Gifts

Author: Travellyr Title: Gifts

It was dark the day Dolphin’s servant came, her cold drowned flesh blending into the cold gray wool of the sky. He didn’t know this one; Dolphin had probably sacrificed her latest primary servant to their Golden Mother when Phibrizzo was killed. The servant knelt on the shore, surf snarling her patchy skirts and ragged tassels and the odd lock of hair let grown long, away from its close-cropped fellows. From crown to hips and, barring trailing tatters, knees to toes she wore nothing but drops of salt water. She knelt in the breakers with her head bowed but her gaze steady, as one servant to another, one higher and much, much older, seeking entrance to another lord’s territory.

It was Xelloss who came down to greet her, matching her gaze and bowing to her, shallowly, as one servant to another, senior to junior, with the foam just barely beyond his shoes. Granting acknowledgement and entrance. She rose, she waded forward, and she stopped.

“I have a message for your master.”

“I am here to receive it.”

“My master the Deep Sea Dolphin extends an invitation to the Greater Beast.” She bowed formally, deeply, breaking their eye contact. “She would be most pleased if the Greater Beast could accept this invitation to visit her home at her convenience.”

“I will tell my master.”

“I will wait.”

He nodded, she straightened, and, the dance complete, he left. She waited, standing shin-deep in saltwater.

Two days passed before Xelloss returned. The servant of Dolphin waited, and the long bits of her hair had dried and were snaking around her in the wind. Salt spray had crusted on her bare flesh, still gray and drowned-looking, and the waves had buried her past her ankles in sand. His master had told him, teasingly, to refuse if Dolphin’s servant looked at all restless.

Dolphin’s servant looked as patient as stone.

“My master considers.”

She bowed. “On behalf of my master, I most humbly thank the Greater Beast for this consideration. On behalf of my master, I will wait for the Greater Beast to consider further.”

And their dance was done for the day. Had he been human, Xelloss might have sighed over the flirting of demon lords.

On the fifth day her skin was cracking. The Dolphin had not seen fit to equip her servant for exposure. He reported this dutifully, along with her words: the same words as before.

“Such a good servant,” Zelas mused, petting the arm of her chair. The pelt on it was still bloody. “You would wait just so, wouldn’t you?”

“I would as my master wished.”

She smiled. “Good boy. Go then, send her back to her master.” Zelas’s smile became a smirk. “I wouldn’t want to damage someone else’s toy with my dithering.”

This was a bald lie, and they both knew it, as they both knew what would happen next. The servant would go, without a proper answer. She couldn’t not, once dismissed, unless she’d been directly ordered to remain.

This was unlikely. Very little about Dolphin was direct. Xelloss went to convey his master’s intent, like the good boy she’d called him, and send the servant back without a clear answer. So demons flirted.

The servant was back at dawn, three days later. Once again Xelloss came to receive her. He was very slightly irritated at having to flirt on his master’s behalf before breakfast; a very lovely little dragon had been caught, spying, and he’d been given the privilege of rewarding her curiosity. If there was any like sentiment in Dolphin’s messenger, he couldn’t find it. He thought he sensed a vague satisfaction or amusement, but he was probably imagining it. Dolphin always did favor passive-aggressive masochists as personal servants.

She bowed. “I bring a gift.” The sea behind her in a twenty-meter circle was mirror calm. Around it, waves crested as usual. Refusing to speculate, he wondered if he should perhaps pray for a year of boredom later. “I have been ordered to let none but your master accept this gift, in person.”

Two years.

“My master is asleep.”

“I will wait.” Behind her, beneath the mirror, something roiled. Who was he kidding? Two months, starting after his curiosity was completely satisfied. Breakfast would have to wait.

oo00OOo0oo

Zelas waved him off and promptly forgot him. Kneeling in the shadows he’d retired to (and it was a great effort to find shadows in Dolphin’s home, because the walls glowed), he could see the entire room. Off in a corner the messenger lurked in a tangle of rotting timber. Her cracked skin had healed somewhat, and she appeared to be completely ignoring everything outside her eyes. How foolish, how convenient, to be without curiosity. Xelloss was impressed.

Dolphin wore her hair in braids, with the jewelry of drowned things strung on it. The last time he’d seen her she wore a single fat plait threaded with bracelets and chokers and vertebrae. Today she wore eight, four to a pigtail, and hundreds of rings banded the braids, from wide dragon’s rings near her head to the rings of what must be human infants near the ends. Some shone, some were tarnished, some had gems, or bone, or filigree work. None of them matched. The effect was dazzling and distracting, and certainly intentional. Zelas fingered one of them, examining the rings, smirking now and then when she read an inscription.

“You’ve got a thousand lives caught in your hair.”

Dolphin smiled, smug. “That is the idea. I have a thousand million lives caught in my seas.” Zelas snorted and wove the braid through her fingers. “I sit, and they come to me, all my lovely lost ones.” She eyed Zelas through her lashes. “So much easier than hunting.”

Zelas snarled a smile, feral and bright. Her hand fisted around the braid and slowly began pulling. “So much less fun.”

“Perhaps.” Smiling, heavy-lidded, Dolphin leaned closer, over the arm of her chair, reeled in on her own hair. Her next words were murmured against his master’s lips. “I’ve never found direct competition much fun. I win more often when everyone has forgotten I am playing.”

