There is a moment on first gaining control of a body not your own where you need to orient yourself. Your limbs are all wrong. The signals coming to your brain are familiar but foreign enough to make you stop and take notice. Then there are the potential gender differences, which is a whole other thing. It’s a lot of stuff you do not typically need to think about. Your brain does not care that you are sitting in a chair or lying in a bed, so all of those nerve endings, constantly shouting, ‘pressure, wind, hair touch me, all body parts reporting for duty, sir,’ get sifted out. That does not apply when you get shunted into a new frame. It takes a good… hour? Two hours? …before you are able to settle in and even vaguely come to terms with your upended reality. And that was just my experience, in a half-remembered dream, with an entirely separate consciousness around to pilot the thing.

  All of which I bring up simply as a basis of comparison. To understand what a thing is, it is often helpful to understand what it is not. As I have said, Jax and I were operating on a kind of spectrum. She was already unconsciously filtering out the noise, so all I was getting was what she was specifically focused on… but secondhand—so, less the sensations felt and more the memories of those sensations.

  And that was plenty.

  Holy shit. It was no wonder she was so horny all the time.

  Jax adored her body. There was the feel of her tongue rolling over her fangs, the way her claws clicked at the cobblestones, the sway of her tail adjusting to her every move. There was the sensation of her thighs settling, the bouncing weight of her chest, every flash of which was directed straight between her legs. And that was just the surface-level stuff.

  What really got her engine revving was… well, me. But frankly, I was doing my level best to dodge those missiles. What the vision of my beard hair blowing in the wind did to her lady bits was not a thing man was meant to know. But there were other things in the mix that were more useful. She loved being touched. Being loved, appreciated, and admired. There was a fire in her belly that raged like an inferno whenever I looked at her, and she had dedicated her existence to stoking that fire, feeding it in any way she could.

  Which I knew. But this was my first time truly appreciating it for what it was and what it meant for me. I now had the cipher to decode exactly how to appease her. I did not have to bend her over every half hour to keep her satisfied. She would have been perfectly happy with an absent stroke of her spine or toying with her hair, perhaps even a lascivious remark or two—just something to periodically affirm that I indeed found her attractive and she belonged to me. It made her feel sexy and warm.

  Actually bending her over could be limited to mealtimes.

  All the empathic stuff was much more difficult to digest—unsurprisingly. It was an entirely separate sixth sense, linked to an organ I not only did not have, but was completely foreign to my species. Of course, it would be confusing.

  She had always compared emotions to flavors, and while that was true in its way, it was also unutterably false. You cannot just tell a person that lust has a lush umami crunchiness to it and expect them to understand. It is not a sensation one experiences with the tongue. The flavor washes over your entire body and is inescapably consumed, with an intensity directly related to proximity… almost as a scent.

  It was like… did you know deaf people sometimes assume the sun must make a sound? Or on getting a cochlear implant, are shocked by how loud trees can be? This was… there were parallels here, okay? Parallels that make sense once you have experienced them, but until then, can only remain as syllables on a page.

  And I had not even experienced them! These were memories and impressions floating one-at-a-time as logs through a river of joined consciousness. Each one I touched drove home just how inhuman Jax was. This was not how a human woman experienced the world. She was something else. Something alien, sensual and sexual to her core.

  I had been prepared for some of this. There had been the miles I had traveled in Mia’s skin—albeit in a dream—and there had been that one time with Arx, but we had been too concerned with staying alive to worry about the minutiae. So this was my first opportunity to really dig in and get my hands dirty… and I spent most of it playing with driving Jax insane with pleasure.

  I take no pride in it. I had a shiny new button that kicked off a Rube Goldberg machine whose endpoint was my dick. What was I supposed to do? Not press it?

  I would probably still be lying there watching the festivities were it not for Lynnria. Just about the point where I was filling in the edge pieces for how Jax’s nipples tied in to her overall sexual apparatus, the lesser Dolilim found my ankle and followed the climax train north until she arrived at my face. This she firmly claimed as her perch. It completely ruined my concentration… but then my stomach reminded me how hollow it was, and I set about my vengeance by ruining her fine motor skills.

