While we made camp that night, I went back over the information that Cariad had given me regarding this particular mission.
According to my daemon case-worker, they’d gotten a lead on this set of ruins using the fragment of… whatever it was that they had come to collect when I’d found it in an apparatus that was emitting raw mana into the air. That had raised suspicion enough that they’d basically scanned the local area for similar energy sources and found this one we were heading towards.
Because of what amounted to corporate politics, they couldn’t do more than tag the location and leave it be. But Cariad had told me that if I, as a Traveler, located the source of the energy and made a direct request for assistance, that would allow the DSR branch that she and Cerebaton were part of to circumvent the boardroom shenanigans going on.
Because of those same boardroom shenanigans, though, we couldn’t wait too long in pursuing the lead. Cariad hadn’t come out and said it, but it was clear to me that someone in the higher-ups of the DSR was likely going to try something soon. And given how the daemons had reacted to the presence of that odd bone fragment, I knew that it had to be important.
My mind kept returning to the strange reaction that had basically packed the interior of the ruin with mana, to the point that it was aggressively refilling my reserves and recharging the girls’ mana-infused coins as they used them. It had soaked into the walls to the point where the stone itself resisted my Manipulate Element
The fact that the fragment had emanated strong sensations of entropic energy, coupled with the sand trickling onto it and resulting in a pulse of mana coming out made me wonder if it was some kind of machine intended to harness the entropic reaction that fueled creatures like the daemons.
And that thought actively terrified me.
If the humans on Cortha had been experimenting with technology like that before they were wiped out, then there was the potential of far more dangerous things being uncovered. The cages in the first set of ruins we explored were evidence enough that the humans of Cortha had no problems experimenting on other lifeforms. I didn’t want to think about explosives powered by magic or whatever else they might have been planning.
“Liam?” Kassandra’s quiet voice from nearby nearly made me jump, but even distracted like I was, I’d picked up on my lover’s unique scent.
The faint smell of cinnamon and musk always followed Kassandra, to the point where I was sure that she had to use it in her shampoo and maybe stored her clothes with cinnamon sticks in the pockets or something. It was enough that I could tell who was who in the dark, but not so overpowering that I couldn’t smell anything else.
Looking up from the crackling campfire, I smiled at my serpentine lover and gestured for her to come closer. Smiling, she threaded her way over the grass before winding her scaled length about me and settling into my lap with her torso. Her scaled tail made roughly three full revolutions around me before she ran out of length, which allowed her to lounge in my arms while wrapping about my chest. She seemed to prefer this position, as it allowed her to steal more body heat from me.
“What's up, Kass? I thought you’d be asleep by now,” I asked as I cradled my first lover close to my chest.
She’d shed her leather under-bust corset already and was wearing only a cotton blouse that left the tops of her freckle-kissed breasts exposed, and a brief skirt around her waist.
Kassandra snuggled in with a happy sigh, pressing a kiss to my cheek as she got comfortable. The fire that I’d been staring at crackled quietly, sending a wave of warmth over both of us that I’m sure Kassandra enjoyed but was unnecessary for me. Colorado winters made me used to the cool mountain air we were currently exposed to.
“I couldn’t get to sleep without you there,” Kassandra murmured in my ear, unbuttoning the front of my shirt to slip a hand inside and start to gently rub back and forth. “The others are all ready for bed too, but none of us could get comfortable enough to sleep just yet.”
“So they sent you out to retrieve me?” I teased, booping Kassandra on the nose lightly. Her eyes crossed briefly as she looked at the offending finger before going to meet mine again.
“If I was to ‘retrieve’ you, as you said, then do you think I’d be wearing my top still?” Kassandra teased gently, pressing her full lips to the tip of my finger as it retreated.
“Yes,” I replied instantly as I felt her coils begin to start their slow squeeze-relax-squeeze rhythm that felt like a whole-body hug. “You hate the cold enough that I would not be surprised in the slightest if you kept your top on to come out here and tease me into coming to bed.”
“If you know that I wouldn’t like the cold, then why are you making me come out here in it?” Kassandra asked, pouting up at me with slitted brown eyes wide.
She upped the ante further by biting her bottom lip provocatively and I had to smother a laugh. Not because she looked funny doing it, but because my mischief macaroni knew what buttons to push to wrap me around her finger.
“I was thinking about tomorrow, Nugget,” I said gently, using the nickname I’d given her sometime ago.
I called her Nugget because she was small and precious to me, something she’d told me was ridiculous enough that she thought it was adorable. But from the way her tail tightened around me when I said it, I could tell Kassandra liked the nickname.
