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Gifts	By : Travellyr Category: +S to Z > Slayers Views: 1416 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Slayers, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Gifts
- 1
It was dark the day Dolphin’s servant came, her cold
drowned flesh blending into the cold gray wool of the sky. He didn’t know this one; Dolphin had probably
sacrificed her latest primary servant to their Golden Mother when Phibrizzo was
killed. The servant knelt on the shore,
surf snarling her patchy skirts and ragged tassels and the odd lock of hair let
grown long, away from its close-cropped fellows. From crown to hips and, barring trailing
tatters, knees to toes she wore nothing but drops of salt water. She knelt in the breakers with her head bowed
but her gaze steady, as one servant to another, one higher and much, much older,
seeking entrance to another lord’s territory.

It was Xelloss who came down to greet her, matching
her gaze and bowing to her, shallowly, as one servant to another, senior to
junior, with the foam just barely beyond his shoes. Granting acknowledgement
and entrance. She rose, she waded
forward, and she stopped.

“I have a message for your master.”

“I am here to receive it.”

“My master the Deep Sea Dolphin extends an
invitation to the Greater Beast.” She
bowed formally, deeply, breaking their eye contact. “She would be most pleased if the Greater
Beast could accept this invitation to visit her home at her convenience.”

“I will tell my master.”

“I will wait.”

He nodded, she straightened, and, the dance
complete, he left. She waited, standing
shin-deep in saltwater.

Two days passed before Xelloss returned. The servant of Dolphin waited, and the long
bits of her hair had dried and were snaking around her in the wind. Salt spray had crusted on her bare flesh,
still gray and drowned-looking, and the waves had buried
her past her ankles in sand. His master
had told him, teasingly, to refuse if Dolphin’s servant looked at all restless.

Dolphin’s servant looked as patient as stone.

“My master considers.”

She bowed.
“On behalf of my master, I most humbly thank the Greater Beast for this
consideration. On behalf of my master, I
will wait for the Greater Beast to consider further.”

And their dance was done for the day. Had he been human, Xelloss might have sighed
over the flirting of demon lords.

On the fifth day her skin was cracking. The Dolphin had not seen fit to equip her
servant for exposure. He reported this
dutifully, along with her words: the same words as before.

“Such a good servant,” Zelas mused, petting the arm
of her chair. The pelt on it was still
bloody. “You would wait just so, wouldn’t
you?”

“I would as my master wished.”

She smiled.
“Good boy. Go then, send her back
to her master.” Zelas’s smile became a
smirk. “I wouldn’t want to damage
someone else’s toy with my dithering.”

This was a bald lie, and they both knew it, as they
both knew what would happen next. The
servant would go, without a proper answer.
She couldn’t not, once dismissed, unless she’d
been directly ordered to remain.

This was unlikely.
Very little about Dolphin was direct.
Xelloss went to convey his master’s intent, like the good boy she’d
called him, and send the servant back without a clear answer. So demons flirted.

The servant was back at dawn, three days later. Once again Xelloss came to receive her. He was very slightly irritated at having to flirt
on his master’s behalf before breakfast; a very lovely little dragon had been
caught, spying, and he’d been given the privilege of rewarding her
curiosity. If there was any like
sentiment in Dolphin’s messenger, he couldn’t find it. He thought he sensed a vague satisfaction or
amusement, but he was probably imagining it.
Dolphin always did favor passive-aggressive masochists as personal
servants.

She bowed. “I
bring a gift.” The sea behind her in a
twenty-meter circle was mirror calm.
Around it, waves crested as usual.
Refusing to speculate, he wondered if he should perhaps pray for a year
of boredom later. “I have been ordered
to let none but your master accept this gift, in
person.”

Two years.

“My master is asleep.”

“I will wait.”
Behind her, beneath the mirror, something roiled. Who was he kidding? Two months, starting after his curiosity was
completely satisfied. Breakfast would
have to wait.

oo00OOo0oo

Zelas waved him off and promptly forgot him. Kneeling in the shadows he’d retired to (and
it was a great effort to find shadows in Dolphin’s home, because the walls
glowed), he could see the entire room.
Off in a corner the messenger lurked in a tangle of rotting timber. Her cracked skin had healed somewhat, and she
appeared to be completely ignoring everything outside her eyes. How foolish, how
convenient, to be without curiosity.
Xelloss was impressed.

Dolphin wore her hair in braids, with the jewelry of
drowned things strung on it. The last
time he’d seen her she wore a single fat plait threaded with bracelets and
chokers and vertebrae. Today she wore
eight, four to a pigtail, and hundreds of rings banded the braids, from wide
dragon’s rings near her head to the rings of what must be human infants near
the ends. Some shone, some were
tarnished, some had gems, or bone, or filigree
work. None of them matched. The effect was dazzling and distracting, and
certainly intentional. Zelas fingered
one of them, examining the rings, smirking now and then when she read an
inscription.

“You’ve got a thousand lives caught
in your hair.”

Dolphin smiled, smug. “That is the idea. I have a thousand million lives caught in my
seas.” Zelas snorted and wove the braid
through her fingers. “I sit, and they
come to me, all my lovely lost ones.” She
eyed Zelas through her lashes. “So much easier than hunting.”

Zelas snarled a smile, feral and
bright. Her hand fisted around the braid
and slowly began pulling. “So much less fun.”

