Chapter 4: Content

A cool breeze off the Caribbean sea late in the night woke Clive with a start and he pulled the thin sheet over them both. It had been so hot earlier, the heat of the day still radiating from the rocks, the walls, the very air. Although the thin line between sky and sea was lighter, they still had an hour or two before breakfast would be served, so he filled his lungs with the fresh ozone-rich air.

Quitting his job and taking the redundancy package was the best decision he ever made. He’d always been a dreamer, dreaming of writing about his vivid dreams. The redundancy money would kept his head above water until he received the six-figure publisher’s advance, partly for his near finished book, a fantasy about a Man and Elf in an earth filled with many adventures to be told, the rest of the advance for the electronic game spin-off. He smiled and relaxed back to his pleasant dream of another early dawn.

Korwyn’s feet poked out of the end of the bed, the largest one the Dwarf Palace could muster at short notice, and his toes were cold in the early morning chill. High Queen Myr promised that her finest carpenters would build a gigantic new one by the morrow. He smiled and relaxed, closing his eyes to return to his pleasant dream of a Caribbean shore and a sated wife, a whole world away from this.

“Where do you go, my dear Wyn, in those quiet moments, when you seem so content?”

Korwyn opened one eye. Zyndyr had lifted her beautiful head from his chest where it had lain the last half of the long, long night filled with memories that could sustain a man’s virility for life.

“Just somewhere I go to get a little perspective on life, my dear, I see another world, quiet and uneventful, unlike here in our world most of the time. It is filled with the everyday pleasures and the minor diversions of family life, if you really want to know. A pleasant place where my mind goes, where I can lose myself when I can. It is but a wonderful fantasy of strange hollow metal birds able to move a whole tribe halfway round the world in half a day and magic power coming from tiny holes in the walls, all conjured up from my imagination. I go there to hide from the dangers we face and the loneliness I have been forced to endure for too long, but now I have found peace in your love, Zyn. Here my reality with you in it has become more wonderful than anything I could possibly have dreamed up alone. I don’t think I will ever need to go back into that strange dream world again.”

“If it relaxes you so, please don’t abandon your imaginary world, we all need to dream, it is good for us. Now, you dream of a family, how do you feel about having a family of your own in this world, our world, Wyn?”

“Family is everything to me, Zyn, sweetheart, but even if it was impossible for us to ... well, I would give all that up for you ... if you want to spend my lifetime with me, that is.”

She smiled and kissed his bare chest, manly in its expanse, powerful in its depth, full of courageous heart and sense of honour, “if you are asking me that to do, then yes, I want to spend a whole lifetime with you, my dearest Wyn, to grow old with you.”

“But what about your people and your ... immortality?”

“Oh, my Man, in fact all men, are so wonderfully blind to the nature of things around you,” she shook her head. “You farm the land without being in tune with the land, you sail by putting your trust in the elements without the first clue what those elements are, what forces driven them and how they can be controlled. You take on in battle a fearsome Dragon-Sorcerer to protect people who are not even of your people, with no thought of the impossible odds, and then you bed an immortal Elf with no inkling whatsoever of the far-reaching implications that our act of mating has for us both. Your innocence of how the world works makes you even more adorable than your undoubted strengths, my sweetheart.”

“What do you mean, innocence?”

“When an immortal ‘marries’ a mortal, my love, whether it be casual or committed, is no light matter for an immortal, it involves sacrifice, a mortal sacrifice. I have now mated with a mortal and therefore I am no longer immortal, Wyn, and my Elf senses inform me that we have already created the first addition to our family, due before the end of next winter.”

“You are already with child?”

“Aye, my Lord, Elves menstruate but the once, at puberty, then my tiny eggs are stored in my ovaries, forever dormant until a choice is made by me to mate,” Zyndyr nodded.

“But your sacrifice of immortality, Zyn, it is far too high a price to pay.”

“Love has no price, it is freely given and accepted, my Lord. I love you and to age with you and alongside you means we can love each other to the ends of both our lives. If I was still immortal, would you saddle me with an eternity of loss, pining for the loss of Man I love?”

“Perhaps I would have liked to have been asked before you sacrificed such a thing as ‘forever’. What if I had another lover?”

“But I know you do not.”

He nodded, not knowing how she knew and realising that how didn’t really matter to him. “True, my love, I have not.”

“And my Elf-sense told me that during our time together, that you no longer blame me for what my kind did to you, are my senses right?”

“Aye, I hold you guiltless of any harm to me or my kind.”

“And, even before we made love last night, you had changed your opinion of me and seem to hold me in quite high regard, is that also correct, my Lord?”

“Aye,” he kissed the top of her lovely head, “I think it is time I owned up that I love you unreservedly, Lady-Elf Zyndyr, and I love only you with all the love a Man’s heart can hold, but I would still have liked to have been asked after being explained full well the consequences of our love for each other.”

She reached up and kissed him gently on his lips, “But I know what your noble answer would have been, my love, you would have been the one to sacrifice a lifetime of pleasure and fulfilment, you and I know you would, so putting the question to you was pointless. My life is my own, my dear Korwyn, and I gift it in its entirety to you as an expression of my eternal love. Now what do you think about our first-born being a daughter?”

“Us? A daughter? My joy would overwhelm me. Will she be as beautiful as you?”

“She will be beautiful, undoubtedly,” laughed Zyndyr, “But she will be different to me. She will not be a half-Elf with wings, such creatures cannot exist, but she will be all human woman. I see her in my mind, not with green hair, that is my own, but she will be fair like your mother but with a hint of red in her hair. She will have my green eyes and my delicate facial features, but will have your squarer jaw, but smaller, to fit her face more naturally. She is tall, a little fuller in the bust than I, but with pale freckles upon her arms, shoulders and upper chest. And she will a future queen, I see a vision of her standing straight and tall in her magistorial robes with a crown upon her head.”

“Queen Urmah’s strange prediction of ‘majesty’ for you and I, do you put much store by that?”

“I do, she is a Witch.”

“While you are an angel,” Korwyn smiled, then grimaced as he wrapped his left arm around his lover.

“Are your wounds still sore, my love?” Her beautiful face was full of concern.

“Not my new wounds, you have healed those completely. Only my old shoulder wound aches. It is always rather stiff upon waking in the morning.”

She smiled, planted both hands on his chest, pushing herself up and away, flying across the room to her pack. In the pale light of dawn, her naked Elfness, her small but pear shaped breasts, her slim athleticism, her rounded bum and shapely legs filled Korwyn with wonder at her wanton surrender to his every ministration this past glorious night. As she collected whatever she went for, she turned, her furry sex still caked in their dried juices, having filled her cup to overflowing thrice where nature intended and once where her tongue had worshipped, stroked and caressed his fleshly bodkin until he’d filled her throat with his spent seed even unto the excess spilled around her lips, which he had licked clean without hesitation, swearing he would never tire of her sweet lips, wherever she favoured placing them, no part of his body out of bounds to her sucking lips and insinuating Elf-tongue.