“In Ragnillum last night, I rested limbs so weary … started by daylight, next morning bright and early…”
His voice was sweet and tenor, but it was lost under the thrum of the tavern. Bored, Marco drummed painted claws on the splintered table to the tune he was trying to remember: “Took a drop of the pure …”
Bah. At the rate the elf on the stage was going at, he’d never get a chance to earn any coin. He thought, briefly, about interrupting. It wasn’t terribly like anyone was paying attention to the stage anyhow. He tossed the thought aside as rude.
A few minutes of enduring bad grog and ear-piercing not-soprano later, he picked the idea back up, dusted it off, and held it in the light.
As if by lightning strike, the rest of the song came to him all in a flash.
The patrons looked up as the heavy thump of tiefling hooves stomped on the table, once, twice, and then in a sharp, catchy staccato that kept perfect time with the eager singing of the fiddle pressed to Marco’s neck. “Let’s have some real music,” he boomed, tail lashing over the heads of his fellows as he played. “Sing it if you know it, boys!”
In the merry month of Squall, from my home I started,
Left the girls of Fial nearly broken-hearted!
Saluted me father dear, kissed my darling mother,
Drank a pint of beer my grief and tears to smother…
Cheers went up; that was more like it. Marco leapt from table to table amid clapping and drunken singing, fully in his element. The fiddle trotted along without so much as a skipped string as he kicked off the walls, perched on rafters, and stole a dwarf’s beer with a flick of his tail. He caught tossed silver pieces with teeth, danced with a pretty young dragonborn, and with a finish fit for a king’s performance, at long last overtook the stage, where the poor elf had stood floundering. She was no soprano, she was a contralto, and she showed it when he finally got her to join him in singing the finale, matching his smile and dancing with him. She wasn’t a bad contralto at all, either, if she’d just stick to it.
The last strains of the song faded, and with an easy flourish he passed the fiddle off to his tail and took the elf by the hand for a bow. Applause and coin showered them; Marco thought he might purr. The call for an encore, though, would have to go unanswered. He was exhausted.
A pint and a meal later, Marco found himself in a considerably better mood. No one could follow his act, so the stage had remained empty. The elf seemed to have forgiven him his showboating since he gave her a portion of the earnings. And his performance had assured him a bed at the inn. The only thing that was missing, he thought a bit wistfully, was someone to warm it; but Alex was off in the Kingdom of Animals, learning the medical arts from the antelopes or something. He said a brief prayer to his preferred god, the lady of the hot months and of storms and of the sea, and really good sex: Bas, don’t let my husband forget to have fun.
And then, as an afterthought: And send me some fun, too.
Content again, he picked at the remains of his potatoes and lamb. Bits of his song still played through his head, and he sang them beneath his breath: “See the laddies smile, laughing all the while at my darling style—”
“T’would set your heart a-bubbling,” finished a new voice, and Marco froze, blinking into his bowl. He looked to the side and sure enough, someone who had not been there earlier had appeared on the stool beside him. She was a sight: skin like dark sand and an explosion of black, kinked hair draped over her shoulders, flowing in waves over the generous curves of her body. She was huge beside him, human with perhaps a touch of dwarf, though indeed it must have been a very tall dwarf that sired her. There was a wild look about her, and a smell that filled him with nostalgia yet he could not place. “Asked me, was I hired? The wages I required?”
“’Til I was almost tired,” Marco finished, leaning his chin onto his hand and beaming. “Good evening, friend. The day treating you well?”
“Always,” she returned with a rich laugh. She had an accent about her, something he’d not heard before—and that was saying something. “I saw your show, earlier. Impressive, and I don’t mind telling you—takes a lot to impress the likes of me.”
“Oh? I’m flattered. I can’t say I broke much of a sweat over it, though.” Marco threw back the last mouthful of his drink, making no effort to hide the way he gave her another once-over out of the corner of his eye. This time he thought he saw something he had not before, and was not expecting it. Perhaps it was the flash of her throat or the crinkle of her eyes as she smiled, but he suddenly, desperately wanted to spend his evening with her. “Marco—Marco, uh, Bellamy,” he offered, startled by his own stumbling. extending one hand. “Wanderer and bard.”
“You may call me Summer,” she returned, taking the hand. “Always pleased to meet a performer. Can’t get enough of them.”
Marco made a show of pondering this, flicking the tip of his tail near around his ear like a pensive cat while trying to recover his dignity. “We tend to multiply wherever we find ourselves, so you’ve that in your favor.”
