Vayal Academy

This is Gelstra; spectacled and emerald-eyed, stretching out the walk back to the dorms, desperate to fill the hours as her afternoon slump turns into evening depression. Being in love is torture — an endless grey slate of longing broken up only by the occasional glances she catches of Posy, in the halls or gardens or in the single class they share (Fundamentals of Magic — Gelstra hasn’t absorbed a word Professor Yola has said all year). Gelstra has even taken to attending church twice weekly, a task she finds personally repugnant but is trying to reconcile herself with, just for the chance at glimpsing Posy lighting incense beside the priestess at the front. It’s Nyrnday though, which means her next Posy fix won’t be for another two days, and she’s quite sure at this stage that there’s no point in living at all, since Acolyte Primrose is celibate and happy like that and so the only thing she can hope to reap from this relationship is more of this horrible grey longing.

She takes the long way.

Abana ‘Redeye’ — who has been following Gelstra since she left her Mysticism classroom (and who was waiting outside the door for some time before that, waiting for the class to end) — bristles with impatience. She has a request of the sleek black porcupine girl, one that requires privacy. How long can she possibly amble about like this before giving up and returning to her dorm?

The question ends up being moot. Abana swivels around a corner after Gelstra and tilts her head to find the path ahead empty. At the same time, a voice speaks from behind her.

“Why are you following me?”

Abana twirls and blinks, caught off guard for only an instant. The confident, slightly husky voice is not at all the sound she had expected to come from the Mystic — she’d expected something quiet and stammering, the voice of a mouse. The girl’s smooth black spikes stick straight up behind her, as if she’s expecting an attack.

Right on cue, Abana attacks her, slamming Gelstra up against the dusty pink brick of the academy wall, so her spikes mash uncomfortably up against her back. Instead of tearing into her throat, though, Abana kisses Gelstra full on the mouth. Shocked into stillness, the raccoon uses the opportunity to whisper in the Mystic’s ear.

“Ride the wave, yes? I have something very private to discuss with you.”

To the raccoon’s surprise, Gelstra immediately relaxes in her grip, returns the next kiss firmly and without passion — when it breaks, she’s the one to whisper in Abana’s ear. “Better be good.”

“I need an agent in Reason.”

“Betraying my Temple for a stranger. I’m not thrilled so far.”

“Betrayal? No. Simple service. You will be rewarded.” Abana’s whisper is seductive, but Gelstra’s not interested.

“And what could you offer me?”

“Restoration. You want to hurt, yes? To bleed? Let your lover take her liberties; let me fix you, after.”

Gelstra rolls her eyes.

“No lover? I could volunteer, then. You can learn much of yourself when you’re bleeding to death.”

“So I let you brutalise me and do another mysterious favour for you?” Gelstra’s spikes burn against the wall, and the only reason she hasn’t pushed the raccoon away already is the menacing aura that drips from her.

“Brutalise? No, no; I’ll be your girlfriend. I see you walking around alone, dragging your feet like a thrall, staring at the ground,” Abana has seen this exactly once, five minutes ago, but her bets usually pay off. “I shall keep you company while you’re waiting for whoever she is to notice you. Then, when she does; it can be over with me; an easy, clean death.” This is as good an arrangement for Abana as any — her previous two relationships were forged under similar circumstances and both served perfectly well. “If I was your girlfriend, you’d want to do a favour for me, yes?”

“Do you even know my name?”

“Must I? I will call you baby and sweetling and keep you company between classes. I will make her jealous.” This thought makes Gelstra tilt her head. Abana leans over her with her half an inch of added height. “You need me to prove myself, yes?”

Gelstra catches the pale raccoon girl before she can fall to her knees. “I don’t trade favours for sex.”

Abana, sensing she should have gone in with a different angle, backpedals. “No no, it’s not… You need not do anything at all, yes? You are bewitching. Let me fuck you, then listen to my proposition; that is all I ask,” her claws trace down Gelstra’s waist. “Maybe afterwards we enter an arrangement, maybe we don’t.” The pale raccoon is very pretty, it can’t be denied, but Gelstra’s heart only has room for one person. Abana’s voice is soft and persuasive. “You cannot convince me you do not long for company; I know you do.”

Okay, Gelstra definitely could use some company — the loneliness is like a physical weight pressing on her lungs now; but she’s not sure she wants the company of this girl, with the scary pale eyes and the sharp teeth. She likes a woman she can sweep off her feet; Abana looks like she might just scratch her eyes out if she tried.

“Why don’t you just stop wasting time and tell me what you want?”

“You. And some privacy; so we can talk more.”

The two go in circles for only a little while longer before Gelstra relents and the two decamp to her dorm.