  And that was how Jax found out what Lynnria tasted like. But we shall return to that detail later.

  The Mescal gameballer had neither the mental resistance, the stamina, nor really even the sex drive to withstand my undivided attention for long. So despite her earlier complaints, she soon rolled away, beyond satisfied. And that was the gentle nudge I needed to wrap things up.

  “The cunt’s back, Master,” Jax informed me on helping me to my feet.

  I spent a few seconds wondering who she might have meant by that, then another to work out how she could have known they were gone… and another still puzzling over why I even needed to wonder when we were mentally linked. And that was when I noticed that the flow of information between us had slowed to a trickle. It seemed physical contact was necessary for anything beyond directed thoughts and whatever stray emotions followed in their wake.

  So, a single touch cleared up everything I needed to know. Jax not only had a vague sense for the direction and distance her servant was from her—just as I did mine—she could tell who was near from their flavor. And apparently, Fekinell had taken advantage of our invisibility to scout abroad.

  “Oh, right.” I limited my reaction to Jax’s glee over the physical-contact restriction to a wry smile. “Uh… look. While we’re on the subject, do you think we can move away from the c-word?”

  “I ain’t see’d nothing, Master. Just sensed the cunt,” she returned, oblivious. Honestly, I did not know why I had bothered. “Got a funny taste to her. Bit of sorrow. Some pride and satisfaction mixed in there. I’m thinking she found Mia’s body… and wants praising for sommat?”

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

  I may have brute-forced my way to a solution to the communication problem with Jax, but Fekinell was going to be a whole other ballgame. The success rate with palm screaming and ear buzzing was only around fifty percent, and having to play telephone on top of that would likely put the percentage into the single digits.

  But if Jax is right about Mia, we can probably expect her return somewhere around this time to—

  “What in blazes happened to my room?!”

  I blinked. Or now.

  “What were that?” Jax asked.

  “You heard that?”

  That was surprising. The yell had sounded distant even to me, more the background noise of a plane buzzing past than anything directed. And Jax and I had not been touching.

  “Felt more than heard. T’were a powerful emotion… but a ways off. Farther’n I should’ve been able.”

  “Huh.” Could she feel Mia’s emotions through me? She had never mentioned it before. “I think our noble hero has returned… and it sounded like she was upset about something.”

  Whatever it was had sent chills rolling down my spine… but before I could figure out why, someone tapped my shoulder.

  “Who… was that you, Jax?”

  “Where what me? Ye just said—oh, hold yer tadger. Feels like the cunt’s gone and stubbed her toe.”

  “Ah, okay. I think Fekinell was trying to get my attention.”

  “And she touched ye? Ha! Serves her right, thinking she’s allowed. Let me see what the bint wants.”

  As she turned away, I placed a surreptitious palm at the small of her back, hoping to eavesdrop—a move which Jax delighted in, by the way—but the conversation that followed was every bit as nonsensical as I had predicted. Fekinell could understand most of what Jax was trying to get across, but she refused to yell or moderate the cadence of her voice in the slightest. And as she was the one with actual information to report, Jax’s irritation levels were soon through the roof.

  “Would ye fecking slow down, ye rage shite?!”

  “She can’t hear your thoughts, Jax.”

  “Ye’re telling me?! Now, still yer gams. I’s trying to concentrate here.”

  Abruptly, the sound of an abused microphone squealed in my ears, jerking my hand away from Jax as I instinctively tried to protect them.

  “Donum…” Mia’s voice began, but blown out, as though she were holding it too close to her mouth. “Has anything… unusual happened in the last twenty minutes?”

  “Ow!” I replied pointedly.

  A beat passed.

  “Hello? Donum?” Distorted thumps reverberated through my mind. “Is this thing plugged in? Hello?!”

  “Yes, Mia! I can—aaaah, crap.”