“Let tomorrow worry about itself, come to bed?” Kassandra asked sweetly and I couldn’t deny her the request.
A thought with Manipulate Element
“As you wish,” I said before pressing a kiss to Kassandra’s lips. She moaned happily into the kiss, continuing to unbutton my shirt as I ducked into the tent and flicked the toggles closed on the inside with one hand.
The interior of the tent was almost pitch black, but enough light from the moon and stars came through that I could see the silhouettes of my girls sprawled out on the mound of blankets and furs that was our bed.
“Told you that Kass would be successful,” Rieka chuckled in the shadows and I saw her outline shift and then felt her hands on my belt buckle. “Move up a bit, Kass.”
Wordlessly, my dwarf lamia climbed higher to let her friend strip me down for bed. I knew that it would just be sleeping tonight though, since both Shayla and Jane were far too shy to try anything. But as I felt the warmth of Rieka’s breath wash over my pelvis when she tugged my pants down, I couldn’t help but imagine what might come in the future.
<><><>
Sleeping in a pile with four beautiful women is wonderful in practice, but has its downsides. Especially when none of them are fans of the cold and you happen to be the warmest thing in the room. Being snuggled from all sides—including above as Jane had this habit of wrapping herself around my head like a curvy little helmet—made for a very comfortable sleeping arrangement until you had to actually get up.
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Thankfully, my girls were used to this and also knew the stakes that we were operating under. They’d only had a brief time to talk to Cariad when the daemon had stopped to talk to us during the retrieval of the bone shard. So once they were awake enough to actually think, the girls banded together to get the tent packed up while I got breakfast ready.
“To think that there were several of these locations so close to town,” Rieka muttered as we worked our way up the rocky hillside.
“I wouldn’t… put this… close to town,” Shayla huffed in between long, drawn out breaths. “It's… not like… people would normally… come up… this way.”
“Oh it’s not that bad,” Jane chirped, bounding ahead of the group. Her little legs pumped quickly as she scrambled up the hillside, virtually ignoring the slope. “Come on, I see a cave mouth up there that we can rest in.”
“Jane, slow down,” Kassandra called after the energetic little woman. “You remember what happened the last time you raced ahead of the group?” The dwarf lamia threaded along over the rocks, her scaled body not phased by the sharp slope in the slightest.
“She’s right, Jane,” I called from the back of the group. “Please, don’t run ahead like that?”
“Okay, Liam!” Jane chirped before bounding back down the slope in a shower of dislodged pebbles.
Jane was at least considerate enough that she didn’t send an avalanche of rock down on top of the other girls, instead skidding down to one side. That didn’t help Shayla though, as the curvy moth woman still jumped and slipped, forcing me to lunge to catch her.
Steadying Shayla with one hand on her hip and the other on her back, I held her until she caught her breath once more.
“I hate… hills…” Shayla panted, her wings flexing in annoyance while she leaned on me.
“Can’t fault you in that, hon,” I said gently. “If it wasn’t for my boosted stats, I’d be right there with you.”
Shayla was, by and large, the least fit of my summoners. That wasn’t to say that she was fat, as she carried her curves in all the right places. But up until she became my summoner, she was fairly reclusive and stayed in towns to work on her art. So she struggled the most with the uneven ground and sharp slope.
“Okay…” Shayla panted after a moment to catch her breath. “I can make it up to the cave… let's go.”
The hillside we were climbing wasn’t sheer by any means, but it was sharply angled. There wasn’t much in the way of undergrowth to help fix the loose soil. But the directions that Cariad had given us referenced this particular hillside.
They hadn’t been able to get more of a fix on the location other than the western face of this mountain, and so we had been working our way up at an angle while I swept it with my Manipulate Element
The reminder to Jane of her own near-death experience only a few weeks ago was enough that the energetic mouse woman kept close to the group, but she was clearly excited at the potential of finding more ruins to explore and catalog.
Rieka continued stoically, breathing through her mouth and nose while she worked her way ever upwards on the angled path that we were using to climb the loose hillside. Kassandra kept pace with her friend, chatting quietly and trying to distract the excited Jane while I looked after Shayla.
Since Shayla hadn’t taken flight even once since I met her, I didn’t think that her wings were capable of supporting her. And since I didn’t know the situation around that, whether it was normal or not, I didn’t ask. Instead, I just stayed ready to catch her in case she slipped or fell at any point while climbing.
The late afternoon sun beat down on us, and as I followed the panting moth woman up the hillside, my boots sinking into the loose gravel and dirt with each step, I glanced back over my shoulder.
