Recruiting Lae'zel

This is a Commissioned Story

“Good,” Shadowheart said, voice steady again. “Now that I’ve dealt with one head, perhaps you can put the other to use for at least the rest of the day, yes?”

Vurog guffawed, loud enough to send two gulls flapping away from the black ribs of the wreck. Shadowheart gave him a last flat look, wiped her mouth with the heel of one hand, and bent for her discarded gauntlets. By the time they were buckled back into place and her shield rested on her arm, most visible evidence of the last several minutes had vanished. Her hair was still damp with spray, her throat worked carefully when she swallowed, but otherwise she looked much as she had before kneeling between his legs.

Having his balls drained had improved Vurog’s opinion of the morning considerably.

His problems remained numerous. He had no idea where he was, how far the nautiloid had carried him from the Crags, or whether the thing writhing behind his eye would turn him into a squid-faced monster before he found anyone capable of cutting it out. This land was warmer than home, thick with unfamiliar plants, and bordered by an ocean larger than any stretch of water he had ever seen. Still, the sun looked right, the air tasted right, and magic settled around him in a familiar way now that the ship was dead.

Better than that, something impossible had awakened inside his skull.

He had opened two minds.

He had changed one.

Vurog did not yet know what the power was, where it ended, or what price eventually came attached to it. Ilneval did not give captains new weapons so they could admire them from a distance. You learned the balance, found where the edge caught, and used it before somebody else did.

For now, though, it felt good to have an attractive healer walking beside him who had proven both useful in a fight and remarkably talented with her mouth.

They worked their way inland through wreckage the crash had scattered across the shore. Broken lengths of nautiloid flesh lay among driftwood, shattered stone, and bodies thrown down from whatever places the ship had passed over before dying. Vurog checked the dead as they went, partly for weapons and partly because Shadowheart had been increasingly pointed about his lack of clothing.

The first useful corpse was too small.

So was the second.

The third was some broad-shouldered reptilian fellow sprawled beneath a slab of drying nautiloid tissue, scales dulled by death. His trousers looked promising.

Vurog stripped them off.

Shadowheart waited while he pulled them up his legs. The material stretched across his thighs and ass but held, which put them well ahead of the other options. Then he turned and discovered the generous opening cut into the back for the dead man’s tail.

Shadowheart studied it.

Her eyes shifted to Vurog’s cock.

“You could wear them backward,” she suggested. “That may be the only opening designed for something near your dimensions.”

Vurog snorted. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Hole in front so you don’t have to dig my cock out every time you get on your knees.”

“Finding Wombreaver is unlikely to be the difficult part.” Her gaze dropped toward the heavy length hanging between his thighs. “He occupies rather a lot of available space.”

Vurog didn’t worry about the tail opening exposing some of his backside and began the difficult task of fitting himself into the front. Even soft, Wombreaver was too long to sit comfortably bunched beneath him. He eventually stuffed the shaft down the left trouser leg, settling the broad head well above his knee.

Shadowheart watched the cloth distort around it.

“If he becomes a problem again,” she said, “I’m perfectly capable of dealing with him. Until then, everyone else may enjoy the rare privilege of not seeing him.”

“Privilege?” Vurog scoffed. “Wombreaver was one of the biggest cocks in Roc Ridge. Women back home were always happy to see him.”

Shadowheart’s attention returned to the thick shape running down his thigh.

“One of the biggest?”

Vurog heard the curiosity hiding beneath the dry tone and grinned.

“Plenty of full-bloods thicker than me.”

Her eyebrows rose.

“All the males in your tribe?”

“Enough.”

“How reassuring.”

“You curious?”

Shadowheart gave him a dismissive little shrug. “I’ve had half-orcs before. None carrying anything remotely comparable to that. If the human half of you was supposed to temper the orc half, it failed rather spectacularly.”

Vurog stared at her for half a heartbeat then his grin widened.

She had never sucked any half-orcs in Baldur’s Gate.

He had read the memories that had existed before he put his own words into her head. He knew what had been there and what had not. Yet Shadowheart remembered those men now with enough certainty to compare them to him, the invented encounters fitted seamlessly among the rest of her life. No hesitation. No confusion. She had not stopped to wonder where the memories came from because, to her, they had always been there.

That was more interesting than the blowjob.

The hag who had first taught him Suggestion had described mind magic as a struggle. Push hard enough and another will might bend, but the victim could resist. Strong minds felt the intrusion. Commands could fail if they violated something too deeply rooted. She had spoken of Greater Domination the same way, a hand around another creature’s thoughts that had to keep squeezing lest the captive wrench free.

