“Whisper soft and waters wake,” I said again, tapping my fingers over my lip as my mind attempted to fit and refit the pieces of this strange puzzle together until they made sense.

  Like most riddles whose solutions had been buried in poetic verse, none of the finer details had been included. There had been no mention of fountains, no hints of captured companions, nor any indications of what those two things had to do with one another. All I knew—through a combination of tortured logic and equally tortured experimentation—was that if we hummed, we would wake the fountain… probably. What that had to do with freeing Lynnria was anyone’s guess, but it at least seemed a step in the right direction.

  I sighed in defeat. “That’s the line. I guess there’s nothing else for it but to try. Whenever you’re ready, Jax.”

  We had come to the solution jointly, but instead of accepting the honors with grace, she only folded her arms under her breasts and fixed me with an aloof stare. “Whenever ye be ready, Master. I done it once. Until I get me reward, I ain’t doing another, so go right on ahead.”

  Perplexed, I turned to look at her. “So… what? You’re going on strike?”

  “Payment rendered be payment due, and I ain’t had me due,” she reminded me pointedly. Her fingers made a shooing motion from beneath her crossed arms. “Ye can hum a tune easy enough.”

  A groan worked its way up my throat. Did we really have to take thirty steps to the side before we took one forward? It was tempting to just take her suggestion and marshal onwards without her, but I knew her well enough to know she would resent me for it. So, feeling like a drunken college girl at Mardi Gras, I bunched my robe into my hands and flashed her.

  The facade of indifference popped in an instant.

  “Whoo!” Grinning now, Jax clapped her hands with excitement. “Give us another! But slower this time. Show me them bedroom eyes when ye wag that sexy beast.”

  A blush darkened my cheeks. I had never had my manhood referred to as a beast before, sexy or otherwise, but I kind of liked it. It was thrilling… and strangely empowering. It was no wonder women so often made a career out of this.

  Hold on. When did we slip into Bizarro World? I felt certain we had just been here, but in reverse.

  Naturally, that was the moment our third appeared from behind and forcefully jerked the robe over my head, dislodging my hat in the process.

  “She said, ‘off with it,’” Mia grumbled hotly. “I need all the clothes in one place if I’m to magic them clean. Now quit dawdling and get Lynnria down before we all drown in this pointless quagmire of sexual tension.”

  There was a pause, then her eyes shifted to the purpled length of flesh she had left exposed and bobbing, and with a quirk of her brow, she delivered a light tap to its underside before returning to her own business.

  I… think Jax may have said something afterward, but I could not tell you what. My vision had momentarily whited out from the effort not to come on the spot.

  “—er? Master, can ye—oh, bugger this.”

  Swearing under her breath, my First turned to the fountain and started making a few hurried and abortive attempts at a tuneless something-or-other, but I had no attention left for that. I had been caught by an undertow of emotional turmoil—but not from myself. From her. Somehow, that slight jostling had knocked loose the block upon the latent empathic link Jax and I shared, which now threatened to drown me in the raw need I sensed coursing through her body.

  To find it there was no surprise. She was what she was, and I had not exactly been a sea of tranquility since entering this little garden. But the intensity?

  I had thought I was horny; she thirsted for my touch almost as much as if I were divinity made manifest, the masculine avatar of the goddess we had witnessed not minutes ago. It writhed and thrashed within her, begging to be scratched, aching to be pounded into submission by the beast she had named, and now exposed, called to her eyes like a shining diamond in the sky. That she had not immediately fallen to her knees in worship and presented herself to its call was a testament to the strength of her Will—or more likely, the Skill that buttressed it.

  For a moment, I burned with envy that she could carry on under such a burden, but then my eyes fell to the gap between her legs, to the slit visibly twitching in its battle not to let its juices slip. The slightest push would see her fall. And just like that, my patience snapped. I could take it no more. Xhinn taunting me from above, naked women everywhere, Lynnria constantly pleading for someone, anyone, to take her…

  Mia was right. They both were. Who was it that benefited from all this self-imposed abstinence? What time had we saved? Who was I trying to impress? I knew exactly what would happen once we cut Lynnria down. She would tackle me to the ground, my weak, self-righteous protestations about improper frames of mind would be ignored, and she would take what she needed. To stop her, she would need to be restrained, and frankly, I no longer had it in me to try.

