Archive of Our Own

More than wealth or fragile peace, it seemed that gossip was the lifeblood of Romirro. It wasn’t the young castellan’s favorite hallmark of the city, but it was an enduring one. Even before her imprisonment, twitters of the latest scandal laced the streets as much as it did the palace halls, carried in the mouths of servants and noblemen alike. She thought it frivolous then—a cheap way to distract themselves from impending doom. Upon expressing as much, the previous castellan told her a story of a woman cursed to dance until she wasted away on her bleeding feet.

The warning: that even frivolity could turn lethal in excess. Unfortunately, it was not the story or even the prophecy that taught her how whispers could be turned to venom, with the right guidance. Hawkern saw to that.

The reappearance of the young Sea God and the salvation that accompanied him drove the city’s idle blathering to new heights. Every room she entered welcomed her with a sudden hush from its inhabitants. On her walks with the Sea God, excited murmurs trailed after their every step.

Rafayel wasn’t bothered by it. His expectations for humanity were dismal to begin with, and it was no surprise to him that humanity’s last ark would be taken with a hobby so cowardly and cruel. Even so, he seemed to enjoy the fact that her wound from the Sea God’s Tomb made her too infirm to see to her usual patrols. It was certainly a benefit in her eyes, despite the awful fevers. As was the touch of her groom’s perpetually cool hands.

“You’re improving,” he commented one day, touching his knuckles to her forehead and then the underside of her jaw. “Your fevers are not lasting quite as long.”

She simply stared off to the walls of his temple and their fine cracks. The feeling that washed over her was more sorrow than relief. It had been so long since she’d been tended to.

Verie insisted on having her examined by a human physician, to Rafayel’s displeasure. With a dangerous glint to his eye, he accused, “She doesn’t trust my care.”

“She is concerned,” his bride corrected. “She worries that your knowledge of the human body is limited. It’s a fair assumption.”

“What’s there to know? All species are fitted with the tools to survive. It’s just that human bodies are too fragile and temperamental to make use of them.”

“So… what?” She drew a stray lock of hair over her shoulder to keep it from getting dirtied by Rafayel’s algae-coated fingers. “Your prescribed treatment is to simply… remind my body of those tools?”

“It is to pamper you so that your body can focus on healing itself,” he hissed, his words brushing across the shell of her ear. “If that wasn’t made clear these past few weeks, then humans truly are greedy.”

She sighed, craning her neck as his fingers carefully stroked lower. Rafayel had cared for her with more tenderness than she ever would have expected from him, that was true. But just a few days ago, Verie had seen her go pale during an audience with the steward seeing to Romirro’s reconstruction. While changing her into her bedclothes that night, Peya paid particularly close attention to the appearance of her wound. They’d certainly colluded on this matter, and she couldn’t blame them. The algae tingled along those marks even now.

“That’s exactly it. It’s been weeks. They haven’t seen how much I’ve recovered, because we shielded them from the worst of it. My seeing a physician will ease their minds.”

Rafayel took a deep breath behind her, thinking. His fingers moved with purpose, riding along the swooping curves of her wound. It wasn’t fair of him to be so distressed. It’s not as if his bride—or any of her staff, for that matter—could recognize how the lines had blurred between them since they returned from his trial at the Sea God’s Tomb.

To care for her after orchestrating the conditions in which she was harmed was the decent thing to do, yes. But it recalled other practices between Lemurian lovers. Fawning. Nesting. Then there was the vision that came to them after the trial.

Rafayel often caught himself dwelling on the sincerity with which she recited their forgotten vows, offering up her heart in surrender. Recently, he'd looked upon her in her slumber and felt a tiny sway in his chest, unfamiliar and affectionate. He’d traced the curve of her cheek under the guise of checking her temperature, only for his thumb to find its way to the crease of her lips. As he felt her breath on his skin, ungodly hot with fever, he found himself thinking she was… cute.

Rafayel was loathe to leave her. The few times he managed to steal away to the sea, he was compelled to bring tokens of affection back with him. He was still abuzz with the smile she gave him days ago, tentative and grateful, when he fed her a strip of kelp to aid her sleep.

The trouble of it was that it was his bride’s duty to fall in love with him. Such was required by the prophecy. He hadn’t accounted for the possibility that he might reciprocate. In fact, he was adamant he wouldn’t. But the idea of another caring for her, even momentarily, in his place…

Rafayel’s silence went on so long she thought he might be willing her to drop the conversation. Let it be lost in the waters of his pool. Then, he said, “The physician will examine you here.”

“No.”

“No?”

She looked over her shoulder with a stalwart glare. “Your presence would influence his assessment of me. I’ll be seen at the palace without your supervision.”

Rafayel had chosen to walk on land today, but he still felt an agitated flick of a phantom fin. She took him in—the sharp corners of his eyes and hard lock of his jaw. As was appropriate for his bride, she’d only ever been awed by him. She’d never feared. Her nerve stirred at a hidden well of satisfaction in him, despite his surface discontent. Not for the first time, he was grateful that she was prouder than she was deferent. She didn’t even deign to give him a nod.

“When?” He asked grudgingly.

“Oh,” she looked to the rays of sun peeking through the stained glass of the temple. “In about an hour or two.”

So she wasn’t requesting permission in the first place. Rafayel looked aside with a huff. “You test me.” He closed the clamshell of goldfeather algae with a definitive snap. “Fine. Have the kitchen prepare a batch fried shrimp cakes for when you return.”

The smile she gave him was small. Cheeky. Rafayel committed its shape to memory and the moment passed.

As expected, the examination was a waste. The physician concluded two things: 1) the wound she’d suffered was one beyond the bounds of human comprehension, and 2) she’d weathered the worst of its effects. Thankfully, the question of how he surmised the latter despite the former was one Verie didn’t think (or bother) to ask.

The castellan tried not to look too eager as she shrugged her robes back over her shoulders, simply nodding at the physician’s final remarks with the patient etiquette expected from a woman in her ranks. “Seeing as your fevers are the last of your symptoms,” he said, “I do worry that the temple may not be the best environment to heal. Especially so late in the season.”

“If I spent my nights away from the Sea God’s Temple, I wouldn’t have improved this much in the first place. My staff has made sure my living conditions are suitable there. If the night grows cold, I’m fortunate to have a groom who has as much mastery over flames as he does the sea.”

The physician paused. “Of course. You’re very fortunate, Your Highness.” He bowed slightly, his hands folded courteously across his lower stomach. “However, on the off chance that you require more comfort than what His Quintessence can give, I can provide a tea to supplement His therapies. We were able to reap the fields of tansy before the storms set in. It would be no trouble.”

Rafayel wouldn’t take kindly to the insinuation that his care was lacking, she knew that much. To that point, she glanced at the windows. It was already evening. She looked to Peya, giving her the little wave that bid her to go to her chambers and prepare her bedclothes. Peya left with a nod.

The physician looked at her expectantly, awaiting an answer. Ever the diplomat, the castellan replied, “That would be lovely. See to it.” She waited until his footsteps were echoing down the hall before loosing a great gust of a sigh. “I thought he’d never leave.”

“There are kinder ways to bear someone’s attention,” Verie chided. “Especially when it’s showered on you with good intentions.”

She bit the inside of her cheek—a tiny punishment of a habit she’d developed during her years in captivity. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Verie regarded her sternly before shaking her head. “Don’t be sorry, Your Highness. Be well.” Her sincerity was immense, despite how gently she said it. “It hasn’t been long since Hawkern fell, and now that he’s escaped… Some of us fear you’ll disappear again, and too soon.”

The castellan’s smile was more bitter than any tincture the old physician could prescribe. “But haven’t you heard? The citizens of Romirro have painted me out to be quite the invincible savior. The Sea God’s bride shall quell the great storm! On the night of the lunar eclipse, with a wave of the Summoneo Staff, she and the Sea God will capture the moon!”

Her tone was not triumphant, but mocking. The tortured hiss of a creature with too many burdens to bear.

Verie frowned at her display. She was the bride’s inheritance—the head lady-in-waiting for the previous castellan and now hers. Verie had seen her trotting about the palace in her younger years, a ball of naive enthusiasm as she led construction of the same temple that worried them now. Which is to say, Verie cared for her. Perhaps even more than the bride cared for herself.

“Perhaps those are the only whispers you care to hear,” Verie murmured.

She bit harder, for shame.

Peya was not in her chambers. The castellan was glad for the wait. Now that she’d won her freedom, she understood that she hated her years of imprisonment purely for the indignity of it. The solitude, however, was something she missed.

Opportunities for it were rare ever since she’d left the tower. There was not a moment when she was not being waited on, seen to, appealed to, or harangued by Romirro’s council. Even Rafayel’s company, as pleasant as it was as of late, came with duty creeping in at the edges, demanding significance from every shared second. Demanding love.

For this fleeting time, however: peace.

Her room in the palace couldn’t be more different than her makeshift space in the temple.  The hangings about her bed and windowpanes were of a thick velvet and vermillion, as per the previous castellan’s sensibilities. Where the temple was erected in granite, her chambers boasted a rich red teak. Past sundown, it was lit by a single fireplace, along with lone candles at her vanity and desk for more precise illumination. She sat on the edge of her mattress and listened to the pops of tinder. It sounded not so different, she realized, from her wound crackling down her spine.

The fire was a far cry from Rafayel’s, which licked at her fingers with the same innocent curiosity as kittens. On chillier nights, he warmed her with pretty blooms that unfurled from his palms like lilies in the morning, their petals casting his face in a pink glow. The more she dwelled on it, the memory—his hands moving over her silhouette, expression cooled with focus—heated her even more than the hearth.

Her thoughts were more inclined to such images lately, but she worried Rafayel was too handsome for it to signal the love demanded by the prophecy. Surely, that would have to be proven by more than habitual swoons.

There was a sudden crash of waves in her ears, her wound beckoning again. The air turned viscous, clinging to the lining of her throat like thin syrup. Over the crackling of the fire, she could hear sea foam in the distance, hissing over countless grains of sand.

She couldn’t be sure whether she’d just imagined Rafayel’s scale pulsing against her sternum but she gripped it nonetheless, stepping out onto the balcony to drink in the salted air. She’d found that simply looking at the sea soothed her symptoms, not that this comforted him any. In the distance she could see the ocean shimmering under the moonlight. To her surprise, she could see swaths of a purple the color of dried dates and even streaks of emerald swimming in the black.

It was later than she’d realized. The lords and ladies who loitered about the palace had returned to their homes for supper some time ago, surrendering the courtyard to the maids.

In her youth, the castellan liked to watch them. She’d achieved her governing power by way of the prophecy; as far as she knew, she was not of noble birth. Eavesdropping on the maids, from the youngest girl to the bawdiest old aunt, offered sly peeks into the life she would have endured had the Tome not dictated otherwise. Even when witnessing the worst of their treatment, she always ended up retreating to her room with an faint sense of jealousy. Each time she stepped back out onto the balcony with the intentions of spying on the common folk, she did so with the knowledge that she was scratching an itch best left alone.

There was the sound of a door swinging open below her out of sight, followed by the sound of several footsteps.

“Tansy!” A woman wheezed. “Can you believe?”

The castellan frowned as four maids emerged into view. One whirled ahead of them, shimmying as if to play the part of a jester. She held a bundle of sheets in her arms, but that did little to hide her swollen middle. “Aye, and what better to prescribe a woman enjoying the nightly bounties of the sea?”

“Enough of that, Riev,” one of her companions hissed. “You know the doctor has proper reasons—”

“Oh, and I suppose you really do think she’s insisting on sleeping in that temple for comfort? Fevers,” this ‘Riev’ sneered. “My husband has quite the treatment for my fevers, too. Works well in a pinch.”

The visibly youngest of the bunch nearly dropped her own bundle as she clapped a hand over a ruddy cheek. “Oh! You mean—”

“It’s a wonder you have a husband at all,” another girl hissed through her own thinly veiled amusement, “seeing as how you insist on being so lewd.”

“That I’d be slandered for giving medical advice!” She swayed her belly from side to side, flaunting its taut shape. “Bit of a side effect, as you can see, but a little more tansy would make quick work of that—”

“You’ve never tried it, Gemma? Truly?”

