Ch. 2.25 | Further Unraveling
PoV: Lania, Sanya
Blood dripped down Lania's chin as warm and fuzzy feelings cloaked her body. She wiped her chin and grinned sheepishly.
That word worked well here, because a second later she was on her back, pressing into the pillows and sheets thrown across the balcony.
Nadiyya nibbled on Lania—whose tunic was now . . . somewhere?—a wolf to its sheep. Lania wouldn't be surprised if she found her top in the alley around the guild hall later. Well, her top was right in front of her, but, her other top—her tunic, not the pretty woman.
Nadiyya, designated top and pretty woman, would be leaving at least a dozen bruises later. Bruises never felt this good to obtain . . . Lania moaned in delight.
Suddenly, Nadiyya's head snapped up and away, and her ears fell. Nooooo . . . come back . . .
“Wha—?” Lania propped herself up by her elbows. “What is it?”
“Early Bird just died, awoo,” Nadiyya frowned.
“Who was that?” I'm sorry, did she just say “Early Bird?” Sanya was right, Nadiyya has some strange and uncreative bird names.
“The birdie with Zahira and Esmat—not to be confused with another raven, Birdie. Nyaway, I just sent a second raven in that direction. I'm sure their group is in purr-fect health.”
“Oh,” Lania said. “Sorry about your bird.”
Nadiyya nodded. They sat there like that, in silence, possibly awkward. Okay, definitely awkward. Although, one of Nadiyya's birds just died. What were they supposed to do about that, grieve? How hard had it hit Nadiyya?
“Sooooo, are you done?”
“How was the meal, cutie?” Nadiyya asked instead, leaning back onto Lania.
Answer my question, hmph.
“G-good,” Lania stuttered. She could not feel anything outside of this lust. Would she be guilty later? Hate herself? Right now, she felt pretty okay—also full. She was full, but would Nadiyya get her stuffed? Um. Ahem. That blood went straight to her stomach and caloric intake. Did it go to her stomach, or did she have a new organ for processing blood?
Nadiyya began to pull off Lania's sirwal. “So, you tasted blood, good girl . . . Do you want to . . . taste something else?” Nadiyya wriggled an eyebrow, or, attempted to, anyway
No words. Absolutely no words for that. Ah, what the heck, ravage me.
“Okay,” Lania squeaked.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes!”
Nadiyya grinned, then resumed biting Lania. Her non-taloned hand danced across her skin, now almost entirely naked.
She even gently used her talons in some places, leading shivers to shake Lania.
Nadiyya was . . . concerningly good at this.
Has she done this with other people?
O-oh, Lania was now entirely nude now.
Mmmm. Nadiyya's fingers felt great . . .
☆ ☆ ☆
Lania lay down with Nadiyya, cuddling, entangled together.
“I'm never going to let you out of my talons,” Nadiyya brushed Lania's cheek with a thumb.
“Possessive already, aren't we?”
“Yes, very. You're too purr-fect to lose.”
Lania frowned. “You're not going to lose me—we are not going to lose each other. In fact, we won't lose anyone in our group.”
“I hope so. Sanya and Mai are paw-some. Aisha is almost like the—chirp—mother I never had.”
“That's sweet.”
“Mmm. Not the part about not having a mother.”
“Yeah . . .”
A bird flapped over to Nadiyya and croaked at her, setting down onto the sheets. She untangled from Lania and shot upright
“No! No!” Nadiyya exclaimed. Lania wanted to mirror those words. She did not want Nadiyya to get up. She was all comfy and warm and smelled nice.
Lania jumped. “What is it?” Her heartbeat had smoothed out into something that had resembled normal, but now it spiked again. Not out of lust and anticipation, but in fear and worry.
Nadiyya squawked back, frantic. She grabbed the satchel she had taken off earlier in the night and sifted through it. She found some paper and a pen with ink and hastily wrote onto a piece. She tore it off, rolled it up, and handed it to the bird.
It took the paper into its beak and took off into the night.
Then, Nadiyya meowled. She wrote another message and tore it off her larger sheet, too.
Some seconds later, a cat paced over to Nadiyya, from who-knew-where. Nadiyya meowed again at it, to give it orders and handed the cat the paper.
It also took it in its mouth, then walked off at an impossible speed. The whole message via mouth thing must have been horribly gross and unsanitary.
“Maybe you should give your animals little satchels of their own.”
“Huh. Why? They can carry the meow-ssages just fine.”
“I don't think carrying them in their wet mouths is ‘just fine.’”
Nadiyya shrugged.
Lania sighed.
The two of them sat there like that. Lania desperately wanted to be back in Nadiyya’s arms, but was afraid to ask.
“Ugh,” Nadiyya said. “I feel like I should be doing meow-re.”
“You're already doing plenty. What's wrong?”
Nadiyya glanced towards Lania, expression vulnerable, dulled. “I don't think Zahira and Esmat are going to make it bark.”
“What!? They're not okay? What happened? What do you mean they won't make it back?” Lania had known them for literally only one day. Yet they had spent a long portion of it together, through the red portal and the events afterward.
