V2Ch76-Share the Good News
When the couple returned, Tybalt and Victoria found the rest of their group outside, watching the sunset.
The necromancer enjoyed the way the others’ faces lit up when they turned and saw him: Mariella’s steady, doe-eyed affection; Vidalia’s knowingly flirtatious look that made him want to take her to bed right away; Kistana’s subtle hint of relief that they had returned safely. Even Dero’s lips twitched in a slight smile. The dark elf had probably just been bored without the necromancer to banter with, though she’d never admit it.
Uncle Edmund and the children were there, too, though they hardly turned at Tybalt’s arrival, and they shifted their attention completely back to the shifting purples and pinks of the desert sky as the necromancer simply stood in place and did nothing after showing up.
“Let me tell her,” Victoria whispered in his ear.
“Yeah, go for it,” Tybalt replied.
Victoria crossed the ground quickly, while Tybalt stayed where he was, several feet back.
The necromancer watched as the two foxgirls converged. They met with a gentle cheek kiss and a hug. Then Victoria let go and started whispering in her sister’s ear. The necromancer saw the moment when Vidalia’s face changed. Her eyes lit up.
Then Vidalia let out a squeal of joy and launched herself at Tybalt like she’d bounced off a spring. She landed against his chest, legs wrapped around his waist, and she covered his face and neck in kisses.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes!” she hissed.
She definitely feels good about Vicky’s decision, Tybalt thought.
The others looked on curiously - Uncle Edmund was the only one showing any emotion at the public display of affection, a slight frown - except for Dero.
“Congratulations,” she said, flicking her finger over the tip of one ear. “I heard the good news.”
“What is it?” asked Kistana.
“She said yes,” replied Mariella before anyone else could speak, smiling at Victoria.
The foxgirl nodded, and Uncle Edmund’s face changed.
“So, the three of you will be mated to Lord Tybalt!” Kistana said. “That’s wonderful news!”
Tybalt noticed that the catgirl’s smile didn’t quite seem to reach her eyes. It must have been the pain she was in. She seemed to have genuine affection for both foxgirls and true admiration for Tybalt, so there was no reason she shouldn’t be happy for them.
I’ll tell her to rest more, he thought. With Baldwin protecting me, there will be less pressure on her to recover quickly. She has to start taking care of herself. She doesn’t have nine lives or something.
“It’s married, not um, mated,” corrected Uncle Edmund. He turned to Victoria. “Vicky, is this true? You’ve decided?”
“Um, I had your blessing for whatever decision we wished to make, right, Uncle?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “But is it a free and voluntary choice? Neither of the two love birds- ” he gestured to Tybalt and Vidalia - “pressured you into this?”
“That’s right. I’m… actually excited.”
“Then I’m happy for you,” he said thoughtfully. “It might be the first time I’ve seen you pleased at the prospect of getting married at all.” He looked at Tybalt, the older foxman’s lips flattened into a thin line. Then he gave the necromancer a slight nod of approval.
“I’m - we’re really going to be your wives!” Vidalia exclaimed quietly into his ear. She kissed him on the neck, almost a bite, with a blend of sweet and spicy intent. As she pulled slightly back, Tybalt saw there were little tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Hey, don’t cry,” he said, grinning. “This is good news. I promise I’ll make you both happy. Or all three of you, I should say.”
“Tch, shut up, I know that already!” She peppered his face with little kisses.
“And I’m happy, too,” he added quietly.
“If you weren’t, I’d make it my mission to fix it,” Vidalia replied. She unwrapped her legs and stood on her own two feet again but didn’t move away, instead choosing to nuzzle against his chest. “We’re going to make you so happy, darling. Vicky’s not going to regret it either.” She pulled back. “This calls for a celebration, but I didn’t make anything special for dinner…”
“Vicky and I are so hungry, I could swear she was about to eat me on the way back,” Tybalt replied. “She could barely stand up straight. So whatever we have right now will feel special. Especially since it will be eaten out here, under this beautiful sky, with you.”
“Well, I guess I have other special things I can do with you after dinner,” Vidalia replied, giving him a sultry look.