“Oh, yes, dear, I’m quite fond of that tendency.” She had been watching his tail as he tossed it to and fro, and with motion so quick he did not see it, caught the fat crimson spade between her thumb and forefinger. Smirking, she bit a spot on her lip. “I find you’re quite good at it, too.”
Bas be praised, he thought.
The bed did not groan so much as it yelped when two bodies collapsed upon it all in a tangle. A delighted laugh burst its way out of Marco’s lungs as Summer’s bulk pressed the air out of him. She was a sailor, she’d told him on their way up the stairs, captain of her own fleet, and the crisp smell of salt and sun on her skin confirmed it. Her hair pooled down around their faces like a waterfall as they kissed, and it blocked out everything else in the room. The room itself was nice, sure; but Marco found the blinders fun.
Fun. There was the key word. Summer had been all teasing and coyness in their lead-up flirting, and possessed a kind of self-assuredness Marco was not sure he had seen before. She had carried him up the stairs to his room laughing, and lifted him like he wasn’t the weight of two tieflings put together with the bulk of his tail. It only made him hungrier for her. “Do this often, hm?” she murmured pleasantly against his cheek as he kissed anything he could reach. Her breath was like a warm breeze.
“You could say that,” he said, and flexed his tail up and around to squeeze her leg. “You?”
A burst of laughter was his answer, and she glanced back at his tail as he coiled and uncoiled it around her. “Daily, if I can help it,” she said, and began to help him out of the patterned red wrap he used as a top. He moved to help her do the same, eager to see her in her fullness, but she stayed his hand. “Tell me what you like, little Marco,” she said in a sultry growl, running her heavy hands over his chest, down his upper arms. “Tell me your secrets, tell me what you want. All of it. Everything.”
Marco lifted a brow, skeptical. “Everything?”
But Summer only smiled at him.
He became aware, dimly, of the sort of unusual sensation in her touch. Magic, he thought, and for a moment was alarmed. But soon after he thought again, magic, but not a spell. It was as if magic was ebbing off of her to pool onto his body, and perhaps that was the meaning of her tone when she said again, “Tell me.”
And this time his tongue seemed to speak of its own accord. Was that the magic too, he wondered? Was it a side-effect of his startling need for her? Yet he did not feel charmed or enchanted, just … relaxed. “Everything,” he said, letting his hands catch her lightly around the wrists, though they did not stop her. “I, mm. I want you to take me every way you can.” He kicked his heels up to wrap them around her waist, and she slid one hand up his neck to cup his burned (and burning) cheek. “I … please.”
There again was that laugh, like the calling of sea birds. “Oh, little one, you don’t know what you ask for.”
“Then show me,” he returned, hastily licking wet lips. “Take me, fill me up, ruin me—gods, there’s something about you—”
“I know,” she purred, and before he could quite parse it, the rest of his clothing was in a heap on the floor. So too was Summer’s top gone, her full breasts lying heavy on her chest as she worked her hands down the curve of his hips, through the scattered white hair on his rounded stomach, down to his thickset thighs. These she lingered on, finding every inch of them. “Little one, you’re so handsome,” she said, and the silly, dizzy part of Marco that had decided it needed her went flush with pride. He loved his thighs. They were beautiful and squishy and he could crush a watermelon with them. It was so good to be with people who appreciated them.
The undeniable fact was that he was already embarrassingly wet. He could feel how he had puffed up in anticipation, how slick his lips were against one another, giving him a jolt of pleasure every time he moved his legs. He bit back a moan as she slid two fingers to the top of his clit, pausing just before they made contact. “And this,” she crooned. “This is wonderful. Beautiful Marco, I can’t wait to take this.”
“Don’t, then,” he breathed, and anything else he had to say turned into a startled hoot when she dragged him up her body by the hips and pressed her mouth to his slit. Her tongue was almost rough, textured just enough to make him squeal and bury his face in his hands as she dragged it in long, slow, heavenly licks over each lip, across the hood of his clit, tracing back to lavish the inside of each thigh before returning to the center to give an open-mouthed kiss to his entrance. When he dared to look up at her again, he was met with those smiling eyes that seemed as dark as the sea. She held his gaze, and he felt her teeth graze his labia gently. They were sharp, they realized, and wondered how he had missed that before.
She shifted to heft his heavy tail over her shoulder, seemingly without effort, and returned to her work, sucking and nibbling each part of him. It seemed to Marco that there were no longer any breaks between his moans: they simply crashed into one another like waves, an endless flow of happy, hungry sound. Sometimes she would stop, pulling away just as the sensations became too much to bear, only to return once the threat had faded. Maybe that was the magic, he thought hazily, being able to read his body so flawlessly—but the thought drained away with his cry as she dove in again. This time her tongue pressed his folds apart entirely.