“Scavenger.” Zelas nipped.

“Opportunist.” Dolphin licked.

oo00OOo0oo

Deep Sea Dolphin ran what amounted to the thrift store of Mazoku servants, taking in and giving forth like the sea she ruled. She accepted anyone and anything that demonstrated a desire to serve her, and even went out of her way to create servants from sea leavings every so often. She had to. Deep Sea Dolphin had the fastest changeover rate among underlings in this world, and probably the adjacent ones as well.

Bad servants were promptly destroyed as they were identified. Servants who were merely mediocre were given tasks designed to either rocket them out of mediocrity or kill them, and he’d yet to hear of any that had rocketed. Good servants were routinely given to her fellow Lords as gifts, where, more often than not, they were either destroyed as potential spies, either through sacrifice, becoming a plaything, or sharing the fate of the Dolphin’s mediocre help; or given minor duties until it was seemly to gift them to someone else. She, Phibrizzo, and the Dynast had gotten quite the game of musical servants going in the past, what with the Dolphin’s constant gifts of prey and servants (no one had ever been able to decide if the gifts were an unsubtle way of planting spies or an equally unsubtle way of accumulating favors owed) and the Dynast’s return gifts and the Hellmaster’s cat’s cradle game of favors given and the mortality rate among his playthings… all of it seemingly designed to be a frantic dance not to be the one left holding the potato when the music stopped. The root vegetable in question was, of course, who owed what to whom. Zelas swore blind the Dolphin perpetuated the cycle out of boredom, and had flatly refused to accept anything from her she shouldn’t eat since before the Kouma wars. Xelloss thought his master wise.

This left the Dolphin with only the truly great servants, and those with potential to become so. The servants who were truly great, jewels of efficiency and loyalty… those Dolphin tended to sacrifice to their Golden Mother every century or so. The entire system seemed expressly designed to prevent the Dolphin from getting anything done, and while the very idea was unthinkable to the Dynast or the Hellmaster, plotting in their strongholds (at least, the Dynast still was), the Metalliums and the late Chaos Dragon had been convinced that accomplishing nothing was Deep Sea Dolphin’s dearest goal. The idea had disgusted Gaav, but amused Zelas. It had also intrigued Xelloss, off and on, for the better part of eight centuries. Of those who merely displayed potential… well, they didn’t last long in that state. They almost always proved themselves to be one thing or another, and Dolphin considered purposefully not living up to one’s potential, especially in an effort to live longer, to be the mark of a bad servant.

The moral of all of this was that, even with his finger on the very pulse of Mazoku politics, Xelloss was never surprised when he didn’t recognize someone claiming to belong to Deep Sea Dolphin. The servant his master had flippantly labeled Flotsam was Dolphin’s current number one. She was ruthlessly efficient and flawless in her execution of whatever task was set to her. Dolphin was almost fond of this one. He expected her to vanish any day now: Dolphin was going through another pious streak, and nothing but the best was fit for their Mother. The other, dubbed Jetsam, was contentedly lurking in a mound of rotting timber and dead coral, watching. Jetsam had been the pawn in flirting thus far, and Jetsam was a puzzle he set himself to chewing over.

She looked to be made from a drowned elf or dragon, gray and soggy as she was. It was hard to tell with her eyes clouded like that. This meant she was at least two hundred years old; a child, but not an infant. That she was still alive meant she was at least a good servant. That her master didn’t seem to care how much damage she took suggested she was not a fantastic servant. That the Dolphin kept her always near and used her almost exclusively as a messenger suggested otherwise. Unless—

Xelloss realized that Jetsam was watching him. It was hard to tell when someone was without pupils.

“I am five hundred years in my master’s service.”

He rapidly revised some of his estimates. A good servant, but probably stupid, spilling her hand like that, but not so stupid if she really had been reading him—

“It does not matter what information I give away, so long as it is not my master’s.” She smiled. It looked squishy. He was fascinated. “Artifice is not a virtue in Dolphin’s service. The more secrets I keep, the shorter my existence.” She winked at him. “I will try to keep one. It would be no fun for you if I told you the answer.”

Jetsam has lasted because she has two great talents. No, three. One is her massive passive-aggression. She achieves her goals through submission, and completes her tasks by behaving as the lowest and most humble of slaves. Two is her utter lack of artifice or ambition, even towards continued survival. She lives only to please her master, which brings us to three. She is incredibly talented at bureaucracy, and she uses her talents for evil. There is no loophole she cannot make into a noose, no procedure she cannot complicate, no system she cannot make ever more Byzantine. There is no mortal bureaucrat who would not drown himself in a toilet after dealing with her. She could come up with a set of requisition forms for dispensing toilet paper in a bathroom stall that would inspire everyone to go back to using leaves. There is no act she cannot slow down to a dead halt, even without paperwork. She can diligently work for hours upon hours, never slacking, never shirking, and accomplish absolutely nothing and at the same time demonstrate clear progress made towards a goal that will, if one were but to take a step back, never be reached.

