Adjusting Lae'zel

This is a Commissioned Story

Vurog looked up at her, irritation already giving way to interest. He had missed his chance with the tieflings, but Lae’zel was still here, trapped conveniently above him with nowhere to go.

That offered possibilities of its own.

The sensation had become easier to recognize since the beach. A slight tightening behind the brow, a warmth around the parasite, then the awareness of something vast and pliable waiting just beyond ordinary sight. He had opened Lae’zel once aboard the nautiloid without knowing what he was doing. Shadowheart had taught him considerably more.

This time he reached deliberately.

Lae’zel’s face softened.

Vurog watched the yellow-green skin around her eyes loosen from the flesh beneath. The separation spread slowly across her brow and cheeks, almost sensuous in its neatness, as though invisible fingers had worked beneath the surface and begun easing the face away from the skull. Her scar split with the rest. Her lips stretched thin, peeled outward, and folded back in wet ribbons. The black mottling across her cheeks distorted as the skin drew away until it became nothing more than color smeared across curling scraps of flesh.

Lae’zel remained upright inside the cage.

Her hands still gripped the bars. Her armored shoulders retained their rigid set. Only the head changed, layer after layer opening for Vurog while the rest of her waited outside whatever strange place he had entered.

The long ears came loose last. One unfolded away from the skull in a narrow strip, ridged edge curling upon itself before fading from sight.

Bone gleamed underneath.

For a few moments Vurog found himself studying the skull simply because it was hers. The narrowness of the face made more sense stripped of skin. Her nasal cavity was almost comically slight compared with an orc’s, little more than a small opening above the clenched teeth. The cheekbones swept sharply outward, giving the whole skull a predatory shape despite its delicacy.

Then the bone began to soften.

The effect looked less like breaking than melting. The jaw sagged first, ivory losing its hardness until it ran upward and away in pale streams. Cheekbones collapsed after it, brow and crown dissolving until the brain beneath sat exposed, wet and gray, glistening in the forest light.

The brain simply hovered above the armored body.

Vurog stared upward, fascinated.

Lae’zel’s body remained trapped in the cage while the brain descended toward him. It passed between the wooden bars without resistance, solid timber offering no more obstruction than smoke. Whatever Vurog saw belonged partly to the world and partly to him alone.

The brain stopped before his face.

Its folds pulsed.

A groove deepened through the middle. Gray tissue drew apart, stretched, flattened and unrolled with a slick organic grace that made parchment seem crude by comparison. Veins lengthened into lines. Folds thinned into columns. Wet flesh became an enormous hanging sheet covered in Orcish writing, characters forming wherever his attention settled.

Vurog breathed slowly through his nose.

Power should have fought him.

Every spell worth learning had fought him.

He remembered evenings spent repeating the same gesture until his wrist ached, mornings copying sigils until his fingers cramped, weeks following rumors because some hedge-wizard supposedly knew a ward that could turn an arrow. Even the least impressive scraps of magic had owners who guarded them, priced them, hid them behind riddles or demanded favors before allowing another man to learn.

Lae’zel’s mind opened because he wanted it open.

That difference still gave him a thrill.

Behind him Shadowheart shifted. She had been watching Vurog instead of the cage for several moments, enough suspicion gathering in her expression that she finally started toward him.

“Vurog, what exactly are you...”

His head whipped in her direction and her head exploded.

The violence startled even him.

Dark hair, pale skin and white fragments of skull burst outward as though something inside Shadowheart had detonated. For an instant the pieces hung in the thickened air around her shoulders, a frozen red cloud marking where her face had been. Then they evaporated, leaving a second brain suspended above her headless body.

Shadowheart’s hand remained half-raised.

Her sentence had stopped with her mouth.

Vurog’s surprise turned into a grin as her brain flew toward him and came to rest beside Lae’zel’s. It opened with the same obscene grace, tissue stretching into lines of Orcish script until the two women hung before him as immense living texts.

He glanced back at Shadowheart’s body. Still just standing and waiting.

He returned his attention to Lae’zel.

Her mind had none of Shadowheart’s deep scars and buried corridors. Shadowheart had been altered so often that parts of her seemed written over older writing, one belief laid across another until even she no longer knew which layer had come first. Lae’zel possessed complexity of a different kind. Her thoughts branched widely, yet they all grew from a remarkably sturdy center.