It was not a question of if he would come, now. She ate of him, lapping his offering into her mouth, suckling his clit. And this time Marco knew it was finally, truly coming—
He had to stuff his hands against his mouth to stifle the wail that ripped through him as he climaxed, ignorant of the way his thighs clamped together and how his tail flexed and thrashed. He had knocked Alex over before, doing this. But when he could think again (an eternity later), he saw Summer smiling down at him, unmovable as the sun, and licking his juices from her face.
Gently, she lay him back down. Every movement was a little agonizing, a new lightning bolt of pleasure flickering through him. “That,” he said through shortened breath, and whimpered. “That …”
She had come to sit beside him, and stroke his hair. That strange feeling pulsed across him again, that hunger, and he wondered when she had had time to undress.
He wondered where she had been hiding the uncommonly large cock now resting on her thigh. He looked at it for a time, his shorted-out brain struggling to put a few things together. She noticed. “Too much?” she asked, gesturing to that part of herself. “Or not enough?”
And as she said it she lay a hand upon it. Marco blinked, and it had grown. It had not only grown, but it had become obscene, with a ridged head and thick veins, with an unmistakable knot starting to swell at the base. “How are you doing that?” he asked, blearily.
“Don’t you know me yet, little Marco?” she said, twisting his hair in her fingers. “I put the song back into your head, I watched your dance in the tavern. I heard your prayer. Your husband is fine, by the way. A little stressed, but he learns stressful work.”
The dots connected.
“My–my lady,” he mumbled, forcing himself to sit upright. His pulse had rocketed back up, and he stared at the woman across from him for much longer than he would have liked before throwing himself prone before her. “My lady, I didn’t recognize you. Forgive me…”
He did now, though. It was as if the scales had fallen from his eyes, and now he could see the radiance of Bas (Bas, Herself, a very god) for what it truly was. She seemed to glow, her hair seemed to drift as if moved by water. Her eyes were deeper, her smile broader, her body heavier, larger. And she laughed once more, catching him by the jaw to caress his cheek. “Do not be afraid,” she told him. “You are pleasing to me, and you are one of mine. A man after my own heart, loving the best things in life: song, dance, wandering … sex. All you do here tonight you do in worship of me.”
Even her scent was stronger, sun and salt and sand, an ocean breeze on a summer’s day. He had never been in the presence of a god before. He supposed he never would again. He stared up at her in awe. “What would you have of me?”
“I would have you, small one, just as you asked. Unless,” and Bas lifted an eyebrow in playful questioning, glancing to her hefty cock again, “unless you would rather worship me a different way.”
Marco could not help but follow her gaze. And he realized now that by the way he had bowed out on the bed it was mere inches from him, half-erect, the tip already beginning to ooze its ichor. “No, no,” he said hastily, pulling his eyes away from it, but he could not disguise the smile pushing its way onto his lips. “No. There’s nothing I’d like more.”
Bas smiled.
She helped him to sit upright again, and herself moved to lean against the pillows. Her legs were kicked apart, giving Marco full view of the taut and heavy sack sitting comfortably beneath the thick shaft she stroked. He did not need prompting. He crawled to her, and with all reverence he could muster, pressed his mouth to her tip.
An approving rumble was his reward, along with her hand taking him by one horn as a kind of handle. He noticed, but just barely: he was more interested in the strange taste he was getting as he nursed the head of her cock, sweet and thick, almost like warm honey. “Is this what they mean when they say something is like ‘the nectar of the gods’?” he said when he paused to lick his lips, unable to keep himself totally in check even in the presence of a deity.
But Bas thought it was funny, if the way she threw her head back and laughed was anything to go by. “Would you believe me if I said yes?” she returned, coaxing Marco back to his work with a tug of his horn.
He was happy to do so, his cautious explorations gradually becoming broader and sloppier. Even her skin tasted magnificent, musky without being sour, and as he went from kissing to sucking to licking he found himself imagining what it would feel like to be speared open by a god: what that precum would feel like against his walls, what those veins would do pressing against his clit as she thrusted in and out of him. How it would feel to be stretched and knotted, and pumped full with the contents of those massive balls. He got so into it that he only realized he had taken her fully into his mouth when the head pressed against the back of his throat. He tried to swallow her deeper in, only to find that she was too big to fit.