Deep Sea Dolphin’s hobby was the art of doing nothing, and she had found the perfect servant. Jetsam was not a good sacrifice because she couldn’t get anything done. Likewise, she was not a good gift. But she was not a bad servant. She was flawlessly loyal and when given a specific set of instructions could complete them perfectly and in a timely manner. She was far from mediocre. Still, she was without initiative. She doesn’t anticipate, speculate, or plot. And, as stated, left to herself she can expend tremendous amounts of effort and not accomplish anything. Any group of underlings given to her to run would fail at their tasks, not because of incompetence, but because they would run out of time. Any army she was put in charge of would grind to a halt, any direct confrontation she was set to would stalemate, and any simple situation she was put in charge of would be endlessly complicated. She excels as a messenger, a valet, a butler, a passive observer, a paper pusher, and a piece of furniture.

She’s perfect for Dolphin. Xelloss supposed that in three or four centuries, once the Dolphin was hopelessly attached to this one, she’d sacrifice her anyway in the belief that the best sacrifice is the possession one holds most dear. The Mazoku thrift shop existed in an endless cycle of decay, growth, destruction, and renewal. In that way the Dolphin was closest to their golden Mother, and that was probably why Zelas was attracted to her.

oo00OOo0oo

Deep Sea Dolphin’s bedchamber was either a very small room or a very large closet, and it was the only room she had with four walls. Three quarters of the floor was her bed.

Dolphin lay back, dragging Zelas atop her. She was buxom and soft where Zelas was hard and lean, and her ringed braids wrapped around them both like tentacles. She’d been wearing a slim dress of knit sharkskin that clung and skimmed and flirted around her ankles as she walked. Zelas loved it. She loved it best puddled around her ankles, just before Dolphin tipped them both over into her bed, with Zelas’s shirt and jerkin next to it on the floor. The pants, being tight, had required Dolphin to be on top to peel them off. Dolphin being on top had required them to wrestle and nip, licking everything in reach. It was fun, even though Dolphin had to bite Zelas frequently to stay on top long enough to get her pants off. Perhaps it was fun because Dolphin had to bite Zelas, fast and sharp and leaving delicious bloody crescents to play with during the few seconds she was still after each bite. They went well with the bloody scratches on Dolphin’s shoulders.

It is noteworthy that Greater Beast Zelas Metallium and Deep Sea Dolphin have something in common besides the obvious: they both share an affection for real clothing, instead of the more common manifestation of themselves. Many (by which is meant four out of five) Mazoku Lords do, actually. Zelas likes real clothing because she has a fascination with material, and what can be done with it, and has ever since Man learned to skin other creatures. Dolphin, on the other hand, likes having ever more things to knit. Because they both wear real clothing, they cannot simply wish them away; at least, not and have the clothing be able to come back. Beast Priest Xelloss, by contrast, chooses to manifest his clothing, as it’s a lot simpler and requires no mending or laundering, and that is always a good thing when traveling the mortal way and especially when traveling the mortal way with Lina Inverse.

Dolphin turned, straddling Zelas backwards and pushing her pants over her knees. Zelas bucked and kicked, because she could, and because this was Dolphin on top of her, smearing heat wherever she slid. So she bucked to feel those hot wet parts slide deliciously over her chest, and Dolphin bent, gripped her with hands and knees, and sank her teeth into the outer curve of Zelas’s thigh. The Greater Beast sighed, toed her pants off, and squirmed as Dolphin’s tongue ran along the new wound, licking up the blood and teasing raw, sensitive flesh as it healed over. She leaned up a bit and wrapped her arms around Dolphin’s hips, and pulled her down. Zelas nuzzled between her cheeks, scraping the soft skin with her teeth, teasing her tongue from Dolphin’s tailbone down the crease to that sweet pucker in hot, wet swipes. Dolphin hmmed, and relaxed, her lush thighs on either side of her lover’s head, and Zelas grinned triumphantly, secretly, and flipped them over. She buried her face in Dolphin’s cunt, inhaling deeply.

“I love the way you smell.”

Dolphin laughed. It made her breasts jiggle against Zelas’s belly. “Thank you,” she cooed, gently teething the folds in front of her. Zelas groaned, quietly, and thrust three fingers inside of her. Dolphin moaned, panted, and attacked the nub she found, sucking and licking. Zelas huffed into her belly, and teased her little finger inside Dolphin’s rear. In, out, in. Dolphin mewled and panted, her legs spreading farther apart, hips rocking, relishing the slide and burn.

It was beautiful, the way she relaxed and tensed, exclaiming her pleasure in breathy shouts of “hah.” Zelas would shove her hand all the way into that sweet slick channel, as fast as she could, and trade her pinky for two fingers from her other hand and twist, just so, to make her feel the burn of stretch, and Dolphin would wail one pure, sweet note each time before she muffled the noise by latching her teeth into Zelas’s thigh. Then it was Zelas’s turn to cry out, throaty and deep, the sting of being pierced mixing deliciously with the pleasure of Dolphin’s desperately lapping tongue mixing her blood and juices.

She growled, leaned her weight forward onto her rocking hips and suckled, hard, hands pumping. Dolphin tensed for one beautiful, bowstring-perfect moment, and released, screaming. Her back arched (the curve of breakers) and her head was thrown back into the pillows, then she relaxed (waves rushing back where they came from). For another sweet, smug moment she lay limp and soft as one of her anemones, twitching from Zelas’s still-teasing fingers. Then she growled and surged up to trap her clit between her teeth, tugging gently, and her tongue scraped over the captive nub, fast and firm. Zelas howled, and let her own orgasm rip through her, until she lay still and sated with her cheek pillowed on Dolphin’s hip.