  A few quick steps closed the distance between us, and with surprising ease, I had her bent at the waist and grasping at the smoothed stone of the fountain to keep from falling in. She gasped at my touch, moaning with the effort to maintain her control, then looked back on me with a heady mixture of hope and confusion.

  “Master? Master, I ain’t in a mood fer teasing. I be dirty yet.”

  Teasing? Ha. The only thing that was teasing around here was the grin at my lips. I was far past caring about a little mud, and the stink of long-dead, stagnant water had already pervaded the garden to an inescapable degree. By that point, all I wanted was to knead the flesh now beneath my hands like the wet clay it now so closely resembled… and to quash the smell under layer upon layer of an altogether different perfume.

  “Yeah, you’re a dirty girl, alright.”

  With that, I rammed my cock home.

  There was no foreplay. No kissing or fondling. Jax never needed any, and after the day I had been having, neither did I. I simply pushed forward, plunging into her liquid heat like a man come to an oasis from the desert.

  The shock of it subsumed me for a lingering moment, and a deep groan of relief and pleasure rippled unwillingly from my lips. Its echo was met threefold as Jax arched her back, her claws audibly digging runnels into the ceramic of the fountain’s edge. I held there as long as I could, perfectly still lest I be overwhelmed, but then my lover’s organ began its diabolical work. It squeezed and thrashed like a bed of eels come to life. Within the span of a single breath, she had tamed my beast, the gift of its seed, spilled.

  Yet I was not satisfied. It was not enough. Not near enough—over before I had even begun… Or perhaps I was simply confusing Jax’s emotions as they poured over and mixed with my own. I could no longer tell the difference, nor did it matter. I would have her again. And again, until tears of joy sprang unabated from her eyes, until she cried my name in worshipful acknowledgment of the passion coiled within her breast.

  I knew just what to do. As I caught my breath, I summoned the Hammer of Glory, but not for pleasure; there was plenty enough of that going around already. I wanted her to feel joy, to know that this moment—slicked with mud and bent, stinking with filth, over a disgusting font of corruption—would be marked as one of the singular highlights of her life.

  And that I could make her feel that way any time I wanted.

  Obviously, I was not in the healthiest frame of mind. If I had not been crammed into a pressure cooker to steep within my own hormones, I would have been revolted by the thoughts now racing through my head, but I had been simmering away with them from the moment I had awakened from that coma. I needed an outlet. So now, here I was, up to my neck in the mental equivalent of a 3 a.m. fap session on an exceedingly sketchy website.

  In hindsight, it occurs to me that some of that might not have been entirely my fault. To say nothing of whatever Xhinn’s influence had wrought, I was buried to the hilt in Jax. She could not plant new ideas in my head, but she could absolutely encourage the ones she wanted—even until they seemed basic sense. So it was no surprise that I was feeling a little… depraved.

  But just as I was running my hands through the fine silt coating my lover’s skin, hungrily appreciating the way the light accentuated its softness while I prepared my mind and body for the second round, Mia appeared at my side.

  “My lord, stop!” She placed a hand on my shoulder, only to jerk away as the Hammer raced through her. Taking a moment to still her breathing, she then gestured beneath my feet. “Look. Look at what you have revealed!”

  My eyes unwillingly followed her pointed digit to where some of our combined juices had spilled to one of the flagstones, yet it took me a moment to understand what had gotten her so excited. There was nothing so unusual about it—just a few drops of our combined passions spilled over bare rock… with a clear ring of filth all around it.

  That’s… odd. It’s scattering the mud like dish soap.

  The last I had checked, there was nothing particularly magical about our sexual fluids. Not in that way, at least. It contained purified Life Energy and could thus be used as a magical catalyst, but that did not make it a cleansing agent.

  Jax panted softly. “Master? Master, more. More! Hnn~”

  BLurBLe.