“Oh, not you, too—”

“I swear to the depths, it does work. Sweats it out like nothing else.”

“And imagine!” Riev crowed. “That’s just our husbands, plain as they are. What mighty ailments a God could cure—”

“Riev!”

“I’m only saying: the Sea God wouldn’t be the first to use His cock to treat a fever, and He won’t be the last.”

“Your Highness.”

Peya’s voice rang out into the night, clear as a chime. The courtyard went eerily silent in its wake. The castellan watched as the maids lifted their heads to the balcony, all of them freezing as a rabbit catching first sight of a fox’s tail. She canted her head slightly, acknowledging them. With barely discernible whimpers, as rabbits do, they scurried away.

Peya stood at the balcony doors, waiting with head bowed as the castellan stepped back inside. They avoided each other’s eyes as she sat before her vanity, patiently waiting for Peya to step forward and undo her braids.

Peya had loosened most of one when she finally said, “I apologize for my late arrival, Your Highness. The laundresses—”

“Have been distracted. I heard.” The girl went silent. The castellan watched her blush in the mirror, dimly realizing there were few ways that news of her appointment could have traveled so quickly. Despite the ache in her chest, she said, “Don’t look so upset, Peya. It’s not as if you were involved.”

When her hair fell loosely about her shoulders, the castellan stood and stripped herself of her robe. Peya took it from her with the reverence of the guilty. “Don’t let it bother you, Your Highness. They have few means to amuse themselves.”

“Yes. I know.”

The nightgown Peya had chosen for her was of a cotton twill the color of pale wheat. Not exceedingly warm by any means, but thicker than the other shifts she’d worn in the weeks past.

Peya’s blush returned with a vengeance when she caught the castellan pinching at her sleeve, quietly hoping the night’s fever would not be so brutal. “Some maids were sent to support medical efforts across the city, Your Highness. It isn’t that...”

That they intended on her discomfort. That they neglected their work just to peddle raunchy rumors all day.

“Peya,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard her. “What are the healing properties of tansy?”

“I couldn’t tell you, Your Highness.”

It was a lie. She could tell by the way Peya’s fingers hesitated to draw a lock of hair from the confines of her collar. How her eyes darted to the mirror and back.

The castellan gestured to the bed, where a thicker robe was laid out and waiting. “I’ll take my dinner in the Temple. I trust the kitchen’s prepared the cakes He requested?” Peya murmured her affirmation as she held up the robe, allowing the castellan to slip her arms into the plush sleeves. “Please have Verie reserve time for me to visit the libraries tomorrow. I’d like to explore the archives for our apothecaries.”

Peya hesitated, eyeing her as she tied the robe at the waist. Bringing her slippers to her feet, she asked, “Do you not trust the doctor, Your Highness?”

She gave her ties one last tug before hastening to the temple. “On the contrary, I trust his expertise completely. I’d like to glean a bit of it for myself.”

A dry aromatic herb of yellow blooms well-suited to purify the bodily humors that may be ingested daily in broths, puddings or tartes, but in medicinal capacities are best prepared in the form of tonics and teas. In such concoctions, tansie is effective in treating fevers, hysteria, and other nervous affectations. It might also be used as an emmenagogue, managing and inducing the monthly flux of female patients in moderate doses, however risks severe harm to those gone with child in excess. Indulging in morning and nightly teacupfuls of tansie whilst fasting is valuable in clearing afflictions of the abdomen, and is of good service to purge worms that may root to one’s stomach in the consumption of fish—

The castellan shut the book with a swift flick of the wrist. The clap of the pages echoed throughout the library, drawing Verie’s concern from her station nearby. “You read something that displeased you, Your Highness?”

The question was a formality. It was plain to see that the castellan’s cheeks were ablaze. Unshed tears needled at her eyes as she replied, “The script is nearly illegible in some places. I was frustrated.”

“Should I find a neater scribe to rewrite it?”

“That won’t be necessary.” She pushed the book to the far corner of the table with undue force. As yellowed as the pages were, the copy was barely worn. The cover was unmarred, apart from a layer of dust. Upon opening it, there was virtually no bend in the spine. The castellan looked to the shelves that surrounded her, teeming with medical journals Romirro had collected over the ages. It should have concerned her, perhaps, that they were barely used.

Rafayel wouldn’t be surprised. He was disgruntled to receive her the previous night, late due to her appointment with nothing but shrimp cakes to show for it. She was still reeling from the sneer he flashed when she told him about the tea (ingredients left unspecified) the physician was preparing in the meanwhile.

“Humans always insist on acting like they know everything,” he grumbled. “They can’t be bothered to stay quiet and learn. If this doctor of yours had simply come here and asked—”

“You would have told him to leave us and nothing else.”

Rafayel looked at her with mild, caught surprise before gruffly replying, “Well, now we’ll never know if that’s true.”

His impression of Romirro’s medical care wasn’t helped by how the night progressed. Her fever, though not nearly as long as it had been in the early days of her recovery, turned severe in the late hours. Her nightgown was as overheating as she’d feared. She sweat through it and the sheets below. In a brief moment of lucidity, she found him stroking at her hair as she cooled her cheek by the scales of his tail.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” He asked before she left, frowning at her from the water.

“I’ll be fine. I haven’t been sick in daylight, lately.” Rafayel never confirmed as much, but she suspected that in recovery, her symptoms had begun to move with the cycle of the moon. “I’ll be back before sundown.”

With a soft glare, he muttered, “I’m sure you will.”

“I’ll retrieve your latest offerings while I’m at it,” she said, ignoring his skepticism. “Don’t you have pearls to search for? I’ve been distracting you.”

Though his expression remained unchanged, Rafayel’s tail swayed uncertainly in the rippling pool. His hair spilled over the surface in ribbons, so long that when he shook his head, they barely moved. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s my duty to see to my bride’s health. Besides, weren’t you the one asking to spend more time together so you could fall in love with me?”

With a wry look, she said, “Yes. And maybe I’ll fall in love with you even faster if you let me tend to my errands in peace. It’s all about balance, I’ve heard.”

A thrill ran through her as a little slash of a smirk appeared on Rafayel’s face. He spent so much time entertaining himself at her expense that it was a victory to amuse him by wits alone. The fins at his ears quivered (in pleasure, she thought) moments before he acquiesced. “Read to your heart’s desire, then. But keep your promise this time. I hate being made to wait.”

Her walk to the archives took more time than scouring the shelves for a guide to herbal medicine did. Reading her first entry on the properties of tansy was as humiliating of an experience as the next. She began to peruse each text for other herbs used to treat fevers, affecting disinterest even as she asked Verie about their availability.

“And yarrow?”

“Yes, Your Highness. I believe we have quite a bit in our stores.” Verie’s eyes were habitually cast downward when addressing her, but the castellan felt her scrutiny nonetheless. “I believe the royal physician intends on blending it with your tea. Would you like me to reserve a portion for another purpose?”

Verie’s suggestion shook the castellan from her spiraling. Tapping her fingers on the table for a moment, she replied simply, “No.”

All her references had warned against tansy in high doses. Of course the tea the physician administered would be a blend. But it did little to erase the implications that came with its main ingredient. She thought of those jeering maids and Riev’s swollen belly. How quickly Peya fled the temple when Rafayel’s treatment of her wound elicited a pained grunt.

So this is what they thought of the nights spent between the Sea God and his bride.

Considering their titles, could she blame them?

But a virtuous castellan made for dull tales and unfortunately for them, she was as virtuous as they came. She thought that would’ve counted for something. What, exactly? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she was barely adept in the “nightly bounties” of her own body, let alone those of a man. Let alone Rafayel’s.

The consumption of fish, she mulled over with distaste. It was a bit on the nose.

She looked to the windows. The sunlight had deepened in color since she arrived, but the shadows were not so long. An idea surfaced out of morbid curiosity. She circled it with the focused interest of an osprey before closing in.

“Are there medical texts on Lemurians, Verie?”

“Lemurians, Your Grace?”

Her cheeks burned as Verie lifted her head slightly, peering at her in a silent request to elaborate. “The Sea God has done so well to care for me, I thought… if I were ever to return the favor—” Her stammering was unseemly. She fought the urge to clear her throat, lest she make things worse. “I should be kept abreast of the differences between our flesh. And anatomies.”

“Your anatomies,” Verie repeated thoughtfully. After a long beat, she said, “Allow me to consult with the archivist. I’ll be back shortly.”

The wait didn’t feel short at all. The castellan found herself pinching at the pages of the books before her, worrying the corners. She flipped through their indexes, humming to feign interest as though there were nosy witnesses creeping between the shelves. Not for the first time, she had the utmost sympathy for her groom and the long centuries (perhaps millennia) he’d spent in captivity. She could hardly bear twenty minutes of listless thoughts.

When Verie reappeared, the castellan nearly leapt to greet her. Verie set her findings before her carefully, without any visible indication of judgment or glee. “This is all we could find, Your Highness. Unfortunately, the text is quite old. The archivist admitted that it’s impossible to verify.”

“Ah,” she replied with faint disappointment. But considering the fact that Lemuria had been lost to begin with, she didn’t know why she expected otherwise. “Of course. That makes sense. Thank him for me, in any case.”

Even the barest sliver of new knowledge, after all, would be an improvement on where she began.

If the script of the medical journals was difficult to read, the calligraphy of this text was chicken scratch. The writing was cramped and faded, inconsistent in format and size. Thankfully, the journal included sketches that exceeded all expectations. There were renderings of male and female Lemurian anatomy, from their muscle to skeletal structure. The text narrowed in on even finer details as it progressed, until the castellan found herself poring over a single finely-wrought illustration of a scale.

In certain appearances, miniscule and flexible, such as about the underbelly or the mons. elswhere such as on tail or pectorals, hard as nail or teeth. Their hides, even where most resembling humans, is 10x thicker than mortal skin. it has been demonstrated Lemurianes are capable of surfacing or changing their density of scales at will when under noticed threat but further experiments required to determine—

She paused. “Did the archivist provide a source for this text?”

“Yes, Your Highness, as best he could. He believes it was authored by scholars of a neighboring dominion who studied two subjects for their healing abilities. It’s the only prolonged study of the species ever conducted. If the notes are to be believed.”

Whether or not these Lemurian “subjects” consented to such a study was left unsaid.

Male specimen more responsive to such agitations, however the female shows greater propensity for healing. slashing wounds upon the limbs shown to reliably healed overnight. Punctures done with less consistency but both demonstrate ability to recover from injuries that might have felled a human soldier of great constitution.

curiously a wound on one subject elicited a response from the other regardless of whether they bore witness by sight or ear; limits to this uncanny empathy to be determined once we are able to locate a space that allows for greater separation.

The castellan swallowed, suffering her bile’s slow slide to her stomach where it lashed and churned. Rafayel had so much hate in his eyes when she first found him. He’d bared his teeth even as he demanded she break his chains. Each word of this text brought his resentment into sharp focus. It was a wonder, she realized, that he didn’t dislike humans more.

She flipped through the pages quickly, as repelled by their contents as she was drawn in. It wasn’t long before the notes mentioned the passing of the female specimen in unspecified circumstances. To her horror, rather than recognize this as a natural stopping point, the authors celebrated this as an opportunity to fold in a study of the internal organs.

After some distressingly fascinating diagrams of Lemurian hearts and lungs, she came across the illustration of an odd shape resembling the head of a ram, with a jagged lining within the would-be animal’s long snout. An arrow in the bottom corner and a common symbol for masculinity indicated there was a paired illustration. She turned the page over, only managing to peel it halfway when she caught sight of a figure in profile, the subject unmistakeable.

Another clap resounded throughout the library. The journal lay before her, mocking and closed. Her hands lay across her face in a manner not unlike the embarrassed maiden from the previous night. When the castellan had reached up to cover herself exactly, she couldn’t be sure.

There were soft footfalls behind her as Verie stepped forward. She laid another slim journal beside the first, with a title that confirmed that the castellan was not so unknowable as she liked to think.

“If you’re to understand the differences between your anatomies,” she said kindly, “it would serve you well to familiarize yourself with your own.”

The castellan was already in the temple when Rafayel returned, sitting behind the curtain of her canopy bed while discussing the morrow’s schedule with Peya. He stepped quietly from the shallows of his pool, announced by little more than the drip of water.

