Majutsu-shi no Chikara Ch. 20

Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"

CHAPTER TWENTY: Winter Flowers

...

It hadn't been much of the wyrmling running that he witnessed, the young wyrms that would grow to become dragons had been half-butchered when he, Abhilash, and Ginga had crested the last ridge before entering the sweeping desolation of the northern wastes. The largest specimen, stretched larger as it was flayed and harvested, could have rivaled Kuruk in height from snout to haunch with a tail easily that length again. Its wings tattered rags of leathery skin that could have stretched wider than the whole length of the wyrmling, but the mess of slashed membrane and crumpled bones were too scattered to make any clear determination.

The sun was dropping to the rim of the world -- far west where the northern waste descended at last to the Sea of White Knives. The northernmost coast was inaccessible to merchant ships, for the many spires of bonelike stone jutting up from the foaming, steaming waves. The wastes, too, made three broad shoals of dark stone blades that refused, however briefly, to succumb into the fine sand that the sluggish breakers demanded for scattering along the shoreline.

Damon kept his eyes narrowed as he looked at Dragon Eater. Abhilash had taught him this meant he acknowledged the ork to be a great threat. Narrowing his eyes only a little, or relaxing his gaze would convey that he felt comfortable -- able to conquer anything he saw. When seeking favors, this would be an insult. Better to keep his eyes narrowed, studying his foe for weakness he couldn't find. Not that he had much hope of finding an exploitable weakness in the savage, scarred ork with the over-sized saber. Even without the War Gods tribe amassed around them, Damon wasn't sure the help of Pyaas would bring victory.

The ork chieftain called Dragon Eater stared one-eyed death at him, wordless and fuming, even after the jotun slave had been sent to instruct Dragon Eater's warriors to grant meiyo to Damon's trio. It was a curious matter, and Damon found himself desperate for the plain manner to which he and Ginga had grown accustomed traveling for so long with Abhilash. It might be that he was overthinking matters, but something felt decidedly wrong with everything Dragon Eater was doing.

Even what Damon believed must be the natural rhythm of a successful hunt -- would it be considered a battle? -- such as this, appeared broken around the chieftain's stony behavior. Skin little brighter, a rosier hue of gray slate like the blasted ground on which he sat, Dragon Eater was bare-chested and thin. Myriad scars -- slashes, burns, punctures from wyrmling bites -- covered hands, arms, chest and back before disappearing into his hide and fur leggings. The prominent burn that blinded the ork's right eye was a slab of burn scar that still looked angry and pushed the line of the ork's braided dark-brown hair to an odd angle, mangling the point of that ear in the process. The ork's hands were overlarge, and Damon found himself wondering if the massive saber were purpose-built for Dragon Eater -- or if the chieftain had salvaged it in combat with some now-dead jotun. Possibly his kept slave's father, brother, or mate.

I AM.

"What?" Damon asked, but it became clear at a glance to his right where Abhilash sat eating raw wyrmling liver that his own voice was the first thing to break the silence since his arrival before the northern chief.

He shook his head, tapping the heel of his palm roughly above his temple as though knocking rocks loose from his ears. It had sounded like a voice. Yet his ears bore not the ringing that should have followed, loud as it was.

"Chieftain..." Damon bobbed his head, eyes angling down briefly before locking with the one obvious, threatening eye staring at him. He kept his eyes narrow.

He felt the sound again -- now clearly in his own mind buzzing like an angry hornet -- louder and more distracting.

WAITING.

"Why are you here?" The ork's voice was low, soft. Dragon Eater spoke with deliberate effort, as though his mouth only barely remembered the way of it and he wasn't himself certain the words meant what he intended. Smoke-stained, yellowing teeth and tusks bit through the ends of words.

I AM WAITING. Damon shuddered, trying to shake the voice in his head loose without breaking eye contact with the ork chief. Pressure built painfully behind his eyes as his vision swam violently.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been staggered by whatever mental intrusion this was -- unless it was something else. The ork narrowed his singular gaze at Damon, a clawed hand closing tightly about the hilt of the jotun-sized saber that Dragon Eater kept close by.

Damon realized the ork had asked him a question, but he couldn't remember what it was. His vision was blurring, dimming as the pressure increased in his skull.

"I am..." Damon felt the words scrape across his lips, pulled out of him by some will other than his own. "... waiting."

He could taste blood on his tongue, his teeth clacking together sharply as the ork grabbed the clasp of his cloak suddenly and pulled him down to stare him in the eyes.

...

"He's had another one of his fits." Abhilash cradled Damon's head in her lap, refusing to look up at the ork called Dragon Eater lest she feel compelled to challenge him. "He is magic sick."

"Better to kill him, then." Dragon Eater grunted, his voice a raspy tumbling well-matched to the blasted valley surrounding them. "But you have meiyo, so you may keep him."

"That is good." Abhilash nodded. "He seeks a dragon said to lair in the High Ice. The southerners call it Eclipse."

"The dragon's eye is the only dragon I know, around here." Dragon Eater sniffed, thrusting with his jaw to the northeast. "A cave, three peaks that way, half-sun walk up the valley. Three... no, eight days walking as a human walks."

"The chief of the War Gods is generous." Abhilash glanced up, eyes narrow, before averting her gaze. "This one knows a story the Dragon Eater may find amusing."

"Southern humor?" Dragon Eater snorted, curious and dismissive at the same time. "I'll hear it at the story fire. Eat. Drink. It has been too long since the blood of Sidero walked freely on the High Ice."

"Three winters is not so long a time." Abhilash smirked, blushing with pleasure at such a compliment.

"To you, perhaps." Dragon Eater sniffed. "I am sick with waiting for the jotun to challenge me, and Sidero was the only fool strong enough to best me in combat."

"Do you know how he died?" Abhilash glanced up again, wondering if the Betrayer's lies would be dispelled so easily.

"Feeding a dragon, I heard." The chieftain thumped his chest and laughed. "I only hunt the little ones! He was said to have found a great grandmother of a wyrm, her shadow could cover the whole of a single peak."

The ork chief waved grandly at a nearby mountain, a smiling laugh twisting his scarred face.

"When you showed up on the edge of my hunt, I thought you were here to challenge me." He scowled thoughtfully. "I'm tired as yak shit, and the thought angered me that I might lose."

"It is a wise chieftain who understands the dancing of a candle flame." Abhilash nodded, echoing something Sidero had said.

"Yes, but we are few. Too few." Dragon Eater squatted nearby, setting small bits of rock into arranged cairns to mimic the surrounding mountains. "Here to here, we range in the summer to hunt the jotun and ice trolls -- the dying races, we call them. They cling to the wick, like southerners in their little wooden villages, and snuff themselves as the world changes around them. We, too, are a dying kind."

"Just so." Abhilash watched the scene take shape at the chieftain's deft movements.

"Here... and here." He pointed, a place far to the east. "Your homeland, now empty. No jotun. No trolls. Plenty for human city-makers... lumber and stone, and water. Sheltered in the elbows of the High Ice, nearer to the Fire Tongue -- the burning mountain a full moon beyond the horizon, at the head of the wastes."

"I remember." Her interest piqued, seeing just how near -- or far -- the old territory of her sire sat from where she was now. "Perhaps the dragon did feast on him."

"Gone, anyway. Dead or not -- his horde is gone." Dragon Eater sniffed, spitting off to the side. "I bought half a dozen seed slaves shortly after, from the Ekimu People."

"Any Sidero?"

"No -- listen... they only sold to me because they wanted southern steel for their totem's blood rituals." Dragon Eater shook his head. "I do not keep with such rituals, but the slaves were good stock. The steel was probably used to feed their foul god your blood-kin. If you want to find Sidero's kin, look south of the Ice. In the shadows of the lowlands, maybe, among Viper and Bear. On the Ice, they would be too few, or they are one with White Death. They would be hunted by the Ekimu, because Sidero's death was their doing. I do not know it, but the signs are ill."

"Many would blame Kamakshi herself." Abhilash sneered, bitter relief at prying loose an old scab for all the itching it caused.

"I do not say they are wrong." Dragon Eater nodded. "She fought well. Near as strong as Sidero himself, with her magic. I do not know why his death made her flee, unless the Ekimu sent her poison dreams."

He frowned at that, looking somewhat sad as he reflected on the recent past.

"Still, the worshippers of the skull idol keep our wits and blades sharp." Dragon Eater clapped her shoulder and grinned with southern familiarity.

"Just so." Abhilash grinned with half her mouth in answer.

Damon stirred in her lap, his eyes wincing and fluttering open by turns -- searching in the deepening shadows of the rapid dusk of late autumn.

"Abhi...?" Damon's eyes skirted left and right, making out little more. "I... I thought..."

"You had another fit." The she-ork explained, her blunted claws trailing aimlessly across his temples and through his hair. "I had to catch you so you didn't split your head on a rock."

"How long?" He groaned, struggled to move, and resigned himself to laying still a few longer moments.

"Not long." Ginga angled into view, her belly shadowing them both from where she stood. "They've got plenty of fire, beer, meat, and furs for sleeping."

"I could've sworn..." Damon shook his head slowly, trying to slough-out the remaining fog in his thoughts. "Maybe it was a waking dream."

"Maybe." Ginga fretted her lower lip with her teeth. "What was it?"

"Later." He frowned briefly, his stomach grumbling loudly. "I feel like I could eat half a yak."

"Funny you should mention." Ginga smirked, jerking a thumb over her shoulder.

...

Charred wyrmling proved a tangy, stringy meat, with an oily bitterness clinging long after one resigned to swallowing whatever chunk taken. It was beyond generous to say it paired well with the stringent, sour mead of the prior summer. Still, Ginga and Damon willfully gnawed, chewed, and gulped-down their portions, each truculent morsel thudding into their bellies as though their efforts had been wholly unmoving to the reptilian carcass.

When Ginga was offered another shank of flesh, she grimaced and pushed the offering away.

"Do none of ye ken how to eat meat?" Ginga demanded of Dragon Eater's warriors, careful to not directly look at their chieftain lest she give him personal offense. "Where's a flank of unburnt wyrm?"

So urgent was her outrage, she'd spoken in her native southern tongue and most of what she said was lost in the guffaws erupting from Abhilash at the confused stares the northern warriors gave the dark-skinned southern female. Damon harrumphed weakly, shrugging and nodding to himself in agreement with Ginga's assessment, but otherwise just as reluctant to offend as the tough morsel he was currently working between his teeth was to descend into his stomach. The she-ork leaned closer, but her voice was far above a whisper and spared no doubt.

"This will be good." Abhilash looked up to a nearby War God; a male human with a scarred, beardless face. "Get her a raw cut of wyrmling."

...

"Here." Ginga set the smoking skillet between Dragon Eater's feet, a skewered sliver of glistening wyrmling wiggling from the point of her knife. "Eat."

She looked him full in the eye, her stormy, gray-blue eyes momentarily wide and defiant before she narrowed them. The chieftain sneered with amusement, leaning forward to snatch the quivering offering from Ginga's knife using only his lips. His eyes closed as he sat back and chewed, his face settled into a stone mask of attention.

"Cook lean meats with extra fat. Butter, or maybe a fatted yak." Damon continued idly, rubbing his hands together as if trying to restore feeling to his fingers despite the sweltering heat of the nearby fire and his own winter clothing.

"Good." Dragon Eater said at last, opening his eye and looking at Ginga, head tilted so the human was his obvious sole focus. "Show me again."

...

"How are you feeling?" Ginga, sweating and breathless, squatted clumsily before sitting down on her bedroll. "Damn this belly."

"Now, now." Damon leaned close, caressing her cheek and scooping her hand up to his lips to rain kisses on it. "Only a little while longer, lady farmer."

"Sorcerer's lady, to you." Ginga glowered playfully, pulling him easily closer and kissing his mouth firmly. "How's your head?"

"It's..." Damon blanched, looking away from her and trying to ignore the flitting, needle-teeth barbs rippling along the ground even now. "It's fine, now."

"Damon." Ginga cupped his cheek, pulling so he looked at her. "Is it getting worse?"

"M-... M-mu.." He stammered twice, took a deep breath and tried again. "Ya."

"How do I help?" She whispered, resting her forehead to his and feeling the relative chill of his skin against hers. "What do I do?"

"I don't know." He only barely shook his head, never breaking contact, and gave a weighty sigh. "I just need to convince the dragon to help us... or find another way through this."

"We made it this far." Ginga smiled sadly. "What's a tower full of wizards going to be, compared to this?"

They laughed, mocking themselves and their fate. It was one of the few things that dammed-up the tears and the dreadful powerlessness that kept dragging against every step forward in their travels. For all they'd done, they had yet to set eyes on the dragon they sought. South-wold, for all they knew, could be nothing more than a smoking ruin. If there was an "or worse" that could be contrived by the wizards of Renks Cairn, they were sure it could happen and so they never gave it any other voice. The northern cold nipped through their cloaks, barely kept at bay by the mead and the fires of the War Gods.

"Nothing, if we can teach a Dragon Eater how to cook a fucking dragon." Damon answered wryly, twisting to nuzzle Ginga's neck and hug her tightly. "It'll be easy as fucking."

"Says the wizard of sex." Ginga tapped his shoulder playfully, the feeling more like a punch as Ginga was still wearing the jotun-hide belt.

"How's your head?" Abhilash stepped over them, staring down over her swollen belly. "Can you rut?"

"Abhi..." Ginga looked up, pleading. "You didn't... here?"

The she-ork's defiant glare softened, her mouth tightening into a line and she sucked in a sharp breath.

"The War Gods could do worse in trade." Abhilash sniffed, the minute implication of contrition smothered quickly beneath her ork pride. "I was promised an army."

"It's alright, Ginga." Damon soothed, patting her hand and kissing her cheek. "What was promised shall be given. This time. Alright, Abhi? This time, I'll obey."

Abhilash held a hand out to him, helping him to his feet and steadying him as he swayed in a sudden gust of icy wind.

"Farmer!" Dragon Eater called from two cooking fires away. "Farmer, here! Your mate has strong knowing."

Damon smiled, waving an abrupt reply and letting Abhilash guide him along the uneven, loose rocks between firelight. He couldn't help feeling a sense of dread welling in his gut. The knot of longing in his chest helped to distract him from the strange figures darting at the edge of his vision.

"Yes..." he mused softly, pausing to glance back at Ginga and then over to Abhi. "Yes, they do."

...

"Not possible... for one who is not a shaman." Dragon Eater pouted, tilting his head. "Your mate says you can, and you are a shaman -- magic-sick or no. If Sidero's blood would seek you out, then the War Gods will learn from them."

Damon grimaced, trying to ignore the hungry looks he was getting from dozens of faces all around.

"I will not let you seed all the females of the War Gods. Too many whelps sharing blood..." The chieftain sucked as his teeth in sage disapproval. "... no good. Ten. One for each talon."

The ork wiggled his fingers meaningfully, then nodded at him.

"Which ten?" Damon schooled his features as best he could, dreading what was likely to be a frigid studding on thin leather over sharp stone shards.

The chieftain laughed, seeing Damon's eyes passing along the many warriors gathered near in the firelight.

"Seed slaves, south-man!" The chief burbled with laughter that shook Damon's vision slightly blurry. "I need my warriors."

At his side, Damon felt Abhilash tense and draw a sharp breath. She already knew what he was about to say, and not even she knew exactly how this northern tribe would react to it.

"They must be willing." Damon stated flatly, eyes still lowered.

"If I tell them, it is so." Dragon Eater lifted his chin, crossing his arms over his chest.

"They have to want it." Damon looked up, locking eyes-to-eye with Dragon Eater, and relaxed his gaze to stare through the ork. "I will not lay with any female that does not desire me."

The chieftain's good eye narrowed to a single line, catching a glint of firelight in the deepest recesses of that angry shadow as if to fire it through the human's heart. The ork's ears itched, and he dug a finger into each of them, snarling and muttering under his breath before straightening up and looking at the human as if nothing odd had happened.

"Your mate will find the females you will seed." Dragon Eater snorted, looking for all the world as if he hadn't just suffered an indignity unlike any before from this southern shaman. "Until then, your mate offered to share her knowing of Sidero's doings since last I crossed paths with that one."

...

"I found him like this." Abhilash shouldered her way into the cramped stone shelter, the twitching, smoldering, naked human sorcerer cradled in her arms. "Had to pull him off the fire he scattered."

"You weren't watching him?" Ginga's shock and accusation tripped over each other, trampled headlong by the charging beast of her own fear. "Gods!"

His right leg was badly burnt -- flesh blackened and charred in places -- with swollen, weeping blisters and cuts all over his arms and legs. His hair smoked the most, much of it charred to shriveled stubble. Ginga stifled a sob as she chewed back the nausea from the stink of burnt hair and skin. He was fussing in sleep, unaware of his injuries.

"Kusuri sap?" Ginga choked the words out, not daring to look away from Damon where Abhilash lay him on the sleeping furs in the stone-roofed hovel.

"They are making their own, but it won't help his leg." Abhilash sniffed, touching her nose reflexively and scowling. "I felt nothing."

"You felt...?" Ginga's focus on Damon clouded her understanding, and she took several long moments to shake the idea through her hands before locking eyes with the ork. "Your curse?"

"I don't know." The she-ork grunted, worry widening her eyes as she watched Damon twitch and jerk against some unknowable nightmare vision. "His magic... I've never felt his pain from his magic."

"Fine time to find out." She could only scoff, wiping wild tears from her face and fighting the snorting, stamping panic threatening to break loose of her will.

"Look." The ork's voice was low, her yellow eyes wide with awe.

His skin crackled, erupting in flame like dry kindling. The flames ran along the open wounds, licking angry, blistered skin and threatening to spread from within. The air grew chill about him, the fires drawing the heat into itself. Frost gathered along the floor and walls of the stone dugout, creeping up their boots and biting at the tender flesh swaddled beneath.

"We can't stay." Abhilash grabbed the human woman's arm and pulled her toward the low entrance.

"Damon..." Ginga followed, but couldn't take her eyes from the burning sight of him.

...

The Lens had cracked. He couldn't remember when, but it had cracked. It wasn't even something he could quantify -- much like the Lens itself -- but it was there. Somewhere. Like a single strand of hair caught in the mouth, it was naggingly obvious to him even if it seemed such a trifling thing that nobody else might notice until he drew attention to it by pulling the offending fiber from his lips. How did one repair a magical remnant of a dead sorcerer that had been forcibly embedded into one's very being just before or at the cusp of death? He had marveled at Matta's Lens, the mystery and artistry of it. He had damned the thing for existing at all. He had beat his hands against it, in those times where he'd perceived it as a thing he could touch and his mind felt like it had hands that could touch it. He had begged, demanded, and pondered at it. Once, he even tried fashioning a spell to pull it out of himself. Perhaps that was where he'd gone wrong.

For now, it was cracked. That didn't appear to impede its function. Not in any way Damon understood. He could still see the wavy, rippling current of magical energy waiting just between the spaces of the waking world like shallow water coursing over smooth stones. He could still feel the vibration of the magic as he gave voice to the spell-song and strummed the chords of his intent. He'd never been one for the lute or gittern, but it was the nearest idea to how it felt. If magic were a melody. But there was more to it, than that.

Something odd had happened while he was awake, but he couldn't remember what it was.

"What is it this time?" he asked himself, tapping an impatient, immaterial foot on an insubstantial wooden floor of the non-existent taproom in which neither of the six -- seven? -- no, six of him didn't stand.

"I'm not sure, but I'm pretty confident it's your fault." He blamed himself, rolling his invisible eyes with spectral muscles and huffing a long-suffering, imaginary sigh.

None of him agreed, each with a nod or formless grunt that made no sound that all six of him shared.

"If we ever get out of this, I'm gonna kill that old man." He seethed through clenched teeth of nothingness.

"We'd have to find him, first." Damon crossed transparent arms over an imperceptible chest, foregoing the customary fingerless pinching of the bridge of nose and shaking of the face he didn't have.

"You mean I would have to find him." He corrected, not from across the conjured impression of a taproom, still impatiently tapping a spectral foot on wooden slats that just weren't there.

"You, I, We, that's what you're worried about?"

"Am I stuck here?"

"Again."

"I said, 'Am I stuck here?'"

"Right -- you, I, we are stuck here again, I'm saying."

"Oh."

"We just woke up after a while, right?"

"No."

"No?"

"When do we ever -- and I, we, us mean ever just wake up?"

"That's a fair point. I, we, us don't know..."

"Oh, don't you start, now."

"He, me, they, we started it!" Damon complained.

"I'm not having this conversation with us again."

"Do I have to separate you two?"

"What two?"

"I think separating is what got us here in the first place." Damon warned ruefully, looking up from an empty table where he didn't sit staring into a mug.

"Did I hear one of you say something about spreading more of this madness among the northern tribes?"

"Ten willing females, I said." Damon nodded, resolute and still staring at the Lens while the rest of him debated at his bodiless back. "That's the bargain."

"What did you bargain for, exactly?" He asked from somewhere behind himself. He wasn't sure which one of him asked, and he wasn't about to look around to find out. He didn't want to give any of him the satisfaction.

