Chapter 147:
– Serie –
Travelling long distances had never been difficult for Serie.
Not when she had spent the better part of a thousand years collecting boundless spells like a magpie collected shiny baubles, hoarding them away in the vaults of her memory until she had more transportation magics than most archmages had spells in their entire repertoire.
The issue had never been capability. The issue had always been preference.
She did not like leaving her home…
It was comfy. The cushions were arranged just so, the lighting precisely dim enough to read by without straining her eyes, the temperature regulated by a sigil she had carved into the floorboards three centuries ago. The kettle was always full. The bookshelves were within arm's reach of her favorite chair. She had a lovely view of the academy grounds where she could watch her foolish human apprentices scurry about pretending to study while gossiping about her behind cupped hands.
And no, despite what some of those whispering little ingrates might say when they thought she could not hear them, she was absolutely not a shut-in.
I simply choose not to leave normally. There is a profound and meaningful distinction there that these mouth-breathing cretins fail to appreciate. If I were truly a shut-in, would I be soaring through the sky right now at speeds that would liquefy a human's organs? I think not!
The wind tore past her in a continuous howl, her long pale hair whipping behind her in a banner that would have been visible from the ground if anyone had been looking up at the right moment. The boundless spell carrying her across the continent operated on principles most modern mages could not even begin to comprehend, folding the air around her into a kind of riding cushion while the world below blurred into smeared green and brown and silver where rivers caught the light.
The Mage Exam started tomorrow. Which meant she needed to hurry.
Frieren had given her precise coordinates before fleeing the study, and Serie had committed them to memory with the casual efficiency of someone who had been memorizing lay lines and ward patterns since before most of her current students' great-great-grandmothers had been born. The location was a meadow in a stretch of countryside that, as far as Serie was aware, had absolutely no business hosting anything of cosmic significance.
And yet.
She crested a ridge of low hills and there it was, exactly where Frieren had said it would be.
A door.
Just a door. Floating in the middle of an empty field. Right in the center of the door was a small figure that Serie had to descend and float closer to properly examine.
A chibi fox.
Adorable. Disgustingly so. I am going to pretend I do not find that charming.
She landed in the grass barefoot, her toes sinking into the cool dewy blades, and that was when the magic hit her.
It rolled off the door in slow, lazy waves, the kind of pressure that made the air itself feel heavy. It was not aggressive. It was not even particularly directed at her. It simply was, the way a mountain simply was, the way the sea simply was, and Serie felt her body flinch before her mind had even finished processing what she was sensing.
The cookies had been bad enough. The cookies had been a pinprick of this. A single drop of the ocean she was now standing in front of. An almost boundless concentration of power.
I am a war elf. I have stood on battlefields where the sky burned and the dead outnumbered the living a hundred to one. I will not back down from a door.
She reached out and pulled it open.
A bell jingled overhead with the cheerful little note of every small business that had ever existed.
Serie blinked.
Then she blinked again.
Then she stepped through and let the door swing closed behind her, and she stood there in the entryway with her bare feet planted on warm wooden floorboards, taking in what was, by any reasonable assessment, the single most underwhelming epicenter of cosmic power she had ever encountered.
It was a restaurant.
A small, cozy, charmingly lit restaurant.
She had not been to a place like this in over a thousand years.
The patrons were diverse and strange. Two humans in traveling clothes were eating bowls of something steaming at one of the booths, a man and a woman who looked like they had come in from a long journey and were too hungry to care about anything else. At a table near the back, a hulking figure with the blunt features and proud bearing of a being she did not recognize was working his way through what looked like an entire roasted bird, and across from him sat someone with delicate ears that swept back along the side of their head like a cat's. There was a creature in the far corner with what looked like genuine antlers growing out of his head, drinking something dark from a tankard.
Yokai, Serie supposed. Frieren had mentioned them, in the spilling rush of explanation she had given before fleeing to safety. Beings native to this Haru's home world, magical creatures with animal features, organized into some kind of supernatural community.
What Serie did not see was the ten-tailed fox man. That had been Frieren's description. Tall. Golden hair. Fox ears. Ten tails. A chef. Behind the counter, usually.
