importantly, could make herself hot enough to kill them. Over the next ten years, the little girl would drive them to the brink of extinction. Silma knew this because she remembered doing the same thing in her early years. By the time she reached adulthood, only a handful of leviathans remained in a magma sea that stretched for days in all directions.

As Firo grew inside her egg, Silma spent a few days checking on the leviathan's eggs to make sure they could handle the coming slaughter. She needed to make sure there would be food for her granddaughter when the time came.

Female leviathans mated roughly once a year but produced eggs numerous times from that single mating. If several leviathans inhabited the area, the unhatched eggs entered a type of stasis where they stopped developing. When the risk of overpopulation passed, the creatures resumed growing.

Leviathan young all hatched within a few hours of each other, creating a bloom in the area, but few would make it to adulthood. The activity often drew adults searching for easy meals while large magmatic crabs preyed upon whatever they could capture, and lava slimes cleaned up any remnants.

Silma ran across one of these blooms when she was younger and was nearly bitten in two by a huge lava-dwelling tortoise. Few things could crack a leviathan egg's hard shell, but the six-legged, slow-moving, turtle-like creatures grew a diamond-hard beak well suited for the job. The tortoises didn't have the same worry as their own shells were virtually impenetrable to anything besides another if their kind or her. Even then, she had to push her body to white-hot before they would melt. There was little need to kill the massive creatures except in self-defense. Their favored prey was unhatched leviathans which produced a fluid that made them taste horrible to most predators. The awful flavor was then transferred to the tortoises' meat, taking them off the menu. The creatures also cleaned up the unhatched remnants of a bloom, and only they, and the amorphous lava slimes, found the murky, disgusting fluid which poured out of a rotten egg appetizing.

Once Silma became an adult, her tastes changed drastically, and she began craving the meat of surface animals. The phase passed quickly but was enough to inform her she could eat and survive off this new, previously unpalatable, food.

The salamander also discovered her new diet sustained her far longer than the meat of magma dwellers. Even so, she still ate vast amounts of food and had cleared out the caves around her home long ago. There wasn't much as far as surface meat available anyway. This same scenario had played out with each new generation of salamander girl, and only animals who straggled in as Firo grew would be subject to her daughter's culling when she came of age.

It was no coincidence this change happened around the time Silma began lusting to have her sex filled by a creature she had never even seen. The lust accompanied unlocking some of the memories passed on to her by her mother. They at least let her know what a human male looked like. The wide range of sizes and colors these 'humans' came in surprised and delighted her. Though her body's reactions to the images in her mother's memories indicated they were all humans, with Silma's narrow experience living underground by a magma lake, it was sometimes hard to believe they were the same creature.

Her mother was a lucky woman, finding many men she deemed worthy of giving her a daughter. But each of those daughters came with a bittersweet moment. A moment Silma had been dreading ever since Kal and Ikuno left.

"Mama, I'm hungry," repeated Firo, unknowingly mimicking the words Silma said just before her own mother left.

The salamander now understood the pull her mother felt and the sadness which accompanied it each time she left one of her daughters. Silma didn't want to leave Firo any more than her mother had wanted to leave her. But her daughter's words triggered an intense compulsion to get away from the child. Much as she hated it, she knew the region barely survived her journey to adulthood, and there was no way it could support two salamanders. In a few months, the compulsion would fade, and she would be able to visit for a couple of days at a time before it came back. But that was little comfort when looking into the sad eyes of a little girl she had known for little more than a year.

Silma also understood her mother's fear each time she went through this. The woman had several daughters and returned as often as possible to check on them. But Not all of Silma's sisters survived to adulthood, and the salamander's mother had not visited in more than a decade.

Silma knelt down and wrapped her arms around her daughter. Her eyes felt strange, like they wanted to do something but couldn't. She had a feeling it was related to the peculiar eye-leaking of the human men Ikuno brought.

Firo's face scrunched up as the memories given to her by her mother warned her what was about to happen.

"Go hunt, my beautiful little girl," said Silma, running her hand over the smooth black pate of the child's bald head. Like her mother, Firo's skin looked like the oil which bubbled up out of the ground with blotchy lines of bright orange running down her back and onto her muscular tapered tail.

"Will you come back, mama?"

The salamander smiled, "Yes, as soon as I can. There are some people I want to find, and I don't think they are very far away. If they agree, think I will stay with them until I can come to see you again."

Silma could see the child sifting through the memories given to her, "Should I go down into the sea then? What if I miss you when you come back?"

"You won't. I'll come find you."

Firo ran a hand over her belly. Silma could see the child's hunger gnawing at her. These trips back home were becoming rare as they only had a few hours before her daughter needed to find food again. She wouldn't starve unless she went without for a few days, but there was no convincing her stomach of that.

"I don't want to go, but I'm hungry, Mama."

Instead of answering, Silma kissed her daughter's forehead and nudged her gently toward the lava lake's shore. Firo turned and walked backwards, her eyes filled with sadness and understanding far beyond the few months since she hatched. As her feet touched the molten rock, the little salamander girl's body began to glow with inner heat until features of her face disappeared in the light.

With a tiny wave at her mother, Firo turned and dove into the magma. A tiny bulge formed on the surface as she swam away until the child flicked her tail and dove deeper.