  Mia could not hear my thoughts, either. Why had I thought that had changed?

  “Mia, I can hear you,” I tried saying aloud, but of course, nothing came out. I was still physically muted, and she had not been here when all of this had happened. Oh, dear.

  Absent muttering continued filtering through. “It’s definitely plugged in… all the lights are flickering. Maybe if I—” Click… Click. “Donum? Can you hear me now?”

  Ugh… Xhinn’s heaving tits. I was going to be certifiable by the time I escaped this Dungeon.

  Quickly, I squatted down and scratched out a Yes into the grass. It was a chilling sight, watching it just appear out of nowhere. I’m a living poltergeist.

  “What in… Donum, are you invisible?”

  I underlined the Yes, then stared pointedly at the Runic inscription that had caused all this.

  “So the plan worked. But… you mean to say you’ve become invisible and mute? Just by scribing Conceal over and over?”

  There had been a bit of a ritual involved, but yeah, basically.

  I turned back to the Yes.

  “Alright, but you know how to cancel the spell. Just cross it out.”

  I did know that. But there was a reason I had cast this thing.

  My hand extended again. Bunnies.

  “Are they still nearby? Blast. I thought I had lured them away. Did you know it takes a while to die after you’ve been beheaded?”

  I really did not know how she expected me to handle non sequiturs in my present condition, but the only pertinent question had been the first one. So I settled on a carefully scratched-out question mark.

  “I don’t… Are you asking if it hurt? Of course it did. Don’t be silly. But it was a sacrifice I gladly—”

  I was already in the process of ripping a No into the ground.

  *

  It took us a while to more-or-less catch everyone up to speed. As near as I could tell, the situation was as followed:

  Mia had been a bit stunned on getting beheaded—which was reasonable enough, even knowing it was coming. Certainly nothing to be ashamed of. But because of that, she had fallen unconscious before realizing she could have simply abandoned her vessel to its fate. Afterward, she had needed to wait until the thing had fully bled out before she could make good her escape.

  I was the one who felt silly, assuming it would be a full day before we would see her again. I had known she could leave her body any time she wanted. It was obvious in hindsight the summoned-entity death timer would not apply, but I had to give myself some credit. Who could have guessed a loss of consciousness would leave her trapped?

  What she wanted to know was why, on returning to her quarters, she had discovered them ripped to shreds. Tables flipped. Mirrors smashed. Her clothes had been everywhere—the works. The word Impostor had even been scrawled across one wall in blood! Now, I had a feeling I could shed… perhaps the faintest dollop of light on that subject, but nowhere near enough to explain the blood. Given our limitations, there was no way I was going to make the attempt, so I had left the matter to a question mark and a scrawled later.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Meanwhile, Fekinell, on finding herself invisible and functionally incommunicado, had taken it upon herself to track Mia’s progress. Along the way, she had collected the Gems the bunny girl had reaped—twenty Greater Rank I’s altogether—which she ‘joyfully’ returned to my hands.

  Joyful sounded massively out of character for the whatever-she-was, but Jax had said the woman was about to come out of her knickers, she was so pleased. I could only take her at her word.

  I was certainly joyous. It was a huge windfall! We probably could have paid off my entire debt to the Lawmaiden and had change to spare with that double handful of marbles… but Lynnria had a ways to go yet before she got to her first Barrier. We would have to see how many we had left over.

  Anyway, Fekinell had to travel quite some distance before she found Mia’s body—several turns away, at least—meaning our sacrificial heroine had left the horde of decapitators on quite the merry chase. I found that surprising. One of the ex-goddess’s chief complaints about her recent vessel was its inability to stop, but I was nowhere near curious enough to brave the communication barrier over it. It could wait.

  I’m going to have to invest in telepathy. My experience with Jax had shown it too useful a skill to ignore, and at this point, it was looking more and more like an absolute necessity. But I also need Lust resistance… and a way to shield Mia’s future vessels from outside tampering. …and a way to grant them Power… and a reliable system to capture new monsters …my aura still needed an off-switch… Potency Cascade would forever languish as a forgotten, one-off skill until I figured out a way of creating my own over-Life… and I had been wanting to experiment with adding new emotions to my repertoire since the first day I had bound Jax!