“They would like to discuss the cleaning of the wells in the southern district—”

“They’re still soiled from the storm?”

The poor girl’s knees nearly buckled at the sound of his voice. Peya was young and clearly unused to her station. (Perhaps she never expected to recover it until Hawkern was overturned.) She was quick to become flustered in his proximity, and Rafayel would be lying if he said he didn’t garner some amusement from her bashfulness.

Peya’s panic was ordinary in the context of things. What was not: the weighty silence from his bride as he slid behind the curtain to sit beside her. Her hand lay between them, without even an acknowledging twitch. Even the lines of her body, though in recline, remained tense and conspicuously still.

Conscious of Peya’s diffidence, she spoke. “The storm swept sewage into their water sources. They’ve been drawing from the wells at higher altitudes, but—”

“They could have asked sooner,” Rafayel said breezily. “I’ll cleanse them tomorrow. It won’t take long.”

Even in the early days of their relationship, his bride would have accepted such an offer with a gratitude as unnecessary as it was endearing. But Rafayel was met only with a brief pause, as if he’d handed her a piece of a puzzle she didn’t know where to place. Upon recomposing herself, she said, “Inform the steward of His intentions, Peya.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Is there anything else?”

“One last, Your Grace,” Peya said. “The physician has procured the ingredients for your tea. He asks whether you intend to take it daily or as needed.”

Rafayel’s eyes narrowed. “A doctor would have his patient dictate her own prescription?”

Another silence passed between them, thin as the curtains and just as obscuring. He glanced at his bride and found the slightest pucker between her brows, subtle proof that there was an undercurrent to the conversation that eluded him. There was the slightest shift in the curve of her cheek as her teeth searched for purchase.

The royal physician’s assumptions were as she suspected, then.

“As needed,” she replied curtly. “Thank you, Peya. That will be all.”

Rafayel sat there, waiting to be acknowledged as the girl’s footsteps echoed and faded. His bride sat there just as stiffly, her cushions as soft as her body was tense. He mentally scoured the previous day’s events for a reason behind her odd behavior. He hadn’t done anything offensive, as far as he knew. The most obvious possibility, however, was worse.

When it was certain that Peya was a far distance off, he turned to her and asked lowly, “Was the physician improper?”

“What?” She turned to him finally, which might have comforted him if not for the nervous flash of her eyes. “No. Nothing like that.”

“But there is something?”

Her lips parted around nothing but air. She closed them again, rummaging for a response. A lie, Rafayel realized. And while their interactions had certainly been awkward at times, he’d never known his bride to be dishonest.

The trickling waters of the temple grew disorderly as he pivoted to face her. His movements, though slow, were fluid and charged, almost reptilian, like a viper slinking into position before the strike. He loomed over her, one hand braced beside her hip and the other gently tipping her chin to force her eyes to his.

She shivered. He was beautiful and horrific. There was no denying his divinity in moments like this. The whole world seemed to bend for him, around him, tuning into his focus. The breeze stilled and hushed. Water splashed against the edges of the nearby pool.

“You’re hiding something. I can feel it.” Their bond, dormant as it was, alerted him as much, roving beneath Rafayel’s skin like a horde of bees. “Tell me.”

Her brow furrowed deeper. Still thinking, even under threat. Finally, she said, “There were unsavory rumors at the palace. That’s all.”

The thrumming of bees quieted, but didn’t dissipate. So it was a half-truth.

Deciding not to press the matter, Rafayel eased back. He was satisfied enough. The breeze stirred once more. The waters calmed. “You know better than to worry yourself over those by now.”

“I’m only human,” she reminded him. It was a soft admission and, to his surprise, pained.

It’s not as if she envied Rafayel’s power. Rather, she envied his inviolability. No matter the whispers or the seething rage of his people, He, at least, had never been the butt of a joke.

When she rose from the bed, he didn’t stop her. Thankfully, Peya had dressed her suitably tonight. Her shift whispered about her ankles with the weightlessness of feathers. The color was just as light, such that Rafayel couldn’t tell whether it was dye or the reflection of the waters that tinged it blue. There was a slight transparency to the gauzy fabric, which would benefit her later when her fever set in. Allowing himself to be lecherous, Rafayel could admit that the view it afforded him—the peeking color of her nipples and the suggestion of a shadow in the cusp of her legs—benefited him even now.

“There was an expedition to the east,” she said, going to her desk. They’d found a temporary spot for it not far from the altar, along the edges of the chancel. “There were ruins there. Nothing like what you’ve found in the forest, I think, but they brought back jewels.”

She returned to him with one hand sparkling. She slid back into her place on the bed beside him and bared her palm, revealing a mess of pearls. Rafayel couldn’t care less about them, but at least she appeared to be more relaxed than when he’d first entered the temple. He picked a necklace up for examination.

“Freshwater,” he declared. He brought it to his nose, sniffing lightly. “Not a whiff of salt.”

“Oh.” Her face fell quite adorably as she glanced from his face to her hand and back. “Well, it was inland… I didn’t realize pearls could form in the rivers.”

“With human intervention.” Rafayel smiled and laid it back in her palm. As the necklace coiled back into place, he paused. “This, however…”

He took up a pearl ring sitting at the end of her lifeline. It was shapely and unblemished to the point of incandescence, shining as if the jeweler had caught a drop of the moon. Small diamonds formed spokes that jutted out from its hemisphere, invoking comparisons to the rays of a sunrise, or perhaps leaves crowning a round fruit.

He studied it for a moment before nodding in approval. “It’s of the sea. It may not be the pearl of the deep sea I’ve been searching for, but it is becoming, don’t you think?”

He reached for her left hand without warning. Though she knew better than to resist him, she couldn’t help but ask, “What are you doing?”

“Humans mark their brides in this way, do they not?” Rafayel slid it onto her ring finger, looking both curious and proud as he admired the look of it. “I’ve yet to do the same for you.”

“I’ve been marked as yours in numerous ways already,” she groused. That said, it was undeniably beautiful. She turned her hand from side-to-side to watch it catch the light, stopping only at the sight of his triumphant smile. “Do Lemurians not claim their brides with rings?”

Rafayel’s eyes dipped towards her bosom. It was a fleeting motion, but one that pierced through her like a dart. “No,” he said, his answer laced with a dark chuckle. “We don’t.”

Of course the afternoon’s text didn’t cover that.

The memory of her studies returned to her unbidden. With it, an undeniable, daunting truth rushed in. That the sketches she pored over were only that—representations—meanwhile here was her groom, poised to confirm their findings in flesh and bone.

Rafayel turned to her as the thrumming set in again, rising with the color in his bride’s face. But it was different this time. Different in general. Of course he’d managed to fluster her before, but it had never felt so sharp at the edges. Clarified.

He brushed away a lurking thought, for decorum’s sake.

“Are you feeling unwell already?” He raised his knuckles to her cheek, gauging the radiant heat. “You’re warm.”

Her color deepened. She turned her head and he suspected it was by luck and luck alone that it coincided with the sound of voices coming down the hall. As her handmaidens came into view, the castellan found she could breathe again. “That must be supper. I’ll feel better after some food.”

Rafayel studied her before granting her a small nod. “I’ll apply your medicine afterwards.”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a request, but for some semblance of control, she answered as if it were. She glanced at her ring, suddenly imagining its damning sheen through her handmaidens’ eyes. “That would be fine.”

She dreamt not of images, but color and sound. Cerulean mottled with white. A blinding crimson veined over charcoal, like the spindly fingers of coral. There were pops at her ear, at times gentle and at others as violent as chomping jaws. In the lull she could hear a surging call of floodwaters at her feet.

She grew dizzy in this awful disembodied place. She was helpless, at the mercy of her senses. There was a pained lowing in the air, trailing and echoing in loose spirals.

“That’s enough.”

Finally: feeling. A touch at her cheek eased her eyes open and color coalesced into shape. Rafayel’s hair was mauve in the night, the two tones of his eyes shadowed with heavy concern. She could feel the effort of her own breathing, lungs taut and bucking with shallow gasps.

“Enough,” Rafayel repeated softly, cradling her cheeks to keep her eyes on his. “I’m here.”

She lifted her hand, testing her corporeality before anchoring herself with a touch to his wrist. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure why. She sounded ghastly. “I don’t feel well.”

Rafayel sucked at his teeth. “That much is clear.”

He guided her to rest against his chest before reaching for a cup on the nightstand, gingerly bringing it her mouth. She might have fallen back asleep if he hadn’t tipped her chin and trickled the water between her lips himself. Once prompted, she drank gratefully. Every gulp soothed her parched throat and quieted the noise in her head.

They woke like this more often than not these days. In the beginning, Rafayel would lay in the pool and wait for her fevers to set in before going to her, but he’d witnessed enough of her nightly fits to know he didn’t like the look of them. Never mind the fact that she was improving—she slept better with him beside her, and that awarded him his own peace.

As he set the cup back down, he murmured, “A bit more ointment, maybe.”

She nodded and sat up. As Rafayel rummaged about for the goldfeather algae, she drew her hair over her shoulder and undid the ties at the nape of her neck. By the time he turned back to her, her nightgown had already fallen to her waist in the back. She held the front to her chest, high enough to preserve her modesty but low enough that he could see a dusky sliver of color over the fabric, drawing even more attention to where it peaked.

Her hair was mussed from tossing and turning, her chest flushed and rising as she caught her breath. Ill as she was, she looked a vision.

Rafayel was reminded of his own impropriety (and the inconvenience of his current form) by a twitch between his legs. He cleared his throat and focused on the task at hand. Luckily, his bride was too fevered to even notice the sound or his leering. He flicked open the shell of algae and ran it with light pressure from shoulder to spine.

By the time he finished, she’d recovered some clarity. She thanked him when she heard the closing of the clamshell. When she drew her shift back over her shoulders, he gently brushed her fingers away so he could handle her ties.

“Did I get much sleep?”

“A few hours,” Rafayel said as he cinched up the knot. He drew her back to him once finished, having her rest against his shoulder as he reclined against a stack of cushions at the head of the bed. Pressing a hand to her forehead then the slope of her throat, he murmured, “You should rest more.”

Her brow pinched as another wave of dizziness threatened to drag her under. She cozied into his chest as if to ward it back. “The dreams make it worse.”

Rafayel’s heart clenched—both for how adorable she was and in sympathy for her misery. He brushed her hair from her sweaty brow. “It’s a wonder that I chose a bride so delicate. I don’t like it.”

Her scoff landed on his skin like a brand. “I didn’t ask you to tend to me. If you want to pursue your other tasks for the prophecy, you’re more than welcome.”

Rafayel paused before laying his hand on her arm, gently stroking to appease her. “That’s not what I meant.”

She peeked up and found him looking at her with look so sincere her fever was temporarily forgotten. “Oh.”

She was so touched by this it unmoored him. “Is it so surprising that I’m upset by my bride’s discomfort?” Rafayel teased. “I’m not so cruel.”

‘His bride.’ Titles upon titles. Roles upon roles. Her pleasant surprise flitted off with the moment and left her tired. Rafayel frowned as her eyes dropped from his, the shadows in them renewed.

He brought his hand to her cheek again, mistaking her malaise for physical discomfort. She turned into it like a cat seeking the attentions of its owner. “Your skin’s always so cold.”

Rafayel pressed more firmly, as if to push her temperature down. “Do you need my tail tonight?”

She looked up in surprise. “Am I really so awful right now? You never offer.”

Realistically, no. Over the course of her treatment, Rafayel had seen her in the throes of pure delirium. He was still struggling to forgive her for the night she bit into him, mistaking him for a meal of roasted fish.

But the touch of his scales relieved her, undeniably. And beyond her physical symptoms, tonight she seemed to require comfort on a different plane. Her mood was heavy. Perhaps resting on him this way would make her less… sad.

“Will it help you or not?”

She assessed him for a moment, searching for evidence of trickery. When she nodded, his hand moved higher, shielding her eyes as his legs vanished in a brilliant flash of light.

Rafayel’s tail was a beautiful monstrosity. His fins dangled from the foot of her mattress despite the fact that her bed was objectively, unnecessarily large. When she moved down the length of him to rest her head on his lap, she could still feel its tapered end brushing at her ankles. She minded the fins at his waist (pelvic fins, the text had called them) as she laid herself down.