Dolphin, of course, had to ruin the moment by squirming out from under her and shoving her to one side. She made up for it, though, by snuggling up next to her and interlacing their legs. She nuzzled her cheek against Zelas’s firm breast, playing with a lock of blond hair, rocking gently against her thigh. Dolphin’s dark, mottled braids trailed everywhere. Zelas made a face, arching up to pull two of them out from under her. She’d been getting the imprint of a long-dead king’s signet ring in her ass, and two dozen ecclesiastical and engagement rings in her back. She dropped the braids on top of Dolphin with an irritated sigh. Dolphin smirked.

“Should I keep my hair to myself, then?”

“No,” Zelas sighed, playing with one of Dolphin’s tits. It smooshed and bobbled gently in the thick, liquid atmosphere of Dolphin’s home. They didn’t float, but the contrast between here and the surface was still different enough to be fascinating. “I like your hair. I just want to keep your hardware out of my hide.”

“Fair enough,” she said, sleepily lapping up sweat.

oo00OOo0oo

Xelloss had never been to Deep Sea Dolphin’s home before. He discovered that Dolphin’s halls, like certain other things about her, were one-sided. What Xelloss meant with that observation was that every room in her fortress was open to the ocean, since every room was missing at least one wall. Usually the main one. The floor was rock and ice and bones and silt packed together so firmly and cleverly not even a blind idiot could trip upon it. All the walls were of glowing, eye-sized bubbles rising so thickly and violently into the ocean above that they were opaque, and treated whomever tried to push through them to the frozen, crushing depths of the normal water outside her home; in that way they were as solid as any stone. Her fortress sat upon a foundation of sunken cities and shipwrecks, and the light given off by her walls revealed an endless plain of deep, squishy silt on the ocean bottom, receding into blackness in every direction but down. On one side of her home a deep sea trench ground her discarded gleanings down into the world’s molten center along with the rest of the old sea bed. On the other side volcanic vents broke up the monotony, with pale, red-tipped worms clustered thickly around them, spewing soot and superheated water that cooled before ever reaching daylight, showering mineral deposits from the cooled plumes in a constant watery snowfall.

It was beautiful if you didn’t mind the silence. The silence was fine, if you didn’t mind all the noise just outside of hearing. No action in Dolphin’s home caused a sound: no footfall, no knock, nothing except speech. Outside the silence had whalesong carving through it, and the great ocean currents blasting a few fathoms overhead, and the subliminal whishing of giant squid changing colors, the tiny swishes of jellyfish and plankton, the lives of the blind deep-sea fishes hunting each other, the whirr of the sea vents and the sound of the trench, which, if you were to record the noise and play it back much faster, would make a slow, grinding, cracking, squelching noise. None of it was visible except the geological features, the vent-worms, and the occasional comb jellyfish or vampire squid passing like a particularly slow and tranquil bird. His master had once told him a Kraken slept in the sea-trench, warming itself at the world-fires that melted all the ocean detritus. She’d said, voice caught between amusement and disgust, that it was practically tame, hadn’t so much as looked at a ship in centuries, and only bothered to wake up when Dolphin wanted to feed it. Given the general fate of epic monsters, especially recently, Xelloss thought this pragmatic of the beast.

One of Dolphin’s lesser servants came up to him, offering tea. Xelloss accepted, sitting with his feet dangling off the edge of the corridor into the open ocean, and watched the servant go. He looked like a washed-away river demon, skin pickled in the ocean salt, hair like strips of braided sharkskin. Maybe it was. Looking over the ocean floor, Xelloss could almost see why Deep Sea Dolphin pursued the art of nothing, here in the silence. The ocean floor, when a sea creature wasn’t crawling across his view, reminded him a bit of the Abyssal Plain. This was a plain, and the ocean’s bottom was unarguably an abyss. The view and the almost-silence encouraged one to wonder, not that he needed any help, but it encouraged wondering about odd things. Like if Dolphin’s kitchen servants faced the same turnover rate as everything else in her empire, and why his tea had steam rising from the cup when there wasn’t any air for it to rise in. To be strictly accurate, though, there was air in Dolphin’s home. It was merely compressed by the ocean’s weight into a liquid, and while he thought about that, he wondered why everyone’s hair and clothing acted as if it were dry, here in the liquid-air inside Dolphin’s home, and wondered if mortals had ever been down here. They should be able to survive, once they got over the autonomic choking response and realized they could still breathe, albeit a much thicker substance. He wondered why the entire rest of the world and the idea of its destruction seemed so impossibly far away, or if that was just him, and being unused to the perspective from the bottom of things. He wondered what kind of tea this was.

He sensed Jetsam coming down the hallway a little before he would have heard her, had there been anything to hear. Being this deep in another Lord’s complex always made him feel a little like he’d wrapped his head in cotton wool and stuffed it in his pocket.