This was nothing like that.

Vurog had written what he wanted and Shadowheart’s own mind had built the scaffolding beneath it.

He finished tying the trousers, scavenged a knife, flint, three copper coins, and a piece of bread from another body, then started up the path with Shadowheart beside him.

After perhaps a hundred paces he slowed.

The sea remained visible through the trees behind them, blue and enormous beneath the afternoon sun. The failed Sending aboard the nautiloid… Now as a chance to check on things.

Veronsha. Checking in. Strange few days. You hear me? Roc Ridge still standing?

The words went and after only a minute Veronsha answered and he grinned with relief.

Yes, of course it does. I’m glad you’re alive. But I’m a bit busy at the moment.

No surprise there.

It wasn’t easy keeping a few hundred muscle-headed orcs pointed toward tomorrow instead of whatever fight, feud, hunt, challenge, or stupidly glorious death had caught their attention today. Veronsha could tell them where to build a wall, how much grain to keep through winter, or why charging a larger warband uphill was a bad idea, and some thick-skulled bastard would still insist his grandfather had done it differently. She would manage them. She always did. And Old Ghorbash was there if things became troublesome, a gray-tusked veteran with a level head and a solid band of lads who had followed him through enough bad fights to know that surviving one was better than dying impressively in it. Vurog trusted him to watch Veronsha’s back when Vurog could not.

There had been no great care in Veronsha’s voice, nor should there have been. Vurog vanished into the mountains for weeks at a time, sometimes longer when a promising trail dragged him beyond the familiar valleys. Several days without Sending meant nothing. Roc Ridge did not stop functioning because he wandered off chasing some hedge-wizard who supposedly knew an unfamiliar ward.

The important part was that Veronsha had heard him.

Whatever impossible roads the nautiloid had taken through the planes, he was somewhere ordinary magic could reach home again.

That settled one problem.

It left the more interesting one walking beside him.

Vurog glanced at Shadowheart.

Roc Ridge could use a cleric.

The idea came easily. His people had healers, of course. Nobody survived long in the Crags without learning how to stop bleeding, set bones, clean wounds, and recognize which plants killed pain without killing the patient. There were old women who knew herbs better than they knew their own grandchildren and priests who could close wounds when the gods saw fit.

Shadowheart offered more.

She could heal with magic. She could read without laboring over the words. She knew cities, temples, medicines, outsiders, and things Vurog’s people only learned when some traveler happened to know them. A few years with someone like her in the valley would mean fewer children buried after fever season and fewer warriors losing limbs because a cut went bad.

She had plans of her own, obviously. Her artifact. Her goddess. Baldur’s Gate.

Those plans no longer looked particularly immovable.

He could put Roc Ridge among the things she cared about. Make the tribe important to her. Make Veronsha someone whose authority felt natural. Make a place among his people seem preferable to whatever future she currently imagined.

The mind would do the rest.

That was the part Vurog kept returning to.

He had not needed to write an entire history of half-orc lovers into Shadowheart’s memories. He had changed the foundation and her mind had supplied whatever experiences were needed to support it. The result had woven itself into her so completely that she could joke about it while walking along a beach with no idea anything had changed.

If three words could do that, what happened when he wrote something larger?

He looked at her again, considering possibilities, then let them sit. No sense carving up something useful merely to satisfy curiosity. Shadowheart already wanted civilization, supplies, a healer, and whatever path would eventually take her toward Baldur’s Gate. For the moment those goals helped him too.

Besides, another thought had begun eating everything else.

Magic.

Vurog’s pace slowed slightly.

He had spent years hunting knowledge one scrap at a time. A cantrip from one hedge-wizard. A ward from another. A trick copied from a witch’s notes after she decided two months of favors bought him the privilege. Shamans hid useful things behind riddles and ritual. Wizards hid them behind locked doors and inflated prices.

A man could own fifty spells and still die having shared five. The arrangement had always seemed natural enough because knowledge was the one treasure a man could carry where thieves could not reach it. Books could be hidden, pages burned, teachers bribed or frightened into silence, but whatever remained inside a wizard’s skull belonged to him until death.

Vurog was beginning to wonder whether that was still true.