We’d made good time since leaving Juneau yesterday. The girls and I had taken a carriage partway, stopping in a town along the road when Kassandra had spotted the mountain that Cariad had given me as reference. Thankfully, my attractive daemon friend had sent a strong description of the mountain range and the girls were able to pick out which particular peak we were after. Which was why we spent the rest of the previous day going cross-country until we reached the foothills and camped.
The first half of today had been working our way up the rolling foothills and into the mountains, following the directions that Cariad had passed on to me.
I thought wryly. “”
When she’d passed the directions on to me, I’d shot them back to her to make sure she wasn’t pulling my leg. Cariad had admitted that she hadn’t been able to give specific directions due to the fact the particular daemon who found the link was using scrying magic, and that naturally clouds the perception of the viewer.
Shayla’s foot slipped again and I reached out automatically to steady her, one hand landing on her full bottom and bracing her. The first time I’d had to do this, the moth woman had squeaked in surprise and proceeded to slip worse. Now she just grunted her thanks and kept powering forward.
I honestly felt bad for Shayla, as we’d not mentioned anything about this kind of situation when she’d agreed to come with us. But my lovely artist didn’t complain, she simply pushed on.
Without any trees overhead to shade us, our group continued to bake in the sun as we worked our way up the cliff face. The cave that Jane had mentioned would be a welcome refuge from the heat for a bit to rest and let the girls catch their breath. We’d left the last of the trees behind several hours before, now there were only scrubby bushes and the occasional patch of long grass or stubborn lichen clinging to the gray and brown rocks.
Overhead, a hawk wheeled in the blue sky, hunting for its dinner. I watched it turn while sending out another pulse of energy through Manipulate Element
“Jane, hold up,” Rieka called and I glanced up to find the miniature scholar scrambling the last distance to the low, wide cave mouth.
Jane waved one hand over her head in understanding and slid to a stop about thirty feet away from the opening, which I was glad for. We had no idea if the cave was unoccupied after all.
“There’s a flat section in front of it. It looks to be taller than I’d first thought!” Jane called back, her hand resting on the handle of her spell rod, clearly ready to act and attack if anything jumped out at her. It looked to me like Jane had taken her brief scare with the traps in our last adventure to reaffirm her determination to protect herself instead of feeling bad.
“Okay, just hold up and wait for us,” Rieka replied and began to push herself a little quicker up the hillside.
Kassandra matched her friend: spell rod already at the ready as her serpentine coils worked over the broken stone. Even Shayla put on a burst of speed, pumping her legs to push herself up the hillside in determination of a chance to rest on even ground for the first time in over an hour.
Jane waited until Rieka and Kassandra had caught up to her before she bounded ahead, this time drawing her spell rod to menace the cave opening while the other two backed her up.
I thought with a grimace. My girls were strong and smart though, and they would be able to handle themselves if something happened. Also, it wasn’t as if I couldn’t race to help if something did happen.
But nothing occurred. No monster charged forth from the cave, or spells lashed out in attack. There was only the rumble of dislodged gravel and the panting of the girls as Shayla and I made it the last stretch up the hillside to join them there on the flat ground.
Despite her exhaustion, Shayla still pulled her spell rod free of her belt to join the other three in menacing the large cave mouth while I studied it.
The opening was taller than it was wide, which was what had allowed Jane to spot it from further down the slope and partially obscured by the lip of this flat space. The opening was maybe eight feet wide and twice that tall, tapering together into a rough point overhead where two large slabs of stone came together. The cave was deep enough that the light of the afternoon didn’t reach the depths of it, though the setting sun was slowly lowering that shadow as it crept through the sky. The stones were a mottled mixture of yellowish sandstone and dark-brown mudstone. The flat ground we were standing on was about thirty feet deep and maybe seventy feet across, curling around one side of the hill to wind further up the mountain at a gentler slope than the loose gravel we’d been going up.
“Oh thank the gods and magic,” Shayla panted when she saw the gentler slope.
“Shayla, can you light the cave up?” Rieka asked now that we’d caught up. “If it’s empty, we can take a break inside then keep going.
Nodding, the moth woman flicked her spell rod and conjured a sphere of light up on its tip. Another flick sent the spell careening into the cave like a tossed ball. But as the sphere of bright light soared forward, no one was looking at the cave.
Instead, their eyes were caught by the glittering threads of reflected light on the cave wall where the two types of stone met, where layers of quartz hid in the shadows until the light hit them just right and they glowed a warm color because of the pale yellow sand trapped behind them. It made the wall shimmer beautifully, as if it had threads of gilding run through it.
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