  My gaze snapped back to the fountain at the sound, mind suddenly racing. We were wrong. Again. This puzzle was not about humming at all!

  Or… no. It was. But that was missing the point.

  Whisper soft and waters wake. Humming, singing, whatever—what was important was the intent! Arx’s skill—all Dolilim skills—required a certain mindset, and if we came at this with the wrong one, the fountain would punish us.

  But there was more to the riddle.

  A gift to drink—but not to take.

  I had never truly made sense of that line, even with the bears. I had thought it was referring to Xhinn’s essence, but with that stuff, it was more the inverse. You could take it, but you would be well advised never to touch it, much less drink it. Yet now, staring at that mysteriously clean spot…

  A gift we drink, but… but instead of taking it—instead of walking away, leaving it unused—we leave it in the fountain? Because… because the Life Energy is pure? And somehow, that purges… what? The water? Why? What difference should it make whether the water was clean?

  Clearly none. Unless…

  My eyes shifted again to Lynnria, to the shining patina covering her body.

  …unless the water was not what we were meant to clean.

  Suddenly, I understood. It was all so simple. And now the penultimate line actually made sense!

  Should courage bloom where wisdom fades…

  Stop thinking so much and let loose!

  My eyes attempted to escape up the back of my head. Xhinn, you absolute bitch!

  Of course that Faen had bet we would never figure this out! The solution went completely against my own nature. What kind of jackass would read that poem, glance at his crucified lover, and think, ‘Oh, sure! All we gotta do is have sex in the fountain. That’ll get her down. Then, once we give her a quick bath in our spunk, she’ll be right as rain!’

  Okay, technically, we did not need to have sex. A bit of light moaning followed by a jaunty circle jerk would have done the trick, but that was splitting hairs. The sticking point was that the right answer was the very thing I had been trying my damnedest not to do.

  And that killed me.

  “This is it!” Mia enthused, unaware. “This must be it. Humming to gently wake the fountain. Coitus to cleanse it, and thus, Lynnria?! It’s as though our kindred has made an art piece of Arx’s being.”

  That was one way to put it. Meanwhile, I felt as though I was about to apply the final anointment to a temple of iniquity.

  “Master?” Jax pressed the plush cushion of her backside firmly against my hips, face stretched—appropriately enough—into an expression of ecstatic revelation. Apparently, I had left the kettle on to boil. I had gotten my tears. They now streaked her face in rivulets, to the point I doubted she could even see. But instead of begging me to continue, like before, she only said, “Nay be angered. Please? N-not while ye got me this way. I—I knowed I were asking for it, giving ye lip and here’s me all soiled… but to make me so happy while yer raging?” A sob cut through her words. “It be… Ye wanted me satisfied. That’s it, ain’t it. I got what I wanted, and now… Even though ye did nay want to… Oh, Master!”

  I think that was the moment to finally break me. Her cry had left an ache in my chest, leaving me to wonder how strange a horse empathy was to ride. It had a way of circling back on itself, so that the more of it you felt, the more chance it had to hurt you. I had only wanted Jax to have a good time because I wanted to have a good time—to have a few moments absolved of thought or consequence. Yet there was this lingering… something within me, constantly whispering that pleasure was wrong! Base and low. The necessary evil of our existence, our duty to escape as we rose from the animals. Jax had once named it as simple guilt. Perhaps it was. But now… it had soured my lover’s joy into a thing of sorrow.

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  Xhinn’s design was plain to me now. Somehow, she had seen all of this; the ways we were subtly torturing ourselves, the misunderstandings and cultural baggage. She had seen them and devised a puzzle whose solution was in the recognition and dissolution of that conflict. It was almost comical. In a way… endearing:

  I would have my friends back once I stopped being such a hard-ass and learned to enjoy life. And not a moment before!

  “…please… …please…”

  I firmed my jaw. We’re coming, Lynnria. Just a few more minutes.

  “Get in the fountain,” I commanded, pulling out.

  “W-wha—” Jax tried before her jellied legs betrayed her, and she almost obeyed by simple accident. Head first.