She moaned as its chill set in. His tail didn’t have the painful bite of ice, but was just as cooling. His scales shifted pleasantly beneath her cheek as Rafayel wound around her as much as he could, worming his tail between her feet and shins at its thinnest points.

“I love your scales,” she sighed blissfully.

Unbeknownst to her, even daintier ones surfaced across Rafayel’s neck and cheeks. “Do you now?” He said, schooling his tone into vague amusement.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, laying her fingers across a plated expanse. She carefully traced along the edges of one, remembering the notes she’d read. If Rafayel truly could change the composition of his scales, he’d always kept them soft for her. It was nothing like resting on a bed of teeth. “I thought they were merely blue at first. Then I understood them to be periwinkle. In some places, they and your fins turn the color of lilacs. Sometimes, when the light hits, they flash green.”

If his human form was traitorous, Rafayel’s true form was no better. He was dotted in silver down to his chest now, each scale glimmering to catch her eyes. He reminded himself, as he had many a time, that his bride could not know how such compliments affected him.

“You have an eye for color,” he said detachedly.

“I never used to.” The two of them watched her pearl catch the moonlight as her fingers wandered higher. “I see more of them now, with this wound. And I like looking at you.”

His heart did that little sway again, at once exhilarating and mocking. “You should be more careful,” he warned. “Lemurians wouldn’t normally take this sort of praise so lightly.”

“They wouldn’t?”

Rafayel’s breath caught as her fingers traced at the border between tail and hip. It was difficult to tell whether his larger scales turned translucent the higher they went or whether it was pigment that formed a gradient into the sandy peach of his skin. Just a bit higher and, to her surprise, she found that his pelvis really was covered with tiny scales, imperceptible from afar. She’d never noticed before, but in some places they were white almost.

“Minuscule and flexible,” she murmured absentmindedly. His pelvic fins fluttered as she tread the same line his metal adornments hung across in the waking hours. “Such as about the underbelly or—”

Rafayel snatched up her hand before she reached his center. The scales on his cheeks flashed as he looked down at her, such that she was momentarily dazed. “What are you doing?”

She considered the question and realized she had no answer for him.

To his horror, there was a lurking part of Rafayel that didn’t care. She’d never studied him so brazenly; she’d never touched those scales. He never expected that she would, and to be proven wrong stirred at a base side of him he’d long since shunted away.

He gripped her hand a bit harder. “You’re delirious.” Her brow furrowed in unspoken argument. Rafayel wouldn’t have it. She’d been acting strange all night. “What manner of unsavory rumor did you hear at the palace?” He pressed. “Tell me.”

After a long moment, she pouted. Her head returned to its perch, letting her hair spread across his blues as she nuzzled into him, as if that might hide the blush on her cheeks. “I’m not delirious,” she deflected. “Only tired.”

She was cute like this, so cute, and Rafayel couldn’t help but gulp in recognition of this unfortunate truth. “Tell me,” he repeated. “Or you’ll have to do without my tail again.”

He was surprised she was capable of such a whine.

She glared at some nebulous place over Rafayel’s shoulder, looking the picture of petulance. After some time, she faintly said, “They believe you are… caring for me.”

Utterly bewildered, Rafayel insisted, “But I am.”

“Not—” She huffed in frustration before starting again. “These women. They were talking about these… remedies. How their husbands break their fevers with their cocks and—”

Rafayel made a choked sound, silencing her. Their eyes met, spearing through the fog of sick and sleep.

“Forget I said anything,” she hurried to say, rising to all-fours in a bit of a panic. She needed to put space between them. To escape. (Where, exactly? She didn’t think that far.) Before she could push away, his fingers found their way around her wrist again, keeping her rooted.

Rafayel’s thoughts spun wildly as he held her in an impasse.

He didn’t even think her mouth could fit around the shape of that word.

“Those are the whispers that have you bothered?” He asked, trying and failing to tame his own baffled amusement. “These women and their husbands’… cocks?”

She looked at him a bit desperately, telegraphing some greater meaning. Her nightgown hung low in this position, offering him a slim peek of her chest. As Rafayel glanced there and back again, he understood with clarity.

Not cocks, but his. Not only his cock, but how she was taking it.

Those base instincts lashed out from their resting place, electrifying him from brain to viscera. His smile sharpened as he took her in. There was a foreign feeling in her gut, a bit like fear but without the intent to run, as his eyes narrowed with a pride as dark as the depths.

“You’re curious.”

She was so tired. She was tired and humiliated and she’d rather be back in that merciless dream void than bearing this torture.

“Of course I am,” she snapped. “It’s not as if I… Stop looking at me like that.”

“My poor, inquisitive bride,” Rafayel cooed mockingly, working their hands up between them. He toyed with the orientation of her fingers, sliding his neatly between hers and trapping them with a smirk. “Always searching for answers. Don’t tell me this has to do with your visit to the library.”

She clenched her jaw. His expression, gleeful to begin with, grew even brighter.

“Interesting,” he purred.

“It wasn’t…” She swallowed and Rafayel followed the motion down the column of her throat to her breasts. “That wasn’t what brought me there, I just—”

“So does it work?”

“What?” She squeaked.

Rafayel drew her closer, turning her hand to lean his cheek against her knuckles. “Does a cock break a fever?” He asked in a sick pantomime of innocence. “As we’ve discussed, my knowledge of the human body is limited. I have much to learn.”

“How would I know?” She grumbled. “It’s not as if any man would endeavor to find out, what with your claim over me.”

A lurking thought pricked at him. “Do you wish it were otherwise?”

“No, of course not,” she sighed. Rafayel relaxed as quickly as he’d tensed, lightly brushing his lips across her hand to reward her. The touch went unnoticed in her distress. “I’m only saying I… I don’t know? I’d never heard such a thing before, but it’s not as if any women in the palace speak freely with me. I only even heard this by coincidence.”

The thrumming was back again, insistent and prickling. The longer Rafayel stared, the more determined she seemed to avoid his gaze. There was no mistaking, now, the nature of her restlessness. He nibbled at her knuckle to see her jump. To feel her twitch of shocked pleasure echoed beneath his skin.

“Do you want to try?”

Her eyes locked onto his. Rafayel peered back with a handsome curve to his lips. The world was bending for him again. She felt as if she were standing before some great beast’s lair and the earth itself was roiling beneath her, looking to tip her through its yawning mouth.

In her silence, Rafayel scratched his thumbnail across the cup of her palm, just enough to tickle.

“The Tome calls me your bride,” she began shakily, struggling to regain her footing, “never your wife. The acolytes interpreted that to mean we never had a proper wedding ceremony. At the very least, they agreed our union was never consummated.”

Rafayel didn’t show much interest in her rambling. He was too interested in her hand—its curves and the elegant bends of her fingers. His eyes glinted at the gasp that left her when he bit into the heel of her palm. There was a flash of pink as he licked at the marks his teeth left. The touch, moist and deliberate, sent little fiery jolts along her web of nerves.

“So? Do you agree with their analysis?” He probed. His lips, mischievous to begin with and now given purpose, passed over the network of veins peeking through the thin skin of her wrist. “The Tome said nothing about the Sea God’s Bride attempting to defile Him in the dead of night, yet here we are.”

He was goading her. It was working. She scowled at him, growing lightheaded again in his toying. “I wasn’t in my right mind.”

“And now?”

Now? Now, she could only wish she were mad. At least then, she could fend him off with incoherency. But Rafayel had caught hold of this sturdy thread of her desire. He was testing her, pushing her to prove herself limpid by spinning her own logic aloud.

Rafayel pressed another kiss to her wrist, letting it linger. “Your analysis, Your Highness,” he nudged.

“I… I think…” She looked aside a moment, struggling to fit her thoughts together. Her wound had long gone quiet, but faintly, she thought she could hear the laughter of women in her ears.

The earth lurched. She tipped.

“I think I freed you to determine whether what was written could be changed.”

Her words, though soft, hit him in a physical blow. Rafayel showed no outward sign of excitement. Likewise, his bride looked back with her own calm veneer. But he could feel her. Her pulse hammering in her wrist. Her hesitant intrigue blending with his, primal and eager, as it coursed through his veins.

She went on. “Besides, if we… I mean, physicality is not the same as love, but it can pave the way, can’t it? Or so I’ve heard.”

Rafayel smirked. “You don’t have to provide more reason for my benefit. As I’ve told you, seeing to your health is my duty. If this is what you require to 'fend off your fevers,' then so be it.”

“It’s not just that.”

He’d taken so much joy in her embarrassment that it disappointed him to see it fall away so suddenly. It was even worse to see it replaced with a sullen frown. Her gaze wandered past him, to some lonely place that unsettled him for being so out of reach.

“I just think,” she said, more to herself than him, “I’d like their tales to be honest, for once.”

There was a faint pang in Rafayel’s chest. He could not tell whether it was his or hers. Regarding her thoughtfully, he said, “They’ll be as honest as you’d like them to be.”

She turned back to him, tenderly accepting the promise with a grateful smile. He dropped her hand to touch once more at her forehead and she blushed at the contact, the import of the situation finally settling over her. Rafayel hummed, pretending not to notice.

“Still warm.” He eased back against the headboard. His expression was open and pleasant, though edged with expectation. “Well? Tell me how you’ll have me.”

She couldn’t say whether it was her illness or shame that summoned her brief wave of vertigo, threatening to topple her to the floor.

She sat back on her haunches to center herself. Rafayel was laid out before her, looking like an offering carved from ivory and opalite. Her gaze skated along the markings across his torso, following the swirls of luminescent blue back to his waist. She lingered, remembering how very soft he was there. How smooth.

“It’s rude to stare.” Rafayel canted his head in his amusement, a lock of his hair shifting over his shoulder and spreading attractively over his chest.

Her mouth felt very dry suddenly, but not for the fever. “Could I just… touch you? Like before?”

It was a predictably tame request, but the circumstances gave him pause. He glanced meaningfully at his scales before clarifying, “Like this?”

She nodded, and Rafayel felt a long-forgotten muscle clench between his hips. He looked across her body, recognizing the difference between them, before sweeping his hand towards his tail in a gesture of surrender.

She returned her head to his lap with a relieved sigh. As her eyes drifted shut to bask in his temperature, he entertained the possibility that she’d fall asleep like this. It would be like her to retreat to her asceticism and feign ignorance in the morning. But before long, she splayed her fingers across him, feeling at where his thighs would be.

His tail’s iridescence shifted between the shadows of her fingers. Her heart was racing despite how slowly she moved, each inch tentatively crossed. When she finally touched those same scales that started this, reminiscent of velvet and finely knit, Rafayel startled her out of her trance with a satisfied grunt.

She looked up and found him smiling down at her, encouraging and patently amused. “You’re soft here,” she said quietly, seeking comfort in conversation. “It’s… unexpected.”

“You think so?” He teased. “I never put much thought into it.”

Very sincerely, she murmured, “It’s nice.”

She reached higher, feeling for the true border of where his scales ended and his skin (hide, those awful scholars had called it) began. Her purpose drew her higher than she would’ve guessed, well past the subtle flare of his hips. Rafayel’s fins twitched against her, tickling at her nose, when she finally found skin at his waist.

His reaction caught her eye. She poked at a tender spot at his side and watched his muscles go conspicuously taut. With a bit of a smile, she observed, “You’re ticklish.”

“I am not,” Rafayel said curtly. “Have you ever had someone poking at you for their own amusement? It’s bound to be uncomfortable.”

She giggled, a delicate sound that resonated in Rafayel’s chest and nestled there. “Suit yourself.”

She continued her exploration, feeling her way towards his center. Giving in to an indecent impulse she’d felt on the day she met him, she groped along the shadows of his abs. She didn’t need to glance up to know Rafayel was back to smirking down on her with all of his arrogance. He was well aware of his virility and his effect on others—on her—but he never tired of reminders, for better or worse.

He fidgeted once more as she brushed across his navel, taking in a deep breath as she traveled lower still. Skin turned to scales again and she pressed more firmly, getting a sense of their give. And then—

His tail jumped violently, distracting her from Rafayel’s sharp breath above. “You… found that quicker than I expected.”