"No idea!" He answered boldly, casting a fleshless, boneless hand toward the empty sky that wasn't anywhere. "Can't remember."

"I don't fancy rutting ten females in a day like some brothel whore." His sullen pout put most of the rest of him off, but he still agreed.

"Since when do we, I, you say 'rutting'?" He chided, but quickly interrupted himself.

"Abhilash has done more than just rub-off on you, me, us." Came the sly grin.

"Did one of you, we, I, us at least grab the tooth, before we blacked-out?" He looked among himself, but he wouldn't meet his gaze.

"It's here." He reminded himself, pointing in a meaningless gesture that only he couldn't see because he had no eyes but he was also the only one -- no, it was still six -- the only six there to see it. "It's always here."

"Even when we're not talking to you!" He shouted irritably at himself. "Do you never shut up?!"

"No he, I, we won't." Another expressionless eyeroll he couldn't see.

"Alright, then!" He sidled over to the tooth where it wasn't, and addressed it directly. "How in the fuck do we get out this time?"

"Bad idea." He warned.

"Very bad." He agreed from where he wasn't sitting.

"Never ends well." Damon reminded.

"Scars. All the scars." Gesturing, bodiless, at an idea of himself that only really existed in the waking world.

The tooth gave no answer, which seemed fitting.

"Have we ever...?" He cut himself off.

"Not this again!"

"What?"

"I, we, you -- dammit, now I'm doing it -- were going to ask if we've ever tried to use the tooth on the Lens."

"Worse idea." He nodded sagely.

"Yeah, way worse."

"I think that's how we cracked the Lens the first time."

"First time?" He couldn't not believe his non-ears.

"I've got an idea..." He started.

"Nope!"

"I'm out!"

"Hang, on, let's hear him, me, us out..."

"What's the worst that could happen?" They echoed.

...

It's dark. Damon opened his eyes, smelling smoke and burnt flesh, but couldn't see anything.

He clapped a hand over his mouth and coughed violently as the smoke scratched angrily in his lungs, squeezing his eyes shut against the stinging itch in the air. A momentary flash of heat and sweat swelled from his skin, and he was dimly aware of the charred wreckage of his former life laying in crumbling chunks around him. The stench made him gag.

The ghostly echoes in his mind gradually coalesced into something that was more or less one voice... one mind within his head.

He had been awake, after a fashion, when the spell had begun. The pain had been more than he could stand, but there was no way to stop the course of it. The magic had already agreed. The magic had rushed over him, eroding his growing imperfections and wearing them away. It was the river surging over its banks and flooding the desert. It was the mountain spewing its molten guts down a mountainside and into the sea. He had been awake, but there was no way he could remain whole as the magic made, unmade, and remade him down to the barest trace of what he could even describe as his body.

Why it hadn't boiled into a stiff carapace of weak pottery made from the foulest excrement the world had ever known, he wasn't sure. Perhaps...

"Thank the gods, he's alive!" Ginga cried from outside the shelter, dashing inside to cough, choke, and spit in the cloud of smoke.

She fumbled hastily about, slapping him several times before managing to scoop her hands under his armpits and hoist him out of the shelter into the biting winds of early morning. The shock woke every nerve to sudden alertness to his nakedness and the bitter cold of the northern wastes. He noticed, though couldn't quite fathom, the cloud of smoke huddled tightly around the stone shelter where he'd recently been. He noticed, and fathomed considerably better, the wide-eyed, suspicious, fearful, and angry eyes of the War Gods all around in the dim gray light waiting for dawn.

"Worse than last time..." He grumbled from Ginga's arms, wedged tight to her swollen belly as she dragged him well clear of the cloud, the hovel, and toward a morning cooking fire twinkling merrily against the brightening slate sky reflecting in the melting night frost. He struggled in her grip, but she wouldn't turn him loose easily.

"You're hurt." She warned, trying to stifle his movement without aggravating the injuries she knew had to be there -- she couldn't smell anything beyond the putrid cloud and her eyes were still blinded with stinging tears from it.

"I'm not." He croaked as loudly as he could, which was very little at all.

"He's not." Abhilash echoed from two paces off, grimacing at the familiar stink that made her want to vomit last night's revelry just to taste something less disgusting.

"I'm alright, Ginga." Damon's voice was stronger, though still no louder than a gaunt whisper. "I need water. Mead. Anything."

"How?" The female human was able to blink away the sour drippings scratching at her eyes -- careful to not touch her face with any part of her that had also braved the horrid cloud in which Damon had been shrouded. "It wasn't like this, before."

"No." The she-ork nodded, grunting a few curt explanations to their northern hosts before fetching a mead horn. "Ancestors know if it is stronger or weaker magic, now."

"Stronger." Damon wheezed. "I think."

His sense of the world around him vanished as he put all his attention on the drinking horn offered to him by the purple-lipped, yellow-eyed female. Without preamble or any effort to steady himself, he snorted-back as much of the sharp honey beer as possible before gagging and choking to spit the resulting slurry from his throat. The sizzling heat of it in his nose was nothing to the relief from the rotting corpse film still clinging to him from his last life -- so it now seemed to him to be.

"What happened?" Ginga steadied him as he retched, gasped, and deluged his nose again to produce another long fit of spewing noxious residue from his throat.

"No magic... only his magic, this time." Abhilash mashed her swollen breasts beneath her crossed arms and glowered thoughtfully at them both. "It does not touch you, as it touched him. It only touches him, now. Look. His scars are gone."

His hair was burnt away -- or had been -- and he was naked as a bairn, though his shivering was considerably less than Ginga would have expected for the chill in the air. His skin was unblemished by wounds of every sort she'd grown so accustomed to searching-out to see how deeply and broadly the black vein-scar growth had spread. The cleaving scar from Pyaas was gone -- for which the magical blade was already filled with furious indignation -- and the root-like, scale-like scar growths that had webbed across his face were only in her memory.

"How?" She asked again, eyes wide before blinking against the cold. "You were so hurt I thought... I feared..."

"I'm hungry." Damon gasped, still wracked with fits of coughing and spitting-out tarry gray phlegm.

"Dammit, answer me!" Ginga thumped him heavily on the shoulder, choking back a startled cry as Damon crashed limply into the jagged terrain as if he were no more than a falling tree. "Damon!"

"Hit him again." Abhilash snorted, reaching for her nose and itching at it. "Harder."

"Ow." Damon rolled slowly onto his side, small cuts welling with blood on his chest, arms, and face. "That's a cold welcome back from the dead."

"You weren't dead." She refused to accept such nonsense -- though legends spoke of it and priests regularly whispered of such miracles. "How did you do this?"

"Again. How'd I do this again." Damon raised a pointing finger of contention before sighing with some unexpected resignation. "I'm not sure, I'm still a bit muddled."

"He's making more sense than he has since we left Varnais." Abhilash gave another dismissive snort. "Let him eat. He can explain after."

"Fine." The human female scowled her stormy blue eyes at them both in turn, which caused Abhilash to smile toothily. "I don't like it, though. And how is he not freezing to death in this cold?"

"Food." Damon whinged.

"Fine!" Ginga hoisted him upright so he could stand under his own power, which looked about all he could manage in his current state.

Shrill whistles, jeers, and laughing circled them, the War Gods taking great amusement at the hairless southerner's dangerous nudity. Only the jotun slave of Dragon Eater did not laugh, or even smile, at Damon's condition. The chieftain himself was among the first voices to cajole Damon for all this southern foolishness and magic sickness.

"Can you still make magic?" Abhilash was offering Damon a steaming bowl of wyrm-broth porridge, an invention the War Gods had long before their arrival.

"Of course." Damon hiccuped, belched three notes of birdsong as his fingers danced over intangible strings only he could see.

The air grew still about them, the heat of the fire seeming to flood outward to wrap them as if they were sheltering inside a well-built house.

"That's new." Ginga accused, crossing her arms over her own swelling stomach. "Any other secrets you've managed to uncover in this latest..."

"Food." Damon wagged a reproachful digit between them before turning all his attention to the steaming bowl.

...

"So, not magic sick?" It was clear that Abhilash had her doubts, but Damon smiled broadly and nodded.

"Never felt better -- rot-cloud aside, anyway -- and I think... think, mind you, that I have remembered a few of the more complex rituals that I was struggling-with when we first entered Varnais." He gestured vaguely in that decidedly southern way that made little sense to the northern tribe listening to half the conversation from the edge of magical warmth emanating from the sorcerer. "Like this... what was it called? Clement Aura."

He looked down to his lap, his empty bowl cradled over his crotch.

"I don't know its proper elf name -- but that's part of its description, 'a clement aura' to ward against extreme elements." Damon pouted and looked up. "What happened to my clothes?"

"Burned up." Abhilash sniffed. "Peeled flaming rags off you, before you started burning from inside. Before we knew you were burning from inside."

"Here." Ginga offered him a bundle of fabric. "I brought you another shirt and breeches... your spare winter boots..."

She sat on a nearby boulder roughly the height of a chair, eyeing Damon with doubt and a fair bundle of newly-woven suspicions.

"You don't remember exactly how you chose to escape this... this between place?" Ginga leaned forward. "How can you be sure you escaped?"

"I can't, really." Damon frowned, pulling the tunic over his head and standing. "Not in any meaningful way to put any of us at ease, at least."

"Starting to sound barmy again." Abhilash warned.

"I'm serious." He chuckled bitterly. "If I've learned anything since we left Tsuro, it's that I can't be certain... I don't like that, but there it is. If it makes you feel any better: the fact that you asked the question should comfort you. Unless you think I've somehow dragged everyone here into my own magical prison -- or whatever it was."

"I wasn't -- but now I have." Ginga frowned at him. "I meant that you got yourself free of it and you won't be going back, ye daft git."

"Sorry." Damon offered her half a smile and an apologetic shrug before struggling into his breeches on wobbly legs as the sharp edges of rocks menaced the tender flesh of his bare feet.

"You woke up in the between-place and broke your magic Lens." Ginga began recounting his story back to him.

"Matta's Lens." He corrected, nearly losing his footing as he tucked his right foot into his breeches and shimmied them up over his hips. "It was already cracked when I got there."

"But you said you... never mind." She shook her head. "It's broken."

"Cracked."

"Cracked. Broken. Same-same." She huffed irritably, eyes narrowing.

"No." Abhilash and Damon responded in unison.

"It still works, near as I can tell." Damon's focus changed, his eyes widening slightly as his pupils dilated to swallow the dark brown irises Ginga loved so much. "I can still see the eddies of magical energy around us. Maybe cracked is the wrong word, but it definitely gave me the impression of a fine line like it was about to split down the middle."

"A break?" Ginga chided, giving him a sidelong sneer.

"Maybe." Damon shrugged. "Broken yet not broken."

"Fine. You wake up in the place, the Lens is cracked, and you're alone." Ginga held up a finger as Damon was about to interrupt her, again. "But you're not alone... you just can't remember who was with you. So, after some... some unknown length of days, you figured out a way to escape."

"Yeah." Damon looked around, willfully ignoring the shivering needle-teeth rippling across the ground and up his legs. "That's the long and short of it."

"You were on fire, Damon." She shook her head, pulling her cloak instinctively closer despite the temperate air in which they were shrouded. "Forgive me if I think your account of things is wildly different from mine."

"Ours." Abhilash added, locking gazes with the sorcerer. "You were on fire."

"I'm pretty sure I used my magic on myself." Damon coughed gently. "... again..."

"Anyway!" He continued, smiling broadly. "I feel better, and that's a step in the right direction. My mind feels clear. Clearer than... than before we entered Fae-wood."

"What about your sex magic?" The she-ork challenged, at last sacrificing her waiting to the ancestors of opportunism.

"Ah! Right. I have no idea." Damon admitted boldly, gesturing at himself. "And I've just gotten dressed and it would be a shame to muss such finery when there's not a proper inn or house... shelter not befouled by my obvious handiwork."

"How long can you sustain this... aura?" Ginga motioned to the air around them, the shale and basalt chips drying within several paces of Damon even as clouds scudded across the sky and everything beyond his magic spell was gathering more frost as the winds gained speed.

"It should last a while." His face twisted with concentration as he rummaged through disordered memories. "At least until midday, I think? I should be able to make another without too much trouble."

"Just like that?" Now Ginga and Abhilash voiced their skepticism in perfect harmony.

Damon laughed.

"I'm not testing any magic, sex or otherwise, without putting on proper shoes." He pointed down at an outstretched foot and wiggled his toes. "These fuckin' rocks are sharp."

Something's wrong. Ginga chewed at her lip, but gave no voice to her fears this time. Whether he was hiding something from her or the War Gods, she would find out later. Even if she had to thump him one. The she-ork snorted with amusement, sitting back against a larger boulder that likely was placed by a long-forgotten jotun trail-maker, and watched Damon as he tried to squat down to clumsily don his boots while simultaneously remain standing.

"You're sure it took you days to escape? Like days in a dream?" She pressed the matter one last time, watching him for some clue as to what was going on behind his eyes.

"Days... moons..." He nodded eagerly, glancing around the camp. "Long time. It might have been a dream. Some magic happens in dreams, I guess."

"You guess..."

"Not like we have a shaman or a school or..." Damon's eyes widened and he looked Ginga full-on. "The dragon!"

"What? You think the dragon is going to take you as a pupil?" Her displeasure at the idea was palpable, so clearly formed in the pouting, frowning, scowling, chewing all happening at once.

"Maybe." He shrugged. "I do think I have a way to... well, I guess impregnate is the only right word..."

Ginga flinched like he'd slapped her, but the sting of it was not so sharp as the first time she'd been confronted with whoring him out -- knowing how likely it would result in offspring. She nodded, looking down and moving bits of rock about with the toe of her boot to hide her face. Looking him in the eye, oblivious to her pain, would only make it worse. The rattle of shale underfoot warned her of the she-ork moving closer. Standing at her side, Abhilash was a solid, towering wall... or barrel, swollen as her stomach was.

"I've got them marked out -- we could've done, last night..." She shrugged, tapping a stone chip with the lightest kick to send it skittering across its fellows and crashing into the rim of the nearest fire pit. "Well, any time you're ready. You want a posh bed, then build one."

"Dragon Eater!" Damon called, turning his gaze about faster than his feet could keep pace. "Have they all taken down their tents?"

"We have a few still standing, there." Dragon Eater pointed to a low ridge, more a jagged step where the sloping belly of the broad, shallow valley wasteland had developed an incurable itch and split itself into two uneven planes that gave a northerly leeward face to the lower side and a slightly steeper slope back into the valley's chipped, cracked, and shattered grayness from the higher side. Beneath this hunched hedge of stone were set two broad, low-slung tents that could sleep six warriors each. Further on, a pair of long-standing hovels of carefully-stacked slabs in all sizes crouched just above the sloping waves of broken black stone -- what Damon had originally thought was just another bump in the plain -- where weighted pelts had been draped to block the wind and vaguely resembling some great fuzzy buttocks of a truly massive jotun face-down drunk in the frozen ground.

"I do not care for an audience, just now." Damon murmured to himself, patting his chest and searching for pockets he didn't have. "Damn."

"It's on the yak." Ginga motioned to the beast tethered quite a few cook-fires distant, mingling among other pack beasts and busy slaves. "Remember?"

"Yes, love, thank you." He smiled, nodding to her in salute before clipping away with nimble feet he hadn't demonstrated in quite a number of days. "Back in a moment!"

The ruin -- so Ginga had come to think of it in the brief time since Damon's emergence from it, which was better than his barrow -- had settled into itself, and the stiff cloud of wholly disagreeable foulness had sunk between the rocks to seep into the ground. It hadn't rightly collapsed -- the thing had been far too full of itself to tumble inward and the earth had been reluctant to allow the smoke-like disease any form of entry into its depths. Now, what had been a low dome of meticulous cairn-craft was reduced to a shallow, split bowl of glass fragments and solid tar clumps whose facets rippled with the distant shapes of clouds sweeping high overhead. Damon had crossed barely a third of the distance when she noticed the wind rake through her clothes and tug angrily at her, the aura of fair weather traveling with Damon as he moved. She wondered, as the she-ork stood just upwind and blocked the worst of it without so much as a word, if Damon knew this... if Abhilash knew it... but she couldn't remember Damon even mentioning such a spell since receiving the elf's traveling grimoire in Tsuro.

It was far colder than the previous day. Colder than any day she'd known yet, in the north. Glancing furtively against the wind, she had to raise her voice over the sudden howling.

"Is this normal for this time of year?" She felt uneasy -- well, more uneasy. "It's not yet midwinter."

"A blizzard is coming." Abhilash sniffed at the racing winds, shielding her eyes from the grit and ice slashing by to peek skyward. "It wasn't on the winds, last night."

"Ask them if they know what caused it?" She made brief eye contact with the ork, careful not to let her fear rule the request -- as if it would fool that damnable nose.

"I will." Abhilash grinned at her, leaning close and kissing her mouth with all the familiarity she'd come to expect of the she-ork.

As soon as the wind-break departed, Ginga turned her back fully to the gale and stamped her feet to keep warm, her winter clothes doing little to defy the elements scouring the broad wasteland. What seemed an interminably long time could only have been a few city minutes before Damon returned, his warm air and still winds swarming over her like a blanket and smothering the wind as easy as pinching a wick between licked fingertips. It was enough that she felt sweat rising on her forehead and a bout of nausea turned her stomach, so swift the change in temperature. The frost smoked angrily with Damon's arrival.

He was wearing the vest she'd chosen for him back when they'd been staying at the Fancy. It hadn't been long, but he hadn't worn it since leaving Tsuro for fear of being recognized. Once they'd passed into Varnais, it had been too cold for such a light garment. Now, perhaps, it didn't matter.

"You have the tooth?" His smile was as warm as the air around her, wrapping her in it and drawing her close with his eyes, eager with expectation.

"Yes." She felt herself catching her breath, a flush the ork had started -- quelled in the icy winds -- burst into a low flame of fresh lust as she saw that healthy blush in his face no-longer carved-over with black wooden veins of scars.

"Want to help me test that my cock still works?" He grinned fully, mischievously.

Just like that, it was summer in his arms and she was grinning with him and giggling in anticipation. They were stealing-away for a hidden moment of pleasure, shirking their responsibilities to frolic against each other and savor the sweetness of their bodies, rather than working fields or tending unruly goats and even more-unruly children. She was laughing as they tripped across the cracked rocks, now a well-worn track through high grasses where hunters would enter the Willow Wood.

They ducked into the hide-covered stone dugout, but they were sweeping boldly through heavy brush and heedless of the young thorns growing there that snagged their clothes. Gasping for air between hungry kisses as they pulled, pressed, and tugged away clothing. That much was the same. She bit his lip and pulled him down atop her. Rather than laying flat on her back, she rolled to her side to ease the pressure of her swelling belly while still allowing him entry. He lingered over her, kissing her as if drinking an entire bottle of wine to bolster his courage. His mouth trailed hot, scraping lips and teeth, his tongue painting strange lines down her hip as he positioned himself behind her.

Here, the memory and the moment divided, for they had lain on cloaks over thick grass -- an itchy event, once they were done with their passions -- rather than layered furs heavily brushed and soft as down beneath a sky of basalt and shale.

As he entered her, Damon groaned his appreciation.

"Damon." Gasping, she reached aside and back to him with one arm, looking at him silhouetted against the entrance of the hovel like some night visitor. "Fuck me... oh, gods..."

Growling in reply, he thrust within her, grabbing her knee and her hip to draw himself fully to her. Their bodies slapped together, his cock spearing into her pussy as if it had forgotten its way and was determined to map the whole of her insides with each pounding thrust. He wasn't as quiet as he had been, then, either. He let her hear the grunting, the sighing, the full-throated calling of her name as he drowned his cock inside her. She, too, cried out as she hadn't then, encouraging and adoring in ways the hidden trysts could never be. She could feel the desperation, the change in tempo as he drew closer. His rhythm grew uneven, hungrier. His thrusts harder, off-timed and the danger of monotony was dispelled in the uncertainty of his movements. His hands changed positions and the deep rumble in his chest told her his body's tolerance for her sex's grip of him was ended. With a feral cry, he hammered into her with rapid abandon. His shaft swelled, pulsing, and the head became firmer as it pummeled Ginga's insides. Spurting his seed, Damon didn't stop thrusting -- but Ginga was no longer aware of him moving.

She had felt the first gush of his semen, and then what doubt she may have fostered in his revival vanished in the galloping, smashing climax that bellowed to life within her and set her body to shaking as every bit and fiber of her being drank the essence of ecstasy from that power. In that moment, she was the sun and the moon, orbiting the world in the heavens above and beaming down on the wide world to bathe it all in her radiance.

They were panting, gulping great, heaving breaths where they lay in the twilight gray morning in the close space of the hovel afforded them by their northern hosts. Dimly aware that, somewhere outside, dozens of strangers had just listened to them fucking like ravening animals. Distant slivers of shame clawed anxiously at the coital afterglow, but found no chinks in that armor to pierce through.