Silma knelt, watching the place where her daughter disappeared. The sight unlocked memories of her mother doing the same with each of her sisters. Like her mother, Silma would get far, far away before raging at the world for separating her and her daughter this way. But not here. Not where Firo could hear her pain.

Glancing back toward the tunnel that led to her home, she shook her head. It wasn't hers anymore. It was Firo's. None of the trinkets in there would survive a trip through molten rock, and most were merely interesting things she found while wandering the caves and had no real significance.

Stepping up to the edge of the lava lake, Silma dipped a toe in the molten rock and swirled it around as a glow matching her daughter's crept up her body. Firo would likely not come back here for some time, and there was always the chance one of the leviathans could get in a lucky bite, and she would never return at all.

Though her daughter was getting further away, now that the girl was out of sight, the compulsion to leave quickly became irresistible. Diving into the magma, Silma flicked her powerful tail and began making her way across the lava lake in the opposite direction, toward the cave where she said goodbye to Kal and Ikuno.

---

She didn't know how long it took to reach the fissure where Ikuno entered the caves but was thoroughly unimpressed by the gray skies dripping water on her head when she poked her head out.

On the way, Silma ran across an open space with a smooth floor that seemed out of place. Looking at the area's roof and walls, she noticed places that appeared melted in between the tiny tool marks where someone had chipped away at the chamber's sides for whatever reason. Aside from the chisel marks, it matched what might happen if she stopped in the middle of a tunnel and released her pent-up rage over leaving Firo. A slight smile crept onto her face at the thought her mother made the cavern after leaving her. There was no way for her to know if it was true, but she liked the idea.

The salamander considered adding to the chamber's size with her own outburst, but she passed some iron crabs hiding in the tunnel leading to the cavern while another hid on the far wall near the exit. She wasn't in the mood to make something suffer for simply being in the wrong place.

Stepping out of the fissure, she turned her head upward, her glowing orange eyes searching for the sun. There seemed to be too much light for it to be night but also not quite enough to be daytime. It had been so long since her last trip to the surface she wondered if she forgot how 'days' worked. After she met Ikuno, the oni stopped by frequently enough she didn't need to make the trip to find a male to sate her needs. Silma had also never come this way before. There was a path from her home that emerged not far from a well-traveled road. She could usually get to the surface, quickly find a male traveler if she was lucky, have her fun with him, and be back home before her next sleep cycle. Going Ikuno's way, she had to stop and sleep a few times before reaching the upper world.

She may have also gotten lost once or twice in the unfamiliar tunnels, but no one else needed to know about that.

If she remembered correctly, Ikuno said her home was 'West' or toward where the sun disappeared before the surface world turned to night. Her lips pursed in consternation as she looked up at the clouds. 'West' didn't mean much when she couldn't see the glowing orange ball in the sky. What did mean something was the slight smell of smoke on the breeze. Her mother's memories contained square structures built by the humans with a stone hollow on one of the walls where they kept fire. Maybe the smell was coming from a human's home in the direction of the oncoming wind.

The falling drizzle began hissing and bouncing off her body as she lifted her nose and walked into the trees following the smoke's direction.

---

Out in the forest, two men hastily secured a large piece of linen sailcloth to some trees as another tried to keep their meager fire going in the light rain. The lean-to would offer some protection from the rain, but if the fire went out, they lost their only source of heat until the rain stopped.

"We should've found a fucking cave to hole up in," grumbled Esel as he tugged on the line securing the tarp in place. His knot slipped, and the loop encircling the tree slid down under the weight of their shelter. Cursing the rope and the constant dripping from the tree leaves above him, he untied the knot and tried again.

"Quit your bellyaching," snapped the man working on the other side of the lean-to. "I told ya already, the town south of the pass patrols the caves around here. We're here to slit some throats and make some money. Not get fuggin' killed 'cause you can't deal with a little rain." Ulay yanked on his side of the cloth to make sure it was secure before ducking beneath it. Cut from a boat sail, the sheet was one of his best investments and had soot marks from the many fires built beneath its edge on days like this one. The previous owner probably disagreed with the bandit, but he was rotting at the bottom of a lake from when Ulay slit his belly open and kicked him overboard.

"I still don't like this," said Hamma as he huddled protectively over the last flickering flames of their fire. A gust of wind from the side made spots on the embers darken and hiss angrily as raindrops struck them. He gently blew on the glowing coals while feeding sticks and twigs into the flames. "I've been told for many years to avoid going south of the pass. Knocking merchants north of here was fine but coming down here was a quick way for men like us to disappear."

"I already told ya' I spent a few months here last fall, and I'm still here talkin' to ya, ain't I?" Ulay smiled, "The merchants were fat with gold and easy pickin's 'cause they thought this area was safe. A damn good winter that was. Warm beds, good food, good ale, and a whore any night I wanted one."

"I could go for a good whore about now," said Esel.

Ulay hooted in laughter, "I bet ya could! Maybe even find one that won't give ya itchy dick next time."

"Fuck off," Esel snapped. "She was all I could afford after buying the shit I needed for this trip."

The leader of the small troupe of bandits shrugged, "Last time I was here, we did well enough for pussy from women with the merchants we offed." Ulay grinned, "High-quality bitches too. No itchy dick."