She lifted herself to review her discovery. As she’d expected, the tip of her finger was dipped into him, parting an imperceptible slit in his skin. She pushed a bit deeper and began to feel along the length of it, pausing at Rafayel’s hiss. “Does it hurt?”

The scales on his cheeks had returned with a vengeance, glinting and spreading lower in intricate constellations. “No,” he replied tightly. “It’s only sensitive. It’s not so different from your own.”

There was a disturbance in the air between them, like a fractured musical note. Rafayel looked at her in faint surprise. “You’ve never…?”

She shook her head, pointedly concentrating on the parting seam of his flesh. ‘Never’ wasn’t quite the word. Of course she’d reached between her legs at some point, but she’d never had the compulsion to do so beyond academic interest. She only did it the first time because it seemed like she should make an effort to learn her body and her touch was graceless when she did. Her desires, uncommon to begin with, would have been better served by groping in the dark.

“I had other concerns.”

“…So you did.” Rafayel’s breath hitched as her fingers caught on the bottom of his slit. “You can press deeper.”

She tilted her head curiously, following his suggestion. Rafayel’s lips parted in pleasure as she sunk in to her second knuckle, testing. He was damp inside, gripping her in welcome. “You’re hot here,” she observed.

“Am I?” He might have sound more amused if not for the huff that escaped him when she shifted, drawing her finger back just to slip another alongside it.

She nodded, ignorant of how her attentions had his brain sparking, each exploratory touch igniting him like steel to flint. “It’s a first.”

There was pressure building against her knuckles, firm and curved. She pushed further and was rewarded by his tail flicking with pleasure near her feet. She could feel ridges she’d only seen rendered in charcoal, hardening and growing in size. She couldn’t quite push down to the root of her fingers and the position was awkward, but she could feel that his channel turned at a bit of an angle. Her fingertips brushed barely at another ring of muscle below his cock.

“Move them.”

She looked up and caught Rafayel’s hooded gaze with hers. His eyes were swimming with color—navy and plum grounded with the same blazing crimson that haunted her nightmares, as darkly prismatic as the sea the night before.

She obeyed, drawing her fingers out and watching his face go dumb with approval as they slid back in. Then again, this time making a point to drag her knuckles firmly across those sleeping ridges. Rafayel’s lips parted with an undignified groan, fins fluttering wildly against the fabric of her shift.

As quickly as Rafayel began to swell against her gentle pumps, he became astonishingly slick. The lubricant he produced was more viscous than she remembered her own to be, coating her digits in a thick, silken layer. Soon, there was enough to make her attentions sound even more obscene than they were, each quiet squelch drowning out the trickling of the pool.

She noticed, then, that his slit was starting to split around a rising bulge. It was bright in color, somewhere between a soft pink and stark white. She paused, withdrawing her fingers to touch at it, wetting the surrounding scales as he caught his breath.

“Do you think we’ve done this before?”

There were few things crueler she could’ve done than to start an idle conversation. Rafayel himself felt fevered, already half-puddled into the sheets. “I can’t say,” he managed. “If we did, I—”

He paused as she laid her fingers on either side of his opening and scissored it a tad wider. His slick webbed out in a fine layer between them, flashing with the hues of a bubble over the crest of his bulge. 

“My body,” he tried again. “My body might have retained its memory of yours.”

“Because of our bond?”

Eloquence quickly draining, Rafayel could only respond with a nod.

She hummed, seemingly satisfied with his answer. She leaned closer to the swell in his tail, studying him as if she were searching for hidden meaning in the Tome itself. He throbbed for it. He could have laughed at how his body reared up for something so simple as her attention if not for how she dipped her head low, tasting him with the tip of her tongue.

His tail kicked up with another gasp. “What are you—”

She frowned slightly, assessing his flavor. There was a predictable brine to it, and it was certainly bodily. But there was a note almost herbal in nature—earthy and bittersweet. It left a faint tingling along her tastebuds, a bit like what a touch of tea tree oil might bring though not as cooling.

Something to ease the pain, perhaps.

She licked again, with more confidence. Rafayel grunted and his tail thrashed lightly against her shins. She looked up at him with a frown. “Would it be better if I laid on you?”

She was far too casual about this. Rafayel expected more reluctance from someone so inexperienced. Instead, she set upon him as if she were testing a series of hypotheses, and maybe she was. He couldn’t decide whether her innocent curiosity was charming or infuriating at this point.

“Where did you learn to do that?” He demanded.

But he didn’t protest when she hiked her skirt up higher and straddled his tail. She leaned over him, flicking her tongue at an emerging ridge, low but prominent.

“More whispers?” Rafayel gasped. “Or did you learn from your books?” He bucked under her as she scissored him wider again, delicately licking along the edges of his slit. “Proper ladies aren’t meant to know such things.”

Whispers, was the answer. More babbling of the maids. Human men seemed more straightforward, though. She once heard a girl claim it was little more fun than polishing a pole.

She shot him a pointed look. “And yet, you haven’t stopped me.” Rafayel huffed at her triumphant smirk.

She eyed his cock as it traitorously pushed a bit further from his slit, spying a space emerging at the underside of the bulge. Licking once more, she said, “You taste… good? I think.”

Rafayel began to laugh, only for it to fall into a sharp breath as her fingers poked at that sliver of an arc. He watched her, marveling at the contrast between her myopic focus and the fevered flush on her cheeks. Whatever discomfort her illness brought on seemed to have been temporarily forgotten in her investigation.

Charming, Rafayel decided. Her curiosity was charming.

“At this angle, you’ll have to do a bit more to coax it out.”

She gave him a determined nod, touching more insistently and teasing him out until the space was more discernible. Rafayel grunted in approval as she tentatively poked into it. “Yes. Like that.” She slipped her fingers more securely beneath him and he encouraged her with a low groan. “Grip it. Gently, now.”

She did her best to wrap her thumb around him, hesitating when his tail rocked beneath her with his full-body shudder. Rafayel shook his head to ease her mind, loosely laying his hand over her wrist to guide her in barely-there pumps over the slim stretch of flesh she’d caught hold of. He released her when she began to move of her own volition, lengthening each stroke by small amounts then by inches as he slowly unfurled.

His cock was, absurdly, larger than the example she’d seen. The ridges she’d groped at spanned the full length of him, subtle to the naked eye but flexible enough to flare on the upstroke. The glans came to a rounded but speared point that seeped with his natural fluids, ramp-like when viewed in profile. His shaft was overall tapered, its girth a bit smaller than a human cock’s at the tip and expanding beyond it at the base.

Or, at least, what she’d thought was the base.

Her eyes went wide as his cock followed the movement of her hand and continued to extend, pushing beyond the circle of her fingers and coiling loosely around her wrist. She looked up at Rafayel, finally giving him the panicked wonder he was searching for. His smirk was devastating—boastful and omniscient.

“It likes you,” he quipped.

She swallowed nervously, reviewing her knowledge to calm herself. She’d already known he was prehensile. He had to be. While the scholars speculated that Lemurians would travel to the shallows to mate, that didn’t rule out the possibility of intercourse underwater. Being able to retract and thrust out from his sheath reduced the importance of being able to move one’s hips, an important factor in a setting that lacked a solid surface to brace himself on.

There was little need for him to flaunt the full length of it, though. Rafayel was just being cocky. For lack of a better word.

But there was still…

She paused, feeling her way back down his shaft. His cock coiled a bit tighter, actually tugging her closer as Rafayel raised a brow. “You really did make good use of your time at the library.”

She ignored him, concentrating instead on an inch of flesh poking out from the top of his slit.

“Go on then,” he said breathily, lifting his hips up as she gently pinched the protrusion between her fingers, stroking as she did before and teasing it out. “What did you learn?”

It rose up far quicker than his first cock. A few more touches revealed a few more inches, though she stroked still. Fully emerged, it was a bit longer than the distance between her knuckle and wrist. Rather than cylindrical, it was like a wide, cupped tongue—concave, flat, about two-fingers thick and narrowed at the point. Its curve fit neatly against the shaft of his first cock and, as the scholars did, she found it difficult not to compare its presumed function to a shoehorn.

It was stiff and inflexible in comparison to the cock around her wrist. Unlike the barely-there pink of the first cock, its hue matched the maroon markings on his torso, dark as wine. Though its tip was rounded, there was a curl to it that hooked inward, towards his navel. As far as what she’d learned: this presumably served the same purpose as the ridges.

As lightheaded as she was starting to feel, her words were steady. “It keeps your mate in place.”

His stiff cock swelled between her fingers. It was then she noticed the puckered opening at the tip that, like the other, wept in a steady stream. His larger cock squeezed at her wrist as Rafayel made a loose sound in confirmation, not quite a laugh or a moan.

She hesitated as she considered her options, of which she knew little. Deciding to press forward with what had pleased him so far, she leaned forward and lowered her head in invitation. With an amused grunt, he unwound his cock from her wrist and raised it to her mouth.

Her lips parted shyly, as if to feed on a bite of food. Rafayel scoffed, brushing her hair back to look upon her face. “You’ll have to open up wider than that.”

He pushed his cockhead between her lips before she could reply, using his tapered shape to ease her mouth open. The indignant sound at the back of her throat was drowned out by his shocked hiss.

“You’re… scorching,” he bit out. He touched at the tender skin behind her ear, still persistently warm—but no measure of her temperature could have prepared him for this. If this was her mouth he couldn’t even imagine…

She looked at him in concern. As she made a move to pull off of him, Rafayel shook his head. “Just let me—” He drew back and pushed in again, groaning as his tip disappeared between her lips. “Let me adjust.”

He repeated the motion, his fins twitching at either side of her. The heat was shocking but addictive, whetting his appetite like a numbing spice. Once the initial shock faded, Rafayel lingered on her tongue a moment before nudging deeper. The look she gave him was a bit cagey, though resolute. The collar of her dress shifted, tugging lower as she scooted up his tail, granting him wordless permission to plunge deeper into her mouth.

But even now, the look in her eyes was more evaluative than anything. It was unfair, Rafayel thought, that he should be the only one falling dumb like this. An indecent part of him ached to thrust with abandon, drive her to a point where every glint of her reason blinked out of sight.

Instead, he traced at her cheek and patiently ordered, “Relax your jaw.”

He shivered as she followed his instruction. As he eased himself deeper, his fingers grazed at her chin, tipping her up to look at him as he coached her through the motions. “Just like that. Mind your teeth. Keep it soft.”

Her tongue tingled as his cock crossed over the length of it, building up to a gentle rhythm. Each thrust lingered on a restrained quiver, giving her time. She willed herself to ignore the strange flaring of the ridges, to swallow the excess of her spit and his fluid between strokes. She was barely taking any of him—little more than his head. The thought dizzied her nearly as much as her nightmares did, circling between her hips in a fervid pool.

When she seemed comfortable enough, Rafayel asked, “Can you take more?” The question was kind but urgent. She hesitated before nodding, wondering what ‘more’ could possibly be. He let his fingers drift lower, touching at the pulse below her jaw as he prompted, “Now your throat.”

He waited as she processed his direction. She took a breath, opening up for him and holding still. She dreaded the moment her body would buck against the intrusion, her failure inevitable. Only, his tip carefully burrowed forward and her throat remained pliant, apparently relaxed by that medicinal quality of his slick.

Rafayel sighed softly, just as relieved to see her body accept him. His cock drew back, then delved further still. Not very far, just enough for her to get used to the feel of him reaching into her. He’d work her up to taking him as he truly wanted another day: her lips flush to his tail as he fucked into her mouth.

For now, he kept a languid pace, allowing her to play with different swirls of her tongue. Her experimentation was a little clumsy, but not unpleasant. He basked in every bit of effort she gave him, tolerating her choices and affirming others with soft grunts.

His thoughts slowed with the seconds. Time between them passed in a slow, hazy drip, only for him to be shocked out of his stupor when she wrapped her lips more firmly around him and sucked.

She glanced up at his low groan, admiring the strained pucker to his brow. He gave her a sharp nod—a plea in a gesture—and she answered it, hollowing out her cheeks as much as she could. His own tongue peeked out from between his teeth in a strip of pink.