Vlaakith. Githyanki superiority. Discipline. Strength. Rank. Duty. Hatred of ghaik. The expectation that weakness deserved contempt and competence deserved recognition. Beneath it all sat the hunger to prove herself worthy of the future she had been promised.

Vurog read enough to understand what mattered.

He could have ruined her easily.

The idea occurred with unpleasant simplicity. He could strip Vlaakith from the center of her world and place himself there. He could turn contempt into adoration, replace every insult with praise, smooth away the aggression that had nearly put a sword through him when they met.

He had no interest in doing that.

The woman in the cage was entertaining because she believed herself better than him. Because she had mocked his magic. Because each time he proved useful she had been forced to revise her judgment by the smallest possible amount.

Vurog wanted that Lae’zel.

He simply wanted that Lae’zel unable to refuse him.

He searched for obedience first.

The relevant passages gathered before him. Lae’zel believed deeply in rank, command and the discipline required to carry out an order one disliked. Obedience itself carried no shame when given to rightful authority. A warrior who ignored command because her feelings were wounded was a child.

Vurog smiled.

He pressed his will into the scroll.

COMMANDS FROM VUROG: HEAR. OBEY.

The words appeared crude beside the elaborate structures surrounding them, as though hacked into stone with a knife.

They did not remain crude for long.

Lines spread outward. The command tied itself into memories of battle aboard the nautiloid, Vurog standing beside her against imps and devils, Vurog surviving, Vurog using magic she had dismissed and proving that it worked. Her mind supplied the rest without prompting: temporary field authority, the value of preserving useful allies, obedience as a practical concession until purification could be secured.

Vurog watched the explanations multiply.

None said Vurog controls me.

Every one said Lae’zel has sound reasons to do this.

His tusks showed.

That was better.

The next alteration required far less searching. Lae’zel’s body existed inside a dense web of assumptions about martial readiness, personal control and the consequences of unwelcome handling. She had been raised among warriors. Touch could communicate challenge as quickly as a drawn weapon.

He changed one line.

VUROG’S TOUCH: ALLOW.

The scroll accepted it.

Her pride stayed where it was. So did anger, contempt, bodily awareness and the instinctive evaluation of every hand that came near her. The change redirected the response. She could resent him. She could glare. She could decide his manners confirmed every low opinion she already possessed about him.

Her body would permit the contact.

The final change interested him most.

Sex sat in Lae’zel’s mind without much of the elaborate sentimental clutter Vurog had seen elsewhere. She understood desire as appetite, contest, recreation and proof of vitality. Attraction did not imply devotion. Sleeping with someone created no automatic claim of tenderness.

Convenient.

Vurog wrote:

VUROG’S ADVANCES: ACCEPT.

The sentence sank into place.

This time the surrounding beliefs moved almost immediately. Curiosity provided one path. Physical appetite provided another. Pride supplied several more. Refusing an experience simply because Vurog wanted it could itself be framed as letting him dictate her choices. Accepting sex carried no necessary implication that she respected him. A githyanki could use a body she found desirable while continuing to despise the mind attached to it.

He spent another moment reading what he had done, making sure nothing important had been displaced. Aggression remained. Pride remained. Vlaakith remained at the center of her world. Her urgency regarding the crèche burned as fiercely as before.

Three changes.

Enough.

Shadowheart’s scroll hovered nearby, inviting him.

He glanced across it and thought briefly of Roc Ridge, of healers and teachers, of how easily he could write his home into her future.

Later.

He closed both minds.

Lae’zel’s scroll contracted first. Orcish letters became dark veins, the endless sheet drawing inward until it returned to wet folds of gray tissue. Her brain floated upward through the cage bars and settled above her neck.

The skull grew around it as smoothly as it had melted away. Bone rose from nothing, first the base, then jaw, cheeks and brow. Muscle spread across it in red strands. Yellow-green skin followed, drawing itself tight over the new face until scar, mottling, narrow nose and pointed ears had returned exactly where they belonged.

Shadowheart reassembled beside him with considerably less elegance. The pieces of her exploded face seemed to rush backward and collide, hair and skin sealing over restored bone in a fraction of a second.

The world loosened.

Wind moved through the leaves again.

Shadowheart finished her sentence.

“...doing?”

