Moons blessing

Lauma’s help ran out sooner than the tent suggested it would.

She sat on a low crate after the hunt had thinned past their row and spoke like a woman who had inherited a house with the floor already gone.
Head priestess, yes.
Authority on paper, yes.
History, no.

“The scriptures burned,”
she said.
“The woman who held this seat before me vanished at the same day. I was raised from the inner attendants because someone had to stand in the gap and say the rites still meant something, and because i was blessed by her. I did not receive a library. I received ash and a title.”
Her mouth tightened.
“So if you came hoping I could tell you how the Scions were meant to live before this market, before the vials of dirt and the hymns that sound like love songs, I cannot. I am walking a road that was already broken when they put my name on it.”

Aether listened without dressing the disappointment.

“What I can tell you is timing,”
Lauma went on.
“After the fire, after she was gone, the rifts began to show themselves properly on the northern islands. Not just rumors. The kind that eat coastlines and do not close because a prayer was loud. I do not have proof that one caused the other. The cult changed its face in those same years. The reverence grew fanatic. Purer. More frightened. I have come to assume the abyssal decay and this new worship are not two stories. They could be related.”

Dehya made a low sound that was not agreement so much as a mercenary filing a connection.

The tent flap twitched.

A devotee’s head pushed through the sheets, pin bright on his collar, mouth already shaped around a report for the head priestess. He got as far as the first glance inward — five strangers, a blond man, the wrong quiet — and Dehya’s knuckles met his face.

It was a clean, ugly hit. Bone and cheek. The man left his own feet, turned a full flip in the narrow space outside, and hit the packed earth without a second thought left in him. The canvas settled. Nobody in the tent congratulated her. Dehya shook her hand once, as if the jaw had been an inconvenience, then she dragged him in by the heels.

Lauma closed her eyes for a second, not shocked, only tired in a new direction.

“That is the measure of it,”
she said.
“You watched what a rumor of you did to them. A threat to the story they are living inside. If I stood in front of that camp tomorrow and changed the doctrine in any way that mattered — there would be riots. There would be dead. I can redirect a hunt for a few minutes. I cannot turn a thousand people who have already decided what holiness looks like.”

Aether leaned his elbows on his knees.

“Then who can.”

“She can.”
Lauma did not decorate it.
“The goddess herself. If she walks back into this enclave and speaks, they will kneel because the idol they printed on flags is suddenly a mouth. Without her, I am a steward of a crowd I no longer steer.”

Citlali’s laugh was small and humorless.

“So we need the missing godess to fix the people who will kill us for wanting her.”

“Yes.”

The parting piece came without ceremony, as if Lauma had been holding it until she was sure they would leave with something sharper than apology.

“She was last seen on the northern islands,”
Lauma said.
“That is not Scion gossip sold at a stall. It is the last reliable sighting I trust. My people believe she is there to hold the Abyss with her own body. A guardian at the edge of the decay. It is a clean reason. It may even be partly true. The rest is unkown. Why she went. Why she has not returned. Why the rifts opened on that water and not this one first”

They were already on their feet when she finished.

The plan to slip the island and find Lisa’s watch before the torches learned a new direction. Lauma had given them the north and the limit of her power, and that should have been the end of the tent.

It was not.

Color climbed her throat first. The horns made the shyness look worse, a tall woman trying to shrink inside a title.

“Wait.”

(https://im.ge/i/QQ235aX)
(artist: FireflyLover)
Too soft. Then, because she had already spent her dignity on a lie to a mob:
“I know the timing is wrong. I know you have to leave...”
Her fingers twisted in the rope at her hip.
“A quick one. Please take me. I have never told the camp this. The moon’s blessing does not steady rites. It keeps me… hungry. Constantly. Fantasies I should not carry. You being in this tent has them running...I can feel it in my chest.”

Aether looked seeking at Rosaria.

Rosaria closed her eyes, exhaled through her nose, and flicked her hand as if waving off a fly that had followed them across four nations.

“Of course,”
she muttered.
“We cannot walk into a holy place without finding another one of these. Deal with her. Fast. I am not explaining a second hunt because you lingered”

Lauma’s thanks came out in a rush. She was already turning, already bending, shoving the ceremonial ropes aside with both hands. No cloth underneath. Nothing. The bend presented her openly, and from the clench of her ass a string of thick beads showed, dark and wet where they disappeared into her.

(https://im.ge/i/QQ23hYK)
(artist: chocoPizza)

She had not been exaggerating.
an impressed wistle from the lioness was the only comment she got from her display.

“I walk like this,”
she confessed, voice small and wrecked with honesty.
“Most days there is something in the other hole to match. I tell myself it is the blessing. That the moon put this heat in me and I am only obeying it.” A breath. Her hips tipped higher. “I also like it. Every second. I am not going to lie to the man I just asked to use me.”

Aether set a palm on the small of her back and took the end of the string.

He pulled the first bead out slow enough that her spine arched. The second came with a wet sound she tried to swallow. Piece by piece he emptied her ass, each knot thicker than the last, each one dragging a twitch out of her that ran down both thighs. Lauma’s hands fisted in her own robes. She pushed back onto the next extraction as if she could not decide whether she wanted them gone or wanted him to feel how long she had been carrying them.

(https://im.ge/i/QQ23iB9)
(artist: chocoPizza)
When the last bead left her she was open and fluttering, cunt gleaming beside the emptied ring, both holes twitching in the dim like they had been waiting for the blessing to be given a body.

“Quickly” she whispered. “Please”

He did not need the reminder.

Belt. The slick of her already painted on his knuckles from the string. He lined up and drove to the hilt in one stroke, burying himself in the priestess until his hips met the meat of her ass and her mouth opened on a sound she had no hymn for. Tight. Hot. The kind of grip that came from being filled all day by toys and still wanting the thing the toys were standing in for.

(https://im.ge/i/QQ23YHf)
(artist: chocoPizza)

Lauma’s forehead dropped toward the crate. Her horns scraped canvas.

“Yes— there— do not be gentle, there is no time for gentle—”