He looked a little pathetic like this. Or at the very least, mortal. She couldn’t tell whether it was the fever or the thought that she’d stripped him of all his godly insouciance that had her warming in a sudden rush. She shimmied forward in search of a more comfortable position to torment him from and Rafayel raised his tail to encourage her, brushing against the growing pressure between her thighs.

She took a sharp breath at the contact, a sound that surprised her and seized at his attention.

“You liked that?” He asked intently, pressing his tail up into her once more.

The touch was overwhelmingly foreign. She hadn’t noticed that her underwear was damp and sticky until now. The texture of his scales, which felt so subtle on her cheeks, was maddening against that sensitive place. Not quite a tickle, but a pleasant feeling that quickly spread.

She moaned a bit helplessly, her mind clouding as he began to undulate against her. Before long she felt dream-like again, not for her fever but for how she was tumbling between sensations—the rolling of his tail and his cock’s steady pushing. His scales brushed across a pinpoint of flesh that pierced through the blur and radiated out like a fallen ember on parchment. Too much, she thought at first, only Rafayel was relentless, pressing up into her until the heat encroached on the boundaries of her anatomy in a controlled burn.

It was too much, until it wasn’t nearly enough.

With a thoughtless whine, she let her thighs fall open wider and drove her hips down.

“Oh,” Rafayel moaned, throbbing as he took in the sight of her. Her lips were already swollen around him, flushed and fucked red. She moved her hips against him at a handful of angles before settling into one, riding him in a slow grind. She looked like an animal in heat rubbing herself against him, craving more even as he fed his cock into her mouth.

He fondly ran his fingers through her hair before gathering it in a loose fist at the nape of her neck. “There,” he crooned as her eyes fluttered open, the spark in them dimmed and quickly growing dimmer. “That’s a good bride.”

She moaned and felt ashamed for it. It was less of how you’d speak to your betrothed and more like the praise you’d heap on a pet. But she wanted more of it—his command and commendation. Caught between the urge to unravel or to please him, her hand moved from his abdomen to wrap around his other cock.

Lightning couldn't have struck him more fiercely. Rafayel’s pelvic fins flared out on either side of her, shivering over her sheets as his mouth dropped open with his loudest groan yet. “That’s—”

He moaned brokenly as she stroked at him,  her thumb pressed firmly to the thick vein running along the inside of the curve.

“Good,” he finished belatedly. “That’s good. How are you so…?”

The rhythm of his other cock stumbled as he gathered himself. Rafayel’s eyes fell shut with a determined grunt, his tongue flicking around another moan as he matched his thrusts with the pumps of her hand. His pelvic fins relaxed in hesitant quivers only to spread again in starts, his stiff cock spurting slightly with each snap. Even the fins at his ears fluttered, the movement as delicate as the flap of a moth’s wing. If not for the fact that she understood this to be a pleased reaction, she would have thought his expression was twisted in pain.

She sucked at him again, careful to do it whenever his cock drew back. Rafayel’s fins twitched once more, then again with fervor at the vibration of her satisfied hum.

There were fragments of curses falling from his lips—words he’d kept out of her ears for propriety’s sake. She knew the exact moment he lost himself by his hand tightening in her hair, her scalp lightly prickling, and his shaking, desperate, “Oh, f—uck.”

His head fell back against the cushions. His body trembled, tail moving against her in jerky movements and hips straining over the sheets. His fins were moving wildly now, shimmering and casting out like translucent sails.

The cock in her hand throbbed in her grip, swelling for such a long moment she hesitated in concern. In the pause, the fluid from its tip turned thick and pearlescent, squeezing out of him as if out of great effort before shooting towards his navel in a stronger stream.

It was the only warning she had before Rafayel’s cock surged to the back of her throat. He held her in place as it went rigid, muscle rippling as it spilled his release down her throat in harsh jets. Within moments, his seed flooded her mouth. She bucked up into his palm and sputtered around him, lips dribbling at their corners. Rafayel cursed again, hurriedly releasing her to grip himself at the base.

She dragged herself off of him, coughing. He shuddered and grunted through the last of it, unable to help himself from thrusting through the circle of his fist. He watched in horrified fascination as his cock pumped out more of his seed in thick, glistening ribbons that fell across the curve of her cheek, his scales, the front of her dress.

He was somehow still dripping when he reached for her and frantically asked, “Are you all right?”

She nodded, even through the coughing. She’d managed to swallow some of it. She could feel it thinly lining her throat, making every breath feel constrained and more than a little shameful. She didn’t realize that tears were beading at the corner of her eyes until he brushed them away.

“I didn’t—” Rafayel faltered. It was a rare moment when he actually looked sheepish, his eyes wide and sorry. “It took me by surprise.”

She shook her head again, rasping, “That’s good, right?”

“I—” Rafayel gaped at her before his expression melted into one of amused disbelief. “I should have locked your handmaids away with Hawkern.”

Her brow furrowed, and his shoulders shook with a restrained laugh. “Yes,” he answered, working to wipe away the white streaks across her face. “It’s good.”

She gave him a reluctant smile before sitting up. They both paused, taking in the scene. Rafayel’s larger cock lay on his tail, subtly pulsing. His seed collected in small puddles that glinted atop his scales and in some places slid in thick drops onto the sheets. She touched at one, watching as it clung to her finger in a stubborn strand.

“There’s so much,” she observed quietly.

Rafayel eyed what seed had spattered onto her breasts. “It must have been unpleasant.”

She paused to reflect. “I’m just not used to it. I wouldn't mind doing it again. It was strange but it didn’t taste... bad.”

Rafayel scoffed, if only to disguise just how much her answer pleased him. “It’s good that you’ve never availed yourself of this remedy before. I wouldn’t have anyone else hear my bride talking like this.”

The remedy.

She raised her knuckles to her forehead to take her temperature, then turned it to do the same with her palm. Her skin was still hot. She felt a bit better than when they’d started, far more sticky but less floaty, but she figured it was more a matter of adrenaline rather than any real sign of recovery.

“It didn’t work.”

“You didn’t come.”

He said it so casually, but it meant little to her. “What?”

Rafayel’s gaze was fixed to her chest, his mouth watering. “Come here.”

She looked at the mess of his lap in a bit of a panic. With a soft snort, he extended his hand. He helped her move higher, positioning her such that she could feel his stiff cock directly below her center as she settled. She gasped as his other rose behind her, sliding beneath the skirt of her shift and along her rear.

As she turned over her shoulder to look down at it, Rafayel leaned forward and laved his tongue over the dirtied swell of her breast. He firmly laid his hand across her lower back, holding her in place as she squealed. “What are you doing?”

Rafayel moaned softly, his cocks twitching as he savored the combined taste of his seed and her sweat. He licked across her chest in slow, flat stripes, cleaning her before closing his lips wetly at her collarbone.

“I suspect,” he rasped, running the tip of his cock along the edges of her underwear with shocking dexterity, “that this remedy of yours concerns your pleasure more than mine.”

“I don’t understand.”

She jumped as his other hand skated up her torso to cup her breast, guiding her nipple to his wanting mouth. His suckling was a cutting sensation, almost stinging for how intense it was. She clung to his shoulders, gasping softly as she pebbled under his tongue.

“What you did for me,” he explained simply, “I’ll do for you.”

He tugged her skirt to waist before cupping her rear. Rafayel pulled what flesh he could grip aside, letting his cock push more firmly between her cheeks. Her underwear clung to her uncomfortably, soaked through with his copious fluids and hers.

His mouth drifted across her chest to lap at her other nipple, humming contentedly as she fidgeted over his stiff cock. It twitched faintly below her, responding to the gentle friction of her underwear and her cunt’s radiant heat.

She struggled to remember through what she’d learned between her reading and eavesdropping. Yes, she’d heard some women crow about how they loved the feel of sex, but she’d always thought the height of the man’s pleasure marked the end of things.

“But you’re done?”

Rafayel paused before nipping sharply at her breast. He watched her flinch without much pity, his glare frigid. “You forget what, exactly, you’re betrothed to.”

She yelped as the tip of his cock touched more insistently at the edge of her underwear.

“I’m not a man,” Rafayel purred, sliding his tip beneath the fabric and pushing to move it aside. “Humans might be content to leave their lovers wanting, but Lemurians aren’t so easily satisfied.” Then, with a smug shrug, he added, “Besides. The first just takes the edge off.”

“The first?”

His cock pushed harder, doing little beyond slicking her skin and bunching her underwear over one cheek.

Rafayel expressed his frustration with a sharp tsk. The hand on her torso delved to join the other beneath her skirt, gripping at the hem of her underwear. “We’ll get you another,” he muttered, anticipating her protest as he tore it with a decisive twist.

She gasped but didn’t dare complain as he did the same to the opposite side, drawing the ruined cloth out from between her legs. Rafayel threw it aside with a reproachful scowl. It hadn’t even hit the sheets before his cock slithered in to take its place.

Her hand flew to cover her mouth as he slotted himself between his curved cock and the crux of her legs, squealing as he used the rounded point of his tip to tease her lips apart.

He groaned as he grazed his teeth across her shoulder. Her cunt was silken and scalding. It pulsed against his tip as if attempting to suck him in deeper, begging to be filled. Fighting the urge to take her in one stroke, he pecked soft kisses at the crook of her neck, her jaw, wherever he could reach.

“Listen to yourself,” he murmured, hovering at the corner of her mouth. His cock poked again at her entrance, just enough for her to hear the quiet crackling of her own arousal. “Seems like you enjoyed sucking at me like that just as much as I did. You’re already wet.”

She captured his lips if only to silence him, sparing her the embarrassment. Or: she simply wanted to kiss him again, the way he’d kissed her the first time he demanded her love.

He’d sent her reeling that day, his skill leaving her dazed and blinking in the light of his temple. Now, to kiss him was to court oblivion. Rafayel surged up to answer her, gripping her at the base of her neck and her thigh. She mirrored him by tangling her fingers in the long locks of his hair, somehow soft despite the saltwater. His every cord of muscle went taut, tongue sweeping between her lips in a promise to devour her whole.

The taste of his seed lingered and passed between their mouths, heady and bittersweet. She wondered if there was some lurking aphrodisiac in it, a chemical reaction that nullified her apathy to the needs of her body. More likely, she was drunk on every new sensation Rafayel was generous enough to give her, whether by lips or hands or cock.

She moaned at the feel of her chest pressed against him, her shift itching and damp atop her breasts. His shaft eased her open in slippery strokes, sliding to-and-fro, his ridges flaring over that pinpointed place as he drew back.

His tip caught on her entrance and ran longingly across her opening before retreating. More to himself than anything, Rafayel gasped, “Not yet.” He tugged impatiently at the ties at the nape of her neck before dragging her dress up over her head, breathlessly demanding, “Let me see you.”

He cast it beside the tatters of her underwear and pulled back to drink in every precious detail: the unveiled shade of her nipples, each thin, pale bolt of a stretch mark and her belly’s soft pouch. He trailed his fingers down her center, watching her shiver with the effort to hold still as he finally reached the coarse thatch of hair at the apex of her thighs.

When he rotated his hand to touch her, he brushed once more against that pinpointed place. She jumped, casting her stare down. She remembered the diagrams—the shy bud of flesh above her entrance.

Rafayel’s eyes sparked at her reaction. “There?”

She nodded, reaching down to guide him by the wrist, adjusting his position until her clit rested squarely against the pads of his fingers. “It’s supposed to—Gently, though. There’s a high concentration of nerves—”

Rafayel chuckled, quieting her with a light, circling rub that left her gasping. “My sweet, curious bride,” he said indulgently, grinning as he sought out her mouth again. “I don’t really care.”

He stroked her clit as he kissed her. She struggled to reciprocate, feeding him sharp whimpers as he played different degrees of pressure and alternated his rubbing with light flicks. When his cock returned to her entrance, tapping ever so slightly forward, she broke from him, allowing her head to fall forward with a low moan.

His tip eased a bit deeper, enough that she could feel beginnings of a stretch. Rafayel sighed at her ear, his breath shaking. “You’re tight. And burning.” Enough to make him tremble. Enough to have his pleasure teetering on the border of hurt.