Ignoring the plaintive baying of inner demons bent on spoiling the moment, they shifted-about and Damon cradled Ginga to his chest, arm draped over her breasts as his knees curled against her sex-sticky rump. She cooed, nestling backward into him and giving a low chuckle.

"That bit still seems as magical as ever, I say." She murmured, grasping his hand over her heart and squeezing her fingers between his. "Any other tricks you want to test with me, wizard?"

"Just one other, before I put myself to 'work'." Damon put a little self-deprecating grinding on the latter, to alleviate the levity of the former.

He wasn't as large as he had been, Ginga realized. In the hurry and panic of his immolation, the surprise of his survival... his renewal... she'd scarce noticed he was -- as she thought of it -- his true size again.

"You've shrunk, you know." She was unable to hide, in her whispering, the note of fear causing her throat to hesitate making those particular sounds clearly.

"That happens, after sex." Damon nuzzled her neck, either unaware of her meaning or ignoring it outright. "I thought you knew, as many times as we've..."

"From East Rill... the way you were before." Now she was wrestling-about, turning on the furs with some difficulty -- her belly was a greater hindrance without the jotun belt -- to face him in the dim light carving pale lines of chalk in the close space as the sky brightened and the wind howled.

"I... I noticed." Sighing, Damon rested his forehead to hers, breathing her breath and savoring the sweet, sweaty stickiness of the heat growing between them. "I noticed. I didn't want to say..."

"You'd be a fool to deny it... and a double-damned fool to think I only love you because you managed to become a sorcerer who could double himself and grew six hands taller not but two moons ago." He could see the shining of her smile in that faint ghostly light, splitting the darkness where the glow of her skin dimmed around the curve of her full lips. "And foolish as ye are, I ken you're not a right damned fool."

"I love you, Ginga." Damon kissed her again.

"Good." Her eyes widened defiantly. "I'd hate to beat yer ass, if ye didnae."

"Don't challenge me, woman." He smiled, his voice whisper-soft and full of laughter. "I'm a powerful wizard."

"Mmm... wizard..." She cupped his loins, feeling the swell of his manhood and the weight of his sack against her searching fingers. "Show me more of your tricks, then."

His attention turned inward, searching for a thing he'd known how to look for only a little while before. He couldn't detect it, and that gave him pause. He sought-about within himself, finding no sign of the magic that once gave him the power to command his cock to wakefulness, command his climax and spill his milk over and over. It was gone, or seemed so. Damon frowned, sitting up with an irritated grumble.

"Stupid magic." Shifting about, he took a few moments to examine himself through the Lens.

"What's wrong?" Ginga felt a short-lived thrill, hoping this meant his magic-induced whoring might be at an end -- immediately dreading what it would mean for him to lay with ten females without help of such magic.

The flap of the hovel whipped open, the light flashing bright only by half as Abhilash's bulk yet blocked the entrance. The she-ork's frustration was plain enough, flaring nostrils and wide eyes demanding answers for their long dalliance. Her priorities seemed constant as ever, but she stopped short of toppling Damon bodily or trampling them both by trying to squeeze down into the sleeping space with them.

"You picked the smallest space for rutting." Abhilash snorted, working her lip angrily over her teeth as she considered what Damon's posture might mean. "Is his magic not working? It smelled like it worked."

"It... that part is working." Ginga sighed, propping up with her elbows and frowning up at the ork. "In or out, but shut the door."

"It's a flap." But she stepped into the low hovel, the entrance slapping closed behind her, and she squatted just at Ginga's feet. "So, Damon... if the other magic is broken, you should make more of yourself -- like before. I can still put you back together, if you resist."

"That isn't the problem." Damon looked down, his prick springing to life as if answering a call to arms. "See?"

"What, then?"

"Maybe it's like Geddall said." Damon shrugged, watching his dick soften and become fully flaccid. "A handprint in the earth... the magic is gone, but the impression is still there -- for now."

Erecting itself again, his pulsing manhood stood proud from his crotch and awaited its due admiration.

"But ten?" Ginga gave him a searching look. "What about the wasting hunger? Without the magic...?"

"Yeah, that's not really... it's not like I have a book for what I already did to myself." Damon pouted thoughtfully, crossing his arms and hunching to look down at his crotch with some accusation. "I don't know that it'll be a problem or not. Maybe we can try the doubling magic, too. How long to midday?"

This he aimed at the bored-looking ork -- the keeper of their time this far north and near winter. The sun moved deceptively low across the sky, and the gray mornings of the last several days had chased them into the wastes. Given that Damon hadn't taken time to orient himself after eating (let alone being "reborn"), he didn't have the clearest notion of the time of day.

"Many leagues. Hours." She reached a blunted talon down to graze the hooded crown of his prick like some delicate baby bird. "Time enough for magic after."

"Oh, fine, Abhi." Ginga grunted in mock outrage, looping the jotun belt about herself. "Let me get dressed and you can test the limits of his magic-less magic... or the limits of your own ork hunger."

"I am very hungry." Abhilash grinned lewdly at the female human, lunging forward to steal a sudden kiss from Ginga.

"Alright, alright!" Ginga laughed, holding onto the ork's shoulder and sucking at her lip in return. "Alright, hungry demon... before you wake my appetite, again. I need to piss."

"Actually, that's not a bad..." Damon was stopped mid-breath as the she-ork shifted to him before he could lurch to his feet.

"No. You stay." She growled, nose to nose, hotly into his mouth. "Hurry, Eun-eo, or there will be none left for you."

"Be careful you do not upset our gracious host, the Dragon Eater." Ginga offered a sly smile, speaking softly in her southern tongue. "Best not keep them long waiting, or -- magic or no magic -- we might find out how strong their waiting is."

"Hmmm." The she-ork snarled her rebuttal, though she did tamp her ardor a little in answer. "Once, then. Then your magic."

"No, once, then I go piss." Damon corrected, laying flat to the furs as his cock bobbed in readiness. "If this is ork seduction, it's no wonder there are so few."

"Hmph." Abhilash straddled him, barely able to see the top of his chest over the swell of her belly until she leaned onto her hands. "If you want... nff... soft love-play... finish breaking my curse..."

She rocked against him gently, insistently, scowling with focus. Always with the eggs, this human. He fumbled his way into her, and she bit her lip with some dismay at his return to smallness. It wasn't an unpleasant rut-stick... but two-score days of proper rutting had given her reason to expect it to continue, and now it was gone. He could change it, she was sure. It would take some time. After whatever magic he needed to work to appease the War Gods and their brood-hungry chieftain. She still hadn't figured that one out, but she didn't see any reason to dwell on it. A chieftain was a chieftain, regardless of who and how it fucked.

"I know -- I've shrunk." Damon groaned from beneath the round-bellied ork female. "It'll have to wait."

"I know." She answered. "Now, use your magic."

"Yeah." He did what he usually did -- though he knew he couldn't think of it the same way, anymore. Now it was a muscle all its own, a piece of himself that would slowly wither over time. How quickly, he had no idea. It was no longer a magical device within himself, no longer a net of clumsily woven strands connecting bits of anatomy to something that he had formed into a lever-like device -- like the trigger of a crossbow. Now, he was squeezing -- or relaxing something that was normally very taut. He wasn't sure. It was more like he was trying to pry his own clenched jaw open without relaxing anything... or relaxing two sets of opposing muscles. Getting the timing right was difficult, because he couldn't quite tell when he was operating it, and when not. There was nothing there to see, after all. Perhaps some augmentation would allow him to perceive this false sinew in his loins, permitting him to exercise it regularly to slow its atrophy. Who could say?

"What's wrong?" Abhilash grunted, feeling him stiffen and soften over and over.

"Just... patience." Damon gasped, working his hips and furrowing his brow. There was a brief instant where he feared he'd need to take the long way round in the matter -- which would prove exhausting if he needed to repeat the performance ten times (or more). That was when he felt the rushing surge, tingling just on the other side of this new, slippery muscle that defied precise control.

Release. Sweet release.

He didn't fully enjoy cumming quite like he had previously. It had become so mechanical, so easily repeated... he'd relied upon it like breathing, or drinking -- just something he could do. Now, he was so acutely aware of each and every tiny part that the final culmination seemed... distracting. Not that it wasn't pleasurable -- and it was pleasurable -- but his mind was so focused on identifying the specific elements of making it happen on command that he'd spent more time impeding his own progress than if he'd pursued it in natural, animal earnest. That wasn't particularly enjoyable. It was like getting dressed in the dark for the first time. Practice might make it easier. So, he did.

Abhilash was just settling down from ragged breathing after the first orgasm had grabbed her and violently shook her atop her human perch, when a second snuck up from beneath and punched upward through her spine. Her vision burst with light, tiny stars erupting everywhere she could see. Her breath froze, burning in her lungs and seizing her voice as she twitched stiffly, her cunt milking the flood of seed that was threatening to erupt from her throat. She knew it was only the sensation of magic -- or so she'd come to assume -- rushing through her body and trying to impregnate every bit and part of her (if it could, she was sure it would long ago have done). Still, there was always that tiny cry of panic, fearful of being split apart from the charging bull mammoth pouring into her. Then it became the familiar, comforting, filling warmth that tingled and buzzed like ten thousand-thousand drunken fireflies rushing every direction within her body. Horde or no, she didn't want this to end. She wanted to mount this human every day. Every night. She wanted to watch her sweet, dark-skinned little Ginga swell with his spawn over and over. Abhilash wanted to see an ocean of their whelps teeming across the north and the south, raiding, pillaging, and building mighty camps that burned bright as any city at night with their bonfires. The chants and war songs would drown-out the bleating goatherds and barking merchants. Her eyes grew wet, and she sniffed messily, wiping her nose and mouth on her sleeve.

"Why do you weep, Abhi?" Damon's voice was gentle, despite the pressure in his bladder and the coarse, grainy irritation radiating from his pelvis.

She grunted, sniffing again and standing off of him she turned to leave the hovel as his semen dripped from her glistening, midnight purple lower lips.

"Go piss." Abhilash barked at him, her voice low and the menace falling well short of any real malice. "Then use your magic."

...

"Ready?" Damon looked at himselves. Or was both of him looking at Damon?

There were four of him, now, but only two of him. Trying to create a third duplicate had caused his mind to fragment as before, rather than stretching over the new body like a blanket. Two of him shared one mind, while the other two, he presumed, shared another. He got nothing from their senses, but saw them both through his two sets of eyes.

"What do you reckon, then? Will there be six of us?" The other pair asked in unison. "Or eight?"

"Or more..." He frowned with both mouths, already dreading what would happen if any of him tried to resist rejoining his single identity.

The dragon tooth grinned evilly from the center of the circle, gloating over the ease with which his body was copied, his mind split, his sense stretched, and his will beaten into a form more of its choosing than of his. He hoped the dark looks from his other duplicates shared his dismay and distrust of the artifact.

"Did you hear that?" He asked from across the circle, two faces glancing from side to side and looking, suddenly, like they knew something he didn't.

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

"Oh, fuck." He replied, catching his gazes and wondering if their proximity was closer, or their affinity -- were they the original?... "Fuck."

"Not again." He shook his head, grasping the sides of his face. "Not now."

"We'll have to make do with only the two... four... two of us." He stood, nauseous and unsteady.

"That's three times each." Damon didn't look convinced by his apparent certainty, but he -- they -- stood. "Well, more or less."

"It's not ideal."

"Neither is more of me... us..." He shook, his pallor becoming more stark, his expression sickly. "Dammit."

OBEY. If the ground had bucked and thrown all four of him into the air, he would have landed with more grace. They collapsed as though hurled to the earth, each bearing cuts and scrapes in differing degrees, but at least he was still...

They snapped apart, eyes wide and terrified. Four men, in four minds, looking around and between themselves as if hoping one of the other three knew something that would make it stop.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me." Their voices, though in unison, were of different pitch and accent skewed to frustration, fear, disbelief, and grief.

"You think I'm the one not obeying, you sick bastard?" They accused, eyes and fingers turned to the dragon tooth grimoire of the Elemental sitting placidly in the middle of their circle of glyphs.

They looked at each other, the slow, churning miller's wheel grinding steadily in their minds toward the same conclusion.

"Right." They said, with unequal conviction and uncertainty, equal dismay and resignation. "Smug prick, fine. Fine, we'll... I'll... no, we'll do it."

"Maybe we should... try to be one, first." He suggested, two of him -- none of them certain it was a previously "matched" pair.

That was worrying, in its own way, but there was no way around it.

"No two ways about it." The other two responded with sardonic humor.

"Ok... but can you imagine if..."

"There were more of me... us?" He laughed, and they all shook with grim amusement.

"That couldn't possibly be the answer." He shook his head and shrugged.

"It would make sense, if the vision inside the Lens was..."

"Yeah, I don't think "real" is the word for it." He frowned. "But I know what you... Yes, we understand."

"As one, then." They looked each to each, nodding in solemn agreement and returning to their positions in the circle.

"We'll assume eight, just in case." One began to reach out and begin painting with a bleeding hand, stopping stiffly with a shared realization.

"The spaces between us..."

"We divided evenly between..."

"Oh, shit."

They counted the spaces between the four of them.

"Was it the spaces? Or did we split each of us into two?"

"Ok, so at least eight of us."

"You don't seriously..."

"I don't, you don't!"

"None of us know."

"Damon?" Ginga asked from outside the circle, the War Gods looking impressed and restless.

"We're working on it." Three of them replied, while the third was waving silently with his chin in his hand.

"So, sixteen, even if we get ourselves into one... one self?"

"It might be better to just try to bed three each." One admitted. "Leave this kind of magic to..."

"Don't even." Another barked, pointing. "Not now, not after everything."

"No, he's -- it's true... we're out of our depth, here."

"That's not what I meant."

"We know."

"One mind."

"Right, one mind."

They shuffled closer together within the circle -- ignoring the tooth's ominous presence in the center. Locking eyes across the circle, two of them found each other and connected their minds with an ease neither had expected. He looked over to the other two, their faces showing that they had met with similar success.

"So, this part..."

"May be a bit more..."

Each pair of Damon gradually inched their perception and attention closer to the other pair. Splinters of pain crept into their minds, unsanded surface thoughts snapping jaggedly where incongruous consciousness touched. It was sickening, but they dared not succumb to the urge to flinch away or vomit. With each breath, their movements slowly, achingly aligned until...

Nothing.

"It didn't work." They looked at each other, sweating and winded.

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

"Fuck off!" They snapped, all four pairs of eyes glowering at the tooth in their midst.

The two of him looked at their four bodies, feeling that irrepressible fury bubbling behind their eyes as the pressure in their skulls began building again. They didn't know if the dragon tooth had an intelligence of its own, but it definitely had an agenda they'd become increasingly wary of. Their shared connection to it had seemed a boon, even into Varnais. Now, it was a badger latched-onto them. A bear trap. Something else equally offensive to their limbs and unmoved by their howling complaints. Maybe it was a marauding ork.

"Fine."

"Sixteen." Abhilash shouted from something both pairs of Damon could only think of as a "probably safe" distance from the circle.

"What?" Ginga glanced back, standing considerably closer to the circle.

"There would be sixteen of him." Abhilash pointed with her tusks. "Four sorcerers, making four sorcerers."

"Sweet Maker's teats." Both Damons gawped, all four faces pale. "There's no way."

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

"Fuck you, it shall." He both retorted, eight eyes staring death at the inscrutable device.

"Why don't you try with just the four of you?" Ginga pointed to the assembled females. "That's only... well, three for two of you, and..."

"I could try just us casting the spell." One pair of Damon said, the other two already shaking heads in disapproval.

"That would be three and six of us." They pointed-out. "Which doesn't make the risks really much better or worse, it's just..."

"Yeah, I remember." The pair shrugged. "But we fixed it, last night, remember?"

"I can't..." They leaned close, hissing in a whisper Ginga couldn't hear. "You know damn well what came of that."

"So, we're either all in or all out."

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

"We know!" They shouted at the tooth.

"What are you whispering to yourself?" Ginga edged closer to the circle, leaning near them and interrupting their malice-laden discourse.

"This fucking tooth... it's..." One pair began.

"... being obstinate." The other pair finished.

"What, it wants you to use the other magic again?" Ginga fretted her lip with her teeth. "And that's a problem?"

"Not sure." He replied, though the alignment of his voices was off. "It's difficult, putting me back together."

"So don't." Ginga moved to step into the circle, but all four of his bodies raised their hands to ward her away.

"NO!" They shouted, and she near tripped backward in shock of it.

He looked horrified. Confused. Sad. Lonely. There were four of him, and he looked like every single one of him was the loneliest he'd ever been of anyone she'd ever seen. She didn't know why they stopped her -- there hadn't been any such issues with her touching the dragon tooth, previously. Now, though, he looked like the idea of her being involved in whatever was going on was anathema to him.

"I don't trust it." He admitted at last, eyes downcast.

"But it's insisting you do this?" She wasn't quite sure what to make of his reaction, or the implication that the tooth was somehow goading him to use magic that terrified him.

He nodded. Unable or unwilling to say it aloud.

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

"Dammit." Damon groaned, holding his heads in his hands.

"What is it?" She was just there... one of her and four of him, and she couldn't help.

That was when he realized that his heated exchange with the tooth had passed entirely within his own minds. She hadn't reacted to any of the earlier shouting, cursing, or carrying-on. The realization filled him with new dread, causing both hearts to beat painfully in his chests -- he could only assume the other pair felt similarly.

"We'll try." They said at last, the pressure in their skulls easing only slightly with their resignation to their fate.

...

The waking nightmare was endless. A sea of memories, sixteen lifetimes swirling. A maelstrom of repeating images, roads not taken, regrets, successes. The sickness that claimed his youngest siblings when he was a boy. His mother dying the summer before the Sidero came. Every time, the orks came. Over and over. The nameless parade of women -- before it had been scores -- were now in the hundreds and he couldn't remember their faces no matter how often they repeated. Every cut and bruise, echoing over and over. Pyaas drinking his life, saving him. He'd been wielding that damnable blade for years, now. Nothing ever changed. He never improved. He just kept repeating the same mistakes -- ran from the same dangers. Narrowly escaped death over and over...

Worse still, the soothing amnesia of Geddall was not only broken -- it was shattered and replaced fifteen-fold. The drugged, near-hallucinogenic fugue of the moon bath of the Fae court was an equally broad plain of jagged memories cut crudely away by Fae whimsy. The torn edges of memories, dulled by magical forgetting, were bleeding, screaming wounds now shouting their violation within him as every single event played again and again and again.

He couldn't sleep, for he had never slept. Nor had he ever been truly awake. Not like now. Not now that he was an army of himself within his own mind, each determined to wrest control of the flesh they shared without. Ginga had tried to calm him, after his conjunction began... or had it been before? Was she still consoling him as he thrashed in this madness? Each memory broke apart, stolen away by the other minds within him, and was copied -- over and over -- only to be rudely shoved back into his senses to be repeated until he went insane. Again.

If the War Gods knew what happened, none of him could say. They had been and always would be -- but now they were gone and had never been. The only thing that remained on waking into this living hell was the memory of a shorter, skinnier ork with one regular eye and one giant, saurian eye held closed in a deliberate winking nobody saw. Every gnashing of teeth revealing the gap where a tooth had been ripped out many years ago, and refused to tell him -- any of him, in any life -- that this was where it came from. Even that could be a lie within his mind, for there were so many of him there to lie to himself. Why shouldn't they? They wanted to be him. The moment they could trick him, get him to give them control of himself -- he would be lost forever.

The damp cloth did nothing to soothe his fevers, the cold winds only seemed to warm him beyond sweating no matter how much ice formed on his skin. The black veins that were washed away in magical smoke erupted from his face again and again, every time he died, only for him to march daftly north and wash them away again in the broken sky beneath an ashen snowfield above... each caught in the others' reflection like carnival mirrors.

He would take a step forward, finding solid ground, empty air, deep water, and blistering flames crackling everywhere. He ate nothing, for he could not satisfy his hunger. He ate endless, for he could not bear the thought of food. He drank, already bursting with drink... and he refused any liquid, he was so parched. Everything was right, for it had all gone wrong. His limbs were not his own, and he had to stop them tearing him apart.

...

"How bad is he, today?" The giantess asked, her deep, dulcet voice drumming in Abhilash's belly.

"Better than yesterday." The she-ork answered, mopping sweat from Damon's brow. "How much further?"

"Two days, carrying him." The jotun squatted beside them, blocking the flap of the tent where Ginga and Abhilash cradled Damon like a fussy bairn. "My master said I am to stay with you until the longest night."

"Five more days." Abhilash nodded grimly. "Is there shelter, there?"

"The cave, only." The jotun shook her head. "It tastes of death. Do not sleep there."

"How bad is the storm going to be?" Abhilash sniffed the air, he senses tickling with remembered smells warning and preparing her for the days ahead.

"Bad. Cold." Came the answer, and a wan smile on the jotun's face. "A pity your shaman is magic-sick. The females said his power was strong."

