We need a plan, don't we?

The enormous rectangular span of water, inlaid with great stones, seemed particularly wasted when they sat so intimately close.

The hot steam of the spring’s captured water couldn’t conceal anything about their powerfully masculine and feminine features. Pale, rock-hard muscle, contrasted with Noriko’s creamy curves and the swell of a generous chest, capped with cute pink nipples just above the waterline.

Nipples that pressed against him, as the priestess worked a soapy washcloth across that muscular body. Reverent and careful always. She seemed to particularly enjoy squishing up against his sturdy back and even leaning against him, as if feeling for herself how solid he was.

Very solid, as it turned out.

“A… voice, my Lord?”

“The former goddess of this place. She has said much. Some of it is helpful.”

“How generous, oh Lord,” spat the voice, somehow. “But yes. She need not go over the basics. I’ve admittedly chewed your ear off while you walked. The main gap in my knowledge is, of course, the fifty or so years since I faded. A blink of the eye to heaven, but much could have changed down here.”

The fundamentals were already well-established to the traveler. The endless wilderness, dotted by points of light. Cities, where all the mortal races crowded together for survival, under the protecting auras of their gods. Who they in turn worshiped. Dark forces gathering outside the high walls.

Everyone in this world apparently accepted that as just the way things were, and the way they’d always be. It was perhaps because he was so new to the world and its ways, that he could ask the simplest of child-like questions.

Why can’t we change things, for the better?

“That will be the plan for the guild we must found.”

Noriko did her best to focus on all this, but it was difficult. She admired the statue that was her Lord’s body. Men were a group she had been kept away from all her life, and the few examples she could possibly match him to all came up hopelessly short.

It wasn’t a fair competition, but her Lord still smashed everything, without even getting into the way he had demolished her... and taken her virginity with tenderness and power both.

“Then I shall be succinct. There is a town upriver of here. Days by raft, or weeks by foot. Cygnus. It was my base for some time as I explored this region, following my sense of destiny.” She smiled in a self-deprecating manner. “The townsfolk believed me quite mad.”

From what he could gather, even mortals who adventured from the cities in groups were considered abnormal. Much less one who traveled alone into the howling dark, from which so many had never returned.

It made her arrival here, and her half-full quiver, even more impressive.

“The whole region has been hit hard in recent years. With the fall of this town, Riviera, a linchpin of trade connecting frigid northern Cygnus with the desert city of Luxor to the far south was lost. Both were left to fend.”

“The goddess of Luxor is one I am all too familiar with,” the voice pitched in. “Anubis was established long before I was imagined. She always reminded me of that, as well as how much taller and more busty she was! As if I can help that! Yet the freshwater and fertile farming Riviera could provide was invaluable. In turn, we got a supply of goods from, reportedly, across the sea.”

“Luxor has the best of it by far, my Lord.”

Noriko reported, turning around to give her back to him. Obligingly, he ran the washcloth up and down her bare, soft skin, exploring without a hint of moderation. Her delightful curves, especially the generous swell of her rear end, were worth rubbing and delighting in the feeling.

So much that he wound up pressing his hips to her child-bearing width from behind, grinding into that softness, getting the white suds back onto himself. Enjoying the warm contact and friction, growing stuff against her.

Her cheeks heated up again and she struggled to keep focus.

“F-for they still have their goddess. The citizens in Cygnus told me they have no deity protecting them. They are under siege now daily from dark armies, who have sensed this lack of divine power, and rushed to take advantage. The people suffer.”

“She thinks you’re the cure to all that,” the voice said. “Well, we do need people to settle here and rebuild everything. You are concerned with that, right…? Come now. A grateful Cygnus and rebuilt Riviera could indeed be the start of something grand.”

Nothing was to be gained by sitting around here, that much was certain.

Except for quite a lot of pleasure, but they had the rest of today to devote to that. The wanderer presumed they could do these lovely things on the road, too. Not only that, but they might find new people to do them with, in time. Though his primary concern had to be gathering more faith.

So the only question left was where to go, and this Cygnus needed help.

Yet Luxor sounded like they might be able to help both their northern neighbors...

“Anubis is so secure in her position, she’ll see no need to help a potential rival get started up. If we had leverage, that’s one thing. Cygnus backing us might do it. So I decree; that’s where we’re going first! Cygnus, then Luxor!”

That sounded good to him, for he was two days old and most things did.

“Very well. Tomorrow, we depart for Cygnus.”

He paused.

“... How will we do that?”

Noriko giggled, and hugged him, pouring water upon them both from a bucket.

“I shall make provisions, Lord. This beautiful river was once a highway connecting these lands. With the proper vessel, which I acquired through various methods, it will be so again.”