“Perhaps.” Smiling, heavy-lidded, Dolphin leaned closer,
over the arm of her chair, reeled in on her own hair. Her next words were murmured against his
master’s lips. “I’ve never found direct
competition much fun. I win more often
when everyone has forgotten I am playing.”

“Scavenger.”
Zelas nipped.

“Opportunist.”
Dolphin licked.

oo00OOo0oo

Deep Sea Dolphin ran what amounted
to the thrift store of Mazoku servants, taking in and giving forth like the sea
she ruled. She accepted anyone and
anything that demonstrated a desire to serve her, and even went out of her way
to create servants from sea leavings every so often. She had to.
Deep Sea Dolphin had the fastest changeover rate among underlings in
this world, and probably the adjacent ones as well.

Bad servants were promptly
destroyed as they were identified.
Servants who were merely mediocre were given tasks designed to either
rocket them out of mediocrity or kill them, and he’d yet to hear of any that
had rocketed. Good servants were
routinely given to her fellow Lords as gifts, where, more often than not, they
were either destroyed as potential spies, either through sacrifice, becoming a
plaything, or sharing the fate of the Dolphin’s mediocre help; or given minor
duties until it was seemly to gift them to someone else. She, Phibrizzo, and the Dynast had gotten quite
the game of musical servants going in the past, what with the Dolphin’s
constant gifts of prey and servants (no one had ever been able to decide if the
gifts were an unsubtle way of planting spies or an equally unsubtle way of
accumulating favors owed) and the Dynast’s return gifts and the Hellmaster’s
cat’s cradle game of favors given and the mortality rate among his playthings…
all of it seemingly designed to be a frantic dance not to be the one left
holding the potato when the music stopped.
The root vegetable in question was, of course, who owed what to
whom. Zelas swore blind the Dolphin
perpetuated the cycle out of boredom, and had flatly refused to accept anything
from her she shouldn’t eat since before the Kouma wars. Xelloss thought his master wise.

This left the Dolphin with only the
truly great servants, and those with potential to become so. The servants who were truly great, jewels of
efficiency and loyalty… those Dolphin tended to sacrifice to their Golden
Mother every century or so. The entire
system seemed expressly designed to prevent the Dolphin from getting anything
done, and while the very idea was unthinkable to the Dynast or the Hellmaster,
plotting in their strongholds (at least, the Dynast still was), the Metalliums
and the late Chaos Dragon had been convinced that accomplishing nothing was
Deep Sea Dolphin’s dearest goal. The
idea had disgusted Gaav, but amused Zelas.
It had also intrigued Xelloss, off and on, for the better part of eight
centuries. Of those who merely displayed
potential… well, they didn’t last long in that state. They almost always proved themselves to be
one thing or another, and Dolphin considered purposefully not living up to
one’s potential, especially in an effort to live longer, to be the mark
of a bad servant.

The moral of all of this was that,
even with his finger on the very pulse of Mazoku politics, Xelloss was never
surprised when he didn’t recognize someone claiming to belong to Deep Sea
Dolphin. The servant his master had
flippantly labeled Flotsam was Dolphin’s current number one. She was ruthlessly efficient and flawless in
her execution of whatever task was set to her.
Dolphin was almost fond of this one.
He expected her to vanish any day now: Dolphin was going through another
pious streak, and nothing but the best was fit for their Mother. The other, dubbed Jetsam,
was contentedly lurking in a mound of rotting timber and dead coral,
watching. Jetsam had been the pawn in
flirting thus far, and Jetsam was a puzzle he set himself to chewing over.

She looked to be made from a
drowned elf or dragon, gray and soggy as she was. It was hard to tell with her eyes clouded
like that. This meant she was at least
two hundred years old; a child, but not an infant. That she was still alive meant she was at
least a good servant. That her master
didn’t seem to care how much damage she took suggested she was not a fantastic
servant. That the Dolphin kept her
always near and used her almost exclusively as a messenger suggested
otherwise. Unless—

Xelloss realized that Jetsam was
watching him. It was hard to tell when
someone was without pupils.

“I am five hundred years in my
master’s service.”

He rapidly revised some of his
estimates. A good servant, but probably
stupid, spilling her hand like that, but not so stupid if she really had been
reading him—

“It does not matter what
information I give away, so long as it is not my master’s.” She smiled.
It looked squishy. He was
fascinated. “Artifice is not a virtue in
Dolphin’s service. The more secrets I
keep, the shorter my existence.” She
winked at him. “I will try to keep
one. It would be no fun for you if I
told you the answer.”

Jetsam has lasted because she has
two great talents. No, three. One is her massive passive-aggression. She achieves her goals through submission,
and completes her tasks by behaving as the lowest and most humble of
slaves. Two is her utter lack of
artifice or ambition, even towards continued survival. She lives only to please her master, which
brings us to three. She is incredibly
talented at bureaucracy, and she uses her talents for evil. There is no loophole she cannot make into a
noose, no procedure she cannot complicate, no system she cannot make ever more
Byzantine. There is no mortal bureaucrat
who would not drown himself in a toilet after dealing with her. She could come up with a set of requisition
forms for dispensing toilet paper in a bathroom stall that would inspire
everyone to go back to using leaves.
There is no act she cannot slow down to a dead halt, even without
paperwork. She can diligently work for
hours upon hours, never slacking, never shirking, and accomplish absolutely
nothing and at the same time demonstrate clear progress made towards a
goal that will, if one were but to take a step back, never be reached.