"It is." Ginga said defiantly, glaring at the mighty giant.

"Range ahead, if you can." Abhilash huddled into the furs and reached for the flap to close their shelter. "If the way is clear, we will press on in the dark, tomorrow."

"I can't see in the dark, like you." Ginga warned. "What if..."

"He'll get better, Eun-eo." Abhilash caressed the human female's cheek as the giantess stomped away in the piling snow. "He will."

He has to. Abhilash sucked at her lip and clenched her jaw, watching Damon's face twist angrily in his sleep.

...

One of the seed slaves of the War Gods... but not. One of the warriors, but not... each time he chose one, he didn't. There were so many different days happening that it dragged on and on. The night when he became many and none.

Had it been five of the warriors? Eight? They were all so different. So similar...

The tooth had grown quiet, after he cast the body-splitting magic a third time from the same circle.

REJOICETHYPERFECTEDOBEYANCE.

It was the last memory they all shared, before his mind shattered into sixteen pieces. But each of him now remembered it breaking into sixteen pieces. Now, as then, they couldn't stop what was happening any more than they could see it happening when they awoke in the husk of Kamakshi's breeding bed after the magical elixir had failed to destroy him.

Breasts, large and small, pointed and round, all teats... all playthings that distracted him from his growing unease of the day. Seed slaves and warriors -- though he would never know the difference of which was which. All were scarred. All hardy, solid females. Orks, mostly. Or were they mostly humans? There were no elves, all of him remembered -- none that chose him. It was a slow, crushing wave of memories, flesh on flesh undulating in time to the whispery chanting songs of War Gods remembering their many glorious dead. Deeds he knew nothing about, and foes whose like he'd never known. None except, perhaps, Sidero's kind. The pieces only came together once the nightmare began, when the host of himself crashed together and the multitude of his life bounced off itself and started over like an interrupted storyteller.

Quim, hot, slick, and inviting, with fuzzy, prickly, smooth mounds grinding hesitantly against him, anxious and eager, desperate for another moment. All of him, yet none of him, more than once even against his better judgement -- if he could claim to ever have had better judgement -- had been certain to sow his seed deep in their wombs. Their eyes full of fearful adoration, dismissal, and confounded wonderment. Before and after, when the raw power of the planted seed found them... the refined magical power focused through Matta's Lens that existed in every iteration of himself, whatever that might mean.

Time and again, his spend washed through them, taking their voices or making them shriek rapturous. They clawed at him, clutching him close, and they flailed uncontrollably, and fell limply twitching beneath him... above him, before him... They never kissed him... always kissed him... he savored each moment, dutifully ignoring his own enjoyment... Always, he would relax, press, squeeze, pull -- his body spat its life-spurring venom each time... until every face became the same, and he could not remember who he had been... only that he was there to sow life. Planting seeds...

Always, the sky prickled with shards of bone, and the ground stabbed at his feet with needle-like barbed teeth. Spiders spun memories in web tapestries, growing out from each other as creeping ice forms on lakes, catching the dry falling leaves of who he'd been before Matta's magic had changed him -- always knowing and always doubting whether he was ever truly himself after each Sidero raid that left him changed... left him exactly the same.

The one-eyed Dragon Eater wore his disguise as a playful badge of honor -- a trickster god in mortal clothing dancing enigmatically to bewilder the foolish. When the dragon-eyed ork had scented the seed of life, not even a day old in the bellies of these new brood mares, Damon was already deep in the throes of madness. He remembered, but had no recollection of the day, for he was delirious with sanity. Befuddled with clarity, and blinded by awareness. Many whelps, and not a single birth.

Damon laughed, screamed, and was sick all at once -- and nothing changed. The tooth dragged him north, again and again, and he broke himself apart for the amusement of a jilted lover. What else could it have been? How else would Dragon Eater have known?

The tooth knew. It screamed the words over and over again in his sleep: rejoice... obey... So often he couldn't remember their meaning and would never forget the stain of them in his bones. They called him out of sanity and into madness, into darkness where the sun was shining brightly. Into promises broken, deceits held sacred.

When it all ended, it began. He couldn't escape, wouldn't dare leave before it was finished. He'd forgotten why he began this mad journey. Could never relinquish the fae-mouthed echo of a wizard's final prophecy. His doom and salvation. Pain burned in his throat, closing the loop between them. The moment when he tore that last sacred piece of himself out that could be spared to plant it into the shells of those caught in the final storm. Broken, unable to call the god-flame, he'd spoken the words without breathing and called-out to summon his own death. The words had burned, carving into each and every one of him in the instant before the troll struck him, burrowing through him and seeping into his marrow to wait. The moment to sprout at the first drop of rain, the first taste of magic. The first touch of dragon fire. Reborn over and over, marching north, shattering pieces of glass showering down on the basalt shards and obsidian ridges of the wastes. All to find...

Black-sunrise. Tower-fall. Oath-born.

...

"Matta!" Damon startled awake in an unfamiliar place, swaddled in warm furs with the scent of steamed herbs, stale sweat, and spices thick in the air.

"Dead." A woman he didn't know, sitting on a moss-topped earthen bench beneath a stone canopy over them, watched him in the dim yellow glow of a single candle that made no sound as it flickered.

Her voice was not friendly, or familiar, but where she bore Damon no goodwill was girded mightily by a deep grief that vastly outweighed his own. Even as multiplied as his pain had become, wide as ten rivers and deep as three oceans, her face and voice carried a tale longer still. The punctuation of her loss seemed at odds with the delicate plainness of her face, the faint lines around her mouth and eyes too deep and well-shaped for such a youthful visage. She was older than him, he could tell, but she presented not as matronly, or womanly... she seemed to him to be only half human, the other half some unreadable statue bearing witness to the ceaseless passage of time. Forever moved and unmoving.

When he blinked, she seemed both more and less real in the low candlelight. When the flame danced, the light smoothed her features while casting each shadow longer or shallower by some artless design that made her look ghostly. When he glanced away, everything about her seemed to vanish into the flat stonework of the sheet wall behind her. He couldn't look around the cavern -- or was it a room? -- without noticing her presence, insubstantial as it seemed.

"Your women will be back, soon." she stood, making it clear she had no intention of staying, her mouth seemed not to move when she spoke. "They left the giantess watching over you."

She looked toward the door... a stone door. They were in a room, then. A stone room made of solid plates or bowls or boulders, rather than individually cut pieces. The rattling questions grew in number in his mind and clumped into an immovable blockage at the base of his skull, preventing anything from escaping his mouth to seek clarity.

"She's fine, but I needed to see you with my own eyes." She moved to stand beside his bed with a fluidity that was both foreign and familiar. Her hair was a curiously black hue that reminded him of crow feathers, and her skin was dark for a northerner -- or pale for someone like him from much further south. He couldn't make out the color of her eyes, but he got the distinct impression they were a venomous amber and hazel amalgam that could strike a man dead if she chose.

A single syllable slipped through the barricade in his mind and ducked across his tongue, fleeing him between his teeth.

"Who...?" He wondered if she knew what he meant, for he wasn't sure what language she was using -- her mouth hadn't moved once since she started talking.

"Listen." Her voice was insistent, her lips still as the stone around them, as she leaned close. "I need your help..."

He was right -- nearly -- about her eyes, the woman's gaze piercing him through and splitting his heart in half with grief. Pale brown, just a hint of green about the edges, alight with burning golden stars.

In the next moment, she was gone. She had never been there. The candlelight was gone. The scent of incense and woodsmoke permeating his mind as he blinked away sleep. Had it been another dream? Another slice of nightmare to taunt his many minds all testing each other and demanding control? The room remained about him, a hollowed space of pale, gray- and white-ribboned black uncut stone that existed as though by the most serendipitous of accidents. It was shaped -- there was no way in his mind that it could be otherwise -- but he could see no tool-marks on the walls, benches, or shelves. The glow of a hearth-fire washed everything in red and yellow ochre as it crackled noisily opposite the single stone door.

He tried to sit up, feeling as though his body were tied to the sleeping pallet, and his head swam dizzily with the effort as his blood rushed in his ears.

Slow, staggeringly unsteady memories plodded, one by one, before him. They bowed briefly and shrugged-off their dreamlike furs to huddle around the hearth for his inspection. He recognized none of them, but they were his memories. They were visions seen from his eyes, wonders worked by his hands and words spoken by his mouth of things that had happened in the last two days. What little he saw in those memories told him, without fear of rebuke, that he had not been in control of himself when he shaped the stone hut in which he now sat. He had not been in control of himself when, in the midst of a blizzard driving drifts half the height of their guide, the giantess slave of Dragon Eater, he had ordered them to stop their march and grasped the dragon tooth furiously in his fist.

REJOICETHYPERFECTEDOBEYANCE.

The song had shish-shushed from his lips like a distant avalanche, and it dulled the sting of the biting wind, soothed the frigid knives of ice forming in his blood from the storm's irresistible cold. The ground had trembled, stone heaving upward at his call. The shape of it was familiar, ancient. The memory of where he knew this place was just at the tip of his tongue and vanished along with the melting snow on his face, running in dripping rivulets into the already sodden wool of his tunic.

"We'll camp here." He'd stated, the stone door opening at his touch to reveal the already glowing hearth within.

The giantess, saying nothing -- or nothing he'd bothered to hear -- had set down what few provisions remained to her, and sat casually atop the hut like some high seat to watch the storm rage around her. She was still naked to the waist, and wore nothing to protect her feet. Even her tether was missing from the drab collar about her throat. Whatever power the jotun had lost in her capture, she still retained an imperviousness to the storms of the north.

Ginga had said something to him, but he couldn't recall what it was -- as though that piece of the memory didn't belong to him. His response had been to lock eyes with her and point into the shelter he'd created. Whatever she saw when looking at him, then, had frightened her. Abhilash had sneered at him when she followed them both into the hut. One corner of the hut was a broad shelf of moss-covered stone that served as a bench. Adjacent to this was a deep basin that was rapidly filling with steaming water, a bath. Opposite, separated from the bench and bath by the channel of firelight emanating from the hearth, was another shelf of smooth stone wide enough for two to sleep. Niches and shelves along the walls for storage, and a narrow mantle above the hearth for hanging cooking hooks or drying rods. All was to his liking, yet he couldn't remember why he knew this place.

"You're not yourself." Abhilash had growled, and he'd heard. He heard it with sixteen sets of ears, before his bodies seized, he bit his sixteen tongues and fell backward into darkness.

"Magic sickness?" The jotun had asked, the last voice before darkness took him back into that place of waking hell.

Made to live his life over and over again, he lost track of how many days -- how many seasons they could have stayed there, waiting for him to wake from his torment. They came and went, leaving foraged herbs or roots, and hunted meat. The giantess gathered more stones to fashion a crude wall, the cracking tap of boulders filtering into the hut and into his deeper sleep to reflect the cracking of bones, the white-hot burning of flesh pierced with steel, and the cries of the dying all around him.

The memories watched him. They took his measure before returning to their places within his fractured mind and melting to seal the gaps their absence had left. There were more gaps, but they were smaller, fleeting chips of wood that burned-up quickly in the fire as one mind or another held sway for an instant or two. Not long enough to wreak greater damage. Not long enough to uncover the lurking truth of whatever else within him had taken upon itself to set up this shelter.

Tiny hut.

His possessions were neatly arranged at his feet, on the bed-shelf and nearer the door, and his hands found the elf's traveling grimoire quickly. The tiny hut was an advanced manipulation similar to the clement aura. One he'd felt too advanced for study, but familiarized himself with it anyway. Yet, now he had used it. Without practice. Without remembering. Or were those sixteen lives time enough for one to delve into such a mystery fully? Compounding moments, stacking them end on end before compressing them between the pages that were the days of his single lifetime, the significance of a single teardrop spanned wider than he remembered -- vanishing faster than a single flake of snow on a steaming tongue.

Sixteen times, every bit of stone he'd ever shaped, every scrap of wood, stitch in cloth or leather... all found a thundering refrain, mirror to mirror, such that the motions felt ancient. Practiced. Sixteen men of doubt, scorn for every flaw, every error, every stuttered or stilted movement. Sixteen hearty lads filled with new-struck iron confidence in their spines moving and speaking with sure purpose. The sluggishly gathering moments caught, hammer and anvil, between the two cadres.

REJOICETHYPERFECTEDOBEYANCE.

"Shut up." He rolled upward, clutching his knees to his chest and rocking atop the furs.

OBEY. The tooth called from within his pack, and Damon swore to himself that he could nearly see the thing lurking within.

He did his best to ignore the Elemental's grimoire. It was easy-enough while his thoughts kept cracking apart, brittle eggshells poorly juggled, he had plenty to distract him from its incessant demand for attention. If he was going to do anything, it would be by his own choosing...

"You're awake." Her voice clubbed him in the chest, vibrating his guts as the jotun peered in through the now-open door. "That is good."

"Who are you?" Damon clutched his head with one hand, but his grip did nothing to ease the growing clack-clack sound of thought upon thought, blood rushing in his ears as he glanced through squinting eyelids at the jotun half-laying before the doorway to block the wind.

"Caollaidhe." She answered, her pale eyes shining with firelight as the hearth bathed her pink cheeks in orange rouge.

"It's night?"

"The half-moon watches over us." She nodded. "They are scouting the cave of the dragon's eye."

He closed his mouth, the question crawling backward on his tongue and back into the choke-point behind his nose where more questions waited to drop into his throat to be spat out.

"How long have we been here, Kayley?"

"Caollaidhe." She corrected, but Damon was sure he didn't know how she'd said it any differently.

"Kaileigh?" He ventured, raising an eyebrow at her -- he still wasn't sure he'd said it any differently than before.

She only shrugged. It was an odd gesture at her size and lying down. Almost as if she was trying to inch closer without moving.

"You are still magic sick?" Whether she meant to or not, the sound of her voice was humming pleasantly in his limbs and groin.

Damon was made keenly aware of his posture, naked, scrunched-up with his loins directed somewhat just in view of the jotun. He felt ridiculous for the flush of embarrassment swirling with sexual fear. Sixteen egos resolving into a potentially coherent thought -- though whether it was a statement or question, even Damon didn't yet know. He let it bump forward and out his mouth.

"You stayed after leading us here." Damon met her gaze and settled into a cross-legged pose, hands bracing against his out-thrust knees as he tucked his ankles inward toward his crotch.

"My master sent me to guide you." She nodded, her gaze noticeably taking him in from top to toes -- tucked under his knees as they were -- that put her line of sight directly at his groin.

"You want to test my magic, too." He didn't feel like smiling, even though the corners of his mouth twitched upward. "Lah big as you would find me... unsatisfying."

"Your magic is not in your rutting stick." She blinked at him, shrugging again. "My master said it would be interesting to learn if it worked on jotun, even if human and jotun cannot mix their blood."

"Can they not?" He let the notion sink into him, running his thoughts over it and pondering it sixteen times. "Abhilash is jotun-blooded... orks can breed with jotun, yes?"

A shrug.

"Why do you think humans and jotun cannot mix their blood?" He asked, finding himself curiously unwilling to accept the concept on its face.

"Caollaidhe cannot bear whelps." Her manner of speaking was like Abhilash, and Damon found himself struggling to keep pace with the conversation -- his grasp of the northern trade tongue not quite as wobbly as her accent was thick.

"So not any jotun -- but you and me..." he pointed from her to him and back again. "We cannot mix blood. I see."

She nodded. Damon smirked. He didn't know if it was a twitching of muscle or the movement of his other fifteen lives, but his mouth kept twisting into a smile even as he tried to compose himself. The tooth, it seemed, had been paying attention to things he had not been able to keep track of.

"Do you remember the magic I used..." He hesitated before finished with 'at camp', in case she mistook what he meant and assumed he was offering to multiply himself again. "... uh, the smoke magic that made me look like... like this?"

Indicating the scar-less left side of his face, neck, and chest, Damon then pointed to his bald head.

"I know a spell to heal..." All would be the wrong word, he felt. "many things."

"The sick smoke -- that is how you are magic sick." Caollaidhe frowned, a deceptively delicate-looking expression on her large face. "Master says that shamans must be stronger than death to wield two magics."

"Stronger than..." It took him aback, but he shook his head and waved his hands to scrub the air between them. "It's one magic -- I use one magic."

"Sex magic." She raised a finger on one hand as it loomed into the doorway between them, then a second and third. "Body-splitting magic. Healing magic. Three magics. That's how you're magic sick."

"No... well, maybe..." He didn't know how to argue the finer points of magical theory even he didn't understand to someone who knew, possibly, next to nothing about magic theory in the first place. "It's more complicated than that."

"Four magics?" Caollaidhe's eyes widened in surprise.

"No, it's just one." He held up a solitary digit with as much resolve as sixteen of him could manage, when they didn't even fully agree. "... I think."

"How?" She seemed unconvinced, but he wasn't surprised by that in the least.

"It's dragon magic." This time, he was pretty sure he gave his voice the severity it needed to fully import the needed meaning. "I use one dragon magic."

"You're not a dragon." Whether she pitied him for being magic sick, and therefore feeble in the head, or she simply didn't quite grasp what he was saying...

"I can show you, but it stinks like the sick-cloud." Damon regretted saying it as soon as he said it, slapping his hand to his face and heaving a long-suffering sigh at his own folly. "That's a bad idea."

The distant call of his name on the wind interrupted, and Caollaidhe backed out of the doorway as torchlight sputtered and spat closer from outside.

...

Ginga's weeping relief contrasted predictably to Abhilash's gruff acknowledgement -- though the she-ork's yellow eyes had long lost their murderous edge when looking at him, and Ginga's eyes had hardened with a new distance in the depths of her affection. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it, and the cascade of memories passed through him too quickly to speak their hidden truths clearly; he was left with a vague dread of the human woman's fledgling unhappiness. If anything, Abhilash's presence smoothed those coarse edges, and he knew that their overlapping pregnancies played some part in that. How much of it was magic, he couldn't say, but there had always been expectant mothers in South-wold talking of their children as if they were already well-fit siblings -- however doomed such dreams might turn out to be in a few summers when the bairns grew to wobble-stepped younglings (striplings as orks called them). Even Damon's own friends were either dead or abandoned to the tides of fate, and he didn't remember many of his father's remarks on how things were before he'd been born.

Kaida. Her name spun a thousand memories through his mind, laughter and tears among the flat, dull drudgery of daily life when a spare moment of joy was a day-long labor of sweat and blistered hands away.

Whether it was his frown, or something in his smell, or some hidden womanly magic beyond even the ken of wizards, Ginga's eyes softened and she drew closer to him.

"What's on your mind, love?" It was his frown, then, and not some unmagical magical knowing only she possessed.

"Home..." Damon felt his heart thump hard and slow in his chest, tight with new grief he'd thought cold ashes. "my mother... and the bairn."

"Shh..." Ginga cradled his head to her bosom, steadying him as he sobbed in an uncontrolled fit of lucid reverie. "It's alright... I know... shh... we'll be alright. No mistake - that one is too stubborn to die on the birthing bed... and we have you."

"Poor trade for a doula." His scorn was weakened by his own bitter humor and shuddering tears streaking his face, and he sniffled wetly. "Fuck is wrong with me...?"

"You... you went mad -- proper daft, after the..." she couldn't yet bring herself to call it what it was, or admit her part in it. "After the War Gods."

"My confluence?" He chuckled at the grotesque parallel, the streams of memory gathering together -- crashing messily into a swirling pile as his bodies had done. "I can remember it. Worse than before. Worse, and easier."

He took a deep breath, scrubbing his knuckles over his eyelids to smear grimy tears on his cheeks. Abhilash stepped forward and, though his instincts told him she was about to punch him, the ork put a hand atop his head in a way he couldn't remember her doing. Not exactly in this way.

"You live." She growled, a low, soft word he couldn't make out in her native tongue -- a word she never explained. "Whatever happened to you -- here you are, alive."

"I'm alive." He looked into those glowing yellow pools, sparkling with firelight and having fewer memories of their time together than he did. "Whatever else, I am alive."

"Eun-eo." The she-ork glanced down at Ginga. "I'm hungry and you need sleep."

"I'll keep watch." Damon offered.

"Like hell!" Ginga scoffed loudly, swatting his ribs daintily -- like a stout tap with a stave. "You're not doing anything alone for a few days, until I'm sure you're not going to tear off barking mad in the snow."

"I'll watch him." The sonorous voice of the jotun broke into the relative quiet of their close trio.

Caollaidhe blinked impassively at the sudden attention from all three.

"Kaileigh, right?" Damon pointed, trying to pick out the strange difference in pronunciation he couldn't place in the way she said her name.

"Caollaidhe." Abhilash and Ginga corrected him, the slightly wetter, breathier sounds not getting lost in the deeper resonance of the jotun's chest.

"Caollaidhe?" He repeated, getting a round of affirmative nods. "Caollaidhe."

"She's very knowledgeable of the area." Ginga smiled at the jotun, but pulled Damon to herself and gave him a reassuring squeeze that near stole his breath. "Kept us mostly to the tree-line, where the ground was easier for walking -- if a bit lopsided -- and she ploughed through some of the deeper drifts once the blizzard started so we didn't get stuck."