The hand between her legs crept forward, testing whether he could open her a bit wider with his fingertips. His cock pushed into her and her body resisted him, struggling to accept even the expanding girth of his head.

“Rafayel…” She whispered meekly, clutching at him with a shiver.

“Slow,” he assured her, using his other hand to rub at the small of her back. “We’ll go slow. But you have to relax.”

She nodded nervously. Her voice was smaller than he’d ever heard it when she responded, “Okay.”

He kissed her cheek, fingers petting at her clit to distract her as his cock continued to ease her open. He nibbled at the shell of her ear as the fine point of his tip tentatively dipped out and in.

It worked, for a time. Her breaths deepened and eventually there was slack in the line of her shoulders. He waited as her hips began to move subtly into the touch of his fingers before venturing deeper, only for her to immediately clench in anxious denial.

He grunted at the feel of her puckering around his tip, fins flicking at the cruel temptation. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked, mistaking it for an annoyed sound.

Rafayel frowned, nudging at her with his nose until she looked him in the eye. “Don’t be.” Flashing a soft smile, he added, “Slow. Remember?”

She nodded, but her eyes were disheartened. “Right.”

Rafayel rested his hands on her thighs, lightly massaging them as he took stock of the situation. It was clear she was growing weary. The fog was rolling back into her gaze, whether due to her symptoms or her increasing need for sleep. More than anything, he feared what failure would mean for her mood in the morning. Knowing her, she’d take far too much of the blame upon herself, rendering the night’s small wins in baring her heart to him moot.

He’d thought it would be easier for her to take him like this, but…

“Lift up,” Rafayel said decisively, touching at her waist.

She obeyed with a puzzled frown, rising onto her knees and looking down as his cock receded behind her once more. He reached between them to grip at its rigid counterpart and angled himself at her entrance.

“We’ll try this,” Rafayel murmured, notching its narrow tip in her. “Hold on to me. Drop down now. Carefully, at your own pace.”

She nodded reluctantly, gripping at his shoulders before easing onto him. The shape of this cock was easier to handle. At least at the tip, it had less girth. But its blunt hook introduced a pressure that shocked her at first, pushing against across her front wall on her way down.

She paused when she felt the stretch of him, his tapered shape working her open. She paused, and Rafayel squeezed encouragingly at the seat of her hips. “Again. See if you can go further.”

She rocked back up on her knees and repeated the motions, rising and easing back down. She let her hips fall a bit more surely this time, stopping when he caught on a ring of muscle inside. She squeezed at his shoulders, steeling herself before pushing firmly into the point of resistance.

There wasn’t the painful snap that all the women taught her to expect, but a shifting—the tap to the final pin in a lock. She gasped softly as Rafayel slipped past that threshold, the sound merging with his contented sigh.

“There,” Rafayel breathed, his mind going cloudy as her body welcomed him with little spasms. She was so wet, utterly molten inside. She could end him like this, probably. He’d be the only Sea God to die on dry land. They’d find him on her sheets in the morning, wasted away like a salmon and halfway dissolved.

“Again,” he ordered. “Deeper.”

She moved carefully, parting her thighs a bit wider as she dropped and slid further down his length. His hook dug across a place she felt in her spine, igniting a pleasure that made her feel full—not of him, but of an intense pressure that spread out from the pit of her stomach and to her chest cavity, threatening to creep higher still.

“What…” She whispered, squeezing at him as he guided her hips in another shallow drop onto his cock. “What is that?”

“Does it feel good?” Rafayel asked, his tone was lower than she’d ever heard it and graveled.

“It feels…” She dropped again, slowing to savor how he scraped across that spot. “Oh.”

His stare was knowing and hungry. Words were unnecessary—he sensed her pleasure like the first ripple of a wave. He squeezed at her waist to guide her up and over him, this time hiking up his own hips to aid her in impaling herself.

She moaned, head dropping forward and arms slipping around his neck. “Oh, god.”

Rafayel grinned around a pleased breath. “Humans really are easy to please. You haven’t even taken all of it, yet you can barely string a sentence together.”

She flashed a stubborn scowl. “It feels like—” she began in another attempt. But words failed her, knocked out of her head as his cock opened her wider, her pussy stinging briefly before it accepted the new stretch.

Rafayel shushed her as he rocked up into her. She’d had enough time to adjust. Her cunt was quickly turning pliant, both by its own accord and the benefits of his slick. He squeezed at her hips as he taught her how to rock onto him rather than rise again. The last of his cock slipped in easily, eliciting a soft sigh from her as her groin pressed in on his tail.

“Feel that? All that trouble and now you’re swallowing me in.”

“Don’t—” she gasped, burying her face into his shoulder. “—talk like that. It’s…”

He drew her up and over him, letting her hear the sound of him sliding into her body. With a smug chuckle, Rafayel murmured, “You like it just fine.”

He guided her into an easy rhythm, hitting a depth she’d never been able or even thought to reach. She was plush inside and her walls were still swelling. He was beginning to feel that spot she liked so much, bumping up against his tip like a sponge and he wanted to fuck up into it, just to see how how flustered she’d get. But in this position with this cock, he could only manage so much.

His other twitched behind her, painfully neglected. She gasped softly, briefly jerking in his hold, as it found its own pleasure by grinding lazily into the cleft of her rear.

It was a chokehold on her senses no matter how gentle the pace, an impossible cloud of moisture and friction. Her pussy dribbled with fluids that had no opportunity to turn chilled between the hot grind of their hips. His larger cock coated her in a thick, sticky film that pulled off of her skin in fine strings.

They went quiet but for their moans, going dumb as they reveled in the new fit of their bodies. Rafayel turned to breathe in the scent of her hair as his mind went fuzzy, his omnipotence cast off. Gone was his sense of the sea and its tides. He could only think of how lovely she sounded and her pussy around him, clinging.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured suddenly. Then, in a strange compulsion, he asked, “Do you believe me?”

Her hips stuttered over him. He lifted his to make up for it, filling her in a smooth glide. Her voice went small again as she honestly replied, “I don’t know.”

And Rafayel didn’t care what they might have shared in their ancient past, or the grand vows they might have made. Even if they only had the privilege of this one life, he knew he’d still find her answer unbearably sad.

He touched at her jaw, guiding her lips back to his as if it would convince her that he wanted it. That he was eager to claim even just one more swath of skin. She obliged him, laying her hand on his cheek as she drew him in deeper. She moaned as his tongue touched at hers.

Out of curiosity more than anything, she began to rock against him with more urgency. She arched her back and shunted her hips forward, landing with a harder strike. Rafayel groaned, drawing back to look at her in wonder for having learned her own body so quickly. She looked back at him to see how quickly the blues in his eyes muddled as she thrust onto him again, newly determined to learn his.

She touched at the scales on his cheeks and watched him shudder. Her fingers followed their scattered lines to his neck. Rafayel’s eyes lingered on her lips as she loosely laid her fingers over his throat.

“You’re beautiful,” she said, just as compulsively. A little playful, though sincere.

His lashes fluttered as he processed her words. Then, with a smirk, Rafayel replied, “That, I know.”

She tightened her grip, feeling his breath hitch.

“And modest,” she quipped.

Later, she would wonder what could have ever possessed her to hold a god’s throat in her hand.

For the time being, she let her hand drift lower, following his scales like a trail of petals to the pale planes of his chest. There was a mole among the silver, a detail that pleased her inordinately. Rafayel grunted in soft amusement as she touched at it, if only to let it be known it was seen.

His nipples, unlike their surroundings, were a pale, eye-catching pink. Remembering her own pleasures of the night, she brushed her fingers across the edges of where the color turned, just barely grazing the bud.

Rafayel twitched as he had when she was first exploring his waist. She pressed closer to where his flesh rose and knotted, and he did it again. “Does it feel good?” She asked, rubbing across it in light circles.

He took a slow breath. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see more fine scales sprouting. Uncharacteristically bashful, he replied, “Yes.”

She smiled, watching him almost shyly as she began to rub at him. Rafayel tipped his head back against the headboard with another breathy chuckle. Speared on his cock and this discovery is what had her so pleased. She took his new position as an opportunity to lean forward and kiss at the slope of his neck.

Her fingers worked at his nipple, her touches augmenting the building pressure in his cocks. His larger pressed more insistently against her rear, seeking friction between her cheeks.

The one inside was lovely, dragging across all the right places. But now that she’d adjusted to him, she found that its curved shape left her wanting. Its width, so difficult to take initially, felt incomplete. Without quite knowing it, her body craved a full radial stretch.

She wanted more. She wanted, and it was more instinct than skill that had her snapping hips over him, the action resonating with a dull clap.

Rafayel groaned, his cocks throbbing, his largest aching to pierce her. He’d thought he could bear sparing her from both of them for the night. He couldn’t tell whether it was the fawning and nesting that chipped away at his reason, or their latent bond. All he knew was that his instincts were calling, begging him to claim her properly. To see the look on her face as he pumped her full of his seed.

With a desperate hiss, he slid his cock back between her legs, neatly laying his tip within the other’s curve. It poked at her on her next thrust, giving her pause.

Rather than fend him off as he expected her to, she rocked over him again, moaning as she took him in further. His head slipped in easily, her pussy closing around him where it couldn’t bear before. She moaned at the blunted burn of it, the edges of her entrance simmering despite his natural relaxant.

“Can I?” Rafayel asked, as if his second cock wasn’t already inside of her, trembling with the need to plunge deeper. “Want to take you with both.”

He squeezed at her to restrain himself as she ground down. “Slow,” she gasped out in reply, remembering how her mouth struggled to fit around him. Her jaw was still aching; she hadn’t even made it to his widest point.

Rafayel groaned in relief, drawing her lips to his as he promised, “Slow.”

She handed him the reins, waiting with her hips poised over him in offering. He fondled her as his cock worked her open with slow slides forward and patient retreats. He shushed softly at her whimpers. Massaged the swell of her breast. His fingers at her rear drifted, brushing up against her puckered opening because he’d made her just that slippery, and she gasped. Her cunt clenched around him like a vise.

He hesitated before exploring this entrance with more intention, gathering the remnants of his slick. She felt caught between again—his finger gently pressing at a place she would have died to have bared to anyone else, teasing her open along with his cock.

His fingertip slipped into her just as his cock pushed past the tip of the other, driving its hook even deeper into her front wall.

She couldn’t say what sort of sound escaped her. It sounded more like an animal’s cry as opposed to a moan. Rafayel paused, his own breath short with the effort of his patience. “Are you all right?”

After a long moment, she nodded. She was burning below, burning everywhere, in every sense of the word. She trembled against him, sweat collecting in the divots of her collarbone. “It’s good,” she gasped softly, actually pushing her hips down. “So good.”

He studied her, marveling at how blissful she looked. How desperate. “You’ll take all of me yet.”

She moaned as his touch grew bolder, his finger delving deeper and hooking in. She threw her head back, taking a gulping breath as he slid in to the widest point of his cock. Her body attempted to clamp down on him in resistance or in need, but it was denied even that simple pleasure. It was nearly a physical impossibility, her muscle stretched to its limit and unable to do much beyond containing him.

His first proper thrust cast the world in white. The second wrenched that animal cry out of her, a plaintive, “Oh, god.” He plunged in and out of her in hard, insistent thrusts, and before she knew it she was dropping into them just as hungrily, wanting to be full, wanting to take him deeper and deeper. She only breathed again, coming to, when she felt her groin finally slap against his fine, smooth scales.

“There we are,” Rafayel said, his breathing ragged. “You’ve been dishonest with me. You’re not so delicate after all.”

Her vision cleared, then all the world was him. His hair was mussed with her clutching at him and his eyes were dark and limitless, like lakes beckoning to a reckless diver, among his scales. She dropped her own to look between them and gasped at the contours of her lower stomach, warped around his shape of his cocks.

She realized then, what this felt like. It was more than a remedy, or a vice, or a fleeting pleasure. It was a redefining of the limits and potential of her flesh. She’d offered herself herself up to the Sea God, and by Rafayel’s hands, she was being remade.

“Please,” she croaked softly. “Please move.”

Rafayel’s lips parted, tongue peeking again. But he paused, suddenly touching at the pulse point of her jaw, her collarbone, then her back. Sweat wetted his fingers and her skin, making her glisten even in the shadows.

