A Restless Morning

Brialla woke to the same blissful seaside soundscape that lulled her to sleep the night before. And the same, thankfully much lessened, sensation of a full stomach she had gone to bed with. Running her hands over her it, it felt flat once more, and if she could not still feel the mild burning of receding aches in her face from repeated impact, she might have imagined it merely a meal too heavily indulged in. Kerendra’s endless ropes of seed could be categorized as such, of course. In impolite company. She felt herself very impolite, sleepily turning to coil the thin covers around her for lack of a warm body.

The promise of breakfast she had made was the only thing capable of prying her drowsy and comfortable mind from its pleasant, thoughtless reverie. The sound of waves terminating on the distant sandy beach, the bustling of what was morning to her, the equivalent of night to the nocturnal Kaldorei, would have been an insurmountable hand beckoning her to sleep a little longer. But she had made her choice, and though sweet aches and a bed warming her to her core might have made her think it a terrible one, the promise of the sentinel herself outweighed it.

Kerendra. Building thoughts centered on the towering night elf rose to a blissful, prurient crescendo in her mind, heating her further. Feeding a burning, tingling, coiling heat in her, reddening her cheeks, making her right hand slip from her stomach and down. Just a few inches down.

She took a slow, shuddering breath, cracking her eyes open, filling the small bedroom with faint golden light. Pressing fingers against her skin, against her pelvis. That pressure was a concession between what she wanted to do, and holding back, waiting for the Kaldorei to arrive. She had seemed eager enough.

Breakfast. Get some food sent up. Brialla sighed, closed her eyes briefly, and then **** herself to roll out of bed, and to stand. To put on clothes – different clothes than the night before, not dirtied with cum-mixed saliva. Padding down to speak to yet another vaguely unfriendly male night elf, the one in charge for the morning and day, arranging to have a meal for two sent up. Specifically, something light. For breakfast. The request earned her another odd glance, but she cared little, instead turning away. Walking back up.

Should she receive Kerendra in the living room, with the chaise longue, and the table, and the carpet and chairs and so on? Decorated in the style of the Kaldorei, with books and crystals and purple banner-cloth and bowls of fruit and nuts. Little houseplants everywhere, spilling out of their pots. A door opening out to a fine view, but not balcony at all. Just a chance to stand in the breeze and wake up. Or hold one-another, keeping warm. Or, perhaps, forget the breakfast, and instead lead the sentinel to the bedroom immediately? But she would be hungry after an entire night’s duty. Surely.

Brialla took a breath.

From the vantage of that false balcony, standing in the open doorway, she observed the slowly dying activity of the town. The elves were clearly winding down for the morning, disappearing to sleep the day away. Gradually, the guards changed, one shift replacing another.

Minutes passed, and Brialla came to miss someone warm embracing her. Remaining in place, nevertheless, scouting for the one elf she wanted to see, her shift over, making her way to the inn. Five minutes passed, and then ten. Breakfast was delivered in sullen silence. By fifteen minutes, she despaired that Kerendra wasn’t coming. Why not? Had she not proven herself amply capable of pleasing the sentinel? If for no other reason, she could at least turn up for that.

By twenty minutes, Brialla resolved to get more properly dressed, socks and shoes and a bone-colored long-sleeve shirt, and a coal-black vest, and similarly dark trousers. And her knife, and belt, with its few pouches. Ready to go back to the Priestess’ residence to find the sentinel, and demand that she come eat breakfast. Returning to the balcony, a few more minutes passed. Brialla spotted the sentinel who had stood guard alongside Kerendra. The uptight, annoying one.

Their eyes met.

Slowly, a smug smile made the night elf’s expression a terrible one. A smile that settled like a stone in Brialla’s stomach, somehow weighty and entirely formless at the same time. Cold, and pointy, and yet wrapped in wool. What happened? Was Kerendra done with her, like that? That would be stupid. But maybe she was the idiot. What reason had she really given the sentinel to show up? She had gotten what she wanted, presumably.

With great effort, Brialla managed to sneer back at the sentinel, though it seemed uncertain whether her grimace was noticed. Infuriating, stupid woman, that one.

Brialla turned from the balcony, forgetting to close the door in her hurry to leave behind the room and go find Kerendra. Leaving the inn, stalking across paths kissed by warming rays of the sun, none of them seeming to warm her much, even as they hit her.

Would the sentinel even be at her post? Perhaps she had already left, went to her barracks? Or home? Brialla would not only have to live with her stupidity for another eight to ten hours while the settlement slept, but also have to suffer the humiliation of having been so easily taken advantage of. She shook her head, increasing her speed as she rounded a corner, the Priestess’ residence coming into view. And, a few paces from that house, Kerendra walking deferentially a few steps behind the regal but faintly aged woman clad in white that Brialla assumed was the Priestess.