"How deep..." But he found a piece of a memory turning in his mind's eye, showing him the tree-tops just peeking from the rolling wall of snow.

"Deep... taller than the water-wheel." Ginga motioned upward grandly. "We could've gone through, or around, but she made it much quicker."

"She's a good slave to her master." Abhilash nodded approvingly, earning twin frowns from both of her human companions. "What? Ask her what she is."

"Still." Ginga shook her head, and Damon could only sigh with resignation. "We're not far from the cave... anything there, you'll have to find. We looked most of the afternoon and well after dark."

"Long-night is coming." Caollaidhe mentioned, on hearing Ginga referring to the dark. "Three nights, as the moon waxes. Two more and the moon will be full, bringing an end to the Long-night and calling down the life-breath of winter."

"Just so." Abhiash grunted.

"Winter-moon?" Ginga looked between them, letting go of Damon and setting about their provisions to prepare something to eat. "It's been so cold, I thought it'd already passed... or we were in the middle of it. It gets dark early, this far north."

"The three-moons night lives further north, where winter never ends." Caollaidhe motioned northward with her eyes, still laying on her side to block the door.

"How is the snow not piling up on you?" Damon asked, noticing the odd patch of wilted grass near the jotun's shoulder.

"You." Abhilash sniffed, thrusting her jaw toward the door.

It made sense, he realized. Still, his curiosity pulled him up (weak-kneed and shaky, at first) from the bed and toward the door. The jotun backed away from the door to reveal the hut's immediate surrounds. The sight of the swirling dome of snow overhead obscured even most of the storm clouds blocking the sky, the barest haze of white brightening where the waxing moon passed high overhead... lost behind the thinnest parts of the storm. A column, a fortified wall of snow had built around them, giving the impression they'd settled into a cistern or great barrel within the belly of the packed white flakes. It rose half-again his height, perhaps half the height of Caollaidhe at its deepest. They were on a slope and he imagined the shadowy presence of a peak, just beyond the impenetrable bank of clouds and more-impenetrable deep snow, lurking in the near distance. Much of the ground around him was sodden, snow melting as it touched the earth or dripping from the swirling vortex above like rain through treetops in fitful spatters. It ran downslope into a small cleft it had carved into the foot of the snow-wall, forming a worm tunnel at the lowest point and sluggishly burrowing away. Tiny shavings of snow-pack calved from the top of the tunnel, the magically warmed water dragging faintly warmer air with it on its escape.

"This..." He could scarce believe it, and his memories grew with aching slowness into a half-seen, gauzy reflection of what had happened.

The tiny hut carried a clement aura of its own, drawing its steaming bath from deep in the earth. It was carefully crafted, as were nearly all the spells in his traveling grimoire -- part of his trade with the elf Chrysanthias. He wasn't sure that Matta's dragon tooth grimoire had quite the same care taken in the shaping of each spell... the two had wildly different intonations (in what limited way Damon had experienced), and Matta had obviously never intended to share his grimoire with any wizard not already using magic in Matta's own particular way. Jayana's grimoire was deliberately crafted to include special considerations for concepts of linear distances, liquid volumes, mass, and other concepts that had given Damon no end of confusion in his early study, but it had been something he could learn through study. Matta's spells had taken the tooth's own insistence to bring Damon any success in using them.

He couldn't sort it all out in one night, he realized. His mind was wandering into trackless terrain, and Abhilash had called to him twice before walking out of the hut and fetching him back inside by the arm. Something like savory oat-mash was steaming, almost bubbling, in a hanging cook-pot at the hearth. Ginga was naked, soaking in the tub, when they returned.

"I mentioned using my magic on Caollaidhe." Damon blurted, finding himself naked, wet, and acutely uncertain as to what he should do next, brushing his hand across his stubbly scalp.

"Shut up and get in this bath." Ginga groaned the words at him, resting her neck on the smooth stone bank of the tub and watching him with heavy-lidded eyes. "Food will be ready soon enough, and you haven't bathed since Varnais."

The basin was only just large enough for both of them, its curbed rim bordered by gritty louvres that allowed the overflow to drain away into some hidden place before belching into the mud outside from some port Damon couldn't see. The mystery of the tub's machination deepened as the level of the water slowly rose and fell around them, even as they grew very still. He watched the water line for long, silent moments, soaking in the heat; feeling sore, tense muscles that had been forgotten briefly complain before suffusing with warmth to drag him into a sluggish half-sleep. Was it only the space of their breathing? The swelling of their chests and bellies? He couldn't reckon it clearly, but he could feel a current in the steaming bath that hinted at the innate magical properties hidden deep within the spell. Some curious source of heat, trapping and stilling the air -- controlling like pursed lips on a horn -- the speed at which the air moved at the outermost perimeter and drawing light and heat to specific points to activate not only the clement aura and the soothing bath; but also generating heat strong enough for cooking despite Abhilash's insistence on supply firewood. The flue of the chimney went straight up the back wall and out the roof above and it, too, breathed as the aura of warmth breathed. It paced him, drawing in and expelling out to suit Damon's comfort in a way only elf magic knew how.

He didn't know the name of the stone, either, for it looked not like granite, limestone, shale, basalt, sandstone... he didn't know the names of all the gemstones he'd ever seen, but it likewise matched none of these. Damon sat in curious silence, lost in timeless contemplation as he stroked lazy fingers across the soft stone of the basin. His fingers clung to it, even beneath the water, confusing his sense of touch for something to be smooth and easy to grip while wet.

Ginga caught his attention with a flick of warm droplets that smacked his cheek and startled him from aimless musings.

"Food's ready, wizard." She whispered, already out of the basin and robed in her winter cloak. "You should get out of the bath, hm?"

"Yes." He agreed, but it took a few moments longer before his body followed the command, as if it, too, had not quite understood what needed to be done.

Damon's stomach growled angrily as he emerged dripping from the tub, sitting bare-arsed on the bench of thick moss.

"Good magic." Abhilash frowned with stern approval at him, her eyes motioning briefly to indicate their accommodations.

"Yeah." Damon acknowledged flatly, still perplexed by the intricate simplicity of the hut.

Beyond the now-closed doorway, Caollaidhe began to hum a song Damon didn't know. The melody faded in and out of hearing as he began to put his spoon into the mash Ginga handed him. The first bite tasted much like the last -- familiar, comforting, unhurried flavor that spoke of faint canela and hard sausage, powdered chiles and the earthy chew of water-fat oats. He half expected the sun to rise and set as he ate, for the porridge seemed endless, bite after bite. When at last the bowl was empty, Damon looked to his female companions -- his lovers, protectors, and charges.

"How long have we been here?"

"A day. Not quite two." Abhilash sniffed, supplementing her third bowl of oat-mash with dried meat. "You did not sleep long, but you slept often."

"And didn't make a lick of sense until you called a stop and summoned this house." Ginga murmured, huddling into the sleeping furs, looking caught between irritated with him, afraid of him, and longing for him. "I watched over you so Abhi could learn the way to the cave, then we went and looked around."

"Nothing." The she-ork shrugged, leaning against the wall and itching at the dry, stretched skin of her pelvis. "Only the dragon's eye."

"The dragon's eye?" Damon couldn't understand how a dragon's eye amounted to 'nothing' in the ork's reckoning.

"The cave wall... it looks like an eye." Ginga motioned with her hands to indicate its size. "Twice my height, slitted like a serpent... it's just stone, much as we can tell."

"We will go in the morning. More light." Abhilash nodded, as if that ended the matter.

Ginga yawned widely, making a show of getting comfortable on the sleeping furs. There was barely enough space for two, let alone all three of them. Damon frowned, then pouted thoughtfully, but it felt like everything was passing along slowly. The she-ork blinked sleepily at him but made no other movement toward or away from the bed by which she stood.

"Are you sure you want to stay up?" He nodded toward the bed, knowing it was impractical for both pregnant females to share the narrow space. "Caollaidhe can watch over me, while you both get some rest."

"I'll sleep tomorrow." She answered, her lip curling with amusement. "A little."

...

The gray light of morning was thin, anemic fire turning the dull bone clouds to silver ashes as Damon stepped out of the hut to piss. The pale-skinned Caollaidhe, bare-chested jotun slave of Dragon Eater, was curled up at the edge of the hut's clement aura. The dozen-and-a-half paces between the hut and the perimeter was a muddy slope covered with tiny puddles and webbed channels running downhill into the massive wall of built-up snow from the blizzard. Whatever wall the jotun had built to serve as a stone picket was lost beneath. A tube of ice had been carved beneath the lowest edge of the snowpack, where all the melt-off and bath overflow had washed away like a drill through stubborn planks. He wondered if there might be some nearby pond growing beneath the snow. The water couldn't stay warm-enough to burrow all the way to the wastes, certainly not even to the mouth of this valley. The sun's light on a clear day would only pass overhead for half its usual time on the nearest plains, the peaks surrounding them were so high and the sun's arc so low at this time of year. The day would pass swiftly, and Damon had little natural light.

"Caollaidhe." He called gently, his eyes still scanning the clouds and trying to determine if the storm had truly broken or if it had just taken a moment to muster its strength for another row.

"I am awake." She hummed, stretching wide and sitting up with her knees akimbo.

Glancing over, Damon could see the pale pink lips and pure blue curls surrounding the recesses of her crotch beneath the wyrm-wing skirt she wore. Her immense size was cowing, but the strangeness of her held his attention two and three heart-beats longer than was strictly proper by southern custom of "chancing" upon someone. Whether the jotun had ever been plagued with any such modesty was impossible to know, her limpid eyes catching and reflecting the hearth-light in traces of yellow-orange butterfly wings as she locked gazes with him before his cheeks warmed. He couldn't look away from those great glittering crystal windows into the Jotun's unfathomable being.

"You will guard my wife?" He asked, hoping his voice and face matched his intent to appear as fierce and indomitable as the Dragon Eater himself.

"My master bid me guide you." She answered, standing suddenly.

Damon was reminded of the raw strength of her, his head barely reaching above her knees. The ground shook -- the barest vibration, but it was there -- as her footfalls steadied her on the moistened slope. He noticed that she didn't sink much in the mud, and the rocks didn't seem to bother her feet in the least. Either the soil of the slope was exceptionally shallow, or she was far lighter on her feet than her size would suggest. He couldn't be sure and decided it was safer to not mention it aloud.

"Would using my magic to heal you be payment enough for you to protect my mate?"

"What are ye on about?" Ginga demanded, waddling sleepily to the door of the hut. "You're not going anywhere alone."

"Guide or not, I'd rather she be inclined to help while she's here." Damon shrugged. "If this storm persists, trekking back and forth from here could be a problem."

"We could move the camp closer." Abhilash ventured, pointing at him with her tusks in proper ork fashion. "You can make a new hut, near the cave."

"No camp near the cave." Caollaidhe scowled with appropriate disgust -- a warning. "Death and ill omen sleep there."

"What ill omen?" Ginga leaned against the side of the hut, then stood upright. "This isn't gonna collapse on our things, is it?"

"No... not..." Damon hesitated, turned his attention inward, sinking to look through the multi-faceted Lens.

His hands bent, strumming invisible strings on a three-tiered harp made of zephyrs, and he chanted out a strange assortment of wet, crunching sounds of a mason setting bricks in mortar. The peculiar, still-faced breathing rhythm of the hut strengthened and the creak of stone against stone gave voice to the structure's muscular tension as it resettled in position. Water burbled and splashed loudly, guttering angrily out of the drain duct on the exterior corner nearest the tub.

"It won't, now." He concluded, sweat beading on his forehead as he panted and gave his human lover a breathless smile.

"Good." She watched him curiously, unsure if he was going to have another fit, faint, or possibly burst aflame. "Good."

"What ill omen?" He turned his attention to Caollaidhe. "Something other than a dragon?"

"Death, sickness... bad things." She said flatly, the faint expressions on her face seemed massive, theatrical displays given the size... she didn't seem to have more information, it was simply what she knew of the place.

"Did you put the camp here because this is the nearest you could set the hut safely?" Ginga slanted her hips and eyebrows at him, rubbing at the chafed skin where her stomach was swelling.

"Of course." Damon answered without thinking, the memory fluttering anxiously forward as if summoned by the very question and feeling compelled to answer -- too late -- for its motivations.

How he'd known it was the closest he could conjure the hut, was a different mystery. It nagged at the back of his brain, sticking its fool head through the slats of a corral and getting its horns caught. Unable to free itself and be understood, the memory of why he knew remained noisily at the back of the herd of unresolved, milling memories still braying, bleating, and nagging for his attention. She's going to ask...

"How'd you know?" Abhilash flexed her hands at her sides... impatience.

"I don't know. That's the maddening part." He admitted, pinching the bridge of his nose before running his hands over his scalp. "It's been eight moons."

"Eight... ah. It has." Abhilash run a hand over her own head, her hair having grown back such she couldn't quite tie it back but it still hung to her nape and over her brow.

"I'd say it suits you." Ginga sighed heavily, clucking regret with her tongue. "But I really love your hair."

"It'll grow back." He shrugged, turning his attention to the jotun again. "So? Healing you... would that be payment enough to guard us?"

Caollaidhe blinked down at him, barely a full jotun pace away. Whether she had considered the question from the night before, she made no indication. Her face clouded with concentration. Uncertainty.

"Would Dragon Eater want you to be healed?" Damon prodded, thinking her hesitation might arise from a twisted sense of loyalty to the tiny ork... well "tiny" compared to a fucking giant.

She frowned severely at that, or looked to be from his vantage, and Damon wondered briefly if his play at hiring Caollaidhe as a bodyguard had just failed spectacularly.

"Your magic makes babies in females." Caollaidhe stated, though he could tell it should have been a question.

"Sidero bedded a giant." Abhilash whispered from near his shoulder.

"You're joking, right?" Ginga scoffed, rolling her eyes. "Never mind -- I know you're not."

"And you think -- what? -- the Dragon Eater is going to become part of your army?" Damon eyed the she-ork with the closest thing he'd felt to scorn for her since...

"Who cares?" She snorted. "When my army gathers, do you think Pyaas will care? You think I will care?"

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

Damon's eyes widened at the drumbeat voice-thoughts pounding in his skull.

Are you fucking kidding me? He turned his eyes to the hut, where the presence of the tooth-grimoire pulsed like the beating of some terrible, mountainous heart.

Sixteen deep, shaking breaths, and their single, resigned sigh echoing in the corridors of sixteen throats as Damon growled frustration. His vision blurred a moment, and he wondered if he were seeing the world sixteen times at once. Perhaps it was just the pained beating of his many hearts in his many chests. He could see Dragon Eater laughing. The ork's giant, reptilian eye gleaming hateful and full of fire.

"I promised the Sidero an army, exile." Damon hardened his gaze at her, feeling the tired pain flashing to new life and bleeding all over again.

The she-ork wrapped her arms over his shoulders and pulled him close so she could sneer down into his face before leaning close and breathing her words into his ear.

"Think of it, wizard." The lust made her voice husky, full of smoke and carnal promises, reeking of charred yak jerky. "Your seed in her womb. Your power growing new life in one of the dying people."

"That's not the kind of legacy..." He could feel his loins stirring at the thought, his body responding to Abhilash eagerly in its predictable betrayal.

"I think we're beyond any normal notions of legacy, Damon." Ginga was nearby, her boots hastily pulled on to walk in the mud. "But... you should do it."

"Ginga..." but he saw the look in her eyes and he knew.

He might not be able to understand exactly. But he knew. Having wept over her in the time of her own rebirth, and been with her when the life growing within her had been expelled afterward... he knew. There was no hiding or mistaking the pain in her eyes, and he felt it stab through all sixteen of him as if he were made of vapor. She would only have agreed if she believed the jotun wanted a child.

"You're sure you want this, Caollaidhe?" His voice barely had any strength, at first, rising as he repeated himself. "Are you sure you want this, Caollaidhe?"

"Yes." She could have struck him in the back, and he might have felt it less.

The desperate pain was there, the pain of one who had either buried their children or had never given birth while all those around her celebrated in the making of life. The longing. It was a sorrow that rivaled the grief of the elders of South-wold, those who had seen their life's glory wither and die long before them. It was the grief he'd felt when he woke up, alive, among the captives of the Sidero. Not for himself; for those whom he didn't yet know had died, but he assumed they had. The guilty grief of those who survived, when others did not. The pain that carried the flawless, beautiful memories of those beloved stolen from this life. He heard her perfectly, and the weight of it pressed him to his knees.

He wished he could have only nodded, resigned to it, rather than feeling any part of that pain called back into his waking mind. He shook with a silent sob before he leaned his head against the swell of Ginga's belly and reached a hand over to hook around Abhilash's thigh.

"Alright." He croaked the word out, and it might have been a different word in a different tongue because it sounded nothing like any of his sixteen voices to his almost three-dozen ears.

"Alright." Damon said again, sniffing several times and standing on shaky legs. "As near the cave as possible."

"No, the cave..." Caollaidhe began.

"Death and ill omen, I know." Damon looked up at her, eyes red and watery on his tiny brown-red face. "I defy both."

...

The trek to the dragon's eye cavern was a sluggish, sweaty affair as the jotun swept tirelessly through drift after drift of snow while the relatively diminutive trio followed in knee-deep clumps of powder or snowpack slabs all crunching and squeaking. At one point, they passed into a bald slope, the wreckage of some ancient landslide far downslope long-buried in trees blanketed white, and they could see across the valley beneath the gray-white haze of the clouds blocking the tops of the peaks to either side. The storm had cast claw-like mounds of drifted snow up and down the valley's sides like interlocking fingers, with odd patches of little or no snow accumulated, and great heaps burying the trees in places with frigid white dunes.

It was just at midday that they reached the mouth of the cavern, a nearby outcrop forming a natural windbreak that allowed the snow to swirl and gather in a shallow bowl where the entrance to the cave yawned toothlessly. A full rod in every direction of the cavern, the shallow snow bowl swooped upward into a great embankment of gathered white that barred sight of the cavern from anywhere but directly overhead. Whether Caollaidhe knew the place by heart, or her height had given her all the vantage she needed to navigate closer and closer, Damon didn't know. He'd been marching non-stop for what felt like two or three moons, but the day had never changed. He never stopped sweating, and his thirst was never fully quenched by the single canteen he'd brought that was only half-empty by the time they'd arrived.

"There." Caollaidhe nodded, but their eyes had no trouble peering across the sparse clearing at the sole feature worth looking at as far as the snow would allow them to see.

"The storm has calmed." The she-ork clapped a hand firmly on Damon's shoulder as he panted. "The snow was deeper, yesterday."

"Still..." Ginga grimaced, fists digging against her tired back. "It'll be good to get back by nightfall, today."

"Hmph." Abhilash nodded once her own agreement. "I think the storm will break tomorrow."

"It won't." Caollaidhe marched down into the shallowest part of the snowy basin, where the fresh powder barely covered her ankles.

Damon followed Abhilash and jotun-belt-enhanced Ginga toward the cave entrance, the snow regularly knee-deep until just before the entrance. When they stopped, Damon doubled-over gasping for breath. The snow around them was rapidly melting, some of it steaming away as Damon had trudged passed. His clement aura magic had kept the trio pleasantly warm, though it could do little for the snow-melt that dripped on them and clung to their clothes, soaking through shortly after they began their trek.

"Maybe don't use that on the way back unless we get really cold." Ginga suggested, and Abhilash nodded her agreement.

Flushed and still puffing tiredly, Damon only nodded.

"Gotta be the belt, or something." Damon coughed up phlegm and spat. "Why I'm fuckin'... so..."

He coughed again, hard. His eyes grew watery and his face darkened noticeably. He spat again and fought to catch his breath.

"So fuckin' ... out of breath."

"You're also holding your breath, like... a lot." Ginga nodded at him meaningfully.

"Right." Damon wheezed, drawing himself upright and taking two slow, deep breaths. "I mean, I can feel the spell, but it's not a physical weight or anything."

"Your lungs disagree." Abhilash snorted with amusement.

"I have a quick question I don't think either of you have thought about." Ginga chirped, glancing at Caollaidhe, the jotun now sitting cross-legged in the middle of the snowy basin serving as the cave's front stoop.

"Rope." Abhilash gestured to the coiled loop hanging from her pack. "Under her shoulders, before he starts."

"And you think you can drag her?" Ginga's eyebrows raised. "She's enormous! Anyway, how long will she be unconscious?"

"Not long, I think." Damon had nearly gotten his breathing under control. "Not long."