Deep
Sea Dolphin’s hobby was the art of
doing nothing, and she had found the perfect servant. Jetsam was not a good sacrifice because she
couldn’t get anything done.
Likewise, she was not a good gift.
But she was not a bad servant.
She was flawlessly loyal and when given a specific set of instructions
could complete them perfectly and in a timely manner. She was far from mediocre. Still, she was without initiative. She doesn’t anticipate, speculate, or
plot. And, as stated, left to herself
she can expend tremendous amounts of effort and not accomplish anything. Any
group of underlings given to her to run would fail at their tasks, not because
of incompetence, but because they would run out of time. Any army she was put in charge of would grind
to a halt, any direct confrontation she was set to would stalemate, and any
simple situation she was put in charge of would be endlessly complicated. She excels as a messenger, a valet, a butler,
a passive observer, a paper pusher, and a piece of furniture.

She’s perfect for Dolphin. Xelloss supposed that in three or four
centuries, once the Dolphin was hopelessly attached to this one, she’d
sacrifice her anyway in the belief that the best sacrifice is the possession
one holds most dear. The Mazoku thrift
shop existed in an endless cycle of decay, growth, destruction, and
renewal. In that way the Dolphin was
closest to their golden Mother, and that was probably why Zelas was attracted
to her.

oo00OOo0oo

Deep
Sea Dolphin’s bedchamber was either
a very small room or a very large closet, and it was the only room she had with
four walls. Three quarters of the floor
was her bed.

Dolphin lay back, dragging Zelas
atop her. She was buxom and soft where
Zelas was hard and lean, and her ringed braids wrapped around them both like
tentacles. She’d been wearing a slim
dress of knit sharkskin that clung and skimmed and flirted around her ankles as
she walked. Zelas loved it. She loved it best puddled around her ankles,
just before Dolphin tipped them both over into her bed, with Zelas’s shirt and jerkin
next to it on the floor. The pants,
being tight, had required Dolphin to be on top to peel them off. Dolphin being on top had required them to
wrestle and nip, licking everything in reach.
It was fun, even though Dolphin had to bite Zelas frequently to stay on
top long enough to get her pants off.
Perhaps it was fun because
Dolphin had to bite Zelas, fast and sharp and leaving delicious bloody crescents
to play with during the few seconds she was still after each bite. They went well with the bloody scratches on
Dolphin’s shoulders.

It is noteworthy that Greater Beast
Zelas Metallium and Deep Sea Dolphin have something in common besides the
obvious: they both share an affection for real
clothing, instead of the more common manifestation of themselves. Many (by which is meant four out of five)
Mazoku Lords do, actually. Zelas likes
real clothing because she has a fascination with material, and what can be done
with it, and has ever since Man learned to skin other creatures. Dolphin, on the other hand, likes having ever
more things to knit. Because they both
wear real clothing, they cannot simply wish them away; at least, not and have
the clothing be able to come back. Beast Priest Xelloss, by contrast,
chooses to manifest his clothing, as it’s a lot simpler and requires no mending
or laundering, and that is always a good thing when traveling the mortal way
and especially when traveling the mortal way with Lina Inverse.

Dolphin turned, straddling Zelas
backwards and pushing her pants over her knees.
Zelas bucked and kicked, because she could, and because this was Dolphin
on top of her, smearing heat wherever she slid.
So she bucked to feel those hot wet parts slide deliciously over her
chest, and Dolphin bent, gripped her with hands and knees, and sank her teeth
into the outer curve of Zelas’s thigh.
The Greater Beast sighed, toed her pants off, and squirmed as Dolphin’s
tongue ran along the new wound, licking up the blood and teasing raw, sensitive
flesh as it healed over. She leaned up a
bit and wrapped her arms around Dolphin’s hips, and pulled her down. Zelas nuzzled between her cheeks, scraping
the soft skin with her teeth, teasing her tongue from Dolphin’s tailbone down
the crease to that sweet pucker in hot, wet swipes. Dolphin hmmed,
and relaxed, her lush thighs on either side of her lover’s head, and Zelas
grinned triumphantly, secretly, and flipped them over. She buried her face in Dolphin’s cunt,
inhaling deeply.

“I love the way you smell.”

Dolphin laughed. It made her breasts jiggle against Zelas’s
belly. “Thank you,” she cooed, gently
teething the folds in front of her. Zelas
groaned, quietly, and thrust three fingers inside of her. Dolphin moaned, panted, and attacked the nub she
found, sucking and licking. Zelas huffed
into her belly, and teased her little finger inside Dolphin’s rear. In, out, in. Dolphin mewled and panted, her legs spreading
farther apart, hips rocking, relishing the slide and burn.

It was beautiful, the way she
relaxed and tensed, exclaiming her pleasure in breathy shouts of “hah.” Zelas would shove her hand all the way into
that sweet slick channel, as fast as she could, and trade her pinky for two
fingers from her other hand and twist,
just so, to make her feel the burn of stretch, and Dolphin would wail one pure,
sweet note each time before she muffled the noise by latching her teeth into
Zelas’s thigh. Then it was Zelas’s turn
to cry out, throaty and deep, the sting of being pierced mixing deliciously
with the pleasure of Dolphin’s desperately lapping tongue mixing her blood and
juices.