“Oh.”
“Um, not that, exactly. Since we waited this long, I might as well do the traditional thing and let you undo my braid in public first, so the tribe knows I belong to you. But I have a, um, good idea for how we can spend the evening pleasurably.”
“I’ll look forward to whatever your perverted imagination cooks up.”
She gave him a look of faux wounded innocence but couldn’t even muster up a joking defense. In their household, she would, now and forever, be the perverted wife. It was a title she would come to own with great pride.
The rest of the evening seemed to fly by.
The group ate Vidalia’s barley and pork for dinner and sat under the stars.
Uncle Edmund took Tybalt aside for a chat, man to man, in which he gave him the cliched commands to honor and cherish the foxman’s nieces and threatened him - with a straight face - if the necromancer should ever do anything to hurt them. It was impossible for Tybalt to take threats from him very seriously, but he respected the attempt.
Then Uncle Edmund added that he would no longer try to babysit the girls’ activities with Tybalt at all, and that he, Hayden, and the other children would go to bed early. He tried to make it almost an offhand remark, but Tybalt understood the implication. The old foxman was leaving them alone in case they wanted to engage in adult activities, which was funny after all his protective remarks and everything he had done previously to try and safeguard Vidalia’s chastity in particular.
But it made sense to the necromancer. Even Uncle Edmund had been young once, and he had probably been irritated by an Uncle Edmund of his own, trying to stand between him and his wife - the woman he had lost years ago, after too short a time together.
“Thanks for the chat,” said Tybalt.
The foxman just nodded and gathered the kids, despite their protests, to get ready for bed.
With them gone, the remaining adults - all of the women and Tybalt, plus the undead who served as his security - built up a fire outside, and they took turns dancing around it.
Mariella and Tybalt, Vidalia and Tybalt, Victoria and Tybalt, Mariella and Vidalia…
Tybalt thought Kistana looked a little bit sad about being left out, and he at first assumed that she wasn’t dancing because she was too weak. But then Dero got her up and twirling around the fire, and Tybalt realized it was because no one had asked her to dance. It was a little comical seeing the catgirl, who was almost as tall as Tybalt, dancing with the diminutive dark elf, but it seemed to cheer her up a bit.
As Tybalt watched in between swinging Victoria around, he could tell the catgirl’s class had made her naturally graceful. It showed through despite her illness.
At some point in the evening, while he was dancing with Mariella or Victoria, Vidalia slipped away. She seemed to have given the others some hint as to what was happening. Not long after, while he was in between dances and complimenting Kistana on her moves - she seemed so cutely embarrassed that it was impossible not to pay attention to her - Victoria announced that she was going to bed.
“Same,” said Mariella, obviously faking a yawn. “We need to get up early tomorrow. Tybalt, you should go find Vidalia, I think there was something she wanted to tell you.”
Dero raised an eyebrow. “Will you two be able to sleep with the loud activities I’m anticipating from the other fox and Tybalt? Vidalia strikes me as a screamer. Or is that kind of noise like a lullaby for you at this point, with how often he and Mariella- ”
Kistana pressed one hand over Dero’s lips almost instantly and shushed her, then pulled her hand away as the dark elf lightly bit one of her fingers.
“Ouch!” the catgirl said, frowning and blowing on her hand.
“Don’t muzzle me,” Dero said.
“I don’t think we’re actually doing that tonight, Dero,” the necromancer said. “But I appreciate your… um, interest?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, human,” she retorted. “I’m just aware that the others might need some way of avoiding the noise to sleep properly. I was going to offer to teleport them somewhere quieter or to teleport you and Vidalia to a nice cave for the night so you could fuck at full volume and get out all the tension the two of you display all the time.”
“I appreciate the offer, then. But really, we’re planning to wait until after the meeting with the Council of Elders. That’s when we’ll announce the engagement to everyone… and when beastfolk tradition would be more respectful of us fucking all night.”
“All right,” Dero said. “The offer is open. I don’t age much, but I still need my beauty sleep to stay this fabulous.”
Tybalt nodded. “Noted.”