Carving a short trough into the further edge of the basin from where they entered, Caollaidhe led Damon three jotun-sized paces into another drift. He had to release the clement aura to keep the drift from collapsing on them as it melted, allowing the chill to keep the trench in which they stood intact. Abhilash followed them, having tied a trio of looped rope about the jotun's shoulders. Caollaidhe lay on her back, eyes watching him intently as he walked around her shoulders muttering and waving his hands in patterns incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Damon didn't take the time to worry whether she understood the movements, or the words. He didn't take the time to dread whether she was some subservient ice-witch owing fealty to the Dragon Eater. Part of him still believed the ork was a dragon in disguise, and the dragon's eye cave was an elaborate jest at his mortal expense. He hadn't lived sixteen lives and learned nothing of deceit. She might be watching. Studying. He didn't have time to consider the ramifications of what it might mean if she took this knowledge to Dragon Eater... but, if the tooth belonged to him, how did the "ork" not already know the spell?

Fucking dragon magic. Damon cursed deep within his mind, as far away as he could from where the magic was spinning within himself like cocoon silk. His fingers rolled the many filaments of magic together, weaving them with the patterns in his voice -- now a two-part melody he had little difficulty controlling. It was so much easier, having practiced over and over and being able to feel the way his vocal cords shook in his throat and his mouth could form other sounds independently. Where he had previously used brute force to reshape himself or others, especially when consumed by a magical draught meant to create an immense explosion, the spell found a refinement as his sixteen minds examined each piece as it issued forth. He made adjustments to his posture and tone even before the structure of the spell could begin to vibrate the slightest off-balance, let alone shake violently out of control.

REJOICETHYPERFECTEDOBEYANCE.

He reached out, caressing Caollaidhe with the arcane energy. Draping the shroud of the spell over her, again and again, and letting it sink into her to burn-away the parts of her he knew he didn't need. Letting it restore her as if she were being re-born, flesh and organs suffused with vitality as if the rigors of life had never happened. Making her perfect. Making her body exult in its obedience to his will. He couldn't see her womb, but he could see the bilious oil sweating out of her skin as everything the magic sought to improve or replace was reduced to noxious waste. Rather than sprint through the spell with as much force as possible, Damon took his time to coax the magic steadily, smoothly through the jotun. He directed the effluvium from her body without allowing it to concentrate in any one place, not daring to risk her newly pristine flesh to suffer more of it than absolutely necessary. If the spell wanted these things gone from her, he didn't want it poisoning her on its way out just because the taste of it was inconvenient for a day or so. Another benefit of his directed control was that the discard wasn't boiling or solidifying. It wasn't steaming or burning out of the body. It was being expelled like sweat, phlegm, urine, or feces. Even a bit of it fogged from the jotun's mouth and nostrils as a vapor. It trickled as tears from her eyes. Though it didn't look elegant, Damon felt this was perhaps the best application of the spell he had yet to manage. He didn't know if Caollaidhe would choose to bathe in a mountain stream (if she could find one) or scrub herself with fresh handfuls of snow as quickly as she could find it. There was certainly plenty of that around, at the moment.

Damon wondered if using the magic on one of the fae would have a similar effect, or if he could use it on one of the other races with which he was much less familiar. What would happen to a goblin? A kobold? Even a prized beast like a horse or hunting dog? Would it make them smarter? That much he doubted. It didn't seem to have that effect on any of his other... subjects.

The spell finished, the jotun coated in an oily sheen, and Damon leapt backward at the sudden onslaught of the smell as his senses were cleared of magic and returned to all sixteen of his bodies within him. He tumbled, slightly, one leg caught in knee-deep snow flopping him down into a bed of thick white -- hurting only slightly less than landing in thick grass. Abhilash reached over him, hooking a clawed hand beneath his shoulder and lifting him upright. No sooner was he standing than she strode toward the faint miasma clinging to the jotun and began pulling on the rope harness. At first, the jotun didn't move. Damon worried the ropes would burst, and the she-ork would hurtle toward him at a most dangerous speed.

Clambering away as fast as he could, Damon scant looked back though he heard Abhilash's grunting, snarling, swearing breathing. New worries arose, worrying she might injure herself or the unborn still growing in her belly -- though it wouldn't be the first premature birth he'd ever heard of, he didn't think knee-deep snow was the place for it. Snow crunched and hissed as the jotun's shoulders lifted slightly and the massive body lurched toward the ork.

Limbs swollen with effort, Abhilash hauled backward with her legs. She stopped after less than a full ork-sized pace, panting and heaving -- spitting bile into the unpacked snow of the trough to her left. Swearing, the ork wound her claws about the ropes again and squatted low. Her knees creaked and her back ached from it. Her bladder whined and loosed its contents, but she didn't giver herself time to worry about that. The whelp, not prone to moving-about much so far as she knew, gave her left kidney a mighty kick. Her vision blurred and she felt faint, but her muscles continued to squeeze against the weight of the full-grown jotun. Another quarter-step. Another. A half-step more.

As soon as the jotun's head was clear of the heavy, frozen fog of rancid death that churned with a slowness that defied the faint wind dipping into the snow trough, Abhilash stopped to catch her breath. It clung to the jotun's skin, reluctant to let her leave its embrace, yet it refused to be stirred from where it hung darkly in the air. The ork mustered herself for another pull, gathering herself with a foot to either side of the jotun's head. This time, when she lifted, the whelp kicked outward and the wall of her stomach ached as though torn with a knife. The jotun inched along beneath her as she slipped thrice as much as her feet gained purchase. Her breathing was hard and fast, too shallow to last long, but the bugger growing within -- or buggers more like -- were sapping her strength. Her tireless energy was spent. Jotun-blooded though she was, she did not think she could move the jotun another half-step, but Caollaidhe was almost entirely free of the cloud created by Damon's magic.

"Damn whelps make even this..." Abhilash gasped, stabbing a talon toward the jotun in fierce reproach. "... heavy as seven devils and half a mountain."

"I could help." Ginga offered, having waited in the snowy basin. "I didn't want to get stuck in the stench."

"I'd help, but I'd need the belt." Damon chattered his teeth and rubbed his arms against the chill burrowing into his clothes now that his magical aura was gone.

"She can wake there." Abhilash scoffed, giving a dismissive gesture before walking back into the snowy bowl that served as the cavern's entrance. "Pissed myself... think they may have cut my stomach."

"Let me have a look." Damon conjured an orb of light, bright as the first rays of sunrise where it sat in his palm. "We should get you to sit or lay down."

...

Caollaidhe woke from her bout with Damon's magic shortly after Ginga and Abhilash relented their dual admonishments of the sorcerer. The sun was nearing the western wall of the valley, far above the storm's cloud cover. The dull gray light was brighter than it had been earlier, but the cavern drank the light as greedily as Pyaas drank blood.

Damon watched the jotun as she retched, scrubbed, and otherwise tried to deluge herself to be rid of the detritus still dripping off her. She abandoned her wyrm-wing skirt, walking naked to the cavern's entrance to squat near them, an occasional phlegmy cough and spitting interrupting her otherwise quiet demeanor.

"Do you want me to try to use my other magic, now?" He wanted her to say no.

"Yes." Well, so much for that.

"She should lay on her side." Ginga mumbled, pointedly looking away and fidgeting with her sleeves.

"Make yourself bigger." The she-ork was chewing more of the dried meat from what provision they still had.

Damon found himself trying to calculate just how much food they had -- how soon they'd need to hunt for a new food supply or retreat back into Varnais proper. The weather would prove a greater obstacle without the jotun to plough quickly through tree-high drifts as she navigated what he could only assume was the shortest path. With the snow, they could manage plenty of water. With the tiny hut, they would have adequate shelter and warmth. Food was now their limiting resource.

"Well?" All three of them were looking at him expectantly, as if he'd been standing stone-still for hours.

Had it been hours? It felt like hours.

The sunlight, what little he could see, didn't seem to have changed much. Either they had indulged him descending into his mind for an entire day, or he hadn't been distracted for any appreciable time. He shook the cobwebs from his mind and stamped his feet to stir the blood back into his many, many toes.

"Lay on your side, comfortable as you can." He motioned to the sunken disk of snow outside before casting the clement aura magic again.

Some magic could be shaped, like a glass bauble to hold a light. Some had to be held like breath, or a full bladder. The aura was a spell he had to actively hold, but it wasn't particularly taxing -- not now. Had he successfully used it in the summer, perhaps his ability to hold the spell would have been weaker than now. Even the spell of duplication required significant effort to hold -- but he hadn't ever used it longer than an hour or so, if the bells of Rill could be believed. Damon couldn't be sure whether it was a kind of arcane muscle that could be strengthened, or more an arcane endurance prone to fatigue. The comparison made him realize the link between the two, so he abandoned the analogy and turned his attention to the jotun.

As large as she was, she was still comely. Her frost-pink skin and blue hair gave her a fae-like appearance, but her ears were shapely round, like those of a human. Her pallid greenish-yellow eyes watched him sidelong, Caollaidhe's head propped on a hand so she didn't have to strain her neck. It was difficult to tell whether her hips were broad or slim, but they were about as wide as half his height. That would prove difficult for lining his cock to her entrance, but that was a problem that could be resolved. He just had to walk over there.

The snow melted around them as Damon approached her, the white crust reducing to slush and pools of tepid water quickly. Where the snow had been was a clearly planed span of rock, a true front step for the cave entryway, that didn't match the hue or patterning of the cavern itself. Some great boulder or slab of stone had been laid here and cut smooth to serve as the doormat for a dragon's lair, he was sure. He could almost imagine an immense round door covering the cave, with a simple -- if gigantic -- knocking ring hanging from the center. Clever, enormous hinges...

"Ahem." Ginga coughed loudly, and Damon realized he'd turned completely around and was leaning against the jotun's hips while staring vacantly at the cave where Ginga and Abhilash sat.

"Sorry." He blushed, mumbling the apology in his native southern tongue as he loosened his belt. "It's not too warm for you?"

When Caollaidhe only gave him a quizzical look, he repeated what he said, then a second time once he realized he wasn't using the northern trade tongue.

"No." Was her simple, reverberating reply.

A fresh, thin sheen of sweat was rising on her skin, though, so he thought it might be a good idea to get a shift on. He flexed the curiously non-magical muscles that accelerated his arousal, then hesitated another moment as he looked at the large mound, the delicate-looking lips thick as his thumbs, and the forest of white-blue hairs curling around her sex like a thin pelt. He touched her hair where it peaked from the crease of her thighs around her crotch, feeling the soft, dense strands much larger than human locks -- almost silken threads. He gave an experimental, gentle tug of a handful of hairs, watching the jotun's skin stretch just a little. She shivered, though whether she enjoyed it sexually or was resisting a sudden ticklish twitch he couldn't be sure. Rather than feathery touches, Damon decided it might be safer to use a firmer hand.

He stroked his palms up and down the sides of her outer labia, presented slightly squeezed in the crook of her thighs as Caollaidhe lay on her side. He massaged in long, slow strokes to feel the way her skin reacted to the attention. Caollaidhe flushed with a noticeable warmth.

"Pull your knees closer to your chest." Damon had to say it twice, his voice had been too soft, too quiet the first time.

As Caollaidhe pulled her knees nearer her chest, Damon's eyes widened as he watched her jotun pussy present itself to him more proudly. Beautifully. He could imagine such a sight on nearly any female -- though he'd really only been with a few of the other non-jotun fold. Elf, dwarf, ork, human... fae? The fae had been much like the elf, magic notwithstanding.

He could feel the flush of her slow arousal filling her labia and making them a little darker, a little more firm to his touch. His hands caressed her inner labia, gently lifting from between the two to reveal the heat-radiating soft pink flesh of a very familiar-looking sight. For all her being a giant, her body's proportions held few surprises for Damon -- to his relief. Her clitoris, and its hooded shelter in the folds of her labia, rivaled the crown of his prick and its sheath. It was a different tone, and it didn't have an eye, so he tried to ignore the similarities there and ducked his head down to breathe hotly over it. It swelled noticeably.

He spread her with firm pressure, almost laying against her as he dragged his tongue over the nub of her massive pearl as if he could flatten the muscle of his mouth to polish her flesh. Caollaidhe's breath hitched sharply, exhaling with a shuddering, shaking of her whole body. Fighting to hold still and not seek to grind against the human. The anticipation of what his magic might do, having watched and listened...

...

Damon had doubled himself twice, then the third paid for all as sixteen of the sorcerer stood in wide-eyed wonder of themselves. Caollaidhe had seen the wild panic and elation rippling among them like wyrmlings in frenzy. The little humans quickly agreed to set about their task of bedding-down the chosen-willing. The initial shockwave peaked again as each female learned first-hand the energetic impact his seed had on their bodies. Sixteen of him... ten occupied immediately with the other six checking each other over and consulting on what to do with the tooth -- the relic passing from hand to hand as the half-dozen copies of Damon seemed eager to both hold and not be seen holding the thing.

Dragon Eater had to tell the remaining females in the tribe they could not volunteer, for the bargain had already been struck and the War Gods could not weather too many striplings at once so close together. They needed to stay light on their feet and ready to fight, already preparing for a winter of low-land raiding nearer the coast now that the wyrm-running was ended. It had earned many bitter, quiet complaints.

Those dour eyes and frowning faces doubled as the ten sorcerers continued their efforts with the chosen-willing, their stamina already exceeding what the War Gods expected of most southern folk... but he was a sorcerer... he was a dozen and more of himself. What difference did it matter what the War Gods thought?

Caollaidhe had watched, silent, as her master bade, and just as silently wished to have been small enough to be part of it all. To feel those long-fingered hands, even if not sized to her, all over her flesh... the way he moved himself spoke of one accustomed to the surface secrets of a female, fingers finding spots on those warriors or slaves that made them moan aloud even after they descended from the breathless heights of ecstasy. He drew out their euphoria, thrusting from beneath this one or behind that one. Ploughing from above or beside. Something about the way they moved -- sometimes in rhythm to one or two of the other duplicates, other times fully independent of any musical harmony between them -- put Caollaidhe in the mind that some wraith moved among them to whisper in their ears... perhaps feeding on them as their gyrations slapped and slopped in carnal rhythm.

Had he summoned an incubus? Was his totem, some many-cocked rut-beast of the burning south, walking invisibly among them? Whatever the case: she wanted it.

...

Caollaidhe allowed herself to drift along on the growing summer winds of tingling in her loins as Damon stroked her sex with his hands, pleasuring her most delicate parts with his tongue and lips. He penetrated her slowly, his hand and arm sinking through her folds in a near approximation of a jotun-sized rut-club. She purred her approval as her natural wetness eased his entry, the sorcerer's tongue still dancing eagerly on her pleasure nub with a skill she'd never experienced in her time as a slave, save by her own hands.

She rose and fell as though climbing up one side of the valley and sliding down into the next valley, her climax building steadily before wrestling hot through her blood, filling her with that glowing, soft sleepiness that felt dreamlike yet somehow more alive and awake. Damon withdrew his arm, her contact with the human broken and Caollaidhe sucked-in a shaky breath as her body continued to throb pleasantly. Then his hands were on her again. On her hips, then her back, trailing up her neck, even as he continued to massage her cunt. She opened her eyes and saw him standing behind her, leaning down to lick and kiss her shoulder. Further down, she saw two more of him leaning against and rubbing her back. A fourth Damon was still hidden behind her hips, an arm sinking deliciously into her as the one near her neck licked and chewed at her earlobe.

"Ohh..." Caollaidhe hummed appreciatively as all four of him plied her flesh as though working soft clay in their little hands.

"Ready?" The two at her back stepped away for a moment, though she wasn't quite sure why.

"Ready." It was the tiny dark female, Ginga, near Caollaidhe's knees. "I hope."

"Everybody hang onto something." Damon's voice vibrated along her slit as his hands traded places with...

Caollaidhe felt a sudden blizzard of fire erupt in her loins, surging upward to her heart and filling her chest to the bursting point. Something was swelling into her, a river moving fast as the coldest winter winds, and sucking the air from her lungs as every fiber of her being sparked with lightning and bliss. It hammered outward along her spine, making her arms and legs twitch violently as Caollaidhe grunted to draw breath.

Ginga nearly toppled, even braced as she was, but she kept the jotun's legs from sweeping backward and clobbering the human sorcerer precariously wedged against her sex. The two sorcerers at her back were bucked away from her, tumbling across the smooth stone slab and colliding in a slithering, screaming heap of flesh. The Damon at her neck fared the best, leaping backward and only tripping on Caollaidhe's hair as she flailed in uncontrolled orgasmic spasms.

When the jotun thought she was about to catch her breath, she heard him again.

"Ready?"

She wasn't. None of them were.

"Ready." Ginga gritted her teeth, leaning against the backs of Caollaidhe's knees.

An avalanche of molten joy entered her pussy, filling her hips, belly, lungs -- radiating into her eyes and blinding her as she shook from the force of this second magically-forced climax. Her limbs felt like they'd tripled in weight and were being held down by mountains of air too sticky to slip out from beneath. In her tunnel, tickling slightly, was Damon's arm. He pressed against the deepest parts of her, massaging the entrance to her womb as though he were trying to relieve a knot in her back.

"That's probably the best we can do, without..." He panted, winded from his efforts as he stood up, drawing his arm out of her. "... knowing for certain whether it worked."

"Got her pregnant, you mean?" Ginga chuckled humorlessly, wiping her brow and leaning tiredly against the jotun's now-limp legs. "Well, you haven't missed a planting, yet farmer."

"I didn't ask for this." He frowned, but didn't look at her. Instead, he walked toward the remaining two copies. Something about two of them made them seem more alike than the third. Caollaidhe wasn't sure what that was.

"I know." Ginga replied.

Caollaidhe saw the sorrow on her little face, and it reached out to caress the corners of the jotun's eyes to draw out tears.

With a strangled, choking curse, the three Damons converged into a single human form. Unlike his previous efforts -- even what Ginga had seen back in Varnais at the bath house -- Damon seemed largely unaffected by the violent fusion of his duplicates. He stood still for a long moment, breathing deeply and grimacing in concentration... then, shaking himself all over, he bolted upright and turned to flash Ginga a wide smile.

"Ok, let's go see this dragon's eye." He crooked his arm and presented it to his human companion, who rolled her eyes and pushed his arm away.

"You're well past half mad." Ginga leaned gently against his least quim-sodden side as they walked together. "You need a wash, after that."

Abhilash passed them, headed toward the still-prone jotun.

"Strong magic." The ork patted the jotun's hip in greeting.

Caollaidhe struggled to sit up, the bloated sensation no longer making her feel like she was about to gush the sorcerer's spend from every orifice.

"It tramples like a bull mammoth." Caollaidhe murmured, eyes wide in amazement. "Like ten mammoths."

"I know, right?" Abhilash grinned.

...

He was blind, he was sure of it. Blind or dead. Only, he couldn't be dead because he could still hear himself breathing. Could still feel the gritty, sandy dust of the cavern floor beneath his boots. He could still smell the dust that stirred-up as he walked around. He could feel the bump on the back of his head where he'd knocked his skull on the ground.

Stupid dragon. He grumbled his frustration aloud without actual words, but the noise was near deafening in the vast chamber's slithering silence.

Sound seemed to grow louder, the less he could hear. The sliding, writhing scales that were the walls had moved sluggishly before, when Ginga was with him. They were obviously moving when he returned. Even when he tried to hold perfectly still, he could see their slow, undulating movement at the corners of his vision. He'd tried to convince himself it was a trick of the light. An illusion of clever stonework, like those two-face cards on string that depicted a bird and an empty cage. Spin the card fast enough, and the bird would be trapped in the cage.

But the eye had focused on him. It had bulged toward him, as if taking its proper shape to see him better. It hadn't made any sound, but he'd tried to spot the movement of the serpentine walls directly -- putting the flat disk of the eye in his periphery. That was when it looked at him. The room had tilted, the eye swelling outward and glaring at him unblinking. Panicked, he'd stumbled backward. His foot slipped, perhaps on an especially smooth bit of the floor, or some fine gravel turning under his boot. Sharp pain at the back of his head, and darkness. The orb had vanished.

Whether he'd spent a few moments or a day there, he couldn't tell. His head ached. All sixteen of them. He'd tried conjuring the light, again, but the pain in his many skulls made it difficult to focus on anything other than the screaming, hammering, aching knife behind all his eyes and radiating like a boiling cauldron from the back of his heads. His fingers probed the growing knot where stone took exception to his brain-box. It wasn't wet, though it felt plenty hot and tender. He wasn't bleeding, at least.

Lights danced in the black, but they illuminated nothing, and the shadows peeled themselves from the walls to skate around him silently as he turned toward where he thought the entrance might be. It was a desperate hope that any light might shine this deep into the cave, but he waited.

He could hear the rushing beat of his heart, the blood pounding angrily in his ears because the blood in his head was that much angrier than usual. The silence struck him, and he held his breath.

Something was there, in the dark. He was sure of it. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew. At least, he thought he knew.

Light. A trick of his already tricky vision, perhaps, but it was the barest silver aura of a single star on a night without the moon. It pulsed in time with the throbbing of his aching head, fading in and out as he thought he could just make out the outline of his fingers in front of his face. He wasn't sure which two hands he saw, but he couldn't afford to be picky at the moment. He crept along the ground, hands and knees. Knees and hands, feeling forward as he shuffled in the dust. Pebbles jabbed angrily into his palms, into the easily-aggravated flesh of his knees. The wound-mending glue yielded easily, and the open cut in his hand shrieked its umbrage. His blood stayed trapped within, and his palm itched.