She growled, leaned her weight
forward onto her rocking hips and suckled, hard, hands pumping. Dolphin tensed for one beautiful,
bowstring-perfect moment, and released, screaming. Her back arched (the
curve of breakers) and her head was thrown back into the pillows, then she
relaxed (waves rushing back where they came from). For another sweet, smug moment she lay limp
and soft as one of her anemones, twitching from Zelas’s still-teasing
fingers. Then she growled and surged up
to trap her clit between her teeth, tugging gently, and her tongue scraped over
the captive nub, fast and firm. Zelas
howled, and let her own orgasm rip through her, until she lay still and sated
with her cheek pillowed on Dolphin’s hip.

Dolphin, of course, had to ruin the
moment by squirming out from under her and shoving her to one side. She made up for it, though, by snuggling up
next to her and interlacing their legs.
She nuzzled her cheek against Zelas’s firm breast, playing with a lock
of blond hair, rocking gently against her thigh. Dolphin’s dark, mottled braids trailed
everywhere. Zelas made a face, arching up
to pull two of them out from under her.
She’d been getting the imprint of a long-dead king’s signet ring in her
ass, and two dozen ecclesiastical and engagement rings in her back. She dropped the braids on top of Dolphin with
an irritated sigh. Dolphin smirked.

“Should I keep my hair to myself,
then?”

“No,” Zelas sighed, playing with
one of Dolphin’s tits. It smooshed and
bobbled gently in the thick, liquid atmosphere of Dolphin’s home. They didn’t float, but the contrast between
here and the surface was still different enough to be fascinating. “I like your hair. I just want to keep your hardware out of my
hide.”

“Fair enough,” she said, sleepily
lapping up sweat.

oo00OOo0oo

Xelloss had never been to Deep Sea
Dolphin’s home before. He discovered
that Dolphin’s halls, like certain other things about her, were one-sided. What Xelloss meant with that observation was
that every room in her fortress was open to the ocean, since every room was
missing at least one wall. Usually the main one.
The floor was rock and ice and bones and silt packed together so firmly
and cleverly not even a blind idiot could trip upon it. All the walls were of glowing, eye-sized bubbles
rising so thickly and violently into the ocean above that they were opaque, and
treated whomever tried to push through them to the frozen, crushing depths of
the normal water outside her home; in that way they were as solid as any
stone. Her fortress sat upon a
foundation of sunken cities and shipwrecks, and the light given off by her
walls revealed an endless plain of deep, squishy silt on the ocean bottom,
receding into blackness in every direction but down. On one side of her home a deep sea trench
ground her discarded gleanings down into the world’s molten center along with
the rest of the old sea bed. On the
other side volcanic vents broke up the monotony, with pale, red-tipped worms
clustered thickly around them, spewing soot and superheated water that cooled
before ever reaching daylight, showering mineral deposits from the cooled
plumes in a constant watery snowfall.

It was beautiful if you didn’t mind
the silence. The silence was fine, if
you didn’t mind all the noise just outside of hearing. No action in Dolphin’s home caused a sound:
no footfall, no knock, nothing except speech.
Outside the silence had whalesong carving through it, and the great
ocean currents blasting a few fathoms overhead, and the subliminal whishing of
giant squid changing colors, the tiny swishes of jellyfish and plankton, the
lives of the blind deep-sea fishes hunting each other, the whirr of the sea
vents and the sound of the trench, which, if you were to record the noise and
play it back much faster, would make a slow, grinding, cracking, squelching
noise. None of it was visible except the
geological features, the vent-worms, and the occasional comb jellyfish or
vampire squid passing like a particularly slow and tranquil bird. His master had once told him a Kraken slept
in the sea-trench, warming itself at the world-fires that melted all the ocean
detritus. She’d said, voice caught
between amusement and disgust, that it was practically tame, hadn’t so much as
looked at a ship in centuries, and only bothered to wake up when Dolphin wanted
to feed it. Given the general fate of
epic monsters, especially recently, Xelloss thought this pragmatic of the
beast.

One of Dolphin’s lesser servants
came up to him, offering tea. Xelloss
accepted, sitting with his feet dangling off the edge of the corridor into the
open ocean, and watched the servant go.
He looked like a washed-away river demon, skin pickled in the ocean
salt, hair like strips of braided sharkskin.
Maybe it was. Looking over the
ocean floor, Xelloss could almost see why Deep Sea Dolphin pursued the art of
nothing, here in the silence. The ocean
floor, when a sea creature wasn’t crawling across his view, reminded him a bit
of the Abyssal Plain. This was a plain,
and the ocean’s bottom was unarguably an abyss.
The view and the almost-silence encouraged one to wonder, not that he
needed any help, but it encouraged
wondering about odd things. Like if
Dolphin’s kitchen servants faced the same turnover rate as everything else in
her empire, and why his tea had steam rising from the cup when there wasn’t any
air for it to rise in. To be strictly
accurate, though, there was air in
Dolphin’s home. It was merely compressed
by the ocean’s weight into a liquid, and while he thought about that, he
wondered why everyone’s hair and clothing acted as if it were dry, here in the
liquid-air inside Dolphin’s home, and wondered if mortals had ever been down
here. They should be able to survive,
once they got over the autonomic choking response and realized they could still
breathe, albeit a much thicker substance.
He wondered why the entire rest of the world and the idea of its
destruction seemed so impossibly far away, or if that was just him, and being
unused to the perspective from the bottom of things. He wondered what kind of tea this was.

He sensed Jetsam coming down the
hallway a little before he would have heard her, had there been anything to
hear. Being this deep
in another Lord’s complex always made him feel a little like he’d wrapped his
head in cotton wool and stuffed it in his pocket.

