Chapter 3: Passionate Reunions

Note: Thanks to WRC264 for beta reading this. Illina – The Black Vault

I stared at the door, thinking. How to get us out of here? I wasn’t about to die in the Black Vault. Not when that cock-sucking, limp-dick, back-stabbing mongrel was out there. Bryce would die on my knife. I would bathe in his blood and...

The pain rose. A tide of anguish that threatened to swallow me whole. I squeezed at my stomach. He was really dead. He’d saved me. My sweet and loyal Barg. He had been in my life for so long. I thought he’d be with me to the end. Having adventures for centuries.

Bryce stole all that from him.

I closed my eyes and pushed through the pain. The rhythm of my heart slowed. I needed to get us out of here so we could track Bryce down. Maybe he was still on the island. We could expose his villainy and kill him.

I opened my eyes. I had to probe into the cracks of the door.

I bent down and unfurled my leather roll holding my tools. I grabbed a shim, a thin piece of metal that was used to probe into cracks and pop cheap latches. Whatever held the door shut would be found in the gaps. Some mechanism must exist to retract the locking bolts. This was the interior door. It wasn’t the outer vault door. That could be opened from the inside. It was designed so the water lock would work. The fact this door couldn’t open from the inside was a joke on Cernere’s part.

Whoever entered had to leave together or never escape. She knew the point when criminals betrayed each other would be in the vault. When all those treasures were there. My body shook in rage. Paladin of Lagu?

“I hope you suck down every drop of Illth’s diseased cum,” I muttered, imagining Bryce fellating the Hermaphroditic Goddess of Pestilence. “That she rots off your lying lips and shrivels your cock to a wizened little thing.”

Stefan gave a dark chuckle.

I pressed my shim against the crack between the door and the frame. The shim was a thin strip of brass, pounded as fine as possible by a skilled smith. I pushed at the crack. The metal flexed. It bent in the middle, refusing to go in. I pushed hard, working at it, trying to slide it inside, but it couldn’t slide in between the door and frame. The fit was impossibly tight. The tolerances on building this vault were outstanding.

This had the feel of Krab’s work, a job he did for Cernere following her plans. Only the God of Crafting could make something this skilled. He made masterpieces. After all, look at me.

I probed around the door, searching for any spot I could get my shim in, but everywhere I tried, it wouldn’t slip in, only bend. I stood back and thought for a moment. I felt Stefan watching with worry now. His emotions almost rippled through the air.

I had just the thing.

I pulled out a small vial I had purchased off of my alchemist, Shasti. When I’d seen her in the Ten-It forest, reveling in all those hermaphroditic elves, she had sold me some useful stuff. Her nightlock draught allowed Stefan and I to fake our deaths.

And her slipperine gel would get us out of here.

I pulled off the cork stopper with my teeth and carefully dribbled a few drops on the shim. After restoppering the vial, I worked the gel across the end of the shim. My fingers glided over it. Almost no resistance. Perfect.

I pressed it into the cracks. It slipped in just fine. I smiled and began probing. I slid up and struck something solid. I pressed my ear to the door and tapped it with the shim, listening to how the sound propagated through the door. The dull sound radiating through the metal a solid rod. The locking bolt.

I slid down and found another bolt. I explored the door with care. There were three locking bolts on the right side, two top and bottom, and none on the left side. There I found the hinges and something that was thinner. It felt almost like a lever. A mechanism.

“I think I have it,” I said and pushed up with my shim, struggling to get it to flip.

I strained, my muscles flexing. The end of the shim bit into my palm. I gripped it tight, ignoring the blue blood welling up between my fingers and the pain screaming through my nervous system.

The bar was stubborn.

I attacked it from the top, trying to get it to move. I felt it give ever so slightly. It had some play, but it was taking a good deal of force to get it to move. I pushed harder on it. My shim deformed. It bent in the middle then it popped out.

I stared at it.

“That’s not good,” he said.

“No,” I said, thinking. “I need something stronger. I don’t have a strong shim.”

“That’s brass?”

I nodded.

“Do you have one of your daggers?”

“Not one on me.”

“Then let’s go to the vault and find one,” Stefan said. “I have an idea.”

Stefan Halian

After hiking back to the Vault and finding one of Illina’s daggers, we came back. She’d hardly looked at Barg’s body. It was like she didn’t want to acknowledge his death. She kept her gaze away from it, her body trembling with emotions she fought against.

She picked up her dagger coated in dried blood. Smears of that treacherous Bryce’s blood. I couldn’t believe Lagu gave that man power. Why would the Goddess of Law support someone who so clearly violated the law? What crime did my mother commit? Even if they swore the vows of a Lubenite marriage, the God of Love didn’t demand those who broke it to die. It was no crime.