The space behind the counter was empty. A clean white apron hung on a hook. A pot was simmering gently on the stove with no one tending it, though Serie suspected from the way the steam curled with deliberate intent that the pot was perfectly capable of tending itself.
"Can I help you?"
The voice came from behind her.
Serie went still. Behind me. Someone has been sitting behind me this entire time and I did not register them. That is not possible. I would have sensed any presence powerful enough to matter, and any presence beneath that threshold I would have sensed because it was beneath the threshold.
She turned her head slowly.
Two women sat together in a booth tucked into a corner she had walked past without giving a second glance. They had a teapot between them, two cups, and a small plate of pastries that had been picked at. One of them had a hand wrapped around her cup. The other had her chin resting on her palm, watching Serie.
Both of them were beautiful in ways that made Serie's eyes narrow. Both of them were anything but human.
Her gaze went first to the one with her chin in her palm. Long crimson hair. She looked like a beautiful human woman but she was anything but. She is a dragon. A powerful one.
The other woman, the one wrapped around the teacup. Golden hair piled in soft waves. Skin like cream. A presence that radiated something steady and deep, like the quiet pulse of an ancient forest, and Serie could not place her at all. Not human. Not dragon. Not demon. Not elf, certainly. Not any of the categories that her thousand years of cataloguing had given her.
Interesting. Serie walked over.
She stopped in front of their booth and let her presence settle, the way she did when she wanted any reasonable being to understand that they were in the presence of someone who had earned the right to be respected. "I am Serie," she said. "I am a mage."
The dragon woman's lips curved. "How quaint." Her voice was rich and amused, and her eyes did a slow appraising sweep over Serie that was less an evaluation and more an acknowledgment. "So am I." She did not stand. She did not extend a hand. She simply gestured, a small graceful motion of fingers that suggested the entire universe should bend around her convenience. "I am the dragon witch Irene Belserion. And my new friend here," Irene continued, tilting her head toward the golden-haired woman, "is Queen Frigga of Asgard. Goddess of the Hunt. And a goddess of magic as well."
Serie's breath caught. She was reasonably proud of the fact that her face did not move.
A dragon who had taken the time to actually learn magic was something Serie would have considered impossible if she had not been standing three feet away from one. That was one thing…
But a goddess? A GODDESS OF MAGIC AS WELL!? When was the last time I felt this excited?
Serie's hands had gone still at her sides. Her heart had done something that she had not felt it do in centuries, a kind of low eager kick that traveled up into her chest and made her teeth want to bare in a smile.
I want to fight her!
She wanted to throw down right here on this restaurant floor, push every ounce of magic she had refined and stolen and earned over a thousand years against this serene golden-haired woman and find out, finally, after so much time, whether she had a ceiling and what it looked like.
She inhaled slowly through her nose. Annoyingly enough, I am here for a purpose. Foolish woman that I am.
"What is this place?" she asked. She kept her voice level. "And where can I find this Haru? Frieren told me about him. I am here to invite him to the First Class Mage Exam."
Irene's eyebrows rose. "A mage exam?" She straightened slightly in the booth, and for the first time since Serie had walked over, the dragon's lazy interest sharpened into something genuine. "That sounds fun. Is it open to anyone? Can my daughter and her friends participate?" She tilted her head, a fond expression creeping into the corner of her mouth that did not match the rest of her at all. "They do tend to get bored easily. Despite causing so much collateral damage every time they go out on quests. A formal exam might channel their excess energies into something less expensive to clean up after."
Her daughter? Before Serie could formulate a polite version of no, my exam is not for the children of dragons who level mountains for fun, the goddess Frigga finally spoke.
"Haru is not here at the moment." She set her teacup down with a small clink. "He is visiting one of his other paramours. In a place called Essos." A pause. A faint, faint flush of color crept up across her cheekbones, and Serie watched the goddess of magic become very briefly and very visibly a woman thinking about a man, and Serie filed that away too. "If you need to speak with him immediately," Frigga continued, "simply walk back out the front door while thinking of that location, and you should be able to sense him easily enough. His power tends to..." She paused. The flush deepened by a fraction. "Stick out. Like a forest fire. To those who know what to look for."
"Mm," Irene agreed. "I love when he shows his dominance…"
The two women exchanged a glance.