“We have an errand,” she said,
“you, Aneyon, and I.” He felt his
master’s presence adding depth to it. A
ship was passing near Wolf Pack
Island, Zelas had given the honor
to Dolphin, and he was to see if there was anything of interest to Zelas on it
before Aneyon (who turned out to be Flotsam) sank it and Jetsam catalogued it
so Dolphin could pick over it. And while you’re up, she purred into a
few layers of himself, be a darling and get me my cigarettes and the wolf-bone holder. And my slippers. He followed Jetsam, and left his teacup on
the floor to enjoy the view.

It had been a passenger ship. What the captain had been thinking (or not
thinking) amused Zelas into smirking while she smoked. Xelloss sat at her feet, basking in her
approval and general good mood, and pondering.
Ships rarely came near to Wolf Pack Island on accident. Perhaps Dolphin had eased them off course. Perhaps the two sorceresses on board had
persuaded the ship to get closer.
Perhaps ochre would be a good color to paint his master’s nails, now
that he’d finished buffing. He idly
hoped the other Lord didn’t mind them sharp, but if she did, it wasn’t his
problem.

Dolphin sat content, working,
whalebone needles clicking. The sound
was peaceful, perhaps at odds with the image of a Mazoku lord knitting up the torn,
braided hair and scalps of the ship’s passengers while Jetsam sat at her feet
(a cool reflection of Zelas and Xelloss), tearing and knotting a sorceress’s
cloak into a single line to be worked. A
pile of sailcloth and courtier’s clothing, more scalps, whatever linens Dolphin
had liked, gleanings from past shipwrecks, and a few pieces of various sea
creatures sat next to her, awaiting similar treatment. From time to time Dolphin would tell her
which to tie in next. Xelloss saw that
the Lord had considerable talent—she worked quickly enough that Jetsam could
not afford to dawdle at what she was doing, and the patterns gradually emerging
from Dolphin’s needles were as breathtakingly beautiful as the brink of
madness. She saw him watching, and
demurely told him she was making a slipcover for her altar. Xelloss nodded, but he hadn’t thought there
would be a dust problem at the bottom of the ocean.

He watched the cloak become part of
the work and thought of Lina, over forty years old now, hair bright as ever and
looking forward to menopause (and the ability to kick ass every day of the
month) with a gleeful, breathless insanity that delighted him and probably
terrified everyone around her. He rather
doubted she’d thought of the REST of menopause’s delights, and he looked
forward to that mayhem as well. He
thought he should stop by, if he had time, and see if he could do anything to
help everyone’s suffering along. Maybe
give her some knitting needles. Big
ones, so she’d be more tempted to stab people with them, starting with him. Maybe he should scalp Lina before age and
habitual overextension robbed the color from her hair, and
ask Dolphin to knit an altar-cloth.
Maybe he should just shave her head instead, in case Dolphin needed some
more. He’d get to see Lina yelling at
him with no hair that way, too. Maybe he
should shave Firia’s while he was at it.
Gold would look lovely with the red.

Idly, Xelloss remembered that
Phibrizzo had enjoyed needlepoint.

oo00OOo0oo

The wolves were smitten with
Dolphin. It didn’t hurt matters that she
was constantly petting one or more of them, combing them, and pulling dead hair
out in great handfuls to float around on the floor. Jetsam assiduously collected the roaming
hunks of fluff, for which Xelloss was grateful.
He had better things to do with his time than corral herds of hairballs,
but he wasn’t sure what those things were.
Recently they consisted of making frequent pots of tea; making sure the
floors and beds were clean; and dealing with Jetsam politely staring at
everything with her filmed-over eyes (often holding a bag of shed fur);
Flotsam/Aneyon looking at him as if she couldn’t figure out how he’d managed
all these years (though he wasn’t sure if it was, personal dislike, doubt in
his talents, or surprise that he was currently the only servant on the island
with opposable thumbs); and Dolphin’s combined penchant for his presence and
for putting an antimacassar on anything that didn’t move. She’d even set one on his head when he’d sat
for a few hours internally cataloguing.
He hadn’t moved except to open his eyes and stare at her, and she’d
smiled, patted him on the shoulder, and walked off, four wolf puppies bouncing
at her heels. This baffled him, because
he hadn’t seen a single antimacassar in the entirety of Dolphin’s domain, not
even in a wreck. He concluded she was
being perverse, baiting his master, flirting with his master, or a combination
of the above, and apart from his “hat,” left them where they were.

It had taken about four minutes to
persuade Deep Sea Dolphin to visit Wolf Pack Island in person. “Come home with me,” his master had cooed,
her long nails caressing under Dolphin’s chin, the sea queen’s braids draped
around her arms and neck and waist.
“Come see the fires in my forest.”
Dolphin had been tending her own altar, laying thick, black oil in great
clamshells and lighting it. The flames
danced high and blue-green against a dark backdrop of the endless open
ocean. Her altar sat in a huge empty
room, with a view of the north, one end of the trench and a few volcanic vents
visible. Her glowing bubble-walls framed
the view of creation in the west and destruction in the east, and the view
framed the altar. It was very
impressive, very different from Wolf Pack
Island’s more
worldly altar in the forest, with its furs and bone, and with the
enormous sacrificial fires going Xelloss had to admit that Dolphin had devised
a watery hell more magnificent than any temple’s heaven.

