32: An Awkward Awakening
Liam blinked a couple of times as he rolled around and felt something furry and soft under his head.
It brought to mind sleeping in the manor house. Particularly a time when he’d been sick with a fever and so he’d been moved into one of the rooms that was normally reserved for Baron Riven and his family. He’d slept in a luxurious bed with sheets that he felt like he could lose himself in, and he almost had lost himself.
The healer had come in time, but just barely. There were times when he wondered about that. The Corruption had been on his mind. It had been right around his eleventh birthday. Maybe a little after. It was hard to tell for sure because nobody was entirely sure of his actual birthday, but it was close enough.
The healer said it couldn’t have been Corruption taking his body, but he still wondered.
Especially now that he knew there was not only an arcane core sitting inside him, but an infernal core as well. Something that had been put inside him by a mad sorcerer in his bid to try and take over the world or something. Liam couldn’t be sure. He didn’t know enough about magic to know for sure.
The point was, Corruption wasn’t corrupting for him. It was just a different form of mana.
He took a deep breath and let it out as all those thoughts came crashing down around him, but those thoughts came and went in an instant. Because more than that, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. A beautiful demon high princess that he’d met out here seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with eyes that danced with yellow magic every time he dared sneak a look at her.
He turned to the side and found himself looking at her. He took a deep breath and let it out. It seemed like even more decadence than whatever soft thing he was lying on that he got to wake up next to her, and then with a surprise he realized there was something even more delicious even than waking up next to her.
Because somehow while they’d been sleeping in the night she’d moved and thrown a leg and an arm over him. The awareness of that touch came to him slowly, but he looked down and blinked a couple of times as he realized how she was pressed up against him.
Which immediately had him worried she might wake up and decide she liked it, or, given everything he knew about her so far, she might wake up and decide the last thing she wanted was to have a strange human pressing up against her.
He also panicked even more as he realized there was something down below making itself known. That had him blushing in embarrassment, for all that there was a beautiful woman pressing up against him, so he wasn’t sure how else he was supposed to react to that sort of a thing.
The bed he was laying on stirred all around him. A small bit of panic shot through him. He’d never felt a bed stirring like that.
Then he remembered he’d fallen asleep lying down on a garzeth of all things. Which seemed like the sort of thing that would be the end of his life, but somehow he’d managed to sleep through the night without getting clawed to death.
There was even one of the garzeth’s paws draped over his arm. Which, again, seemed like the kind of thing that should’ve been one hell of a threat, but it simply made him feel more secure given the battle they’d gone through together the night before.
He took a deep breath and let it out. He looked up to the skies above. They still moved and shifted with magical light. It was a transfixing sight. Not anywhere near as transfixing as turning to look at Ana, but it was definitely transfixing for all that.
And he could feel the raw mana pulsing up there. He wondered that nobody else had ever been able to feel it. It seemed like this whole area was full of potential, and yet nobody had ever come here to try and take it.
Though as he thought of the scourgelings they’d gone up against yesterday, he had to admit that was a good way to keep people away from even potent mana like what waited above the city of Isai.
He looked down, pushing those thoughts out of his mind for the moment because…
He stopped and held still. Ana was staring right at him. Her yellow eyes were open, and they danced with that light. He stared into them, transfixed. Hypnotized into forgetting about anything in the world but her staring at him.
She looked at him. He looked back at her. He waited for the inevitable moment when she’d get her claws out and try to dig into his flesh. Which was something his mind still thought was a very real possibility, for all that the rational parts of his brain told him he didn’t have anything to worry about because she would never be able to do true damage considering how much mana he’d absorbed last night.
He could even feel that as she pressed up against him. Feel how much mana she had in her because their essences were so close together. And as he felt it, he realized it was something he would probably be able to feel from anyone if he had a mind to look for it.
He took another deep breath and let it out. She continued to stare at him, and then finally she smiled.
“Good morning, Liam,” she said in a cheerful voice that totally avoided any of the awkwardness of the situation they found themselves in.
“Um, good morning,” he said.
“I trust you had a good night’s sleep,” she said.
“It certainly seems that way, doesn’t it?” he said.
She looked up at the garzeth beneath them and frowned ever so slightly, but then the smile was back almost as quickly as it had disappeared.
“I have to say that I never thought I would be going to sleep on top of a garzeth of all things, but I also have to admit it’s been a very comfortable experience.”