“I told the bird to go fetch Mai. The cat is going to paw at Aisha. We might have to be nocturnal tonight, but maybe I can do some time magicky stuff and slow us down to get a longer cat nap.”
“So, it is truly terrible?”
Nadiyya nodded. “Are you done? Do you want to try to sleep? Meow-be you want to go down the hall for all of this?”
Lania yawned, eyelids drooping. “Do we need to be there for anything? You did your stuff, and hopefully they can be saved by the others. I want to sleep.”
“Okay,” Nadiyya said. She threw up a slow bubble around them and cuddled up. They both pulled the sheets closer around them for a blanket and grabbed some pillows. Neither had bothered to reclothe. Everything smelled like certain bodily fluids.
“Good night,” Lania whispered, closing her eyes.
“Night.”
☆ ☆ ☆
At some point, Sanya and Mai's tongues had joined in on the kissing, exploring the taste of each other. They had done a lot of that. It was, at the very least, interesting, and Mai seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed it.
Then things had progressed. In a direction Mai wanted, of course.
Now, Mai was sprawled out and naked on Sanya's bed, and she guided Sanya through the actions to take so that she would feel the things she wanted to feel.
Sanya had declined to bite or to wrangle out the eldritch hands.
This was her first time, after all, no need to get too crazy with it.
It was Mai's first too, although she knew what she wanted and was ready to go to the weirder things.
Sanya had already made a concession, and she wasn’t willing to go beyond that. At least Mai had stuck with hands and then one probe to see if Sanya would bite. Mai has not asked for Sanya to use what remained between her legs. Maybe Mai did know exactly how much was left, only that something or somethings may have been missing.
Sanya touched and explored at Mai's guiding words until her body shook and fluids left between her legs. Sanya had done all this with a distance, almost disassociating. She had been trying not to think, and the things just happened, following Mai. Soon, but still far too long of a time, it was over.
She found it hard to believe that normal people were like this and wanted it—and often too. Eugh.
It made her glad she couldn't do that anymore. It was gross, and she had hated it.
At least Mai seemed to have had fun.
She lay there, panting, face flushed. “T-thanks.”
If Sanya hadn't known any better, she would have thought Mai was in pain. There had also been a lot of crying out Sanya's name.
Mai grinned like mad—utterly blissful. Then she seemed thoughtful. “I’m sorry I can't return the favor.”
Sanya shook her head. “Don't be. I don't want it.”
“R-right.”
The silence was awkward.
Mai must have felt it too, because she spoke up again. “Was that it, or will you be willing to indulge me again, some other time down the road?”
“I . . . I don't—”
That was when one of Nadiyya's ravens chose to fly into their home and deliver a wet—slobber-y, did birds slobber?—message in its beak.
Sanya grimaced, but plucked the message out of its mouth and unfolded the paper. She gave the bird a nice scratch under its chin before it croaked and then took off.
Sanya's expression dropped from flat and vacant to deeply troubled. Her eyebrows furrowed, face scrunched up and frowning.
“What is it?” Mai asked.
“We have to go to the guild hall. Now.”
Mai groaned. “I really don't want to.”
“Esmat and Zahira need your Fleshweaving.
“Oh. That's not good,” Mai sat up and rushed to get her clothes—the scant ones. “Still, couldn't they have gotten another Fleshweaver?”
“I doubt that she thought we'd be too inconvenienced by this,” Sanya shrugged.
“Globetrot?”
“Globetrot,” Sanya confirmed.
Fully—”fully”—clothed, Mai retrieved her staff from her [Pocket Repository] and cast, “[Globetrot Anchor - Guild Hall].”
They emerged into the hallway where Aisha's office and other back rooms sat. Immediately hearing a few different voices, urgent, panicked, and tired, the two of them rushed into the main room
There, a worried Aisha hovered around Zahira and Esmat, both sprawled out on top of the tables. There was a surgeon there trying to stop as much bleeding as he could, patching and cleaning wounds. Well, for Esmat. The surgeon seemed to have given up on Zahira.
They would have to be thoroughly cleaned later, how unsanitary.
The Temporal mage was there too, standing awkwardly, fidgeting, and with a worried expression.
Fazl was acting as the surgeon's assistant, handing him tools when prompted.
Upon noticing this, Mai ran up to the sprawled out Zahira and Esmat.
“How long ago was this?” Mai glanced around, to Aisha, then to Fajr.
“An hour, maybe, according to Fajr,” Aisha said. Upon noticing Mai's clothes, she raised an eyebrow. Then she grimaced, as if noticing a bad smell—because she probably had. Her expression changed into silent question before it returned to what it was before—stress, furrowed, and distraught.
“Okay! I can work with this. [Flesh Memory]!” Mai cast on Esmat. She turned and did the same to Zahira.
Aisha swallowed at that, and suddenly found the floor very interesting.
Why had Sanya needed to be here for this? . . . Her eyelids drooped, and she stifled a yawn. As interesting and dire as this situation was . . . she really wanted to sleep.