Zelas had been licking Dolphin’s
ear. “Do you remember what fires look
like above? Golden and red, with secret
violet hearts, like my beloved Xelloss’s eyes.”
Xelloss, standing behind the pair with Dolphin’s attendants to either
side, had been reexamined by Flotsam and Jetsam. Flotsam/Aneyon had appeared mildly peeved
that he did not have his fire-heart eyes open for her to study. Jetsam appeared contentedly indifferent, as
she always did. “Mother and child, they
are,” Zelas continued, and Xelloss pointedly opened his eyes to smile at
Flotsam, all his centuries and astral teeth showing. She looked away. “Violet chasing the red gold around the fuel,
gold and black entwined as flames and sparks rise toward the night. Come home with me.”

“Your child,” Dolphin murmured,
kissing Zelas’s cheek.

“Our mother.”

“Yes,” she smiled, and Dolphin (and
Flotsam, and Jetsam) followed them home.

oo00OOo0oo

The last time the fires had blazed
so high, there’d been priests and shrine maidens to throw into them. Two had been dragons. He thought of Milgasia,
more angry and bitter than afraid of him, disillusioned, hypocritical, and
surviving, and how beautiful it made him; he thought of Firia, so young, so hopeful
and stubborn and fierce, too busy being affronted to be afraid, and full of
bent ideals; and he thought of how gorgeous they’d look, how utterly perfect, dressed
in the golden flames. No better rest for
them than the arms of his Mother.

Dolphin set a hand under Aneyon’s
chin, caressing her, then caught her lips in a kiss,
deep and slow and thorough. Her other
hand settled on Aneyon’s hip, and as she drew back the hand on her chin stroked
down over throat and chest to settle on her sternum. Dolphin smiled, Aneyon smiled back, and
Dolphin shoved her into the fires.

She snarled and thrashed and
blistered, but she did not try to leave the flames and she did not scream, not
when the blisters burst and not she began to melt before she finally began to
burn. The only sound Aneyon ever made
was one sharp click of her teeth coming together, and the pop and sizzle of her
blisters bursting. They watched, silent:
Dolphin and Zelas, smiling; Jetsam and Xelloss, somber and respectful; the
wolves, ranged around them and beyond them eyes without number, watching this
sacrifice to the Lord of All at her altar in the wild forests of Wolf Pack
Island, the sea to the West and the manor house to the East. When Aneyon was only a puddle of burning oil,
Dolphin let out an ululating cry, she and Zelas throwing huge chunks of kill
into the fires while the wolves surged around them, howling their own
melodies. Burning oil splashed
everywhere, consuming everything around the altar. Two wolves went into the flames, the roaring
and howling drowning out any noise they might have made. The flames towered taller than he, taller
even than Zelas, and in their golden ferocity Xelloss could see the blackness
of the void and feel his Mother’s eyes.
He understood Dolphin’s overwhelming piety in that moment, felt it
himself, and would have thrown himself into the flames of his Mother’s arms had
he been able to move.

He didn’t feel one way or the other
about that, at the time. It simply was,
just as the ocean of the Golden King’s awareness that flooded him, pushing out
even the tie to his master, simply was.
He stood there, gazing into the fire while the wolves sang and his
master and Dolphin went at each other before the flames like women possessed by
lust or madness or both. When the wolf
song had faded and the fires died down to crackling embers he came back to
himself. He and Jetsam stood alone, the
wolves and their masters gone. Xelloss
and Jetsam strode forward and knelt in the ash before the coals. He could hear her knees hiss as the hot ash
met their sogginess. He could smell his
trousers smoldering. Jetsam took the
knife from the altar, ignoring her sizzling hands, and cut a fistful of hair
and some of her scalp from her head.
Water oozed from the cuts to sizzle next to her knees. Xelloss took the altar knife she handed to
him, pulled his glove off, and sliced his wrist and hand deeply. Black blood welled up and drizzled onto the
coals. It did not sizzle. Jetsam tossed her hair next to it, and it did
not burn. Instead they slowly vanished
over the coals, the blood and the hair, like the smoke over the clearing, while
the Mazoku knelt in the ashes.

Days later and the destroyed altar
implements had been lovingly replaced and the soot scrubbed from everything but
the altar itself. Zelas felt it looked
more appropriate that way; Xelloss agreed.
Jetsam had combed and rebraided her master’s hair, and retired to the
sea to rejuvenate her roasted flesh. She
hadn’t gone far—Xelloss could see the top of her head at low tide.

Dolphin now wore her
treasure-wrapped hair in five braids, the rings braided in instead of merely
strung onto the finished plait, with bangles hiding under the sleeves of her
sweater. She wore a troll king’s torque
over it as a belt, patinated from the ocean salt, and
a full skirt knit from kelp and hair flowed below it. It moved like water rushing around shore
rocks when she walked.

He’d noticed the air around her
seemed dewy; moisture beaded on hard surfaces near her, evaporating with a
brief tang of salt as she passed on. The
wolves followed ten paces behind her, hopeful and licking the salt off the
walls. Xelloss was waiting for them to
pickle themselves so he could stop magicking tongue-prints off the polished
surfaces.

Dolphin cooed over the wolf in her
lap, caressing his throat and ears. The
wolf, for his part, appeared to be about three strokes away from melting,
having an orgasm, or both. A second wolf
crawled along the floor, licking her toes.
Wolves three and four lounged behind her, offering themselves
as a backrest and sniffing up the clean, sea-damp scent of her hair, while
still more lounged close to the Lord of the Deep. They liked her scent nearly as much as their
master did.