Hands and knees, little by little. He could feel sweat gathering on his brow, the pain waxing and waning. Days passed. Years. Lifetimes swept slowly by on rivers of time as Damon inched his way to the edge of the cavern. His hands told him where the wall was, and his palms walked up the jagged surface slowly as he got to his feet.

Still blind, or stuck in the dark. If the light was real, it didn't seem to be helping.

The room tilted slightly, accompanied by another shiver in the ground, and Damon near lost his footing. Grabbing hold of the cut surface of the cave wall, he felt the world spin wildly like an upset bottle not content to pitch over. It rocked back and forth on its base, slowly turning about as it settled in place again. More trembling, and Damon's nose filled with dust. He sneezed.

Light exploded everywhere and Damon thought he'd truly been blinded as he clutched his face. The pain was too distracting.

Reaching back out to the wall, Damon found smooth, cool scales gliding under his hand. He jerked his hand away, clutching his hands to his chest in child-like fear of the dark. A hiss reached his ears. He didn't know if dragons hissed, and he hadn't dealt with snakes long enough to know whether they hissed. It was more like a cat. Perhaps he was imagining things. Perhaps it was a trick. An illusion.

Perhaps he was the illusion. His stomach lurched as he put his hand, shaking with cold dread, back on the wall of the cavern. Stone. Cleverly cut, jagged stone. He could feel the ridges that cast scale-like shadows, tool-marks of expert stonemasons. Whether one or many, he couldn't be sure, but he didn't really care. Growling. Deep, with a strange whinging sound at the end.

His stomach. He was hungry. How long had he been here? His mouth felt full of chalk, his tongue a leathery reminder of what should be cradled in his lower jaw. Gently, he set his back against the wall, keeping his offended head away from the rough surface, and found the neck of his canteen. Rinse, swish, spit. The water splattered on the ground, and his mouth felt a little better. Two mouthfuls of water plunked into his empty stomach.

Then he fished-around blindly in his pack to find something to eat. Pemmican. His stomach growled louder as he nibbled carefully on the meat briquette.

"Stop toying with me."

"Who's there?"

"Never mind... it's just me."

He wasn't sure how he was supposed to entreat the dragon. He wasn't even sure there really was a dragon. The feeling of unease could be some evil spirit, or his own mind playing him a fool. It didn't have to be a dragon. But this was the only place he knew...

Unless Dragon Eater was a dragon. Was he the same dragon? The dragon Damon had come all this way to find? A cruel joke, to send him here, if that were the truth.

He laughed. All sixteen of him laughed. It helped dull the pain, listening to his voices bounce back and forth inside the cavern. Over and over, deafening. So loud he couldn't tell when it stopped, because his ears were ringing from the silence. Maybe it was the knock on his head.

"Eclipse." The word tumbled out of his mouth as if knocked loose, and he didn't have time to catch it.

He waited in stillness.

The shocked, numb stillness he'd felt in the Spring, when he'd returned naked and filthy to South-wold, was the nearest he could equate, throughout his many repeated lives, to this curious churning slowness. This waiting.

When the pain in his head eased enough that the spots before his eyes had faded, he tried conjuring the light orb again. He started with the smallest, sparest invocation. It was the dull orange of a single ember about to vanish into ashes. It was dazzlingly bright in the total darkness, and he squinted his eyes against the sudden assault.

He conjured a second glowing ember beside the first. Then a third. He conjured the smallest flame of a dying candle, closing his eyes against the sun-like glare it produced. When the itching sting faded and he could see the soft yellow through his eyelids, Damon hesitantly cracked his eyes open.

The cavern was rough-cut stone all around, save the smooth, flat disk -- twice his height in any direction -- of the serpent-like eye pattern that was the dragon's eye. The entrance...

Was gone.

Bile rose in his stomach as his innards ran icy, watery. He swallowed, forcing his heart back into the middle of his chest. It could just be a trick of the light. The air was chill, his breath clouding faintly. The clement aura was gone. Had they left him here? Alone? No. No, his mind was playing him tricks, again.

He doubled himself, stretching his awareness across two sets of eight of his bodies. Or were they sixteen, as well? He had to push that thought aside, Damon decided, and focus on whether he was actually trapped.

They each conjure a brighter orb, dismissing the dim candles for torch-bright red-orange orbs that clung to each of his left hands. Now he could just make out the far edges of the cavern, and the slow, undulating rhythm of those clever shadows struck needles of panic into him. Seeing all of it through two sets of eight... no, through two sets of eyes... didn't help the vertigo created by the illusion of movement.

The cavern wall wrapped, uninterrupted, from the right side of the dragon's eye, all the way around to the left side.

"Eclipse Dragon?" He had to fight the words out of his constricted throats. Only one of him had the tooth. His right-self pulled the tooth from its carrying pouch, holding it out for the eye's inspection. "I am Damon of South-wold. Wizard Matta... the Elemental's last... I have his grimoire, here."

The sound of his own voices echoed angrily around him, mocking his hesitancy with hissing laughter as more thin dust clouds settled from above. It angered him. Confused him. He couldn't be sure that what he was hearing was even real, anymore. If he was trapped, then perhaps he was trapped within his own mind.

"That which was promised shall be given." He put as much iron into his voice as he could summon. "That's one thing the tooth told me. And the duplication magic... and the first magic..."

He converged with himself, taking several long moments to catch his breath and wait for the pounding headache to settle again. Closing his hand around the tooth, he shut his eyes and chanted the lullaby. He was careful. Leaving his intentions out of the magic words that were only pieces of a single word. He didn't drag his fingers across the shivering, dancing waves of magical energy coursing in every direction.

"Rejoice thy perfected obeyance." He repeated in his native tongue, once the lullaby was finished. "That's what it means, isn't it?"

Silence stabbed into his ears, and the flat stone eye was unmoved. Looking over his shoulder, Damon saw the entrance of the cavern. No sound of grinding stone, no whispering hints of magic. No flickering light or nauseous clenching of the stomach.

Was he hallucinating? Was the dragon really here and only toying with him?

Jaw clenched, Damon turned his attention back to the eye. A glimmer caught his attention. Something he hadn't noticed before. Half-way up the iris -- near the center of the eye -- a single drop of water beaded out from a hairline crack in the stone. He reached out, paused, and dabbed the pad of one finger to collect the drop of water.

Salt. It stung his taste buds. "Tears? For the Elemental?"

There was the faintest trace of moisture running down the smooth black iris of stone, but no salt staining. It hadn't been there this whole time, had it? Certainly not long, else the water was of the purest kind -- and he'd tasted the salt of it!

"I need your help, Dragon of the Eclipse Sunrise." Damon knelt before the iris, hands clasped together around the tooth-grimoire. "Please. South-wold has suffered much, and the Tower of Renks Cairn will turn their eyes upon it... I need you."

His voice faded into a pained whisper. The only sensation he felt was a growing sense of emptiness. Hollowness.

"You weep for him, don't you?" Damon choked the words out, ignoring his own bitter tears. "But what of those he left behind? What he left in me?"

He felt a momentary hesitation, the image of some great, clawed hand emerging from nowhere to crush him into the stone floor. Gone as soon as it began. Was it an eye? A door?

"Is this a door?" He asked aloud, appraising the eye through the Lens.

Nothing. Bare rock. Unyielding stone. The magic rippled through it as it rippled through everything. There was nothing.

He wanted there to be a secret word he knew. Wanted the iris to roll aside like a wagon's wheel, to reveal a well-lit chamber adorned like an elaborate study. He needed there to be something!

"I was left behind." Damon hammered his fist against the broad black iris. "I was tasked with finding you. Telling you..."

He sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. His vision was blurry from more than tears, more than just the pain in his head. The light orb vanished as his concentration broke, plunging him back into chill darkness. He felt like he was falling, even though his feet proclaimed otherwise.

"Black-sunrise... Tower-fall... Oath-born." He accentuated each by rapping the root of the tooth against the stone like a tamp. "Black-sunrise... Tower-fall... Oath-born. What is promised shall be given."

Again and again. The litany quickly lost meaning as the cavern only echoed what he was saying and no further answer came. Even the tooth itself was noticeably silent.

Oil. Pitch. Torchlight. Feet scraping on dust and pebbles.

"Damon?" Ginga's voice hit him with such clarity that it hurt. His own voice had bent and distorted back to him. Hers struck him as though he were the bell, and the cavern baffled the rest.

"I'm here." His throat hurt... like he'd been shouting... or crying.

"It's late." She walked to him, resting her chin on his shoulder and squeezing him carefully with one arm.

The torch spat, this close to the eye, and another droplet of water was already growing from the surface. He couldn't be sure... not of anything, really... but it felt like that droplet could have been tears of laughter.

"I'll try again tomorrow." He agreed, reaching back to gingerly probe the swollen, angry bump on his head.

"What happened?" Ginga's fingers traced lightly over the obvious swelling and she grimaced. "You hit your head, obviously."

"I tripped... thought I saw something." He shrugged. "I think Abhi's right... I'm losing my mind."

...

"Not bad for a first attempt." Ginga nudged Abhilash playfully. "Pity we can't do the same for your armor."

"Metal's still good." The ork sniffed, clipping the end of the thread with a small knife. "We have plenty of fur and meat for this storm..."

"No." Caollaidhe, sitting outside where the hut's aura made the surrounds a drizzly gray mess, couldn't help but eavesdrop for lack of anything else to do for the night. "This storm will last until the next full moon. Do not stay here. I go, tomorrow."

"The next full moon?" Ginga shouldn't have been surprised, but the idea of a storm lasting so long was truly unsettling.

"Feh." Abhilash spat into the hearth, her spittle hissing angrily as it burned away. "More hunters and scavengers will come. We will have plenty of meat."

"We should probably leave in a few days." Damon mumbled from the bath.

"Did the dragon answer you?"

"If it's there? No, I don't think so." Damon shook his head slowly, head lolling against the rim of the tub as he soaked. "Unless it was telling me to 'fuck off,' I didn't really hear anything."

"Well, you can try using magic, tomorrow." It was all Ginga could do not to scream her own frustration at the circumstances.

"Yeah." His agreement was flatly unenthusiastic.

...

Three days passed. The longest night of the year -- longer still, this far north -- came and went with Damon making no progress in trying to coax anything out of the dragon's eye cavern. His visions and feeling of being watched were less than shadows on his subsequent visits. The walls still had the subtle, eerie illusory shifting as light played over the cut stone, but he never felt the wall turn to snake scales again. He didn't hear laughter or hissing that he didn't make himself (sometimes just to hear something other than his own babbling). The minute crack in the iris would gradually accumulate a single droplet. Watching intently for some time, he guessed it would produce a single drop no more than ten times a day. A drop that would run down the face of the stone in a thin streak that evaporated before it could ever really amount to a puddle on the floor.

He tried pleading. He tried shouting. He tried casting spells at the stone eye. First, the smaller spells he knew. Then, larger spells from the elf traveling grimoire. Finally, the spell that had started his journey. Nothing.

It was late, the first night of the full moon after the longest night -- the winter moon -- when they arrived at the tiny hut. A strange contraption lay on the roof of the hut, spread out like some meatless bird with no legs or head. Standing pensively, watching them as they entered the hut's clearing, a woman whose warm-looking clothing seemed insufficient for the scale of the storm around them. Her hands reached for her belt, cautious and ready, as the trio passed through the well-trod channel in the ever-deepening drift built-up around the hut's aura.

"The fuck are you?" Abhilash demanded, Pyaas flashing into her hand in an eyeblink.

"Easy, Abhi." Damon laid a hand on the ork's shoulder. "We'll talk first. Maybe we won't even need steel."

"Thank... you." He couldn't help but think she looked familiar, but the light was pale white on her nut-brown skin. "I've been searching this area for a while."

"For what?" Damon asked, walking forward and setting his pack just inside the hut. "You're not a thief, or you'd have stolen something without waiting for us to get back... not an assassin, or you'd have waited for us to be asleep..."

"I..." She started, taking a half-step away from him as he passed, turning his back to her even as the ork closed from the other side. "I need help."

Ginga and Abhilash huffed in annoyance at this, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes in human fashion before the she-ork made a gesture that caused Ginga to grin behind her hand.

"That a magical flying machine?" Ginga pointed at the not-bird. "Looks like a dragonfly."

"Yes." Her hair was dark, and the pale white light of Damon's light orb shone an iridescent blue tint across the wavy mane. "It was a gift from my laird... my patron."

"So, a sorcerer seeking the help of another sorcerer." Damon dusted his snow-damp hands and stood up beside the entrance to the hut. "Well, it's wet out here and a bit cramped in there, so...?"

He gave her an expectant look, which seemed to unsettle her. Her eyes kept twitching to either side of his face. She raked a hand into her hair, tucking it behind an ear and flinching as she did so. It was a subtle thing, but he'd lived sixteen lives. Long enough to recognize her unease with her own body.

"A curse, then?" Damon sighed, ducking his head and entering the hut. "Explain or don't... It's been a long day and I'm fucking tired."

Abhilash snorted, glaring at the newcomer as she passed and ducked into the hut. Ginga gave a cautious smile, but otherwise made no effort to introduce herself.

"Odd time to make new friends." The very dark-skinned female said with a shrug before disappearing into the hut.

"I am called Siegrune." She knelt in the doorway, heedless of her cloak trailing in damp mud.

"You are not." Damon looked her in the eyes, pulling his boots off before peeling his cloak and shirt.

"I am." Her resolve was ten-fold steel, near as Damon could tell.

"Called that, maybe... but that's not who you are, is it?" He didn't look at her, now. He pulled his breeches off and climbed stiffly into the steaming basin of the tub. "You know me. I saw it in your eyes."

As he sank into the water, Siegrune stifled the urge to gulp back her disquiet as the young man turned to face her again. The other two females likewise stripped their soaked garments and set them at the hearth to dry. The she-ork, huge-bellied and due soon, lounged with her sword in-hand and gave Siegrune a dour, narrow-eyed stare. Even naked and swollen with child, the jotun-blood ork would prove a fearsome foe; the curling sneer of the ork's lip bade Siegrune to forget that at her own peril. The black-skinned human with blue eyes of a summer sky in storm, she was not due for another season, and was perhaps the least dangerous of the three -- yet seemed the least concerned with Siegrune's presence. That fact would have set Siegrune's nerves on edge more than the other two's scrutiny, in another life.

"Don't just stand there." Ginga waved to the moss-bench seat nearest the door. "Come in and shut the door... magic or not, this hut is no good at keeping beasts out if the door sits open."

"Thank you for your hospitality." Siegrune nodded, entering the hut and closing the portal at her back. The warmth filled her sinew as she settled to the bench, the hut's magic pressing into her and soothing the aches of her traveling.

"Laird is an elf word, is it not?" Damon's deep brown eyes bored into Siergrune. "I forget where I heard it."

"It's an old word." Siegrune shrugged, looking at her hands in her lap. "I don't know if it's elvish or not."

"How do you know me?" His dark eyes pressed as insistently as the magic suffusing her limbs. "Not from Varnais."

"I..." Siegrune hesitated, biting back the lie as their eyes met. He's much older. "Madame Cosima's."

"The Fancy?" Ginga chirped, looking between them. "And you followed him all the way up here from Renks Cairn?"

"Shitty assassin, to introduce yourself." The ork grunted, tapping the tip of her blade on Siegrune's thick leggings.

"She's not here to kill me." Damon sank into the tub so his chin was just in the water. "Cursed, remember?"

"Who cursed you?" Ginga looked over her shoulder. "Another wizard in the city? Someone in Tsuro?"

"Someone I'd rather not cross paths with again." Her hands were shaking slightly as she put them through her hair and took a deep breath. "You know how complicated these things can be."

"I have an idea." Damon nodded in answer. "But we've never met -- yet you know me... knew me."

Much older. Siegrune swallowed hard. "You were very popular, I'm not surprised you don't remember..."

"Don't." Damon's eyes had a coldness she didn't notice before. "I may not know the truth you are hiding, but I can see the lie in your face easily enough."

"I was not a patron..." her contrition was flawless, but Damon tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes at her.

"So... you're the elf." He frowned at her thoughtfully, remarking on Abhilash's disapproving growl. "Abhi, be still, please."

"Your power is much stronger than before." Siegrune offered Damon a bitter, humorless smile. "Yes, I am the elf."

"You were." His correction caught her like a slap in the face, and Siegrune flinched under his gaze. "Cursed -- I can only guess your patron in the Tower or maybe one of your kin-folk? -- and you seek me? That makes little sense to me, unless..."

He sucked in his lip, thoughtful another moment. Siegrune found herself holding her breath, dreading him landing anywhere near the truth. Terrified that, now, she might not have the strength to stop him... whatever he was doing. His eyes narrowed at her, catching the expertly-hidden fear behind her eyes. Damon's gaze softened, his mouth shaping an easy smile. Affable. Friendly. Human.

"So, you had some sort of falling-out with the Tower -- or because of the Tower." Damon nodded more to himself than anyone else. "And I'm hunted, which means my value is being recognized ahead of even my own estimation... you were right, about the sword. I can only guess that the crown took exception to our possession of such a weapon, and our self-defense is no defense against the injured pride of a monarch. How many bounty-hunters have you seen, circling overhead day after day?"

"You knew?"

"Abhi told me." Damon tilted his head, a reverent acknowledgement the ork accepted with a mollified sniff. "With the clouds so heavy, it was her nose that found you out... and the jotun. The War Gods warned me when you passed overhead. You've been trailing us since we entered the wastes, no?"

"About that long. You were barely a cub, when we first met." Siegrune frowned, doing her best to ignore the malicious yellow glare of the she-ork. "I'd say you were a prodigy, but..."

"... but you know better." He nodded again, glancing through the wall and across the valley through the ice-crusted trail leading to the dragon's eye cave. "The dragon likely played a part. Your laird, if I had to guess."

"That's not a dragon's cave." Siegrune's jaw stiffened and her eyes returned to watching her hands twist the hem of her cloak. "Not for a long time, if ever."

"And the bounty-hunters?" Ginga cut in, worry clouding her face as she turned her attention to Damon across the tub.

"Only one group. Maybe a dozen strong." Their guest shrugged, taking a moment to pull her hair back into a high ponytail before settling her fidgeting hands back into her lap. "One hedge-wizard -- a dwarf steel-shaper -- and several arbalists to flank six spears. Enough to capture or kill you all. Relic blade or not."

"You think you can scare me into running? Begging you for help?" He laughed, but it was as hollow and humorless as her own smile had been. "You don't know what I've become."

"No. I don't. I don't want to know." Siegrune freely admitted. "However you shed your old skin -- the mana scars that were growing through your face -- I want no part of it, unless it can break my curse."

"Feh." Abhilash spat into the hearth, turning herself deliberately to face away from Siegrune. "No help, there."

"She's right." He agreed. "What happened to me won't help your curse -- might make things far worse for you... what is your curse?"

Siegrune waved vaguely toward her face and head.

"You're human?" The she-ork guffawed loudly, laughing harder as Siegrune's face darkened and the cursed elf scowled resolutely at her now-still hands.

"What makes you think I can break this curse?" He was climbing out of the basin, groaning and still stiff-limbed. "You didn't..."

He stumbled slightly, catching himself only just before the ork's hand swept under his armpit to steady him. The mixed blessings of small spaces. He grimaced at the bungled dismount from the tub and gave Abhilash a grateful nod.

"Didn't have anywhere else to go? Not home -- so the curse is powerful and near to home, or that's where you would have gone." He straightened up, drawing his steaming cloak from the hearth and draping it around himself in a veneer of modesty. "But you're not the kind to do something like this on the chance I can help you. You believe it."

"Will you help me?" Siegrune clenched her jaw and met his eyes, forcing back the itching tears threatening to swell in her eyes.

"Who cursed you? What's the curse -- how are you planning for me to break this curse I know nothing about?"

"What do you pay?" Abhilash tapped the tip of her blade atop the hearth, her wolfish eyes closing deliberately as she looked away from Siegrune.

"No-one you know..." she began, but Damon interrupted.

"Out." He pointed to the door.

"What?"

"Out, I said. Get out." He looked Siegrune in the eyes, that new, cold edge sharp and accusing. "You will not get anything from me through lies."

"A nymph... the Elemental's consort." Siegrune's face paled, her body trembling uncontrollably as she fought back the terror of losing this opportunity to free herself. "She answers to..."

"Prende." Ginga's voice was full of half-remembered dreams and long-lost loves too deep and profound for her age. Damon pursed his lips, sighing through his nose with audible irritation.

"She said... that my greatest fear's love would free me." She couldn't bear to look at them, their judgment acidic to her already humiliated ego, so Siegrune turned toward the door but didn't move otherwise. "I asked a petty favor of her -- nothing to do with you, and I'll say no more of it -- and she cursed my impudence. Fae can be tempestuous."