It had been Pater. What woman said no to the God of Gods, to the Father of All.

And he had Monica with him. She carried my half-sibling in her womb. She had to be important. That was why Bryce had acted again. He had another chance at his plan. He had her, the Ambrosia, and headed to the Black Spire where the three Norns lived. The demigoddesses who wove the fate of mortals.

Not Gods, mortals. Yet he thought he could get something there to kill my divine father.

My emotions roiled on the trip back to the exit, Illina marching ahead of me with bristling steps, the dagger clutched in her hand. She had retrieved another that she’d thrown at him to save my life, striking his wrist and keeping the sword stroke from being instantly fatal.

I owed her much.

“Okay,” she said when we were back at the door. “Use your magic and turn this into a shim.”

“Uh, sure,” I said. I pulled out a vial of Ahlona’s pussy juices. “Is this going to work? The other one didn’t.”

“It will work?” she said as she held the dagger lightly in her grip. “It’s got a handle so I can grip it better, and the blade’s made of high-quality, Zeutchian steel. Only dwarf steel is of higher quality than it.”

I downed the sweet pussy cream, savoring the taste of my angel’s passion. The power swelled in me. I hardly had any left. The light I sustained grew brighter. I sent out tendrils of earth magic into her dagger, reshaping it.

To her, it must look like it grew thinner and longer all on its own. She didn’t see how I manipulated the crystalline structure to let it flow like water without disrupting the pattern of iron mixed with the carbon that gave it strength and made it steel. It thinned, stretching longer and longer. I flattened it out, made it as wide as her hand. It was thin and strong.

She nodded, coated the tip in the gel and pressed it into the crack. She pushed down on the mechanism, gripping the end of the dagger. She straightened, her face contorting with the effort of pulling down on the mechanism.

My heart pounded so fast. I swallowed as I watched her strain and strain against the mechanism keeping the door shut. She let out a low growl. Her red hair danced about her shoulders. Her dagger pulled down a fraction of an inch.

A loud click echoed. Her shim shot down. She stumbled for a moment, off-balanced by the sudden give of the mechanism. Gears turned inside the door, steel grinding on steel. Then came several loud thuds that reverberated through the air.

“Oh, no!” she gasped. “Cernere’s black cunt! You’re such a bitch!”

“What?” I demanded. “Didn’t it just unlock.”

“It locked worse!” She moved her shim up and down and struck obstacles. “Those are new locking bolts that just fired out. That lever was just something to get us to waste time. She wanted this door to only open from the other side.”

“So we’re dead,” I said, this sinking weight falling in my stomach. I had thought we would get out of here. Already, thirst attacked the back of my throat. We had no supplies. We would die in a few days, trapped in the dark.

“We are not dead!” she spat. “You’re only dead when you give up!”

Illina

My mother’s twentieth rule echoed in my head. You’re only dead when you give up.

There had to be something in the Vault that we could use to get through the door. I prowled through it, staring at the items. I snagged one thing off a pedestal. It wouldn’t help me escape, but it would make killing that bastard so satisfying. It vanished into my pocket.

My gaze swept past the Gem of Reflected Greed. That thing wouldn’t help me. Only led me to dying in here. Nor would Gewin’s Blinding Shield or the Cloak of Living Night. Saphique’s Ivory Dildo, while intriguing, was not going to help us get through the door.

I refused to look at Barg. I wanted to. I ached to fall to my knees and stroke his face. To say goodbye to him, but I was afraid I would never leave his side. I couldn’t surrender to my pain. Not so long as Bryce lurked out there. I would flay him inch by inch and leave him to be eaten by fire ants. I would cut off his cock and shove it down his throat, choking him to death. I would strangle him with his intestines. Cut his wrists and bleed him out slowly.

He would pay for robbing the world of a better man.

“I’m not seeing anything that seems useful,” said Stefan. He snorted. “We have the wealth of nations down here, and it doesn’t matter.”

I glanced over at him standing by the stacks and stacks of gold bars that Cernere had accumulated. There was a mountain of them. More wealth than any other place in the world. His magical light gleamed off their polished surface. I could see a dull reflection of myself in the sides of the bars.

My brow furrowed. “Wealth of nations, huh...”

“What are you thinking?”

“We could shove that into the crack in the door.”

“That? What, the gold?” Stefan gave me a confused look.

“Gold is soft and malleable, but it’s dense. That’s why it weighs so much. It doesn’t compress easily. And we have a lot of it.”

“I’m not following,” he said.