“We have an errand,” she said, “you, Aneyon, and I.” He felt his master’s presence adding depth to it. A ship was passing near Wolf Pack Island, Zelas had given the honor to Dolphin, and he was to see if there was anything of interest to Zelas on it before Aneyon (who turned out to be Flotsam) sank it and Jetsam catalogued it so Dolphin could pick over it. And while you’re up, she purred into a few layers of himself, be a darling and get me my cigarettes and the wolf-bone holder. And my slippers. He followed Jetsam, and left his teacup on the floor to enjoy the view.

It had been a passenger ship. What the captain had been thinking (or not thinking) amused Zelas into smirking while she smoked. Xelloss sat at her feet, basking in her approval and general good mood, and pondering. Ships rarely came near to Wolf Pack Island on accident. Perhaps Dolphin had eased them off course. Perhaps the two sorceresses on board had persuaded the ship to get closer. Perhaps ochre would be a good color to paint his master’s nails, now that he’d finished buffing. He idly hoped the other Lord didn’t mind them sharp, but if she did, it wasn’t his problem.

Dolphin sat content, working, whalebone needles clicking. The sound was peaceful, perhaps at odds with the image of a Mazoku lord knitting up the torn, braided hair and scalps of the ship’s passengers while Jetsam sat at her feet (a cool reflection of Zelas and Xelloss), tearing and knotting a sorceress’s cloak into a single line to be worked. A pile of sailcloth and courtier’s clothing, more scalps, whatever linens Dolphin had liked, gleanings from past shipwrecks, and a few pieces of various sea creatures sat next to her, awaiting similar treatment. From time to time Dolphin would tell her which to tie in next. Xelloss saw that the Lord had considerable talent—she worked quickly enough that Jetsam could not afford to dawdle at what she was doing, and the patterns gradually emerging from Dolphin’s needles were as breathtakingly beautiful as the brink of madness. She saw him watching, and demurely told him she was making a slipcover for her altar. Xelloss nodded, but he hadn’t thought there would be a dust problem at the bottom of the ocean.

He watched the cloak become part of the work and thought of Lina, over forty years old now, hair bright as ever and looking forward to menopause (and the ability to kick ass every day of the month) with a gleeful, breathless insanity that delighted him and probably terrified everyone around her. He rather doubted she’d thought of the REST of menopause’s delights, and he looked forward to that mayhem as well. He thought he should stop by, if he had time, and see if he could do anything to help everyone’s suffering along. Maybe give her some knitting needles. Big ones, so she’d be more tempted to stab people with them, starting with him. Maybe he should scalp Lina before age and habitual overextension robbed the color from her hair, and ask Dolphin to knit an altar-cloth. Maybe he should just shave her head instead, in case Dolphin needed some more. He’d get to see Lina yelling at him with no hair that way, too. Maybe he should shave Firia’s while he was at it. Gold would look lovely with the red.

Idly, Xelloss remembered that Phibrizzo had enjoyed needlepoint.

oo00OOo0oo

The wolves were smitten with Dolphin. It didn’t hurt matters that she was constantly petting one or more of them, combing them, and pulling dead hair out in great handfuls to float around on the floor. Jetsam assiduously collected the roaming hunks of fluff, for which Xelloss was grateful. He had better things to do with his time than corral herds of hairballs, but he wasn’t sure what those things were. Recently they consisted of making frequent pots of tea; making sure the floors and beds were clean; and dealing with Jetsam politely staring at everything with her filmed-over eyes (often holding a bag of shed fur); Flotsam/Aneyon looking at him as if she couldn’t figure out how he’d managed all these years (though he wasn’t sure if it was, personal dislike, doubt in his talents, or surprise that he was currently the only servant on the island with opposable thumbs); and Dolphin’s combined penchant for his presence and for putting an antimacassar on anything that didn’t move. She’d even set one on his head when he’d sat for a few hours internally cataloguing. He hadn’t moved except to open his eyes and stare at her, and she’d smiled, patted him on the shoulder, and walked off, four wolf puppies bouncing at her heels. This baffled him, because he hadn’t seen a single antimacassar in the entirety of Dolphin’s domain, not even in a wreck. He concluded she was being perverse, baiting his master, flirting with his master, or a combination of the above, and apart from his “hat,” left them where they were.

It had taken about four minutes to persuade Deep Sea Dolphin to visit Wolf Pack Island in person. “Come home with me,” his master had cooed, her long nails caressing under Dolphin’s chin, the sea queen’s braids draped around her arms and neck and waist. “Come see the fires in my forest.” Dolphin had been tending her own altar, laying thick, black oil in great clamshells and lighting it. The flames danced high and blue-green against a dark backdrop of the endless open ocean. Her altar sat in a huge empty room, with a view of the north, one end of the trench and a few volcanic vents visible. Her glowing bubble-walls framed the view of creation in the west and destruction in the east, and the view framed the altar. It was very impressive, very different from Wolf Pack Island’s more worldly altar in the forest, with its furs and bone, and with the enormous sacrificial fires going Xelloss had to admit that Dolphin had devised a watery hell more magnificent than any temple’s heaven.