"At the least." Damon agreed, but the keening edge of metal in his tone had only sharpened. Hardened more than Siegrune had thought possible for even a human such as him. What had he done to himself?

"And Damon is your greatest fear?" Abhilash snorted her amusement, grinning viciously up at Damon. "Or me?"

"Neither." Damon turned toward the hearth, glancing side to side at each of his mates with a sad smile on his lips. "It's neither of those."

"It's motherhood." Ginga sat up in the tub, water sloshing around her as her breasts floated only just off her ribs with the help of the warm liquid. "Or carrying a human bastard, if more than just the fear of being a mother."

"What makes you say that, love?" He asked, his hand drifting down to caress her naked shoulder.

"Well, she hasn't given us but a glance since we clapped eyes on her, ken it?" Ginga stood up, unsteady and grateful for Damon's arm as he moved closer. "And every chance she gets, she won't look at either of us or you, 'less she has to."

"Hmph." The she-ork huffed, but otherwise made no further comment.

"It's a bit of a jump, I admit." Ginga shrugged, carefully balancing on the tub's curb as she swung a leg up and over. "But she's not afraid of either of you -- not death or she'd have sought it just about anywhere... what's that leave us? Life. Or making life."

"It is a bit of a jump." Damon looked over at Siegrune, the elf-turned-human stone-still and weeping in pained silence. "But straight to the heart of it, it seems."

"That settles the payment, then."

"Abhi!" Ginga's indignation for Siegrune's part was genuine, her shock barking out of her and causing the ork to give an exaggerated eye-roll in response.

"What? It does." Came Abhilash's retort, her eyes done rolling for the moment. "Tell me it doesn't."

"You're right." Damon agreed, his voice soft appeasement whisking gently across both of them.

The sound of it cut Siegrune sharply, and she gasped against the torturous silence clutching her hands into fists, tears streaming from her eyes. Her breath stayed, stuck in her lungs, and her ribs wouldn't budge to draw breath. Either she was in the breathless heights, or the depths of the sea -- either way, she wasn't breathing and the pain in her heart squeezed tighter and tighter with every shattering heartbeat.

"I can't help you, Siegrune." Damon said, but he was standing before her, fully dressed and only slightly damp.

How long has it been? She wondered, not remembering the passage of time. The terror, screaming mindless horrors in the endless dark, had consumed time within her mind for how long she couldn't know.

"You... were in my mind." Siegrune forced herself to look him in the eyes, to confront the descending avalanche with what bravery remained to her.

"Or you were in mine." He shrugged, glancing beyond her and into a space too far away for mortal eyes to see. "It took some work to put the pieces together, but I've had a lot of time, recently."

"I tried..."

"Reaching out days ago -- I remember." His smile was softer than his eyes, gentler. "You woke me up, if I remember right."

"P.. please." It was the most she could say, not trusting herself to say more as her fear rampaged within her marrow.

"I can't give you a child you would grow to hate." His hand stopped, having risen to caress her cheek as if by habit they'd never shared. "How could that possibly break your curse? How could you love such a child? How could you love me -- or I you -- if I gave you such a child? I can't help you, Siegrune, because you cannot give yourself to this child, knowing it is the key to breaking your curse."

"You... your magic..." again, words failed her. It had been growing desperation that had followed Damon north, and now it was a formless, flailing, wordless hunger devouring Siegrune alive from the inside.

"I don't know that the child would be an elf -- or even a half-blood. How can you promise to break the curse by loving someone that looks like me when hatred and fear fill your eyes?"

"Abhi, don't start." Ginga clipped, shaking a finger at the ork who had traded places with her in the tub.

Abhilash grumbled wordlessly, abandoning whatever she had been about to say to the glowing warmth of the hearth. The hearth spit irritably, personally affronted at the ork's snide remark.

Siegrune blushed at the implication, Damon's reputation from the Fancy flaring to life in her mind and filling her stomach with disgust even as she desperately clung to the notion of it being the key to her freedom from the nymph's curse.

"Try..." the word sounded as though it had died six days ago in a sun-scorched desert, so dry and brittle that Damon didn't recognize it at first.

He stared at her a long time, Siegrune's vision swimming with fresh tears as she continued to return his gaze beyond the point of pain. She could feel slithering chains constricting her chest, she'd stopped breathing again. Her arms were too heavy to lift, muscles turned wax or hard clay that wouldn't answer her will to move a hand and wipe away the unending spill of tears when she blinked.

"You'll have to do better than try, Siegrune." The human's smile was warm, sharing in her pain in a way few others ever could. "Can you promise me that you will give your heart to this child? If a child comes of this -- and I have every reason to believe so -- that you'll do everything in your power to protect and teach this child? Not for me and not for yourself. The child would be blameless... both for my part in this and yours. I didn't seek you out, remember? You hunted me."

She nodded, but the words wouldn't scratch their way out of her chest. They were there, hooked into the flesh like a startled cat, and refused to be stirred from their precarious nest. A vibration started somewhere just to the left of a heartbeat, emanating from inside the southern human's chest. The wave moved with a predictable pattern, one Siegrune recognized from her past.

...

Damon turned his gaze through the Lens, now filled with fissures and cracks mirroring the scars that once covered his body. He could see the otherworldly presence just beyond it, deeper within himself -- or perhaps on another plane of existence he couldn't yet perceive fully. He could sense it waiting for him. Whether it was answering him, or subverting his own will, there was no way to know. He'd been broken into too many pieces to remember if he was still real, but promises were realities unto themselves.

"One hundred and eight." He said, but he wasn't sure which of the sixteen of him said it.

One more. Came the profound, soundless, empty, deafening answer from beyond -- or maybe inside the Lens.

"What's so important about one hundred and nine births?" Another of him asked. Maybe it was the same one, but they couldn't really tell each other apart so it didn't really matter which of him said it.

"Not births." He amended. "Pregnancies. We don't know how many of them... well, strong magic or not, I'm sure it's the pregnancies you wanted, and not the actual bairns."

WHATWASPROMISEDSHALLBEGIVEN.

"Right. So that was you." He nodded -- somehow more of him were following suit than not.

"A promise is a promise..."

"But a promise between sorcerers..."

...

"Therese. My name is Therese." She admitted, her face a stone mask in spite of the drying tracks of tears still gleaming in the hearth light.

"Then swear it, Therese." Damon's words bent at the edges, peeling free the wicked, barbed words wedged in Therese's chest. "Swear it to me and to yourself, in the name of your laird and your people whom you seek to rejoin."

Therese felt the shockwave from beyond the horizon, shuddering and rumbling closer from all sides. They stood at the center of a magical sinkhole, Damon's body a conduit into infinity as slivers shed from within him that he either didn't know or didn't care that he was losing. The moon shifted angrily in the sky, the clouds ripping away as furious gales -- tornados laid flat and scything across the mountains -- cut over the northern reaches of the world and laid everything bare to prying eyes. Eyes of gods, fiends, priests and wizards of inscrutable power in their bastions of secret knowledge all watching in mute judgment.

I swear it. Therese responded in her mother tongue, the musical song of her people all but lost in the magical storm raging silently around them.

...

"What in the hells is going on?!" Ginga screamed in Abhilash's face, the howling winds outside deafening and threatening to rip the words from her before they ever made it to the she-ork's ears.

A deep horn sounded, the whistling of ferocious winds over the small openings of the hut as the clement aura was compressed in the mailed fist of shredding air. With a crack like thunder, the floor shivered and the roof tore away into the sky. The sky, black and full of stars with the newly full moon staring down in all its pale glory. Cold rage fell on them from the heavens, the moon in the wrong place by a wide, terrifying margin that stabbed into the most primitive corners of their minds and filled their bones with dread. Within the confines of the hut, even open to the sky, the air was still and close. The storm screamed above them, around them.

"Dark magic." Abhilash put her lips on Ginga's ear and growled the words low, below the pitch of the storm. "Hold tight to me."

The she-ork gripped Ginga close, wedging their swollen bodies into the narrow channel between the bed and the tub. The ork gave a wordless curse as the firewood she so ardently demanded fill the hearth spat outward at her and showered them both with flaming sparks. Beside them, cradling each other in carnal passion as the winds reached down to lift them, Damon and the cursed elf-human spun lazily on an invisible string. Rising upward, unhurried as Damon thrust himself into Siegrune. He sloughed off himself, a second man writhing with them in the air. Another, and another -- folding off of him and into being as if the storm itself had conjured them.

The wind ignored the two females huddled in the ruined shelter, scooping the water from the tub and hurling it into the sky as a freezing mist that shrouded the handful of tumbling bodies churning through the air above the hut. Magical energy crackled, lightning and fire spewing from vents cut in the very space between realities.

Screams... but not from the tumult of Damon -- his bodies giving and dividing their attentions on Therese in their midst -- rather it was from somewhere south of the clearing. Somewhere beyond the snow-wall the hut had built about itself.

"DAMON!" Abhilash shouted so hard she thought her throat would tear or her chest might burst. The wind caught her voice and scattered it to meaningless flinders. "STOP!"

He became a multitude, falling upward into the air in a great ball of naked flesh. Now, the outermost layer of his dopplegangers turned their attention outward. Their eyes flashed, black as the night sky, catching moonlight like dark pools of oil about to spark to flame. Their hands moved -- seeming both in unison and not -- and the storm split asunder as if torn by mighty, unseen hands. Yet the howling did not relent, even in the stillness. The fissures in the sky around the swirling human mass did not close. The wind grew still, and what screams they could hear were suddenly, violently silenced. The rents in the air guttered dark, vanishing into the nothingness whence they came.

Damon's sixteen bodies collapsed in on himself. Not in stages, as they had grown, but all at once.

Damn him. Abhilash swore, jumped to her feet as two flesh rag-dolls fell from the sky.

Had Caollaidhe been with them, the jotun could have easily snatched the two falling small-folk from the air like drifting feathers. Abhilash, strong as a jotun though she might be, was not so tall she could easily reach either before they struck the ground in a mess of burst organs and shattered bones. Had Ginga been dressed, wearing the jotun-hide belt, the two of them could catch them without killing themselves.

Luckily for Abhilash, she knew none of this, and thought even less on it. From the instant she sprang from where she sheltered Ginga, the she-ork bounded out of the broken hut, leaping with both legs from the cracked top of a wall. She caught Damon's ankle as she hurtled toward the elf-human. She felt the bones of his lower leg snap as she wrenched her arm hard in an overhand hatchet throw. She collided with the small female, wrapping her arms around the small figure and tucking herself into a ball. Twisting with such a large belly was harder still, and she struck the ground on uneven legs. Abhilash slapped sideways against the wet, rocky mud of the slope and slid until she hit the boundary wall of snow -- now little more than a crumbled hedge of packed snow and ice. The whole right side of her body felt frozen. Burnt. Cut and bleeding. Her stomach lurched angrily, now, and she vomited.

"Abhi!" Ginga was running out of the roofless hut, still stupefied by the sudden storm and even more sudden breaking of it.

The human female struggled with the jotun belt, hastily wrapping it around herself as she slipped, barefoot, on the muddy slope. The belt's aid proved invaluable. Abhilash struggled twice to stand before the ork gave up the effort and lay panting in a growing pool of blood mixing with the icy mud slurry. Ginga carried the ork to the hut, first. Then the unconscious, less wounded-looking Therese. Then to Damon, who had been catapulted over the snow boundary wall and was lodged in a low drift. Numerous branches were wedged around and beneath him, his flight -- fall, it was definitely more a fall -- interrupted only with brittle effort by the nearest conifers who sacrificed precious nettled limbs without complaint. Not any complaint Ginga could hear, at any rate. By the time she was back in the roofless hovel, Ginga was chilled to the bone and shivering.

"Stupid." Abhilash groaned, her left hand exploring the scrapes, cuts, and bits of jagged rock along her right side.

"You might be the only reason either of them are alive." Ginga arranged Therese more carefully on the moss-bench before turning her attention to Damon.

"His leg..." Her mouth formed a tight line. "I hope this elf can help him, because there's nothing I can do for that."

"He'll heal himself." Abhilash shrugged, eyeing the basin of the tub and the steam wafting from it as it slowly refilled itself. "The hut's magic is working."

"Is it?" Ginga's teeth chattered, too chilled and tired to know differently.

"Sit." The she-ork stood, wincing and bracing herself with both hands clutching the edge of the tub. "I'll wash again, and you can pull rocks out of my skin."

"Joy." The human rolled her eyes, shook her head, and gave a soft laugh. "I'm glad you're alright, Abhi."

"I'm a long way from dead, Eun-eo." The ork gave her a weary, crooked grin. "I have a block of sap..."

"I know where it is." Ginga nodded, shuffling along the bed on her arse, feet dangling over Damon.

She fetched-out the lump of resin and set it in a pot at the hearth before ladling some water from the filling tub into the little cauldron to speed the kusuri's melting. The she-ork was gingerly lowering herself back into the water, watching the smoking, crystal-clear liquid run cloudy red and brown as mud and blood washed off her skin.

"I've heard stories of bairns... afraid of things that wounded or frightened their mother while the bairn was still in the womb. Dogs, usually... or horses..." Ginga used the ladle to pour water over Abhilash's bruised and bleeding shoulder. "Stupid human things like that. I bet it's the opposite for ork-folk. I bet your bairns will be fearless, mountain-climbing, tree-jumping warriors. Jotun-blood and all..."

Ginga used a fine-pointed knife to carefully trace the visible wounds for larger gravel and shards.

"Humans speak much of fear." The she-ork groaned, feeling a different magic seeping into her after the violence of the storm. "Did you check on the hunters Damon killed?"

"Hunters?" Ginga pouted, brows knit in confusion.

"You didn't hear them? That way..." Abhilash pointed south. "Take Pyaas and make sure they're dead."

"Alone?" Ginga fretted her lip.

"They're dead." Tapping her nose, then her ear. "They smell strong of blood and they're not making any noise."

"None you can hear." The human female's scowl was all the reproach the ork needed.

"Fine, I'll go with you." Abhilash climbed grumpily from the half-full tub. "But I'm not getting dressed for this."

"Suit yourself." Ginga smacked the ork's unmarred left buttock.

...

By the time they were returning from the carnage of the bounty hunters that they hadn't even known were nearby until Damon and Therese were naked and floating into the sky, Ginga and Abhilash were surprised to see the hut fully restored.

The aura of the hut felt stronger. Warmer. The slope of the valley where they sheltered beneath a jagged peak was spewing moss and creeping heather on every exposed scrap of mud and inching painfully over the gritty, split surface of churned stones knocked loose by some new upheaval that passed while the two females were away picking through the wreckage of Damon's pursuers.

Fleshy ribbons in blood-drenched armor, little-enough like human to be called as much though their features had been obliterated in a hail of magic darts broad as swords, long as spears. Ginga shuddered at the clinking, scraping weight of the cloak-wrapped bundle of scavenged belongings on her back, the grisly reward of such ruthless murder -- even though she told herself it was for their own safety. She deliberately ignored the terrible notion that this was only one of many hunting parties searching for Tsuro's wayward magical relic.

"They were looking for me." Damon answered her thoughts from inside the hut, his voice clear and strong as she approached. Ginga couldn't help the hitch in her breath and racing patter of her heart.

"So the elf said." Abhilash growled, the elf-human's eyes meeting hers as the she-ork re-entered the hut and climbed unceremoniously back into the now-full bath. "Her magic?"

"And more of mine." Damon shrugged. "She's a better hand at elf magic than I am."

"The gladding field will speed our recovery." Therese worked her neck stiffly as she gave Abhilash an appreciative nod. "Thank you for saving my life."

"After your air-dance rutting..." the ork's yellow eyes shone with cruel delight. "I knew you wouldn't be able to save yourself."

"I didn't expect the storm." Damon's admission caught his companions by surprise, but Therese rubbed her hands on the tops of her thighs.

"There was a great deal of magic going on at once." She said, looking back and forth among them. "Powerful, old. Some of it his -- most not. A bit from those bounty hunters."

"And it created a storm?" Ginga felt her already nauseous belly flop with a new queasy gyration. "Does that always happen?"

"No -- not usually." Therese shrugged, her voice flat and eyes staring through the floor. "It's probably to do with who is hunting you, and whatever insane magic is at work around you."

"The purpose of the Lens..." Damon mused, chewing at his lip while both hands tenderly worked the flesh of his recently mended leg.

"The what?"

"Matta's Lens, he calls it." Ginga answered the human-elf from the bed, stripping out of her clothes to ready for another bath after her grisly foraging. "The thing Matta gave him that lets him use magic."

"That's not..." Therese had been about to say "That's not how magic works." but she thought better of it, given the humans' primitive understanding of magic and planar energy transfer. "Elves do magic differently, then."

"Is it a language?" Damon asked, his hands turning the dragon tooth idly as he stared at it. "I know my trade-letters well enough, and the northern trade-tongue a little... it's a language; magic?"

"That's as apt a description as any." Therese shrugged. "Most..."

She'd been about to call them younger races...

"Most tribal people and small villages don't teach it that way... few larger cities, too..." She hedged. "Elves make it a part of everyday life. It's in everything we do."

"Matta always made it sound like it was some innate gift." Ginga's frown told the story of a lifetime of belief newly challenged. "He called it sensing, I think."

"I've heard of something like that." Therese sighed, picking at the fabric of her shirt. "Some folk are better at learning languages -- or have learned bits of it almost by accident. Some are more naturally resistant to magic, but it's something that can be taught."

"Prende said one of our lullabies was a dragon word." Ginga found herself grasping for connections, blue eyes searching Therese's face for answers before the pseudo-human could form a full response. "Are dragon words magic?"

"That's... complicated." Was the only real reply she could think of. "Not all words, just like not all human words are magic."

"But human magic is gibberish." Ginga scoffed, climbing into the tub with Abhilash, sending a wave of steaming water surging over the curb of the tub and into the hidden channel that directed the excess water outside. "It's noises and half-words that I can't make. I don't know how he does."

"Magic." Damon grunted, smirking.

"Reshaping reality does have that effect on those who are still rooted in this reality." Therese nodded. "That's what makes creatures like dragons, fae and fiends so powerful. They're already part of more than one reality."

"What about elves?" Abhilash's voice was coarse, but otherwise lacked the hostility from before.

"We're as rooted here as dwarves, jotun, humans... even orks."

"Hmm..." the ork mused with a low growl.

"Kobolds, goblins, trolls...?" Damon ticked on his fingers. "I'm guessing there are more such races across the world?"

"A few." Therese agreed. "There were more, once. Several of the elder races are long dead, their empires and city-states ground to dust when the dragons appeared. At least, that's how my people tell it."

"How long ago was that?"

"A thousand years... ten-thousand...?" Therese shook her head, putting a hand over her eyes. "Your histories are so short, and there's been so much war..."

"Why aren't half-breeds sterile?" Abhilash cut in pointedly, her voice carving a solid chunk of quiet out of the stirring thoughts among them.

"You mean like a hinny or a mule?" Therese gave Abhilash a wide-eyed stare of baffled unknowing. "That's a question for the sages. I don't know."

"I think it's because we are all the same." The she-ork snorted, as if it were the easiest conclusion ever. "Like different hunting dogs or horses."

"Don't let the clergy hear you say that." Ginga snickered behind her hand, splashing the she-ork with a small flick of her wrist.

"Rut 'em in the arse, if they don't like it." The ork huffed, leaning back and closing her eyes. "Damon, use your magic to get the rocks out of my skin."

"For snapping my leg in three places and saving my life..." Damon groaned, setting the dragon tooth aside and stepping beside the tub to lay a hand on the ork's shoulder. "Seems the least I could do."

"Only three? Lucky she didn't rip your leg off entirely." The dark brown-skinned Ginga giggled. "She'd have launched you clear out of the valley, if you weren't so damn heavy."

"Maybe next time." Damon quipped back, his voice dull and bored. "You're slacking, ork."

"Next time, then." The ork snarled, leaning her head to rub the side of her face against the back of Damon's hand.

"Don't really tear his leg off." Ginga's exasperation was only half-feigned. Her concern was also half-feigned, but only because she genuinely half-feared the ork taking her suggestion all-seriously.

"Not even to save my life?" Damon pouted at her from behind the ork.

"Stop." Ginga's wide-eyed warning told him she was not amused. Not entirely, at any rate.

"Not even to save your life." The ork groaned, shaking her head. "Now shut up and use your magic, or I'll punch you."

Sitting on the moss-bench, seemingly forgotten by the trio, Therese brooded darkly on the horizon of oncoming consequences she faced for the bargain struck. She dreaded verifying whether or not the spark of life had taken, yet. She dreaded more if it had not. It would mean having to try again -- though likely with far fewer magical storms coalescing around them -- but she was not eager to feel Damon's touch again. The mercy of it all was also the worst part: as brief as their carnal tryst had been, the intensity of it had been unlike anything before in her life. She found herself torn with a primal, urgent desire to feel that again at the same time she was horrified of her body's reaction to the human's touch. In the morning, she would use a spell to determine whether new life was already growing within her. She stopped at that, not allowing herself to consider what would happen afterward.

...