  It was quite the list all its own, but it only included the stuff I knew to be at least theoretically possible. One of these days, I would wield my own fireballs, damn it!

  What I really needed was to spend a few weeks just Layering up and theory-crafting. This constant Dungeon delving was leaving me with a massive experience deficit.

  Setting all of that aside, there was more to the good news beyond the Gem delivery. Several of the murderous beasts had been lingering near Mia’s body, so Fekinell had taken it upon herself to ‘experiment.’ In other words, to attack.

  Jax seemed to believe that decision had been borne out more by instinct and hunger than anything rational, but it hardly mattered. Reckless endangerment was what it was. A solo commando raid deep into enemy territory, with no backup, and supported only by a sketchy-at-best invisibility spell? Fekinell was lucky to be alive!

  Fortunately, the spell had held, and the rabbits had turned out to be far less intelligent than I had given them credit for. Something about having their compatriots yanked into the air by a formless, scentless, utterly silent entity had badly shaken the little creatures’ resolve, and seeing their lifeless husks raining to the ground had broken it entirely. The rest had put up barely any fight at all before fleeing en masse, and Fekinell had been ‘back-flipping with joy, she were so giddy with the chase.’ Again, completely out-of-character for the woman, but Jax had a knack for storytelling that made a person allow for these good-natured stretches of the truth.

  However much legitimacy there was to the yarn, Fekinell had brought back no proof of her deeds. Apparently, she had felt the twenty Gems had been enough of a tribute, and consumed the rest on site. There was no telling how many that had been, but I shrugged it off. The important thing was that we now had a means of taking the fight to these things.

  As for Lynnria… well, she had been knocked senseless through most of the conversation. She had been too greedy. Delved too deep, foolishly thinking that just because she had survived a day under the low-voltage thrum of the Demon Queen’s essence she could handle the Hammer when tuned for Jax… and paid the price.

  In mind-shattering orgasms.

  Okay, so I was playing myself up a tad, but she had been reduced to clutching my robes in the back of the formation, shaking like a newborn calf. Which was fine. The strategy I had devised did not need her.

  Fekinell was currently some distance out in front, diligently hunting every flicker of light she came across. Thanks to our undetectable cover, she could do so without fear of the rest of us suffering reprisals, though she still needed someone to play clean-up. That was where Jax came in.

  My First could not see much of what was happening out there, but she could sense enough to keep an appropriate distance from her underling. If any stray rabbits came streaking from the flowers, hoping to revenge themselves upon whatever was attacking them, she was there to make sure they never got a second chance.

  And I was there to make certain no one missed.

  It was slow going, but relatively safe. The only one of us at risk was Fekinell, and she had enough Life in her now to regenerate from almost anything—though it was anyone’s guess whether she had needed to thus far. It seemed to me limbs ought to reappear on being detached from a person’s body, but none had yet shown themselves. Either the were-vampire thing Ahnbe had created was getting quite good at striking and ducking away before she could be attacked, or my spell was better than I had thought. And if our activities had attracted more than the usual concentration of the little bastards, Fekinell had not stopped to report them.

  That probably meant we were still in the clear… but I had elected against returning to the statue. The attack we had suffered might not have been solely from loitering about; it could have been triggered by the sculpture’s proximity.

  And anyway, Arx was our translator. Sure, Mia could do it, but we all knew that even without the communication barrier, she would have just given us was a bunch of hints.

  Which was how I found myself trudging along the hedge-maze path, feeling rather bored and isolated despite keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings ahead of me.

  Kneeling, I touched one of the carcasses the vanguard had left in their wake, and uttered the command phrase, “Convert.” I was still muted, but whatever magic handled these things did not care. The command worked as usual, and within seconds, I was holding another of the marble-sized Gems. Stowing it quickly, I gave Lynnria a tug to let her know we were moving again, then hastened to catch up.