Zelas had been licking Dolphin’s ear. “Do you remember what fires look like above? Golden and red, with secret violet hearts, like my beloved Xelloss’s eyes.” Xelloss, standing behind the pair with Dolphin’s attendants to either side, had been reexamined by Flotsam and Jetsam. Flotsam/Aneyon had appeared mildly peeved that he did not have his fire-heart eyes open for her to study. Jetsam appeared contentedly indifferent, as she always did. “Mother and child, they are,” Zelas continued, and Xelloss pointedly opened his eyes to smile at Flotsam, all his centuries and astral teeth showing. She looked away. “Violet chasing the red gold around the fuel, gold and black entwined as flames and sparks rise toward the night. Come home with me.”

“Your child,” Dolphin murmured, kissing Zelas’s cheek.

“Our mother.”

“Yes,” she smiled, and Dolphin (and Flotsam, and Jetsam) followed them home.

oo00OOo0oo

The last time the fires had blazed so high, there’d been priests and shrine maidens to throw into them. Two had been dragons. He thought of Milgasia, more angry and bitter than afraid of him, disillusioned, hypocritical, and surviving, and how beautiful it made him; he thought of Firia, so young, so hopeful and stubborn and fierce, too busy being affronted to be afraid, and full of bent ideals; and he thought of how gorgeous they’d look, how utterly perfect, dressed in the golden flames. No better rest for them than the arms of his Mother.

Dolphin set a hand under Aneyon’s chin, caressing her, then caught her lips in a kiss, deep and slow and thorough. Her other hand settled on Aneyon’s hip, and as she drew back the hand on her chin stroked down over throat and chest to settle on her sternum. Dolphin smiled, Aneyon smiled back, and Dolphin shoved her into the fires.

She snarled and thrashed and blistered, but she did not try to leave the flames and she did not scream, not when the blisters burst and not she began to melt before she finally began to burn. The only sound Aneyon ever made was one sharp click of her teeth coming together, and the pop and sizzle of her blisters bursting. They watched, silent: Dolphin and Zelas, smiling; Jetsam and Xelloss, somber and respectful; the wolves, ranged around them and beyond them eyes without number, watching this sacrifice to the Lord of All at her altar in the wild forests of Wolf Pack Island, the sea to the West and the manor house to the East. When Aneyon was only a puddle of burning oil, Dolphin let out an ululating cry, she and Zelas throwing huge chunks of kill into the fires while the wolves surged around them, howling their own melodies. Burning oil splashed everywhere, consuming everything around the altar. Two wolves went into the flames, the roaring and howling drowning out any noise they might have made. The flames towered taller than he, taller even than Zelas, and in their golden ferocity Xelloss could see the blackness of the void and feel his Mother’s eyes. He understood Dolphin’s overwhelming piety in that moment, felt it himself, and would have thrown himself into the flames of his Mother’s arms had he been able to move.

He didn’t feel one way or the other about that, at the time. It simply was, just as the ocean of the Golden King’s awareness that flooded him, pushing out even the tie to his master, simply was. He stood there, gazing into the fire while the wolves sang and his master and Dolphin went at each other before the flames like women possessed by lust or madness or both. When the wolf song had faded and the fires died down to crackling embers he came back to himself. He and Jetsam stood alone, the wolves and their masters gone. Xelloss and Jetsam strode forward and knelt in the ash before the coals. He could hear her knees hiss as the hot ash met their sogginess. He could smell his trousers smoldering. Jetsam took the knife from the altar, ignoring her sizzling hands, and cut a fistful of hair and some of her scalp from her head. Water oozed from the cuts to sizzle next to her knees. Xelloss took the altar knife she handed to him, pulled his glove off, and sliced his wrist and hand deeply. Black blood welled up and drizzled onto the coals. It did not sizzle. Jetsam tossed her hair next to it, and it did not burn. Instead they slowly vanished over the coals, the blood and the hair, like the smoke over the clearing, while the Mazoku knelt in the ashes.

Days later and the destroyed altar implements had been lovingly replaced and the soot scrubbed from everything but the altar itself. Zelas felt it looked more appropriate that way; Xelloss agreed. Jetsam had combed and rebraided her master’s hair, and retired to the sea to rejuvenate her roasted flesh. She hadn’t gone far—Xelloss could see the top of her head at low tide.

Dolphin now wore her treasure-wrapped hair in five braids, the rings braided in instead of merely strung onto the finished plait, with bangles hiding under the sleeves of her sweater. She wore a troll king’s torque over it as a belt, patinated from the ocean salt, and a full skirt knit from kelp and hair flowed below it. It moved like water rushing around shore rocks when she walked.

He’d noticed the air around her seemed dewy; moisture beaded on hard surfaces near her, evaporating with a brief tang of salt as she passed on. The wolves followed ten paces behind her, hopeful and licking the salt off the walls. Xelloss was waiting for them to pickle themselves so he could stop magicking tongue-prints off the polished surfaces.

Dolphin cooed over the wolf in her lap, caressing his throat and ears. The wolf, for his part, appeared to be about three strokes away from melting, having an orgasm, or both. A second wolf crawled along the floor, licking her toes. Wolves three and four lounged behind her, offering themselves as a backrest and sniffing up the clean, sea-damp scent of her hair, while still more lounged close to the Lord of the Deep. They liked her scent nearly as much as their master did.