  I was in no mood to explain, and I knew I would have to for Jax to climb into that stinking basin willingly. Even resolved, I was having second and third thoughts myself, so I just nudged her the rest of the way in.

  “Oh. Okay.” Mia grimaced. “I see we’re committing to this without a trial phase.”

  Before I could answer, Jax came up sputtering, strings of flotsam-best-unnamed dangling from her horns like an unusually curvaceous sea hag. Far from cleaning her, the water had only added a fresh coat of muck to her body… save over one critical area. I could actually see the blackened tar fleeing down the inside of her leg.

  I turned my head just enough to make eye-contact with Mia. “That good enough for you?”

  She bit her lip, then returned a shaky sort of nod.

  “What in blazes did ye do that for?” Jax shouted, though it was clear from her gasping that this was more than simple anger. I had pushed her to the precise of a full-on emotional breakdown. “Having a laugh? That it? Make me happy enough to coax some of the only tears I’ve shed since I were a wee lass, then shove me whole into this stinking pit?! All because I were covered in filth and dared covet ye?”

  She brought her claws to her throat.

  “Say the word, Master. Say the word and I’ll burn me flesh clean. I’ll be fresh again come the morrow, just the way I were meant. Ye’ll see.”

  Wow. I really needed to be more careful with that happiness setting. A little went a long way, and a lot could make a person dangerously unpredictable. I had to suppose that made sense. After an emotion that powerful, the mind needed some kind of rationalization for why it felt that way, just to ground itself again, and it would gladly seize upon the first it came to, right or wrong. Left to chance, it was liable to make someone into a fanatic. Or a suicide bomber.

  Still, that she would go that far, to rip out her own throat just to be worthy of me again? I would never want her to do it, of course, but just the fact that she was willing… It was kind of hot.

  Fortunately, there was an easy way to talk her down.

  Delaying only the moment it took to kick my Boots of Muffling into the laundry pile, I climbed into the basin with her.

  “Master?!” Jax’s eyes widened with shock, and she sloshed a step back. “Master, what be this?”

  “I should think that was obvious,” I returned, trying to keep from grimacing.

  I had good intentions, but the reality of having my feet settle into a vat of obscured goo had my mind racing with all sorts of nightmarish scenarios. There was no way of knowing what was in here with us. Decomposing bodies. Flesh-eating bacteria…

  Snakes.

  Schooling my face, I quickly grabbed the hand threatening her neck and pulled her to me.

  “Don’t be a dunce. Even if you were cursed to spend the rest of time right here, covered in gunk, I would still come back to you every day, just to kiss my first true love goodnight.”

  Yeah… it was a corny line. I admit that. I was no fairytale prince and Jax was hardly the prototype for maidens fair, but if we were going for theatrics…

  Without so much as giving her sewage-streaked face a wipe, I pressed my lips to hers and gently slipped my tongue inside. The thin coating of corruption did sour the taste, at least at first, but it was worth it for her reaction. Feeling that elated cry of surprise and relief reverberate up through her, her hands sliding up my shoulders and into my hair, her perfect, mud-slicked body pressing to mine…

  “Sing for me, Jax,” I called, on coming up for air. My hand went to her inner thigh, and I slid my hand firmly home—but only for a moment. There was no need for a digit so crude. And as I lifted one of her legs into the air, my intent became clear. “Sing so everyone can hear.”

  “Sing again? Master, I—” Jax bit her lip. Her eyes were now filled with the arousal I had felt dammed within her, and she began to effortlessly roll her hips in a tantalizing display, even balanced on the one leg. Yet, as her body called me forward, her words were filled with a lingering doubt.

  “I nay understand.” Her hands rose to my chest, torn between a futile attempt at scrubbing me clean and a loving caress. “Just look at the mess I’ve made of ye.”

  I just grinned. “No worries.”

  With my other hand, I scooped the remnant of our earlier coupling from my yet-throbbing member and gave my face a vigorous scrubbing.

  “See?” I said with my best rakish grin. “All clean.”