Zelas took in the scene in her
chamber with a look of disgust. There
were antimacassars on her pillows, her chairs, and her tables. She snarled, scattering the wolves, and
hauled Dolphin to her feet. She kissed
her, Dolphin wrapping around her with a satisfied “mmm.” Zelas wrapped Dolphin’s braids around her
fists, pulling her head back, nipping and sucking at her neck.

“You,” she growled between bites,
“had better not be thinking of doing to my wolves what you did to that kraken.”

“The kraken,” Dolphin sighed,
twining a leg up around Zelas’s waist like a tentacle, “is perfectly
fine.” She tipped her head back farther,
arching her back. Zelas moved the attack
from throat to shoulder, and Dolphin licked Zelas’s ear.

“For a lap pet,” Zelas growled,
pretending she wasn’t pleased. Her hands
rid Dolphin of the torque-belt.
Dolphin’s pushed inside her dress as she bit down on Zelas’s ear. Zelas hissed.

“The kraken,” Dolphin said firmly,
pulling off her sweater, “is perfect.” Her hands landed on Zelas’s rump and she
pulled them together sharply.

“If you say so,” Zelas snuffled
down between Dolphin’s breasts, licking.
Dolphin was always damp, but it was given that when on land the creases
of her body (behind the knee, for example, or between her fingers) where always
outright wet, and that lovely Dolphin-scent collected there, fresh and briny
and deep. Zelas’s own musk collected
under her hair and down her spine. “But
my wolves are not pets.” Zelas licked
around into her armpit, growling. “And
they are not allowed to lick
you. That’s for me.”

Dolphin tangled her hand in Zelas’s
long hair and pulled her head up, eyes narrowing a bit. “I’m not yours,” she stated, biting Zelas
sharply on the chin. Zelas growled and
bit back.

“No.” She licked where she’d bitten, and Dolphin,
appeased, happily let her. “But it’s my
island, my wolves, and my bedroom.” She
had her arms wrapped firmly around Dolphin—somehow, they kept their balance
until Dolphin took advantage of the clinging grip they had on each other. She quickly snaked her legs around Zelas’s,
knee and ankle, and yanked. She giggled
as they went down. Zelas grunted.

“Haven’t had sex
next to the bed yet.”

“I’m surprised,” she cut off with a
gasp as clever, clawed fingers found softer places on Dolphin’s soft body. “Plenty of furs.”

“I dislike cold floors when I
rise.”

Dolphin kissed her, their astral selves smushing together like two insistent cats. She tasted like tides and felt like salt
spray, or perhaps that was backwards and sideways. Amused, Zelas rolled them over, trapping and
tangling them in Dolphin’s damp, ring-weighted braids and knit skirt. “Off,”
Dolphin growled, yanking at Zelas’s clothes.
She tugged the fastenings open and Zelas squirmed atop her and Dolphin
yelped as it yanked a braid (and her head) sharply to one side. Zelas got the clingy suede bunched around her
hips and gave up, laughing into Dolphin’s breasts.

“What?”

“My hand is stuck in your
skirt.” She pulled, wiggled a bit, and
managed to get the not-stuck hand up by Dolphin’s ear. “And kelp is stronger than I thought. What did you do to it?”

“Ruby-Eye’s
testicles.” Dolphin started to
snicker. “Get up.”

“I can’t.” Zelas snickered and nibbled a breast. “Your skirt is wrapped over me and you’re
laying on it. And your hand is down my skirt.”

Dolphin smiled, wiggling her
fingers further under the suede until they found something interesting. “You’re complaining?”

“I’m not,” Zelas groaned, tilting
her hips as far as she could. “I just
want naked.”

“You or me?”
Dolphin teased, two fingers running back and forth from clit to slit, spreading
moisture. Her thumb and other fingers
made themselves at home in the surrounding folds, stroking and squirming.

“Both, you,” Zelas hmmmed, “you utter bitch.”

“Then get off of my hair,” Dolphin
purred, “and I’ll tell my skirt to let you go.”

Zelas moaned a laugh, hips
rocking. She licked Dolphin’s breasts
and caressed through the pools of her self, and Dolphin shivered and moaned
back. fursilksoftwet.
Zelas wrestled her trapped hand around, binding it in more layers of
skirt but able to rub Dolphin through it.
Dolphin moaned again, her fingers curling in Zelas, and they both tried
to spread their legs, Dolphin’s being held by the skirt just together enough,
and she hit her head against the floor, hissing in frustration. Zelas wiggled until the skirt of her dress
bunched around her waist with the bodice, laboriously pulling her knee up next
to Dolphin’s elbow, past the tight binding of Dolphin’s skirt, rocking down on
those fingers in earnest. She spread and
invaded on one plane and was spread and invaded on another, she and Dolphin
nestling into each other on the higher planes like thistles. Zelas felt herself teething Dolphin’s nipple,
licking down the side of her breast to her ribs. She felt her panting breaths on the wet
places. Dolphin felt herself inside
Zelas, warm soft fingers crooking forward, plunging in and out. Her thumb rode circles around Zelas’s clit
and she felt that too. One of them cried
out and it vibrated through them both.
Limbs and minds clung tighter together, inadvertently confusing them
both as to who was whom. She came, her hips jerking into her hand, and
it crashed through her self, into her self, the waves of it stoking her fires
higher and she came, clamping down on her and her fingers as her climax washed
back through her, and into her, and back into her, the echoes sloshing back and
forth between them.