Zelas took in the scene in her chamber with a look of disgust. There were antimacassars on her pillows, her chairs, and her tables. She snarled, scattering the wolves, and hauled Dolphin to her feet. She kissed her, Dolphin wrapping around her with a satisfied “mmm.” Zelas wrapped Dolphin’s braids around her fists, pulling her head back, nipping and sucking at her neck.

“You,” she growled between bites, “had better not be thinking of doing to my wolves what you did to that kraken.”

“The kraken,” Dolphin sighed, twining a leg up around Zelas’s waist like a tentacle, “is perfectly fine.” She tipped her head back farther, arching her back. Zelas moved the attack from throat to shoulder, and Dolphin licked Zelas’s ear.

“For a lap pet,” Zelas growled, pretending she wasn’t pleased. Her hands rid Dolphin of the torque-belt. Dolphin’s pushed inside her dress as she bit down on Zelas’s ear. Zelas hissed.

“The kraken,” Dolphin said firmly, pulling off her sweater, “is perfect.” Her hands landed on Zelas’s rump and she pulled them together sharply.

“If you say so,” Zelas snuffled down between Dolphin’s breasts, licking. Dolphin was always damp, but it was given that when on land the creases of her body (behind the knee, for example, or between her fingers) where always outright wet, and that lovely Dolphin-scent collected there, fresh and briny and deep. Zelas’s own musk collected under her hair and down her spine. “But my wolves are not pets.” Zelas licked around into her armpit, growling. “And they are not allowed to lick you. That’s for me.”

Dolphin tangled her hand in Zelas’s long hair and pulled her head up, eyes narrowing a bit. “I’m not yours,” she stated, biting Zelas sharply on the chin. Zelas growled and bit back.

“No.” She licked where she’d bitten, and Dolphin, appeased, happily let her. “But it’s my island, my wolves, and my bedroom.” She had her arms wrapped firmly around Dolphin—somehow, they kept their balance until Dolphin took advantage of the clinging grip they had on each other. She quickly snaked her legs around Zelas’s, knee and ankle, and yanked. She giggled as they went down. Zelas grunted.

“Haven’t had sex next to the bed yet.”

“I’m surprised,” she cut off with a gasp as clever, clawed fingers found softer places on Dolphin’s soft body. “Plenty of furs.”

“I dislike cold floors when I rise.”

Dolphin kissed her, their astral selves smushing together like two insistent cats. She tasted like tides and felt like salt spray, or perhaps that was backwards and sideways. Amused, Zelas rolled them over, trapping and tangling them in Dolphin’s damp, ring-weighted braids and knit skirt. “Off,” Dolphin growled, yanking at Zelas’s clothes. She tugged the fastenings open and Zelas squirmed atop her and Dolphin yelped as it yanked a braid (and her head) sharply to one side. Zelas got the clingy suede bunched around her hips and gave up, laughing into Dolphin’s breasts.

“What?”

“My hand is stuck in your skirt.” She pulled, wiggled a bit, and managed to get the not-stuck hand up by Dolphin’s ear. “And kelp is stronger than I thought. What did you do to it?”

“Ruby-Eye’s testicles.” Dolphin started to snicker. “Get up.”

“I can’t.” Zelas snickered and nibbled a breast. “Your skirt is wrapped over me and you’re laying on it. And your hand is down my skirt.”

Dolphin smiled, wiggling her fingers further under the suede until they found something interesting. “You’re complaining?”

“I’m not,” Zelas groaned, tilting her hips as far as she could. “I just want naked.”

“You or me?” Dolphin teased, two fingers running back and forth from clit to slit, spreading moisture. Her thumb and other fingers made themselves at home in the surrounding folds, stroking and squirming.

“Both, you,” Zelas hmmmed, “you utter bitch.”

“Then get off of my hair,” Dolphin purred, “and I’ll tell my skirt to let you go.”

Zelas moaned a laugh, hips rocking. She licked Dolphin’s breasts and caressed through the pools of her self, and Dolphin shivered and moaned back. fursilksoftwet. Zelas wrestled her trapped hand around, binding it in more layers of skirt but able to rub Dolphin through it. Dolphin moaned again, her fingers curling in Zelas, and they both tried to spread their legs, Dolphin’s being held by the skirt just together enough, and she hit her head against the floor, hissing in frustration. Zelas wiggled until the skirt of her dress bunched around her waist with the bodice, laboriously pulling her knee up next to Dolphin’s elbow, past the tight binding of Dolphin’s skirt, rocking down on those fingers in earnest. She spread and invaded on one plane and was spread and invaded on another, she and Dolphin nestling into each other on the higher planes like thistles. Zelas felt herself teething Dolphin’s nipple, licking down the side of her breast to her ribs. She felt her panting breaths on the wet places. Dolphin felt herself inside Zelas, warm soft fingers crooking forward, plunging in and out. Her thumb rode circles around Zelas’s clit and she felt that too. One of them cried out and it vibrated through them both. Limbs and minds clung tighter together, inadvertently confusing them both as to who was whom. She came, her hips jerking into her hand, and it crashed through her self, into her self, the waves of it stoking her fires higher and she came, clamping down on her and her fingers as her climax washed back through her, and into her, and back into her, the echoes sloshing back and forth between them.