Still with the pit in her stomach, Brialla nevertheless took a breath and let it out slowly, her shoulders sinking. Fists she hadn’t noticed clenching relaxed. She had no claim to the sentinel, nor her time, but she wanted to believe that she had not earned the scorn of being abandoned after throwing herself at the night elf. The still towering, strong, statuesque kaldorei that her eyes strayed to, and stuck with. For a little too long. Until Kerendra’s pale blues shifted to her, responding to whatever emotion she saw on the small elf’s face with a lopsided smile. At once self-satisfied, and understanding. Somehow.

This small exchange seemed, in some inexplicable way, to alert the Priestess to Brialla’s presence. She turned, her attention impressing the feeling of being in a kindly but ever-curious, only slightly judgmental spotlight. Deference lent her by the two almost equally impressive sentinels escorting her seemed to bleed into this sense of being larger than she was. The Priestess was tall, of course – she was Kaldorei. But, compared to her kindred, she was more a refined, slim marble statue, the closest a people who had thrown off royalty came to something like it. Bleached clothes, white hair, near-white eyes, skin so soft a pink as to almost be white, too.

A smile both kindly and conveying the command at the Priestess’ fingertips fell on Brialla. Diverted, then, to Kerendra, who had long removed her gaze from the blood elf.

“This is the one?”

The Priestess spoke to Kerendra, but did so slowly enough, and with diction so perfect, that Brialla understood the Darnassian.

After a moment’s hesitation, the sentinel likely sharing the total incredulity at the Priestess’ ability to discern some connection between one of her guards and the sin’dorei, she answered. “Yes, Priestess.”

“Come now, Kerendra. You would need far more subtlety in your comings and goings to escape my notice. You were right outside my door.”

“Yes, Priestess,” Kerendra said, bowing her head. The sentinel did not seem embarrassed, but rather acknowledging of her superior’s observations.

Brialla supposed that they had not been particularly quiet, but, tucked away into a wing of the residence, her mind had safely stowed their encounter as something only she and Kerendra knew. Having set aside any thought of speaking with the Priestess on mercantile business, she had mistakenly set the woman’s presence aside entirely.

It was within the power of this woman to do almost anything she wished – at least, that was what Brialla had been told before leaving. The faith of the night elves centered around the moon goddess, Elune, and her closest servants, the Priestesses of the Sisterhood of Elune, were effectively little nobles. Theocratic and bureaucratic and legal and every other kind of authority rolled into one. Propped up by faith, their decisions in all matters were that much harder to resist or undo. As such, if she decided that Brialla was unwelcome, or that Kerendra and her were not to meet any longer, it would be a deathblow to their tryst.

“You wish to establish trade relations with us, sin’dorei?” The Priestess’ attention settled once more on Brialla. Lighter, this time, but fencing her in. She could move anywhere she wanted to within the metaphorical, closed pasture placed around her by this woman, but the enclosure felt claustrophobic.

“I do, ma’am,” Brialla said.

“What is your connection to our town?”

Brialla hesitated, but could not figure out the Priestess’ meaning. “Connection?”

“What ties you to us, specifically? What would make us think that you would invest the necessary time and energy in us?”

Did she not know how commerce functioned at a base level? Money. Profit. Brialla’s eyes darted from the pale woman to the ground at Kerendra’s feet, then to the sentinel’s chiseled abs, to her face. Then, realizing what she was doing, tearing her gaze away and back to the Priestess. “Is trade itself not the connection, ma’am?”

“Once, perhaps. Recent history has shown that your people, and those you call allies, count such connections… not at all. We need something else.”

“I must regretfully say that I don’t know what I could offer, ma’am. I represent a merchant house, nothing more.”

Several seconds of pregnant silence hung between the two. The Priestess exhaled, just the faintest hint of despair in the tone of that breath. The kind of despair an uncle or aunt might feel when an adorable niece or nephew fails to do some basic task for the seventeenth time. “You have found a safe harbor in Kerendra’s arms, have you not?”

Brialla was not embarrassed, exactly, of her encounter with Kerendra. She decided she wanted it, and she knew Kerendra had, too, and so they had done it, and it was not any more difficult than that. But it was a spur of the moment thing, a thing done because she was away from home, away from prying eyes. Or so she had thought. At length, she nodded, spending her energy fighting back the crimson in her cheeks. Failing to respond verbally.

“Kerendra likes your… type. Likes you,” the Priestess said. She did not spare a single glance for her guard, whom she was speaking for. “But randomly copulating when you both feel like it is hardly fertile soil for something serious. I might put a stop to it, were it only that.”

Momentarily mute, Brialla nodded. Again. Felt stupid for her silence, but felt acutely, too, the Priestess’ ghostly, metaphorical fingers gripping her throat.

“It seems to me you might both have what you want. You, sin’dorei, need to forge an ironclad investment in us. Our people. This town. The two of you seem in a position to enjoy one-another, and create that investment.”

The Priestess spared a significant look for Kerendra first, and then Brialla. “Go with her,” she decreed to her sentinel, and then turned, disappearing into her residence, her other guard in tow. Leaving a few seconds of silence in her wake.

Brialla wet her dry lips with her tongue, and then shared an awkward smile with Kerendra. “So, ah… breakfast?”