He imagined another mind opening beneath his attention, the skull peeling away and the brain unrolling into those impossible lines of Orcish script. A wizard this time. He could ask what spells the man knew and let the scroll answer. Words, gestures, diagrams, old lessons repeated until they became instinct. The precise angle of a hand corrected by some master thirty years before, the memory of a ritual that had failed and why, the contents of a page read once and never seen again. A spellbook contained whatever its owner had chosen to write down. A mind carried far more.

The thought spread naturally from there. A smith held decades of hammer-work in memory, a hunter knew spoor and weather better than most men knew their own children, a merchant carried roads, prices, names and debts wherever he went. Soldiers remembered the weak points in walls they had guarded and which officers could be trusted, bought or frightened. Every skilled person Vurog had ever met walked around with a storehouse inside his skull.

Voices ahead pulled his attention back to the path.

“Just leave it,” a woman was saying. “The goblins will deal with her soon enough.”

A man answered more quietly. “And if they don’t? We should take her back to the grove. Let Zevlor decide.”

Vurog kept walking, though his hand settled more comfortably around the hilt of his sword. Shadowheart had heard them as well. She shifted closer to his side and brought her shield around without comment, the movement practiced enough that it barely interrupted her stride.

The path curved between sun-warmed rocks and opened into a small clearing. A rough wooden cage hung from a timber frame several meters above the ground, and inside it stood Lae’zel in her bright silvery armor, both hands wrapped around the bars. Vurog almost laughed. She looked less like a prisoner than an angry animal waiting for someone foolish enough to put a hand through the slats.

Two tieflings stood beneath her. The man was lean, armed with bow and sword, while the woman beside him had dark hair, red skin and horns sweeping back from her brow. Her tail moved restlessly behind her. She was pretty enough that Vurog’s eye lingered for a moment on the shape of her hips and the long red tail above them. Given more agreeable circumstances, he would have been quite happy to discover how she looked bouncing on Wombreaver.

Then Lae’zel saw him, and the parasite behind his eye tightened.

You. Get rid of them.

Her voice arrived inside his skull with all the force of a spoken command.

The tiefling woman noticed Vurog a heartbeat later. Her attention went first to his tusks and sword, then to the badly fitted trousers that left most of his upper body bare. The man followed her gaze and stiffened. Shadowheart stepped into the clearing beside him in dark armor, shield already in hand, and whatever courage the pair had worked up while arguing over Lae’zel visibly thinned.

They looked soft, like displaced city-folk in the wilds, standing beneath a cage containing something they already considered dangerous. They had no appetite for adding a half-orc and an armed cleric to the problem.

He walked toward them, sword loose in his right hand, and summoned the easiest bit of threatening magic he still had at his disposal.

Blue-white lightning snapped alive around his left hand.

It crawled over his red fingers in branching threads, jumped from knuckle to knuckle and cracked sharply in the warm air. Vurog flexed his hand and let the sparks dance. Shocking Grasp was hardly impressive magic. He had to get close enough to lay that hand on somebody before the spell could do anything useful, but from ten paces away there was no reason for the tieflings to know that.

The man’s hand twitched toward his bow and stopped.

His eyes had gone to the lightning.

Vurog looked at Lae’zel, then back at the pair. “She’s with me. Walk away, or I’ll fucking kill you.”

That settled it.

The tiefling woman caught the man by the forearm before pride could make him stupid. He glanced at her, then at Vurog again, taking in the sword, the tusks, Shadowheart’s armor and the gith glaring down from the cage above them. Whatever he saw convinced him. His hand came away from the bow.

““Damays,” the woman said, panic sharpening her voice. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“Yea…”

Vurog watched them retreat along the opposite trail. They kept their faces toward him until the brush grew thick enough to put some distance between them, then turned and hurried away. The woman disappeared last, her tail slipping between the leaves after her.

He gave the empty path an appreciative look before turning back toward the cage as he released the cantrip with an open flick of his fingers.

A few steps later the thought struck him.

“Fuck.”

Shadowheart glanced over. “What?”

Vurog stared after the tieflings, annoyed with himself. Two strangers, neither of them connected to the nautiloid as far as he knew, and he had chased them away without trying the one thing he most needed to test. If either of their minds had opened for him, he would have learned whether the power required another parasite or whether the creature in his own skull was enough to pry into anyone he pleased.

He considered going after them, but they already had a good lead and there would be other people. If this coast held villages, roads and goblins, it held plenty of heads.

Above him, the cage creaked as Lae’zel shifted her weight.

“Enough gawking?” she demanded. “Get me down.”