Then the necromancer went into the hut to find Vidalia. He felt more nervous than he expected. The teasing from the dark elf, the obvious hinting from Mariella, the way Vidalia had slipped away without a word to him, everything made him wonder if there was going to be more to tonight’s celebration than he had expected.
The foxgirl was in her own room, of course. She pouted as he entered.
“It took you long enough,” she said. “I was getting cold.”
She seemed to be covered by only a thin sheet. Her hard nipples showed through the fabric.
“So, you wanted to give yourself to me tonight after all?” Tybalt said, looking down at her near nakedness. “This is the celebration? Dero guessed right?”
Without waiting for a response, he climbed on top of her and began kissing her, grinding against her, caressing her body over the sheet from her thighs all the way up to her chest, and even fondling her ears.
“Hey,” she complained weakly as she managed to pull her mouth away. “That wasn’t my intention, but if you keep going, we’re absolutely going to go all the way tonight…”
“If it wasn’t your intention, why are you dressed this way?”
Undressed this way was more like it.
“To g-get you in the mood,” she half-said, half-moaned as Tybalt’s palm rubbed the top of one sensitive nipple.
“The plan was to get me in the mood, and not fuck?” Tybalt asked. “So you wanted to celebrate by giving me blue balls?”
And yourself, he thought but did not add.
“No, my plan was that tonight we visit the paladin again,” Vidalia said, managing to speak clearly for a few seconds even as he ran a finger over her opening through her clothes.
Tybalt smiled. “I see.”
***
Samara found herself in the same dream as last time, a replay of the most difficult part of her paladin trials.
Every paladin was forced to face a different aspect of Goddess Astara’s divine legacy in order to finalize her paladin vows and become the Goddess’s instrument. It was a vision quest brought on through hallucinogens that took the initiate as close as they could possibly get to experiencing the Goddess’s own struggle.
For Samara, the vision had taken the form of the Last Temptation of Astara.
In waking life, she only remembered bits and pieces from the trial, but somehow, this dream seemed to recall every detail, even those she only remembered from scripture.
The initiate took the position of the Goddess, who traveled alongside a man who took the form of an ideal mate - not the man best for her to be with, necessarily, but one whose traits she was most irresistibly drawn to. This was the test that best suited Astara’s unique attributes. She was a woman both uniquely lustful and discerning.
The man was, of course, meant to be some evil god in disguise, attempting to break her chastity before she could reunite with her one true love, usually assumed to be the God of War by theologians. Scripture was vague on some of these identities.
The challenge was that the reality that Astara and this god inhabited was extremely dangerous, so trial completion could only be achieved by accepting the evil man’s help on the perilous journey to Sang-Ti, the Divine City, yet resisting his efforts at seduction… all while enduring the elevated sex drive the Goddess herself was subject to.
This instance of the dream played out much like the last - and very like the actual trial, with a few key differences.
The mystery man rescued her from the Tentacle Pit of Von-Zenoth, but he did so while grinning and joking about where the naughty tentacles had reached. That adventure always stripped away much of the initiate’s armor as well as her outward modesty.
He fought the horrors of the Maze at Tolun to protect her and carried Samara in his arms through the last portion of the adventure when she had taken a wound to her ankle - and then he sucked out the venom from that same wound. All the while he gazed upon her with undisguised lust in those smouldering green eyes.
The danger and genuine fear the vision brought on only seemed to intensify the lust that mingled with it.
Then came the Challenge of the Dungeon at Qayf.
Astara had been apprehended by local authorities on false charges and thrown into a dungeon, for reasons that never seemed very important in either scripture or the vision.
What was important was that the initiate felt the long, lonely, unpleasant hours of isolation, before her protector appeared to free her. The door swung open, and his long cloak dragged across the ground as he stalked toward her, every inch the predator. Outside this room, she knew, the bodies of the two guardsmen lay broken on the ground.
It was the first time the man had killed humans for her, and the paladin felt the tension in him, smelled the blood from outside the cell - or possibly even on his hands? That was new.
The dream lover reached down and pulled Samara to her feet, shackles clanking loudly as he raised her.