She blinked dazedly at him as he leaned forward with a smug chuckle, telling her, “Your fever just broke.”

He surged into her, rendering her speechless. She fell forward with a gasp as his finger began to pump. Another poked at her, circling her rim with the last remnants of his fluids before pushing in easily, stretching her wider and sharing its space.

She sobbed against his shoulder, caught in the churn of his attentions. His curved cock pushed firmly into her walls while his fingers moved in her with lazy strokes. His other was a slick glide between them, his ridges flaring and catching on the texture of her pussy with enough friction that, if not for how wet they were, she might’ve thought she’d be entirely scooped out.

His pelvic fins were fluttering over her ankles. His tail twitched restlessly at the foot of the bed. Rafayel groaned miserably below her. The irony was that he was being rent apart by her relentless grip on him. Her impossibly compact fit.

“Look at me,” he demanded, reaching for her.

His hand traced at her cheek and she turned into it, mouthing at his fingers as they passed over the corner of her mouth. He throbbed as she chased his thumb, wrapping her lips around it and grazing her teeth across his knuckle with a needy moan. It was improper, it was perfect, her reason shed off somewhere with his divinity and forgotten.

“I should have you in front of the maids,” Rafayel heard himself say. “Show them just how true their whispers are. How good you are at taking me like this. Would you want that?”

She shuddered as she imagined all those women witnessing the plunder of her body, nothing but shock in those jeering mouths. What sort of sound they’d make to see her open around his fingers. To see Rafayel go dumb and twitching as his lengthy cock roamed between her legs. She shivered to imagine it—streaks of wine red and white-pink rippling as they plunged into her and disappeared.

He somehow swelled inside of her, somehow became bigger, as she whimpered around his thumb and gave him a little nod.

“Oh,” Rafayel moaned. His fingers left her and his hand dropped to grip at her hips, dragging her into the harsh thrusts of his cock.

She cried out with hurt and pleasure. His fins snapped and tickled at her feet. He struck a place deep in her, stiff and aching where the rest of her was soft. He burrowed forward, pressing his pointed tip flush against it. She pressed her hand to her distended stomach and felt the telltale swell of muscle heralding the moment he came, both from inside and out.

Rafayel muffled his cry against her shoulder, holding her in place as he spilled into her in a searing rush. She remembered what he’d said—the first was to take the edge off. Still, she was surprised to see him quake even more fiercely than last time, his stomach and cock tensing in brutal contractions as he pumped his seed into her in hard, prolonged waves.

He broke from her shoulder with a gasp, dragging her hips up and onto him. Their bodies parted and met again with a loud sloshing sound. He thrust into her again, his cock briefly going rigid and twitching, and she realized faintly that he still hadn’t stopped.

She couldn’t contain it—the flood of his seed or the force with which he filled her. Her thighs braced her against his thrusts, quivering with light spasms. She could still feel him stiffening in her in stops and starts. The excess dripped down his cocks in white rivulets.

Rafayel looked to the mess collecting in his lap and growled in frustration, a feral sound that briefly struck fear into the most reasonable, mortal part of her. “What a waste.”

Her back hit the bed.

Rafayel hovered over her, still rooted in her pussy. His hair spilled over his shoulder in elegant veils, delicately shielding her from the rest of the world.

She yelled, somehow feeling even fuller in this new position, as if he’d found a new channel into her body. She’d thought she’d taken all of him before, but now it felt he was truly sheathed to the hilt.

Gone was his patience, his bare attempts at human decency. Rafayel paid no mind to whether she’d adjusted or caught her breath before he moved.

He pushed on his hands to lift himself before thrusting back into her, falling with the full weight of his tail. His curved cock actually dragged across that spot inside with this new range of motion, just as it when he’d first penetrated her. But it felt even better now that she was so much slicker, so much fuller, her walls stretched taut and worked devastatingly raw.

Rafayel watched as her eyes rolled to the back of her skull, his fins quivering in pleasure. Her hand flew towards her mouth and he caught it before it reached its destination, pinning it fast to the bed. When she looked back up at him, his gaze was condemning, faintly glowing in the shade of arctic waters. He leaned closer as he fucked into her, tongue flicking behind fangs so subtle they could have passed for teeth.

“Come.”

“I-I don’t—” She stammered hopelessly. "I don't know how."

She didn’t know what to do with that awful, oppressive feeling he’d planted in her. It was nothing she’d ever felt before, a tangled skein of pressure winding up from the pit of her stomach and coiling around her lungs. There was a part of her that wanted to shy away from it, let it fade into obscurity. She thought it might kill her if he didn’t stop.

Rafayel’s breath left him in a frustrated hiss. He grumbled as he ran a hand down her calf, muttering under his breath, “Nonsense,” before hiking her legs over his arms. He fell onto her again, his eyes narrowing at the sound of her punched out moan. This time, he lingered a fraction of a second, angling to grind his scales across her clit.

The touch, one sensation atop of so many others, brought her into sharp clarity, as does a painter’s final stroke. She became aware of her every overworked muscle, every inch that he’d filled in her. The utter filth between her legs, seeping out of her onto the sheets and the small of her back.

The waters of the pool were growing disorderly again, splashing against the granite. Faintly, she could hear the whistling of the wind outside the temple, like a budding storm. Again and again, he fell against her without mercy, subjecting her to drag and thrust and grind. Her legs began to shake around his elbows, her body going numb everywhere but where it fed on him.

“Oh,” she moaned, the sound tight and almost weepy. “Oh, god.”

“My name,” he hissed, seizing her attention.

Romirro had no dearth of tales from the deep—creatures looking to lure in its pretty maidens. Which is to say, she should've known better than this. But she was only human, and her groom was at his most beautiful when he was lethal.

She gazed up at him, memorizing the cruel line of his mouth and the forbidding depths of his gaze. “Rafayel,” she breathed softly.

His fins snapped and quivered against the back of her thighs, and that was the last she could bear. Somewhere, in that tangle of hurt and pleasure and pressure, a frayed thread snapped.

“Rafayel.”

Her back bowed over the sheets. Her lips parted in a silent cry that dissolved into sharp moans, then wails. She was burning again, feverish, her temperature spiking by degrees. The pressure between her hips crumbled in horrifyingly, wonderfully slow breakage. Rafayel was benevolent, and he was awful, relentlessly pistoning into her—scraping and battering her into total collapse.

He loomed over her, lips parted and eyes narrowed as she endured the throes of her climax. They’d never done this before, he decided, or else fate was crueler than he could have ever imagined. He couldn’t imagine a world where he’d ever forget her looking at him as if he were her last lifeline, gasping and writhing on his cock.

There was a flicker in his stomach, familiar and needy. Rafayel groaned as it flared within instants, setting him ablaze. Again, his body begged, again, and he lowered himself. At his ear, her moans spilled in endless cycles of pleading for mercy, pleading for more. Above the rough plunder of his hips, he tenderly kissed the arched cords of her throat.

“Another,” he said hoarsely, not even knowing whether it was a demand or a warning.

“Yes,” she gasped as he ground into her—she was so full of him—and held her at that tremulous peak.

Their bodies ground against one another in feral desperation. She clutched at him, burying her face into his shoulder as he ground his stiff cock into her with harsh snaps of his tail. The other fucked into her below it at a rapid pace, its glide impossibly smooth. Eyes closed and mouths dropped open in tandem as their bodies struggled to contain the overload of sensations. Their nerves rubbed against each other in a constant churn of static and threatened to burst.

The sound of them echoed through the temple, a primal beat of clap and squelch and grunts. There were no personas left between them, no castellans or gods. 

Somewhere in the mess of it, she heard him say her name.

Her legs quaked at his elbows. Her teeth dragged across a dense patch of scales on his shoulder, ripping a hoarse shout out of him as she bit. Her cunt clamped down inasmuch as it could as he surged within her, and just as his next release began to fill her, she came with him, liquid spurting around his cocks as if to match.

“Oh, fu...” Rafayel moaned, gripping at her hips and angling them up into him as she wetted his scales. “Fuck.”

She sobbed at his shoulder, keening as she came down from her high. Rafayel slowed his pace, pouring into her in aching pulses as he eased her head back onto the bed.

There were the tracks of tears on her cheeks and more beading along her lashes. Rafayel touched at them and he must have looked worried, must have looked guilty, because she laid her hand over his and assured him, “It was just intense.”

It soothed him, but only slightly. He kept still through the last sputtering throbs of his orgasm, focusing instead on holding her and kissing along the trails of her tears. She held onto him, twitching around the swells of his cocks then not at all, her breaths eventually evening out.

Even then, Rafayel was disinclined to withdraw from her. He tenderly unhooked her legs from his arms for the sake of her comfort, somehow managing to stay sheathed. When she settled into a more comfortable position, he brushed her hair from her brow, frowning as he watched the strands unstick. “I should’ve gone easier on you.”

“I didn’t want you to,” she said quietly, “If we did this, I wanted all of you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be worthy of having the Sea God as my groom.”

He paused before smiling down on her, the slightest of wrinkles at the corner of his eyes. “You might regret that come morning.”

She actually pouted, simply arguing, “No.”

There was a warm feeling in his chest, the sort that comes with the first sip of tea. Rafayel chuckled indulgently, laying his forehead on hers. “No fever,” he observed.

Her expression softened, then reddened. Meekly, she agreed, “No.”

They laid like that for some time, simply basking in each other’s lazy kisses and touches. Rafayel withdrew from her naturally, his cocks gradually receding into his slit. His seed trickled out of her as her body returned to its own shape, closing with a soft, wet crackling. She flushed at the sound, even as Rafayel nuzzled at her cheek in a silent bid to pay it no mind.

He was being kind to her. He had been, ever since she was wounded. But the longer they laid there, nestled against each other like lovers, she found that she did dread the morning after all. Castellan and god, bride or groom. After a night like this, she couldn’t say what they would be.

Those sobering thoughts were a blight on her, ushering the aches and exhaustion back in. Rafayel frowned as her eyes began to turn dull and weary. “It’s late. We should get you to bed.”

Every bit of her wanted to agree. But she could feel the chill setting in in the mess between her legs, and it wasn’t particularly conducive to a comfortable rest. “I’m cold. And filthy.”

Rafayel laughed softly. There was a flash of light that briefly blinded her as his tail parted into legs. He rose from the bed, retrieving something from nearby. She realized that, unlike other times when he took his human form, he was still nude as he walked back to her. Absurdly, she couldn’t bring herself to look.

He nudged her out of the wet spot on the bed before bringing a cloth to the crux of her legs, gently wiping. It was lovely, though stung a little across her opening and…

“Is that my robe?”

“You bathed in the palace today. Peya didn’t provide towels.”

“But…”

The laundresses. Their whispers.

Rafayel eyed her carefully, intuiting her concern. “Are you sure you don't regret it? If you’re so worried about this, there’s more proof of what we did on the sheets. I could cast them in the sea after you wake.”

She’d somehow forgotten about the sheets. She didn’t even want to look at them. “I don’t regret it,” she replied. “The gossips will find something to whisper about, whether they have reason to or not.”

Rafayel said nothing, instead prompting her to roll over so he could clean the rest of her. She suddenly felt she was being unfair to him. There seemed to be an undeniable contradiction in fearing what people might say, while claiming not to regret what actually took place.

He parted from her, setting the robe aside in some lonely corner. She rolled over to face him when he returned.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I know it’s your duty to tend to me, but…”

Rafayel peered back at her, considering. Her hair was mussed, but only marginally worse than her usual bedhead. Her lips were attractively swollen, but by morning they wouldn’t look so obviously used. There was very little difference in her appearance, now that she’d been cleaned, except there was some new cast to her visage, only visible to his eye, binding her to him in shimmering color.

He drew her to him, letting her rest her head on his chest as her breathing slowed. “Duty or not, this isn't a matter you would ever owe me thanks for.”

She hummed noncommittally, curling against him, and drifted away.

That night, she dreamt not of images, but of color and sound. Tendrils the color of fresh blooms of heather cast over ivory. The protective, abyssal black of the deep sea. Whispers swept away by the hush of the tides and a flute playing a hymn beneath the steady toll of the morning bell. A glimmering, ephemeral, nacreous pink.