  This was tedious work, but rewarding. With a functioning plan in place, we were cleaning up! I doubted even Mia could have drummed up a spell to equal what I had pulled off by accident. Sure, it had its flaws—gaping… hideous flaws—but now that we were in the field and somewhat on the same page with one another, we were ghosts in the machine! Spec ops. Black site operatives. It almost felt like we were cheating!

  My lip twitched at the thought, and I begrudgingly turned my gaze to the false sky.

  “You’re not going to give us a hard time about this, are you?”

  I did not truly expect Her to answer. Honestly, I felt I was breaking the fourth wall a bit even asking, like I was hoping for a glance behind the DM screen—a sure recipe for disaster if ever there was one—but I knew She was somewhere out there. Watching us. Plotting. Inviting Her ire was the last thing we needed.

  Nevertheless, the Demon Queen’s presence rolled over me like a warm blanket. I could almost feel the glory of her body pressing against me, sense the heat of her breath upon my neck… yet there was a distance to it. A weightlessness. Somehow, I knew that the majority of her attention was directed elsewhere, and if I were to look, I would find the skies above unguarded. It was an extremely interesting revelation—and one I clamped down on immediately. One does not play the game by showing his cards.

  “A hard time?” Her voice drifted to my ears as an ethereal whisper. “Whatever for, my Gift?”

  My lip twisted again. If she was going to make me spell it out, I would need to be tactful about this.

  “Well… we broke Fekinell out of that cage when you told us not to, and now she’s making this maze of yours, er… more profitable than it should have been.”

  A contemptuous chuckle floated across the wind.

  “Trivializing it, you mean? Reaping rewards you were never meant to reap? And you fear punishment for using your tools to their potential.” Her phantom limbs tightened about my neck. “Am I so petty? Would I begrudge my Gift a few drops of Power?” Her grip loosened, and the heat of her breath drifted closer to my ear. “Or would I rejoice in them?”

  I cleared my throat delicately, trying to ignore my tightening manhood. Right. Somehow, I got the impression that she would normally have been moved to punish us for this, but my gaining in strength was… something of a priority. How could I have forgotten?

  “So you’re not upset about Fekinell?”

  Her presence relaxed against me, as though she were resting her head against my heart. “It was as expected. No more.”

  Okay… Then why the warning? Why bother with the cage? It was an answer within a non-answer. Hmm…

  “And what about what happened before? In my head?”

  The ghostly presence lifted from my chest as though to look at me. Her voice remained knowing—even if her words were not. “I’m afraid you’ll need to be more specific… my Gift.”

  I sighed. We both knew the incident I had been referring to had been implicitly carried by the thought that bore it. She was just making me dance for her amusement.

  “Did you trash Mia’s room? Was it you planting ideas in my mind?”

  Her smirk was palpable, even unseen.

  “Well, now. Those are two very different questions… even if the reply remains the same.” Her lips drifted closer to mine, hinting at their delights. “No.”

  My brow bunched in confusion. It was amazing how blunt and enigmatic she could be at the same time. How could they be different questions? I was so sure…

  “Then was it—”

  “No.” A finger tapped against my nose, silencing me. “Not me, not the Third, nor any of the rest. No goddess inhabits your mind. And I shall tell you no more. Deeper questions require deeper costs.”

  I grimaced. Not spectacularly helpful. Still… I had gotten something for my efforts—assuming she was not lying.

  “Interesting Dungeon, by the way,” I said, changing the subject. Anything requiring a cost was best avoided. “Romantic Gift Bears. Rabbits everywhere. Quite the, uhm… obvious theme.”

  “And yet you don’t embrace it.” She tutted sadly. “Pity. I had hoped it would… enrich our relationship.”

  Then, tittering as from some private joke, her voice drifted away, taking her presence with it.

  Okay, she had to have meant something by that. Pausing, I knelt to gather another Gem and then, with a surreptitious adjustment of my robe, rushed to catch up. These divine chats had a way of making a fellow’s steps falter. But did it tie in with that crack from earlier about getting my feet wet? Or was it unrelated?