  Out of context, I was sure that sounded a lot worse than it was. Most people do not associate sexual fluids with anything resembling cleanliness or purity—quite the opposite. But Jax loved it. From her gaping lips to the contortions now twisting their way up her body, you might have thought I had just laid a chisel upon the dike of her libido.

  “That’s right. Just like that,” I said, teasing the entrance to her ever-grasping nethers. “But out loud. Sing for me, hum and moan, let it all out and don’t keep a single drop inside.”

  With that, I struck home with as much pleasure as I could… but only for a moment. To cleanse the fountain, she needed to hum with rapture, and thus to breathe. If I robbed her of that completely, we would accomplish nothing. And so, like a smith at an anvil, I forged her, smashing the Hammer down as hard and high as it would go, only to rip that ecstasy away with my every retreat. Over and over, I went. On and on.

  Jax’s calls were more screams than song. I could not have said that she was even truly aware of what we were trying to do, but it worked. The fountain awakened almost immediately, and we were soon coated, head-to-toe, in some of the foulest muck I had ever encountered.

  It was… not the most pleasant of experiences. I was forced to breathe through my mouth and squeeze shut my eyes lest I be overwhelmed—neither of which much enhanced our lovemaking. Watching Jax enjoy what I was doing to her was a big part of what I enjoyed about doing it. Seeing her fingers coiling about whatever she could find just to hold on, the contortions of her face, the vision of her writhing body, the pendulous sway of her breasts as she struggled for balance… Sublime, every one.

  Also, the lack of air was messing with my rhythm.

  Yet with each new wave, the corruption thinned. The water cleared. The smell eased. By the time I had worked myself up to a second eruption, we were standing in a pool that could not have been more pristine had it had been scrubbed by a toothbrush… even if it did now carry the unmistakable aroma of whiskey. And that certain undefinable musk that I associated with myself.

  It was probably best not to linger on that point. I had played it cavalier for Jax’s benefit a moment ago, but I held no love for my own masculine contributions. I might have even regretted its inclusion within this homeopathic tincture we had brewed, but as the expected crash and thud heralded the release of our long-suffering compatriot, I knew that at least she would resent its absence.

  “Lynnria!” Mia, now visibly washed and dripping, rushed to the girl’s side in an instant. When Lynnria did not respond, she ripped away the cloth binding her eyes and began checking for signs of injury. “Are you alright? Cursed Faen… if only I were not trapped in this body. Quickly, my lord! She may have struck her head on the way—”

  To the surprise of no one, save apparently Mia, Lynnria roused in much the same way as a character in a zombie-themed porn parody. Her eyes snapped open, swam over her surroundings only long enough to clock the nearby bunny-eared lilim—then she lunged.

  “Hrrraaagh!”

  “No! N—d-down. Down! I don’t—” Mia wrestled with the girl for a moment, trying to fend her off, but her body was built for speed, not strength. And Lynnria had been greased. “My lord?! Help!”

  Any other day—indeed, not thirty minutes prior—I would have rushed to do just that. Lynnria was out of her mind, and I would not have wanted her to do anything she would later regret. But, whether lessor or otherwise, she was Dolilim—not human or even laoi. Sex was an enormous part of what she was, and that part would only ever spread. Unless I stepped out of her way, everyone’s way, and let her be what she was, I would only cause her pain and stunt her growth.

  So I just looked to Jax and asked, “What do you think? Foursome?”

  My erstwhile fiery redhead was still trembling from the record-breaking number of orgasms I had just delivered, so it took her a moment to catch her breath. But once she had, she only shook her head.

  “Nay, this fool of a First be satisfied and then some.” Chuckling, she released her hold on me and sloshed back. “Start in on the wean. If she’s got a lick of sense left in that bean she calls a head, she’ll go for ye soon as ye get close. Once ye’ve scratched her itch enough to settle her some, and I’ll drag the both of ye over for a scrubbing. Then we find that Faen. We got us a prize to collect!”

  *

  It turned out our antagonist—whatever her name—was as good as her word, and her payment was as prompt as it was silent. Right at the base of the tree, pretty much in the exact spot that Lynnria had fallen, a little golden box had been left behind.

  A little golden box… which was locked. With no Key in sight.

