an unlikely ally

Lauma did not keep it small.

The first thrust had been the quickie she asked for. The second was the one she actually wanted. Her voice went up into the canvas and stayed there, raw and unashamed, every moan landing like she had been waiting years for a cock that was not a string of knots and a story she told herself about a blessing. Aether hooked her raised leg over his arm and took her standing, the other foot barely finding the packed earth. Horns scraped the tent ridge. Then they lit.

Moonlight ran along the bone. Not a lantern. A pale, wet shine that pulsed when he drove to the root and stayed there, as if the blessing had decided this was the rite and the rest of the camp could scream about purity on its own time. Lauma’s hands locked behind his neck. She rolled down onto him like she meant to keep him, cunt greedy, the emptied ring of her ass twitching against his hip every time he bottomed out.

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

“Deeper,” she said, not a whisper. “All of it. I can feel you in my stomach. Do not— do not pull out to be polite—”

He gave her the heat. Short, heavy strokes that punched the air out of her, then long ones that dragged her up his length until she swore and sat back down. The quickie had already missed its window. She was too wet, too loud, too set on being filled while the false trail outside still bought them minutes. Her robes hung off one shoulder. The beads lay in a damp coil on the crate. She kissed him once, messy, then lost the kiss to another moan when he ground against her and the glow on her horns flared bright enough to paint the wool.

Shenhe’s head turned toward the flap a second before it moved.

Dehya was already moving.

The canvas tore aside and she came through low and fast, fist cocked, the instinct that had put a devotee into a flip still running hot. She stopped with her knuckles an inch from Xilonen’s nose.

Xilonen did not flinch. She looked at the fist, then past Dehya, at the horned woman bent open on Aether’s cock with moonlight running down her antlers and her mouth open on a sound that had led them here.

“Nice,” Xilonen said. “We followed the noise. I assumed it was a hint.”

Lisa stepped in behind her, Lynette at her heel with a bundle of belts and blades she had not been allowed to carry inside the rope. Ineffa ticked once in the entrance and stayed there, a door that could count. The tumult outside had grown again — closer, wrong direction abandoned, someone shouting about a glow in a tent that was not a cookfire.

“Be honest with me,”
Lisa said, pleasant and sharp.
“Is you breeding the head priestess the reason this camp wants us on sticks, or did that start before the horns lit up.”

Lauma laughed, wrecked, and did not climb off him.

“Before,”
she got out.
“They hated his name. This is— this is me. Do not stop. They already want him dead. I am not part of it.”

He pulled out because Rosaria had said finish or leave, and the torch outside was becomming a promise.

Lauma did not accept the geometry of that decision.

The second his cock left her she turned, shoved him down onto the crate, and sat back onto him before the air between them had time to cool. Back to his chest. Robes rucked at her waist. She took him to the root in one drop and started to ride like the camp outside had the wrong god and she had found a better one. Not coy. Not the shy ask from ten minutes ago. A fanatic for a different cause, hips slamming down, one hand braced on his knee, the other reaching back to hold his wrist against her stomach so she could feel the depth.

(https://im.ge/i/QQSrVA4)
(artist: chocoPizza)

The blessing showed.

Moonlight ran the length of her spine in a thin, wet line, climbed the curve of her ribs, pooled under the horns until they threw pale light on the canvas. Every time she seated herself the glow pulsed. Her cunt made a filthy, open sound around him. She was already coming — he could feel the flutter, the helpless clutch — and she kept riding through it, chasing the next one like the first had been an insult.

“More,” she said, voice cracking. “I can take more. Do not let me stop.”

Aether decided the farce was over.

He wrapped an arm under her breasts and the other low across her hips and took the pace away from her. Short, mean, exact. The angle Xilonen had drilled into him for a woman who was already gone and still asking to be finished. He drove up into the climax she was having and stacked another on top of it before the first had anywhere to go. Lauma’s mouth opened on nothing useful. Her face broke — brows crushed, eyes losing their aim, a sound that started as a moan and ended as a raw, mindless spill. The horns flared once, hard, and then the light stuttered.