  Either way, it was best to commit everything she said to memory. That one spoke between the lines by default.

  As my hurried pace brought me around the nearby corner, I froze in alarm, which in turn drove Lynnria straight into my back, causing us both to stumble.

  We had arrived.

  Directly ahead of us lay a clearing. Much like the one on the maze’s opposite side, it was a large square with tall hedges all around and a magnificent fountain in its center. However, where Lynnria’s had been immaculately manicured—aside from the muck clogging the basin—this one was its dark twin. Flowers grew in haphazard patches with no thought to arrangement or composition; weeds choked the life out of everything, to the point where a person might think they were this garden’s primary feature; and yet the fountain sparkled with waters so pristine they could have been distilled. Not that it mattered. The fountain was completely overrun with a teeming mass of vines, which were in turn topped by a pair of enormous, yet familiar, roses.

  None of which had anything to do with my state of alarm.

  That was because Fekinell had become plainly visible.

  My hands rose on instinct to reconfirm the status of my spell, but it was still intact. I could see nothing of myself. Nor Jax, now that I had the space to think. Something must have happened.

  “Mmm… class arse on that one,” Jax’s thought purred into my mind.

  “What?”

  “Huh? Oh, eh… I were just thinking how we need to put the cunt on a diet, be all. Them swallies has gone straight to her hips!” she lied. I could sense her hunger even from here.

  Not that I blamed her. Had my brain not been whirling into gear for what I knew had to be coming, I would have been right there with her. Fekinell had clearly filled out for the better since the last I had seen her, and it was that special time when a person’s Charisma transitioned them from a hard-pass to a what-do-we-have-here, too! Even if I did not have an eye for that sort of thing, Fekinell’s hair had grown to her shoulders in the span of an hour. In shimmering silver! A blind fool would have noticed that.

  Still, I had seen the scores of drained rabbits she had left in her wake. I had known something like this was likely in the works and steeled myself accordingly.

  It was not like I could touch her.

  “You can play with your toy later, gorgeous,” I chided—assuming Fekinell was even into that sort of thing. Were it not for Jax’s empathic senses, I would have laughed at the mere suggestion. “Right now, we need to keep our heads on straight. Something dispelled Fekinell’s invisibility.”

  My hand reached out until I found her shoulder, simply trying to reestablish our mental link. Communication was easier and a lot faster when you did not have to think in sentences.

  The first thought to spring into my awareness was all about her elation that we were again touching. Then came a dissatisfaction.

  Not there. Lower.

  It was less a thought than a half-formed wish, yet my hand obeyed before I was even aware it should, down the valley of her spine and over the delicious sweep of her backside. There I paused. On reflection, this was a much nicer handrest than a shoulder, so I did not begrudge her the delay. But she remained unsatisfied.

  Lower.

  My brow arched upward even as my hand moved yet again. In our joined state, there was no need to wonder where she was leading it—straight between her legs… and into her secret fire. Without a second thought, I slipped inside.

  I felt the air escape her lungs even as I sensed the contentment radiating from deep within her center. This was her preferred state of being. In her mind’s eye, she envisioned us in a chapel to the Hand of Mercy, Fekinell kneeling in supplication before her and all the nuns, priestesses, and innocent novitiates in attendance to witness my daring—as one burning with jealousy.

  I cleared my throat delicately. “Damn, Jax. Take it easy.”

  “I be what I be. If ye don’t want to ken me secrets, don’t come a-knocking.”

  It was not as though I was unfamiliar with the concept of intrusive thoughts… or displeased with my new handrest. So I let it go with a shrug.

  Jax’s hips shifted around my finger, relishing the increased pressure, but her eyes were already scanning for what might have caused her servant to reappear. It did not take long. The signs were plainly visible when you knew what to look for.

  Domain line.

  My lips curled into a smile. It seemed the Queen had adjusted things to her benefit, after all.