They lay there, rocking gently
until they could tell each other apart, twined around each other through the
planes of reality. Zelas’s nose nestled
behind Dolphin’s ear, Dolphin’s braids wrapped around Zelas’s wrist and back,
Zelas’s leg across Dolphin’s hips, one hand each stuck down the other’s
bunched-up waistband and Dolphin’s skirt cocooning them both from the waist
down.

“Are we still stuck?”

“I hope so.”

“Insatiable cur.”

A chuckle. “I should hope so.”

“Come on, roll over.”

“Over you or into
the bed leg?”

“Into the bed
leg, unless Mazoku Lords’ arms bend backwards.” A shove and a thud. The bed creaked.

“Ow.”

“Poor Zelas.” Dolphin slowly sat up, unwinding her hair to
collect the slack to do so. Zelas pulled
herself away from the bed, glaring, but without any effort behind it. She draped herself across Dolphin’s back,
moving braids aside to lick her nape.

“You taste good. As good as you smell.”

Dolphin gently detached herself,
setting both their assorted astral bits in their proper places. She and Zelas still sat skin to skin, the
Greater Beast’s tongue moving over her nape in slow, lazy swipes, but they were
sitting apart from each other in all the important ways. She sat up away from her and turned. Zelas’s amber eyes were as warm and sated as
the aftermath of the first bloody feast around the first fires.

“Offer me tea.”

Zelas’s smile showed fangs. “Would you like tea?”

Dolphin dimpled. “On the veranda.”

oo00OOo0oo

Xelloss served. His master had coffee with cinnamon, he and
Dolphin (for he sat with them, at his master’s request) had his favorite
tea. Dolphin leaned back, twilight
playing with the jewelry in her hair.

“I think I shall leave tonight.”

“Going home so soon?”

“I thought I’d visit
Grausherra.” Her smile was lazy and
sexy. “We need to spend more time
together; we are brother and sister, after all.” Zelas pointedly raised an eyebrow, and
Dolphin laughed. The light made her
teeth look like pearls. “Maybe I should
stop at home first. He needs a
present.” Zelas laughed into her coffee.

“Give him the kraken.”

Dolphin threw a sugar cube at
her. “I’ll do no such thing. The kraken dislikes the cold.”

Zelas gave her a flat look. “He lives on the bottom of the sea.”

“I’ll have you know it is warm at the bottom of the sea, from the
world-fires,” Dolphin snipped, and sipped her tea.

“You just want to keep your pet.”

“He is not my pet. He simply belongs where he is.”

“As your pet.”

Dolphin threw another sugar cube at
her. Zelas swatted it aside and it
plunked into Xelloss’s cup, where he blinked at it. The Lords laughed.

“If he were my pet,” Dolphin giggled, “I’d have named him.”

“I think you should name him
Charlie,” Xelloss said solemn-faced, stirring his tea. Dolphin stared at him for half a second, and
began giggling all over again. He sipped
his tea, and smiled.

oo00OOo0oo

Four days later, Xelloss arrived at
the bottom of the ocean, to leave a gift for Deep Sea Dolphin on behalf of his
master. He brought five hundred head of
live sheep, in a bubble, a note he didn’t read, and something else, wrapped in
amber silk. A lot of amber silk. It was a dragon-hide collar the size of a
small harbor, embroidered with the name “Charlie.”

Four weeks later Xelloss was
ordered to get rid of the antimacassars.
A continent away, Firia ul Copt came downstairs in the morning to find
an antimacassar on top of every pot, mace, and flat surface in her shop. There was no note, but she had a very good
idea of where they came from anyway.

Three months later, Jetsam arrived
on Wolf Pack Island’s shores, to leave a gift for Greater Beast Zelas Metallium
on behalf of her master. She brought
thirty-five knit dog beds, two wolf stuffed toys knit from spun fur with black
pearl eyes and tiny sharks-teeth fangs, and a tea cozy. Zelas had glowered at the gift while
thirty-six wolves (one of them on two legs) stared at her hopefully.

“Fine,” she had growled, and
stalked off. Xelloss hurried behind her,
a plushie in either arm and the tea cozy in hand, while the wolves picked and
fought and dragged off their prizes to be field-tested.

“If it helps,” he quipped, “I’ve
heard that the Dynast has recently received a very good servant, a woolen hat
with tassels on top and ear flaps, two pairs of slippers, a scarf knit from
amber silk that’s nineteen feet long, eleven coasters, and a stuffed toy of the
kraken.” His master stopped to look at
him over her shoulder. He held out one
of the wolf toys, grinning winsomely.
“Here, Master, this one is for you.”

She took it. It smelled like Dolphin. She held it a moment, aware that Xelloss was
still there, smiling. She grinned,
slowly.

“Xelloss,
darling.”

“Master?” he chirped, holding his
own toy. Zelas took out a cigarette, lit
it slowly, and savored it, still smiling.

“I think my dear sister could use
some rabbits. Find her a few thousand,
would you? Oh, and a nice sushi set.”

Xelloss continued to smile,
inwardly wondering where on the world staff he’d put a few thousand rabbits
while waiting to give them to Deep Sea Dolphin, and how he’d keep the wolves
out of them, and if he was required to keep them alive. He rather suspected he was, at least until
the last moment. Perhaps he could start
off with a couple hundred on a deserted island and breed them, since they were
going to be breeding whether he intended it or not. He resolved to ask for his year of boredom
the next time he made a sacrifice to the Lord of Nightmares. Perhaps she’d like some rabbits.
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Gifts