Lae’zel’s grip tightened once on the bars. “Whatever occupies you, indulge it after I am free. We have already squandered enough time.”

Vurog looked at her for several seconds, enjoying the fact that neither woman knew anything had happened, then stepped beneath the cage and studied its bottom. The crude floor was little more than narrow slats lashed to the frame.

He raised his sword and hacked through one binding, then another. The wood shifted under Lae’zel’s boots. A final blow split the remaining support and the bottom dropped away beneath her.

Lae’zel fell cleanly through the opening.

She hit the ground in a crouch, one armored hand touching the dirt as broken slats and loose rope clattered around her. A heartbeat later she was upright again, straightening with the offended dignity of someone who considered the entire episode beneath her.

“The creche remains our only sensible destination. We find a settlement, determine our position, and obtain directions. Every unnecessary delay brings us closer to transformation.”

She started toward the path and Vurog moved into her way.

Lae’zel stopped and he seized her around the waist.

Her armor scraped against his forearm as he pulled her bodily against him. Lae’zel’s eyes flashed, shoulders hardening beneath the plates, one hand beginning the smallest motion toward his arm before stopping.

“Vurog.”, the threat was clear in her voice even as he bent down and kissed her.

Lae’zel accepted the contact with rigid disdain. Her mouth stayed closed against his, her body refusing every invitation to participate while still allowing him to hold her. Vurog kept her there a few moments, enjoying the novelty of doing something that would have earned him a blade through the ribs an hour ago, then pulled back enough to see her face.

His grin widened.

“Good spoils.”

Lae’zel’s stare sharpened into something murderous.

“If driving away two frightened teethlings and cutting some wood is sufficient conquest among your people, I begin to understand why your standards are so low.”

That made him laugh.

He liked her answer enough to kiss her again, though this time he withdrew almost immediately and left his hand resting against the back of her neck.

“Kiss me back.”

Lae’zel’s expression changed very little.

She caught him behind the neck and drew him down.

The difference was immediate.

Her mouth opened against his with aggressive purpose, tongue meeting his hard enough to turn the kiss into something closer to wrestling. One hand held the back of his neck while the other braced against his chest. When he pressed deeper she answered rather than yielded, teeth scraping his lower lip before catching it between them.

Vurog tasted blood with a pleased growl.

Lae’zel broke away when she decided she had done enough, releasing his neck and looking at him with the faint satisfaction of someone who had just demonstrated the proper execution of a basic maneuver.

“Better,” Vurog said.

Her nostrils flared at the praise.

Shadowheart had stopped smiling.

She looked from the blood on Vurog’s lip to Lae’zel, then back again. “Did I miss something aboard the ship? Because I distinctly remember her looking ready to gut you for standing too close. Now you order her to kiss you and she responds by trying to remove your lip.”

Lae’zel’s gaze cut toward her. “Do not mistake my restraint for helplessness, half-elf. I need this fool alive until we reach the creche. I will not jeopardize purification merely to educate him in manners.”

Shadowheart raised an eyebrow. “Of course. Very practical.”

He reached for her face.

This time, after the brief tightening that always came when his hands first touched her, Lae’zel simply stood and allowed him to do what he wanted.

Vurog took her jaw between both hands and turned her toward the light. She watched him throughout, ochre eyes following his face while he examined hers at close range. The black mottling above her brows and across her cheeks looked almost painted until he rubbed a thumb over it and felt ordinary skin beneath. Her scar caught his attention next. He traced the pale line from her forehead down the side of her nose toward her chin, enjoying how sharply it cut through the softer details of the face.

He had always found scars attractive. Roc Ridge had little use for people who expected a body to remain untouched by life.

Lae’zel’s face suited her.

Sharp. Scarred. Strange.

Vurog turned her head to the side.

The ear appeared from beneath her auburn hair.

He pushed several strands aside and examined it closely. His own ears carried a point from his orc blood, though theirs were broader and considerably shorter. Lae’zel’s tapered for a surprising distance, with small ridges running along the rear edge.

He took the tip between thumb and finger.

Lae’zel’s gaze shifted toward him, but she said nothing.

Vurog bent the ear forward, feeling it flex beneath his fingertips. It was thinner than his. He folded it almost against itself, released some of the pressure and watched it slowly straighten. Then he ran a thumb along the ridged back, tracing each irregular rise toward the base.