  You might then wonder how we knew it was our payment, but that was obvious. The top of the box had been engraved and then decorated with a silver filigree in the shape of a clawed hand flipping us all off.

  Jax shook the thing angrily, listening for the telltale rattle of the Crystals we had been promised. They were in there all right. Even I could hear them, but they were completely inaccessible.

  “This ain’t any kind of acceptable, ye flaming Demon!” Jax yelled into the sky. Smashing the box to the flagstones, she summoned her axe and struck it as hard as she could, but it did not leave so much as a scratch… though it did cause some curious Runes to flair briefly to life. “Ye tell that Faen cunt to come out here, or I’ll cram her head up her own fart box!”

  There was no reply. And Jax did not quite have it in her to risk climbing the tree to see if She was still up there.

  “Well, that makes three Keys we’re looking for,” I grumbled.

  “So it would seem,” Mia agreed. “I’m betting Arx will have at least one.”

  Our corporeal-for-now mind virus had eventually given up on fending Lynnria off and surrendered herself to whatever the girl had wanted to do to her, which she had tolerated in much the same way as a lioness might the play of her cubs tugging away at her ears. Mia was different from the other lilim that way. Where the rest seemed to have a ravenous appetite for anything carnal, Mia’s metabolism operated on a different level. She was content to sit back and watch the rest of us satisfy ourselves with only minimal involvement—unless I asked her a bunch of questions all at once—and would only come to feed when she got really and truly famished. Then, things could get a little dicey.

  In the meantime, she had escaped to the side of the fountain, where she was now lounging with her arms draped over the lip.

  “The structure of the poems hinted this to be the path leading to the exit,” she continued. “The door here solidifies that hypothesis, so I cannot think but that the other must hold whatever Keys we might need. Two, at a minimum.”

  I paused to fix her with a considering glance. “Only two?”

  “Only two,” Mia confirmed with a sigh. But before she could elaborate, Lynnria resurfaced from between my legs.

  Doused in the purified waters of the fountain and well scrubbed, my purple-haired imp had eventually returned to her senses. For the most part. She had still needed over an hour’s worth of our undivided attention just to calm down, so I doubted we would get the usual earful about the… feminine involvement in her recovery. But then, she had yet to say much of anything coherent. Her current focus was entirely devoted to the massage of her swollen breasts while she relaxed, nose held just above the surface of the water like she was bathed in a sensory deprivation tank.

  Of course, by that I mean I was massaging her breasts—Hammer set to relaxation mode.

  “Nnnnooo…” she drawled lazily. “Don’t stop…”

  I took the distraction as an opportunity to shake some of the cramping from my hands. “Lynnria, they’ve loosened up a lot already. I’m sure they’ll hang like they’re supposed to now.”

  “Oh~ poor Donum,” she murmured before sitting up. Turning to me, she crawled up my lap until we were face to face, and her legs encircled my waist, trapping my rapidly stiffening erection between us. She kissed me once, sleepily, taking her time while her tail danced circles around my bared feet. She then purred into my ear, “Do you tire of rubbing my… sexy tits?”

  My eyebrow poinked skyward. Sexy was a bit of a stretch. They were bigger, sure, and I was glad she was so proud of them after all the effort that had gone into them, but her Charisma was only 7. That qualified them as nice, but sexy? She would need a 9, at least.

  And yeah, I know. Boobs, right? Who was I to judge?

  A guy who had fondled a goddess before, that’s who.

  Still, that was something I might have expected from a femme fatale, not Lynnria.

  “A little, yeah,” I admitted, cracking my knuckles. “Look, it’s already been a long day, and we still need to rescue Arx. If you’re up to it, I’d like to get moving.”

  She pouted prettily. “Oh, but I’m not up to it. Not at all.”

  Her legs squeezed tightly around me, and her heat began to rub sensually up and down my length.

  “I need you inside me, Donum. Mark me as yours. Again and again. Please?”

  “Well…” I glanced at Mia apologetically. I really would have preferred to continue our conversation, ideally on the way back to the central hub, but some things just could not be helped.

  “Fine. If you insist.”