“Yes, very comfortable,” Liam murmured, not sure what else to say.
“Now, Liam,” she said.
“Yes, Ana?” he said, feeling awkward as he addressed her by her first name.
He thought about the difference between him and Andrea, or even the baron. He thought about how that difference between their stations in life had been made abundantly clear to him in recent years after the princeling came through, and he thought about how there was an even wider gulf between him and a high princess of the demon realms.
Not to mention the demons and the humans had only signed a treaty some twenty years ago with the burning of Isai. And this seemed like the kind of thing that might break that treaty.
“Could you do me a favor, Liam?” she asked, that smile still there and putting him at ease.
“I can certainly try,” he said, though he wasn’t certain about offering any favors to her without knowing what those favors were.
She was a demoness, after all. What if she asked him to go and murder a child and suck their soul out of their body or something like that?
The notion seemed ridiculous to him even as he thought it, but he couldn’t help himself. It was the kind of thought that just sprang into his head, borne of countless stories he’d heard near the fire growing up in Baron Riven’s estate with him and Andrea huddling close together, wide-eyed, listening with equal parts terror and rapt attention.
She reached out and started walking two of her fingers along his chest, which was all sorts of distracting, and it had him thinking of some of the other things he’d liked about being able to press up against Andrea as those old stories from the wars and from when the Rift was originally created were told.
Then suddenly those fingers became claws and she pressed them down against his chest. Not hard enough that it actually hurt, though he wasn’t sure if she could hurt him, but hard enough that it got his attention. Hard enough that it let him know she certainly could cause more damage if she suddenly got a mind to.
“Could you please get off of me?” she asked.
He blinked and he stared at her, and then he looked to where his own arm had come to rest under her head. He tried to pull it away, but she remained firmly in place, staring at him with her two claws digging into his chest and a thin smile that showed off the barest hint of her fangs.
The more he moved, the more she refused to budge. To the point he almost thought she was doing that on purpose.
“It’s not polite to touch a lady without asking, you know,” she continued on, speaking airily as she pressed her clawed hand into him. “Especially a high princess of the demon realms.”
“I keep getting that a lot,” he said. “But I’ll note that you have your leg draped over me and you’re the one pressing against me.”
“Am I?” she asked, both of her eyebrows shooting up as she hit him with a look of such practiced innocence that he knew she had to be doing that on purpose. “I hadn’t noticed.”
He felt those claws digging deeper and deeper, and along with it he felt something swelling inside him.
Suddenly a spell came up in his head. Something that would use a bit of air to lift somebody and pull them away, and he frantically looked at the diagram as she dug in and refused to move so he couldn’t get his arm out from under her as requested.
Almost as though she put him in this no-win situation on purpose, and was enjoying every moment of it.
He looked at the diagram in front of him, and then he started to move the mana brush in his mind. He tried to clear his mind like he did when he was sketching something. He tried to just be at one with what he envisioned in his head. For all that it seemed a little odd to have a diagram simply floating in his vision like that.
It helped that this diagram seemed simple. He tried to focus on those fundamentals as he sketched. He moved the brush around quickly, simply. It seemed to be a lower level spell, which helped. He wasn’t sure how he knew it was a lower level spell, just that he knew it was.
And he wasn’t panicking, or surrounded by a bunch of scourgelings, or a garzeth trying to kill him, this time around. Though it did seem like she was trying to dig straight into his heart. Not that it was working, but she was trying and he very much wanted her to stop.
Finally, the spell diagram was complete. It glowed fitfully for a moment, and then he heard a voice beside him.
“Why in the hells would you draw a blowing wind spell like that? You missed the lower control glyph entirely, and you didn’t use the proper mana for an air spell.”
He turned to see Albert staring at him with a typically swishing tail. Then he had a moment to turn up and look at Ana as her eyes went wide as a mighty wind seemed to rise all around them. It lifted her up and off of him and sent her flying through the air, holding a hand out as though she wanted him to grab it.
Which he didn’t. She had been digging her claws into his chest just a moment ago, and he was pretty sure she’d been messing with him. He figured the least she deserved was to go for a little flight, courtesy of him apparently botching yet another bit of magic.
And he’d been so proud of himself for being able to go into a flow state where he was able to sketch that diagram with the mana brush in his mind. Oh well.
Apparently he had more learning to do.