---

Gelstra’s room is extremely tight, with only a narrow alley of floor space between her bed and the planter boxes. She might put them along the walls, instead, as is the style in her home, the Kingdom of Thecla, but the wall’s taken up by the alchemy lab. People picture a little table with a mortar and pestle, maybe a sprig of rosemary or two, but actually your advanced potion making requires one hell of a set up — the retort, the crucible, the alembic, the athanor, the aludel. That’s a whole wall right there, not even accounting for bench space (everyone thinks they can skip out on space until they’re juggling six boiling bottles and drop one — assuming they survive to learn the lesson), or the racks upon racks of spare glass.

So basically the room’s fucking cramped, but somewhat shockingly the overstuffed room has an on-the-whole pleasant atmosphere, a combination of damp earth and fresh buds that cancels out the chemical smell of the alchemical workshop itself — or not so much cancels as reduces to an undernote redolent of citrus soap.

She’s taken Abana here to hear what she wants — if it’s something simple, something small, then maybe the raccoon can offer her another, better way to get her paws on Posy, and if she can then why not? But certainly she isn’t here to fuck.

“I require a tome,” Abana says, as they move ponderously through the room. “A treatise by Archmage Thiliden.”

“The disgraced necromancer? Are you insane? There’s a reason-”

Abana really only cares about getting the book from Reason’s endless library; it’s just that Gelstra’s cute, and she doesn’t know she wants it, which is like a flag to a bull, as far as Abana’s concerned.

Gelstra’s spines bristle at the sudden hand on her throat — they jab into Abana, drawing blood across a hundred points, but the raccoon merely angles her head to the side and presses herself closer to Gelstra’s back, letting the useless flesh bleed (she knows the only true threat is to the soul, not the body). Her other hand finds its way under Gelstra’s skirt; the sudden touch makes the porcupine’s knees buckle, and she falls to the floor in the narrow space between the bed and a planter box of garlic, lemongrass, and holherb. Abana falls with her; her blood spills onto the floor.

“Get off me, idiot! You’ll get yourself kill-”

Abana tightens her grip, letting Gelstra breathe so long as she strains for every gasp. Every flex of her arm shoots pain all across it; exactly how she likes it. The girl’s personality leaves much to be desired — meek, and boring — but physically she’s perfect for Abana.

Meanwhile Gelstra can’t even think, or when she does think it’s just useless faff, pure thought loops; she’s in full panic mode, because normally the spikes work just fine on their own. She’s never had to get to the point where she’s fighting back, because even then her first resort is running the hell away — the “Zeroth Resort,” as her Master put it, is the clever use of potions to avoid conflict in the first place. Stupidly, she took her belt off when she came in (but then if she had fallen on it they’d have both been immolated, and really it was a reasonable precaution because who could’ve expected Abana to be so- oh fucking hell she’s good with her fingers).

“You like it, yes?” Abana coos, her voice like a morgue.

“Stop-”

“More convincing?”

Abana’s fingers slip inside Gelstra and perform strange, intricate movements. A cool, prickly sensation radiates into her clit, and moments later it feels like there’s a tongue circling it.

Her back arcs and her needles shift, sinking through Abana’s cheek and filling her mouth with blood. The raccoon bathes in the pain. Gelstra cries out and cums — Abana rolls her onto her back and runs a restorative hand over herself, sealing the thousand puncture wounds — though the blood remains, staining her fur. She spots the shiny locket around Gelstra’s throat and straddles her, rips it off, breaks the chain. She pops it open.

“The Priestess? This is who you want?”

Flushing, Gelstra looks away, pants, tries to come back to the ground after the cloud-launching orgasm. “It’s not-”

“Yes. This is who you want. You will help me, or I will take her from you.”

“She’s celibate.”

“All things die. Traditions. Rules. Dictates. Is her custom a stronger defence than your spines? What good did they do you?”

There’s something about being covered head to toe in blood that really helps a threat land, so Gelstra shudders. I’d even take Mistari over her. “But if I help you?”

“Yes. I will make her jealous. She will desire your attentions.”

One small problem with the plan, Gelstra reckons. “Okay. But. She’s not gonna be interested in me if you’re throwing me against the wall.”

“Ah. Yes. We will speak to my friend, the Mystic. She will connect our minds; I will tell you what to do. How to handle me.”

“I know how to-”

Abana shifts her weight up and grinds black panties against Gelstra’s snout, ignores the muffled protests, and moans. Needles pierce right through her hand as she holds the back of Gelstra’s head, keeps her nice and still. Her thighs clamp and, yes, this too brings more blissful pain, a dance of knives through flesh and muscle, like being forged anew.

Gelstra keeps slapping her hands against Abana’s side, trying desperately to tell her she can’t breathe, but Abana knows this perfectly well, and doesn’t much care. In fact it only makes her grind faster, harder, push more of her weight down until the porcupine is down to the last whisps of oxygen in her lungs and then even less than that, until the hands stop beating and Gelstra passes out. Only then does she cum, quietly and almost politely.

She hops off the shallowly breathing girl and gives her a bit of Restoration magic for the minor brain damage she just suffered, and as her eyes flutter back open Abana says “we will talk to my friend, the Mystic.”