She went slack on his cock.

He came with her because why wouldnt he, packing her while her body jerked through the ruin of it and then simply stopped helping. When he lifted her off, her cunt drooled the load in thick, copious strings onto the crate and her own thigh. He set her on the wool. Eyes rolled. Mouth open. Utterly spent. The glow on the horns died to a coal.

(https://im.ge/i/QQSrz2q)
(artist: chocoPizza)

“Move,” Rosaria said.

Lauma stayed where he had put her. There was no version of the next minute that included carrying a glowing priestess through a market that wanted him dead for existing. Shenhe took the flap. Dehya went through it first. The ice bridge they had walked in on was the wrong direction entirely — back through the heart of the enclave, back past the register, back into the scream. The shore was the only other exit that was not a wall of bodies.

They did not get a clean sprint.

A devotee at the end of the dye row saw the blond head and put his lungs into it. The call jumped. By the time they cleared the last stall the camp had remembered what it was hunting, and the size of it landed wrong in the eye. Not a thousand. The lanes behind them filled in layers. Torches. Snapped poles. Faces that had been buying pins an hour ago, now a field. Thousands, easy, the kind of number that stopped being a crowd and became force.

“Boat,” Dehya snapped, already angling them toward the water. “we need a way out of here that isn't a bloodbath”

The vessel sat off the near beach, larger than a fishing hull, no mark on the sail, no crest on the stern. Close enough to steal if the deck was empty. They ran for it because the alternative was the horde, and the horde was learning how to run.

The deck was not empty.

Fatui. Dozens. Coats on the sand, coats on the rail, a line of them that had been waiting for something that was not a mob with tent-poles. Aether’s group hit the last stretch of beach and saw both problems at once: spikes behind, masks ahead. Shenhe’s weapon came up. Rosaria’s frost answered. For a second the only plan was to be ugly in two directions.

A woman’s voice cut across it from the rail, flat and precise, the kind of tone that expected obedience from people who had not agreed to give it.

“Board. In peace. Now.”

The soldiers did not raise weapons at the party. They turned. A rank of them stepped off the sand and set themselves between the fleeing group and the first of the torches, masks forward, buying a corridor with their bodies like it had been drilled. Aether did not argue with an oportunity given freely. They hit the gangplank at a run. Xilonen hauled Lynette up by the waist when the cat’s foot slipped. Lisa did not look back until her boots were on wood.

The ship was already moving.

No wait for the rank on the beach. The gap opened. Water took the hull. From the stern they watched the corridor collapse — a dozen agents still on the sand, then not, the horde pouring over them in a wave of splintered poles and shouting. It was fast and it was ugly and it bought the rest of them the sea.

Sandrone stood at the wheel-side rail as if the overrun had been a line in a ledger she had already accepted. Pale. Assembled more than dressed. She looked at Aether the way a craftsman looked at a delivery that had arrived scuffed and still useful.

“Sandrone,”

(https://im.ge/i/QQSuQvT)
(artist: crank)
she said.
“Harbinger, if the title helps you file me. I was hoping you would reach Nod-Krai. Not as a target. As a piece I would rather have standing on my deck than in a Fatui report about a man who breeds archons and then wanders into a moon cult.”
She tipped her head toward the shrinking beach, where the last of her screen was disappearing under the mass.
“Those ones knew the cost. You are on the water. That was the point.”

Dehya had her back to the rail and her eyes on every coat still aboard.

“Ally,” she said, testing the word like it might be poisoned.

“For this stretch of sea,”
Sandrone answered.
“The north is worse than your priestess’s tent. If you want the goddess and the rifts, you will need any help you can get. Try not to make me regret the offer before we clear the headland.”

- - - - - -

I know this isn't a good point to pause the story, but i don't realy have a choice currently.

Sadly, I need to take a hiatus from storywriting. burnout at my Workplace has drained my creative energy and i can see my quality getting affected by it too. The break should last no longer than December26 at most, since I’ll be switching jobs then.
Feel free to leave a comment on what you wish or hope for, i will see if i can include it in the future for when i return!