The spell reconstructed Esmat's arm. Zahira did not have anything missing, but had a handful of very bloody spots of bandages. The spell could probably reconstruct all of that, too. Magical stitching! Mai's Fleshweaving literally saved lives. It made Sanya kind of wish she could do that. All her “saving lives” amounts to killing stuff before they could do much harm.
Mai poked Esmat in the cheek with a finger. “They're both unconscious?”
Aisha said nothing. Fazl said nothing. Fajr shifted her weight.
“Um? . . .” Mai's expression dropped into horror. “They're not dead, are they? The surgeon was working on—” Mai turned to Zahira. “Oh. Oh no.”
Mai began to sob, depositing her staff and stuffing her face into her hands.
Sanya went over to hug Mai, which she accepted after trying to push Sanya away for a moment, before realizing she needed it. Mai guided Mai over to the wall, where they sat down and entangled.
With everything that had happened over the day, Sanya found sleep quick to take her.
☆ ☆ ☆
Sanya awoke to angry screaming.
“You're a Necrotic mage!” the voice shouted. Sanya barely registered it as Esmat's. “Do Necrotic magic and revive her! Do. Something!”
Sanya groaned, a headache pounding her. Mai was still there with her, up against a wall of the guild building. Her back ached too, and her butt . . . and the back of her head.
Ow.
Her brain split in half as the shrieking continued. In short, she felt the worst way that one could possibly wake up. Her whole body begged to go back to sleep. The headache and screaming and terrible position was having none of that.
“I can't. That's not what this magic is capable of,” a deep, quiet, and melancholic voice responded. Aisha.
“We did that for nothing! When will that portal open up again? A day? Two? How much did our actions there really matter? Calinichia had begged us not to close the red portal, and then it happened. What if cutting off the portals hurts us in some way?”
It didn't work like that. The red portal was Calinichia's home, and Lania's, kind-of. Cutting it off severed them from their homepage. Sanya did not think Temporal magic came directly from the Temporal realm, considering Temporal magic could be channeled before.
A pair of footsteps descended the staircase from the second floor. Sanya opened her eyes to look.
Lania, with deep bags under her eyes and a disheveled appearance, stepped into the main room. A second pair of steps quickly followed, Nadiyya. Both of them had also probably woken up to Esmat’s raised voice. The two of them had been out on the balcony instead of sleeping at their new home, because Nadiyya had been doing Fauna mage stuff.
“For nothing! We did that, for nothing!”
Okay, but at least closing a portal pushed back the doom date by a bit. As opposed to fighting and dying hopelessly against an eldritch entity.
Ugh. Sanya's hand went up to her head, and she tried her best to tune the screaming out. She sat there in some half-conscious, slow state. She could not tell if she had dozed off again at some point. Probably not, because of the incessant screaming.
Eventually, maybe an hour later, it stopped. Her consciousness was lured back by the smell of breakfast.
A tired Esmat stood, panting for breath, sweating, and absolutely ragged.
Someone had pulled a white sheet over the other table at some point.
Zahira was dead. Fleshweaving could not bring back someone already gone. Neither could Necrotic magic.
Sanya let out a long breath. She felt . . . only kind-of sad about that. Was there something wrong with her? The emotions did not come. Not when she had been indulging Mai, and not now. Everything had a muffled, gray sheet thrown over it . . . not unlike Zahira's body . . .
“Good,” Aisha sighed. “Everyone’s here . . . And I see that nobody got a wink of sleep.”
“Nobody is the luckiest person alive, that dastard,” Mai muttered.
Fazl was there, too, eating breakfast, as if one of his younger colleagues hadn't just died. Even Sanya did not have much of an appetite. Mai was probably famished, though, because of the Fleshweaving magic she had used in the night.
Fajr was not there, and neither was Calinichia. Calinichia did not count under “everyone,” it seemed. No one extraneous was in the hall. Aisha had probably cordoned it off for the inner circle again.
“And uhhhh. Nadiyya has a tail now,” Aisha continued with her observations.
Sanya turned to look. Indeed, Nadiyya had a black, cat-like tail protruding from her back, putting the “tail” in “tailbone.” It waved back and forth in a depressive lull, Nadiyya's ears slanted down.
“Unfortunately . . . Zahira will not be with us to defeat the inevitable apocalypse. Oh, and uh, Nadiyya? I need you to send this note out to Zulfaqar, we're going to war.”
Yup. The worst possible way to wake up.
Some sort of feeling of doom rushed through Sanya. Someone really should have killed her earlier. Maybe she could still do that herself.
Maybe Zahira would not have died. Things would be well, by now.
The entity within her fought back against that thought. Stupid thing.
Ah. If Sanya died, they would probably also have had to kill Esmat. They were both in this together, now and before.
Was Esmat really traded for Zahira? Perhaps not, if they would all die to the entities.
. . .
Okay, then. Sanya wanted to save people, and she would do it the way she knew how. She would get stronger and make sure that none of the others would die. Not to eldritch entities or to anything else. She would defeat their opponents to make sure they did not have to risk their lives.
No one else would die. Not Esmat. Not Mai. Not anyone else. The librarian's divinations had all just been chances, ones that could change. They will all see through this, until the end.
Whatever or whenever that end may be.