They lay there, rocking gently until they could tell each other apart, twined around each other through the planes of reality. Zelas’s nose nestled behind Dolphin’s ear, Dolphin’s braids wrapped around Zelas’s wrist and back, Zelas’s leg across Dolphin’s hips, one hand each stuck down the other’s bunched-up waistband and Dolphin’s skirt cocooning them both from the waist down.

“Are we still stuck?”

“I hope so.”

“Insatiable cur.”

A chuckle. “I should hope so.”

“Come on, roll over.”

“Over you or into the bed leg?”

“Into the bed leg, unless Mazoku Lords’ arms bend backwards.” A shove and a thud. The bed creaked.

“Ow.”

“Poor Zelas.” Dolphin slowly sat up, unwinding her hair to collect the slack to do so. Zelas pulled herself away from the bed, glaring, but without any effort behind it. She draped herself across Dolphin’s back, moving braids aside to lick her nape.

“You taste good. As good as you smell.”

Dolphin gently detached herself, setting both their assorted astral bits in their proper places. She and Zelas still sat skin to skin, the Greater Beast’s tongue moving over her nape in slow, lazy swipes, but they were sitting apart from each other in all the important ways. She sat up away from her and turned. Zelas’s amber eyes were as warm and sated as the aftermath of the first bloody feast around the first fires.

“Offer me tea.”

Zelas’s smile showed fangs. “Would you like tea?”

Dolphin dimpled. “On the veranda.”

oo00OOo0oo

Xelloss served. His master had coffee with cinnamon, he and Dolphin (for he sat with them, at his master’s request) had his favorite tea. Dolphin leaned back, twilight playing with the jewelry in her hair.

“I think I shall leave tonight.”

“Going home so soon?”

“I thought I’d visit Grausherra.” Her smile was lazy and sexy. “We need to spend more time together; we are brother and sister, after all.” Zelas pointedly raised an eyebrow, and Dolphin laughed. The light made her teeth look like pearls. “Maybe I should stop at home first. He needs a present.” Zelas laughed into her coffee.

“Give him the kraken.”

Dolphin threw a sugar cube at her. “I’ll do no such thing. The kraken dislikes the cold.”

Zelas gave her a flat look. “He lives on the bottom of the sea.”

“I’ll have you know it is warm at the bottom of the sea, from the world-fires,” Dolphin snipped, and sipped her tea.

“You just want to keep your pet.”

“He is not my pet. He simply belongs where he is.”

“As your pet.”

Dolphin threw another sugar cube at her. Zelas swatted it aside and it plunked into Xelloss’s cup, where he blinked at it. The Lords laughed.

“If he were my pet,” Dolphin giggled, “I’d have named him.”

“I think you should name him Charlie,” Xelloss said solemn-faced, stirring his tea. Dolphin stared at him for half a second, and began giggling all over again. He sipped his tea, and smiled.

oo00OOo0oo

Four days later, Xelloss arrived at the bottom of the ocean, to leave a gift for Deep Sea Dolphin on behalf of his master. He brought five hundred head of live sheep, in a bubble, a note he didn’t read, and something else, wrapped in amber silk. A lot of amber silk. It was a dragon-hide collar the size of a small harbor, embroidered with the name “Charlie.”

Four weeks later Xelloss was ordered to get rid of the antimacassars. A continent away, Firia ul Copt came downstairs in the morning to find an antimacassar on top of every pot, mace, and flat surface in her shop. There was no note, but she had a very good idea of where they came from anyway.

Three months later, Jetsam arrived on Wolf Pack Island’s shores, to leave a gift for Greater Beast Zelas Metallium on behalf of her master. She brought thirty-five knit dog beds, two wolf stuffed toys knit from spun fur with black pearl eyes and tiny sharks-teeth fangs, and a tea cozy. Zelas had glowered at the gift while thirty-six wolves (one of them on two legs) stared at her hopefully.

“Fine,” she had growled, and stalked off. Xelloss hurried behind her, a plushie in either arm and the tea cozy in hand, while the wolves picked and fought and dragged off their prizes to be field-tested.

“If it helps,” he quipped, “I’ve heard that the Dynast has recently received a very good servant, a woolen hat with tassels on top and ear flaps, two pairs of slippers, a scarf knit from amber silk that’s nineteen feet long, eleven coasters, and a stuffed toy of the kraken.” His master stopped to look at him over her shoulder. He held out one of the wolf toys, grinning winsomely. “Here, Master, this one is for you.”

She took it. It smelled like Dolphin. She held it a moment, aware that Xelloss was still there, smiling. She grinned, slowly.

“Xelloss, darling.”

“Master?” he chirped, holding his own toy. Zelas took out a cigarette, lit it slowly, and savored it, still smiling.

“I think my dear sister could use some rabbits. Find her a few thousand, would you? Oh, and a nice sushi set.”

Xelloss continued to smile, inwardly wondering where on the world staff he’d put a few thousand rabbits while waiting to give them to Deep Sea Dolphin, and how he’d keep the wolves out of them, and if he was required to keep them alive. He rather suspected he was, at least until the last moment. Perhaps he could start off with a couple hundred on a deserted island and breed them, since they were going to be breeding whether he intended it or not. He resolved to ask for his year of boredom the next time he made a sacrifice to the Lord of Nightmares. Perhaps she’d like some rabbits.

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