Then it jostled something wrong in him and he had to pull back, coughing. It lasted only a moment, and he wiped the drool from his chin. “Please,” he said, “Let me be your temple. I can’t wait any longer.”
A moment later he was on his back again, being showered with kisses. Bas dragged claws she had not had before down his sides, light and titillating, and kneed his legs apart. She broke away only to sit back and press the fat head of her cock to his still-soaked slit, and for an instant Marco worried it would not fit. Not even Alex was that big.
Bas pushed forward, guiding herself with one hand, steadying him by the hip with the other. He felt himself stretch, stretch, he felt the tiniest pop of pain, a distant ache, but that was lost by the overwhelming sense of pleasure and rightness as she sunk into him. It was different from before; it was a slower, deeper kind of pleasure. Marco moaned, claws digging into the sheets. “Ready?” Bas asked.
“Yes!” His own voice cracked. “Yes, fuck me!”
She thrust, a single smooth stroke. In response Marco twisted, trying to spread himself out wider, his horns catching in the bedding as he tossed his head. Already her knot kissed the slick lips of his hole. Her withdrawal left him gasping and whimpering, the hunger stronger than ever, until she filled him again a second later. On the third stroke he came, covering his face again as he tried to stifle his pleasured howls. She kept fucking him through it, caressing him, kissing his long legs, every thrust bringing new pleasure he had never felt before. When it passed she only increased her speed, gripping his ample hips, and when Marco looked down he could see her bulging his stomach with every inward motion. This time he lasted a while longer before another orgasm swallowed him up.
He lost track of how many times he came. He lost track of time. His whole world became Bas and the explosions of sensation inside him. At some point she flipped him over and began to fuck him from behind; at another she put him on his side, his upmost leg hooked over her shoulder. Surely, he thought, at some point he would get tired, at some point he would stop coming, at some point she would come. But he came down from each climax just hungry for the next, and the next would always arrive.
He was right, though, about Bas. The knot knocking against his body began to do less knocking and more pushing, and he watched with utter delight when she shoved it all the way into him. He nearly came again, his walls fluttering against the huge intruder. When she pulled out and pushed in again in two swift, almost rough motions, he did. And she as well.
Soaked in sweat and wracked by his own pleasure, it took Marco a moment to notice the heat rising within him. But it became more, and hotter, and all-encompassing, and when he looked up at Bas he found her with her eyes closed in exultation as she claimed his body. He could feel each pulse of her dick as it filled him with her cum, and how his body felt heavier with each burst. His stomach bulged out further, and felt the cream begin to force its way out around her cock.
The air, which had been thick with his voice and the wet smack of bodies, now only held ragged breathing. Awash with contentment, Marco went limp on the mattress. “Did I—hnnf—please you, my lady?” he asked, scarcely able to speak above a whisper.
Once more she touched his face, loving and gentle. “Yes, my little Marco,” she said. “You have done well.”
He’d climaxed a final time when she pulled out of him, that titanic knot deflated but still enough to push him over the edge when it left. Her cum poured out of him in spurts and gushes, coating his ass and tail, still impossibly warm. The last thing Marco would recall was Bas stroking his hair. He slept, too tired to even clean himself off.
When he awoke, though, it was not to an unpleasant mess. He found himself tucked under blankets and with a pillow under his head, and a lasting soreness that was not wholly unpleasant. Sometimes he would shudder with what was almost a mini-orgasm, as if his body was remembering what had been done to it.
And there was Bas, in bed beside him, reading a book.
He pushed himself up. Stretched, asked what time it was—morning. She was reading something about clockmaking, which struck him as somewhat odd, but thought it was perhaps better not to say so.
He had to catch a boat today, he remembered aloud, sadly. Not nearly late enough for another round, either, though Bas chuckled and said that greed only led to unhappiness. “But if you wished it,” she said in the end, one of those bottomless ocean eyes glimmering, “it could perhaps be arranged.”
“Could it?”
“You’re a beautiful thing, my Marco. You exemplify me. And I am a hypocrite, and I am greedy, and I would very much like to have you.” She held out a hand, which Marco observed uncertainly. “Would you come with me, to my home amid the planes? To live forever in plenty and peace, in paradise?”
“Now?” Marco asked.
“But of course.”
Naturally, he was tempted. He doubted anyone wouldn’t be. But temptation is not the same as action. He took her hand, smiling, and folded her fingers back into her palm. “I’m flattered. And I did break a sweat over it, this time,” he laughed. “But my husband is waiting for me to come back to him. That is my paradise.”