“You can affect it, right, use your magic on it?”

He stared at it for a moment. “Yes. It’s not like the walls of the Vault. It’s not made of anything anarcane.”

“Then let’s get as much of it as we can back to the door,” I said, smiling.

Stefan Halian

I wasn’t quite sure what good this would do. We had transported a large stack of it with my magic. Lifting it with air had been taxing on my power. I burned through two vials of pussy juices. I was down to my last one. If this didn’t work, we wouldn’t have my magic to try on anything else.

I lifted up the first bar and pressed it into the crack. I made it thin. Fine. I pushed it into the gap in the door. I shoved it in hard, forcing it to flow in. It was easier to shape than the steel dagger. But it was a tight space, and she wanted me to push the entire bar into it. More and more vanished, filling the space. Resistance grew.

I pushed harder. My magic couldn’t touch the door but I could shove in the gold. The precious metal began compressing. My magic forced more and more through. It spilled around the locking bolts, filling up across the entire side of the door by the time the first bar was in.

Illina pressed the second bar against the other side of the door.

This still felt foolish. I was devouring the power of Ahlona’s pussy juices to push the gold into the gap between door and frame. The bar dwindled as it flowed, more and more pushing inside. A yellow gleam soon ringed the door as that bar had vanished inside.

I did the same to the top and bottom. It was getting harder. Less space. But I forced it in anyways, compressing the metal. There was a lip on the far side, a flange kept it from escaping. As I shoved in the fourth bar, metal groan.

“It’s working,” Illina said.

As I shoved in the fifth bar, this time on the right side where I started, the door protested. Metal strained and moaned. Something popped inside of the door. It shivered. My eyes widened as I watched it start to deform. The gold, while malleable, was filling up that space between the door and frame. It was dense enough the pressure it put on the steel was too much for the metal to handle.

The gold wanted to escape out of the crack. I had to exert more magical effort to keep the gold in the crack. To stop it from oozing out. I drank my last vial of pussy juices and shoved another bar into the door. Sweat broke out across my forehead. The forces pushing back against my magic were titanic.

I shouldn’t be able to do this. The amount of force I was unleashing was insane. I could rip the door apart if I could affect it. Could a master mage utilize this much raw power? It flowed out of me, thick strands of earth magic affecting the gold.

“Look at the door!” Illina chortled. She rubbed her hands together in delight. “It’s warping in the middle.”

A crease ran through the door. Metal groaned louder, a sustained sigh. Brittle snaps. Mechanisms inside the door broke. I shoved in another bar, pushing hard. I clenched my fists and growled through clenched teeth. The gold flowed into the space that it shouldn’t fit. Compressed so tight—

BANG!

The door burst forward and collapsed on the floor of the water lock. The gold I had compressed to fit now expanded into deformed shapes, blossoming out into a misshapen frame of gold as thick as my hand in most places.

Illina burst into chortles of delight. “I knew that would work. We’re getting out of here, Stefan!”

“Gods be praised,” I panted, my magic almost exhausted. I stared in awe at it as she slipped through.

She reached the outer door and then said. “We have to put the inner door back in place as best we can. We won’t be able to open the outer door if we can’t flood this room.”

“What?” I gasped.

It took some doing. I used the last of my magic to clear away the gold and then we lifted the door back in place. I used the gold as lifting straps to pick up the heavy, deformed structure and shove it back into its frame. But it was distorted. I packed in the edges with gold, forming a watertight seal.

My light flickered out at the end.

“That’s it,” I said, trembling. My voice echoed through the room. I shuddered, feeling the darkness pressing on us. “I hope the outer door opens.”

“Me, too,” Illina said. “let’s do it!”

Ahlona

The loud bang roused me out of my stupor.

My wings fluttered. Darkness had descended on the clearing. The only light came from the stars above and my halo which had almost gone out. I stood up and peered at the water. The surface rippled. My brow furrowed.

Had I heard something? Was it just my grief? How could Stefan be gone?

I had watched him since he was born. I was there when his mother birthed him. I had stood over Stefan at my mother’s behest, ready to act her will and kill him if she deemed it. At first, it was a task I had relished in following. I had embraced it. I was my mother’s servant, devoted to Slata.

And then, slowly, I came to care for the boy. Watched him grow up without a father. Saw the joy in his mother’s eyes that battled back the grief brimming in her soul. When he went to the Collegiate Tower, I grew so frustrated with him when I saw he wasn’t excelling. It was so clear to me. He wasn’t being challenged. He was a demigod, but they treated him like any other mortal. So he had never tried. Never rose to the tasks before him.