There was something satisfying about being allowed to investigate her this way.

No warrior willingly stood still while another man manipulated her face. Certainly no warrior like Lae’zel. Vurog remembered their first meeting too clearly. He had known her for less than a minute when she tried to kill him. Even after the parasite connected them, every presumption had been answered with contempt and every touch treated as potential challenge.

Now her hostility remained concentrated in her eyes while his fingers explored wherever curiosity carried them.

He slid a fingertip around the base of her ear and found the opening.

For no reason beyond the thought occurring to him, Vurog pressed the tip inside.

Lae’zel’s jaw tightened but that was all.

He eased his finger slightly farther into the warm canal, moved it experimentally, then drew it out and rubbed his fingertips together. Lae’zel did not dignify the behavior with commentary. Her stare conveyed enough.

Vurog grinned.

Her refusal to complain about every indignity suited her far better. She had told him already that she considered him primitive. Repeating herself would accomplish nothing.

His attention wandered toward her nose.

The thing remained absurd.

Orcs tended toward broad noses, broad jaws and large teeth. Lae’zel’s nose was so narrow and flattened that Vurog could almost imagine someone had pressed the center of her face inward while she was young and forgotten to pull it back out.

He turned her face forward and ran one thumb slowly down the slight bridge.

Lae’zel just watched him passively.

Vurog touched the side of one nostril, then pressed gently against the opening with a fingertip, testing how tiny it actually was. He moved to the other and did the same. His finger was too large to enter beyond the very tip.

Lae’zel let out a controlled breath through her nose and gave him a look of monumental disdain.

“Have you finished cataloguing my face, or must our survival wait while you discover that I possess two nostrils as well?”

Still she held herself motionless.

Shadowheart, standing nearby, had begun watching more intently. The earlier amusement had faded into curiosity. She knew Lae’zel well enough from the nautiloid to understand how many of Vurog’s fingers ought already to have been broken.

Vurog moved on to the mouth.

He put one thumb against Lae’zel’s lower lip and dragged it down, exposing the small even teeth behind it. Her lips were thinner than Shadowheart’s, shaped more for sneering than softness, yet warm beneath his hand.

“Open up that little mouth of yours.”

Lae’zel opened it.

Vurog tilted her chin higher.

He looked inside with the fascinated bluntness of a tribesman examining something unfamiliar. Teeth, gums, tongue. Ordinary enough, though everything seemed strangely delicate compared with an orc’s mouth. He pressed his thumb briefly against one canine before turning his attention to her tongue.

“Stick it out.”

Lae’zel extended her tongue.

“Farther.”

Her eyes narrowed but the tongue came farther out anyway, long and pink against her yellow-green skin.

Vurog took hold of the tip and rolled it gently between finger and thumb, feeling the wet muscle shift in his grasp. Lae’zel breathed steadily through her nose while he drew the tongue outward another fraction, studying its length and the movement beneath the surface.

Shadowheart made a soft sound somewhere between disbelief and amusement.

Lae’zel looked toward her without moving her head.

That glance managed to promise considerably more violence than most people could communicate with an entire speech.

Vurog released the tongue.

He gave her only a moment before pressing his index finger against her lower lip.

“Open.”

She did.

Vurog put the finger onto her tongue.

He pushed it inward slowly, feeling the slick warmth close around him. Lae’zel’s gaze remained fixed on his face as the first knuckle passed her lips. She showed none of the uncertainty another woman might have displayed. Her irritation remained obvious, yet the acceptance beneath it transformed the act into something stranger and more intimate than simple submission.

“Suck on it.”

Her lips closed around his finger.

Lae’zel obeyed efficiently.

Her tongue flattened beneath him, then curled upward as suction drew against his skin. Vurog had expected reluctant compliance. What he received felt much more characteristically Lae’zel. Once the act had become something she was doing, she applied herself to it with the same uncompromising competence she brought to everything else.

Vurog laughed quietly and her eyes narrowed.

He slid the finger outward until only the tip remained between her lips, then pushed it back over her tongue. Lae’zel maintained the seal around him, sucking harder on the return. Her cheeks hollowed slightly, tongue working beneath his finger while her stare never softened.

The contrast sent heat through him.

This was the result he had wanted when he wrote those commands into her scroll. Lae’zel had lost none of the qualities that made her interesting. She remained proud enough to look insulted even with his finger in her mouth. She remained disciplined enough that, having accepted the act, she performed it thoroughly. She remained aggressive enough that Vurog could almost feel her looking for some way to turn the situation into proof of her own superiority.

He worked the finger slowly against her tongue several more times.

Lae’zel sucked with increasing firmness.

When Vurog finally drew it free, her lips dragged against his skin before releasing him. Moisture gleamed along the finger.

Lae’zel closed her lips and regarded him in silence.

No complaint came.

She had already made her opinion of his behavior clear. Repeating it would only grant the foolishness more importance than she believed it deserved.

That pleased Vurog immensely.

His gaze dropped toward the body beneath her armor. The silvered plates enclosed almost everything he would have liked to inspect next, hiding the narrow waist and lithe musculature he remembered seeing in motion aboard the nautiloid.

For the first time since freeing her, he found the armor actively irritating.

Later.

There would be time to get it off her.

Vurog gave her jaw one final squeeze before releasing her face.

Lae’zel immediately straightened, rolling her neck once and restoring the distance between them as though she had merely endured an inconvenient inspection by some particularly stupid military physician. Her eyes remained hard, posture immaculate, dignity reassembled so quickly that the last several minutes might have happened to somebody else.

Shadowheart finally exhaled. “Wonderful. Now that you’ve finished discovering what a githyanki keeps inside her mouth, perhaps we might return to the problem actually wriggling around inside our heads.”

Lae’zel adjusted one of the straps across her armor. “At last, something sensible. We find the creche and undergo purification.”

Vurog had no objection to finding the place. Whether he wanted the creature torn from his skull the moment they arrived was becoming a rather different question.

Yesterday the answer would have been obvious. A parasite that promised to eat his mind and turn him into one of those tentacled things deserved nothing except fire and a knife. Now the same parasite had given him access to thoughts, memories and beliefs more completely than any spell he had ever learned. He could open a person’s mind, read what they themselves had forgotten, and rewrite pieces of them with less effort than preparing a cantrip.

He wanted to know what the creche could do.

He also wanted to know whether “purification” would take that power away.

For now, following Lae’zel toward answers served both purposes.

“Where is it?”

Lae’zel’s expression tightened slightly.

Vurog waited.

“I do not know the precise location of this region’s creche.”

Shadowheart’s brows rose. “That seems a rather important omission.”

Lae’zel ignored her. “The teethlings spoke of another of their kind, Zorru. He encountered a githyanki patrol nearby and survived. Find him, and he will tell us where he saw my kin. The patrol will lead us to the crèche.”

Shadowheart regarded that chain of possibilities with very little enthusiasm. “So we first find this Zorru, then find a githyanki patrol, then hope they know where this creche is. In the meantime, there may be an ordinary healer somewhere nearby who doesn’t come accompanied by an entire company of githyanki.”

“My people possess the means to remove the parasite.”

“So you keep saying.”

Vurog looked between them. Shadowheart plainly wanted nothing to do with walking into a nest of Lae’zel’s people, while Lae’zel seemed incapable of imagining a better answer than one supplied by the githyanki.

He cared less about which of them was right than about gathering enough information to decide for himself.

“If your tribe knows what these worms are and how to deal with them, I want to see it,” he said. “But we’re not marching blind through country none of us knows. First we find people. Food, gear, somewhere to sleep, maybe another healer. We ask about Zorru and your patrol while we’re there.”

Lae’zel’s mouth tightened. For a moment Vurog expected another lecture about wasted time.

Then the alteration buried inside her mind found its purchase.

“A settlement will provide information,” she allowed. “We find one quickly, question this Zorru if he is there, and proceed to my people without further distractions.”

Shadowheart gave Vurog a sidelong look. “A surprisingly reasonable plan.”

Vurog grinned. “Get used to it.”

“I very much doubt I will.”

Lae’zel had already turned toward the trail, impatience visible in every line of her armored back. Vurog watched her go, still amused by how naturally she had made his decision her own.

He touched two fingers briefly to his temple.

Whatever waited at the creche, he intended to learn exactly what “purification” meant before allowing anyone to take away the most useful thing that had happened to him in years.

Shadowheart lingered beside him for another moment.

Her gaze followed Lae’zel, then shifted to Vurog.

There was a question in it now.

Vurog pretended not to notice.