He needed his destiny.

So when my mother had a change of heart on Pater’s bastards, I was so joyful. I not only didn’t have to worry about the day when I might have to attack him, but I was given to him. His angel. His lover and companion.

And I’d failed him. I let him go into the black without me to light the way.

My wings hugged me tight as I stared at the dark waters. I didn’t hear anything else. Didn’t see anything. The surface had calmed once more. It was probably just the wind that had disturbed the pool. Hope died in me.

The bubbles rose.

The center of the pond roiled. I gasped at the froth breaking across the surface. My heart tightened as I stared at the dark waters. I couldn’t see anything. But where had all that air come from? That had happened once before for me.

I needed to see.

I let my hope blaze out of me. My halo shone, illuminating the pool. A figure rose out of the dark depths, long hair flowing. Then Illina broke the surface, her red locks plastered to her youthful face. She swam for the shore. I stared dumbstruck at her.

“Y-you’re dead,” I said.

“So Sir Backstabber might think,” she growled and grabbed the edge of the pool.

Before I could ask any of the dozens of questions spilling through my mind, another shape broached the surface. Blue robes billowed in the water. Stefan stared at me, his brown hair clinging to his side. He smiled at me, his goatee dripping with water.

“S-Stefan,” I whispered. My knees buckled. Collapsed. I trembled on the edge of the pool as he swam towards me. “He said you were d-dead. This ... You’re...” Tears spilled down my cheeks. My halo glowed brighter and brighter. A blinding light spilled over everything. He was here. He was alive. “I ... You’re...”

“I’m here, Ahlona,” he said. He reached the edge of the pool and then rose out of it. I seized him, my wings furling wide. I pulled him to me. His wet robes pressed against my naked body. His weight pushed me onto my back. He was on me. Kissing me.

I kept crying and laughing and kissing him.

He was here. Real.

I clutched him so tight. Joy exploded through me. I trembled, not caring that cold water sluiced over my body. I was bursting with too much positivity. I could warm winter with the happiness blazing in my heart.

His goatee rasped on my lips. That familiar feel of him. I squeezed so tight about him, wringing out more water from his soaked robes. I trembled beneath him. I was so wonderfully confused by what had happened.

I broke the kiss. “How? Sir Bryce said you were killed by the Vault’s defenses. He barely escaped alive.”

Illina snorted and then she stumbled away.

“Bryce killed Barg,” Stefan said, some of his joy fading from his eyes. “He tried to kill Illina and me. Thought he had.”

Shock struck me. “B-Bryce?”

“He’s the Lawbreaker!” growled from Stefan’s lips. “It’s Bryce. He’s the one who’s going to kill Pater!”

I gasped in shock. And yet, even knowing that, I was just so happy to have my Stefan back. I hugged him tight, my eyes closing. Grief hovered on the edges of my awareness for Barg’s murder, and anger burned in me for Bryce. We had him. We could have killed him in the forest, but Monica convinced us that he was our ally.

The poor thing had no idea who she’d married.

Illina

I stared at them having their reunion. This great emptiness filled me.

I rubbed at my belly and stumbled away. I felt hollowed out. Gutted. Barg filled my memories. He had been in my life for so long. First as my mother’s companion, almost like a fun uncle, then he had raised me. I had fallen in love with him. Seduced him when I became old enough. I had made him into my lover and my partner.

He was there for my first burglary. We’d almost gotten caught. I had broken my mother’s first rule. The guards were not where they should have been. But I was just so eager to steal ... What had it been? Some jewels. Some pathetic baubles. Barg had almost died that night getting us out.

I reached the lakeshore. I fell to my knees, the pebbles of the gravelly strand shifting beneath me. I stared out at the dark waters. I had gotten him killed. I brought him to Cernere’s Black Vault. I had dragged him on adventure after adventure and ... and...

I would never get another one with him.

I clutched my belly, leaned over, and sobbed. The tears spilled down my cheeks. The gears in my mind clicked with only one thought. What I’d lost. I grabbed at my toga as a keening wail rose from my throat.

The water washed against the shore. Over and over. A rippling splash that accompanied my grief. I stared at it, watching the water rise and break on the beach again and again. Barg wouldn’t get to see this.

I had agreed to do this. I had wanted to break into the Black Vault so badly. My mother died trying this. I had to beat her. Be better than her in every way and now ... She hadn’t gotten anyone else killed breaking in.

All I had left of Barg was his seed in me. Ever since the disastrous robbery of Lord Korvan’s riches, I had been storing Barg’s seed. He’d almost died that day, too, because of me. I realized one day he would die and ... I wanted a piece of him.