Serie watched the air between them shift, and she realized with a slow dawning incredulity that she had been entirely dismissed.
The two of them started chatting with each other, either about Haru or their own children. They were no longer including Serie in their conversation at all.
I am being ignored…? Serie stood there in her bare feet, in front of a booth occupied by a dragon witch and a goddess, and she watched the two of them lean toward each other with the unmistakable body language of women who had discovered they had a lot in common and were going to spend the next several hours unpacking it.
She blinked.
It had been so long since anyone had simply ignored her that the experience genuinely lacked precedent in her recent memory. People who met Serie tended to do many things. They became nervous. They became aggressive. They became unctuously polite. They tried to impress her. They tried to provoke her. They occasionally fled the room. None of them, as far as she could remember in the last several centuries, had simply decided that discussing each other's favorite brands of shampoo was more compelling than her continued attention.
She was not, she discovered, entirely sure how she felt about that.
And yet.
If nothing else, it is novel. She stood for another moment, listening to Irene describe in dreamy detail the particular way Haru rolled his sleeves up to his elbows when he was working on something complicated, and Serie decided, with the swift practicality that had kept her alive through a thousand years of bad decisions made by other people, that further engagement here would yield her nothing.
She turned on her heel.
She walked back toward the door and behind her the conversation continued without missing a beat. Something about the way Haru laughed. Something about a particular tail that had a slight kink in it where the others did not, and Frigga thought it was endearing.
Serie reached the door. Essos. Walk out while thinking of Essos.
– Haru –
The morning light in Meereen came in through the tall arched windows of Daenerys's chambers. The drapes had been pulled back hours ago, and the breeze coming off the Slaver's Bay carried salt and something floral I could not place, some flower that bloomed only in this part of the world and only in the heat.
Daenerys was lying on top of me. Her cheek was pressed flat against my chest, right over my heart, and her silver hair was a pale river spilling across my skin and down over my shoulder. Her body was warm and naked, pressed full-length against mine from the soft press of her breasts to the slim curve of her hips to the smooth length of her legs tangled with my own.
I had not moved in a while. I did not particularly want to.
My tails had wrapped themselves around her without me deciding they should. All ten of them, sealing her against me in a warm cocoon of myself.
I had noticed it happening last night, when she had drifted off to sleep with her ear pressed over my heartbeat, and I had noticed it again this morning when I had woken to find her still there and my tails had simply refused to release her.
She is carrying my third child. My body knows. There is something in her now that belongs to both of us, and the animalistic, the fox part of me is not going to let her out of arm's reach until I know she will be safe.
Her fingers paused on my chest. Then they resumed moving gentle patterns on my skin. "You are thinking too loud," she murmured. Her voice was rough at the edges, low and warm, the kind of voice that came after a night of being thoroughly used and not getting nearly enough sleep. There was a small smile in it.
I huffed a quiet laugh and let one of my tails drift higher, the very tip of it brushing against the curve of her shoulder blade. She made a soft pleased sound against my skin and arched into the contact like a cat.
"I bite my lip when I am thinking," I muttered. I let the silence sit for a moment.
The breeze moved the drapes. Somewhere far below, in the streets that wound around the base of the Great Pyramid, I could hear merchants beginning to set up their stalls and shouting at each other in three different dialects of Valyrian-corrupt trade-tongue. The city was waking up around us.
I bit my lip again. "Danny?"
"Mm?"
"Can I ask you something, and will you give me an honest answer instead of a queenly one?"
Her fingers stilled on my chest. After a second she lifted her head, propped her chin on the back of her hand, and looked up at me. Her eyes were a violet so deep it did not properly exist in nature, and they had a way of fixing on a person that made you feel as though she was reading the back wall of your skull. "Always," she said.
I drew a breath. "Do you actually want to be Queen of Essos?"
Her brows drew in, a small line forming between them.
"Hear me out," I said. "Sansa proposed it during her negotiation, and it solved a problem in front of us, and I went along with it because it solved a problem in front of us. But it was rushed. The whole thing was rushed. I broke your invasion of Westeros, I dropped you back here, and within about a week we had decided you should rule a continent." My ears flattened a little against my hair. "It was an asshole move, Danny. I sent you back here to rule with no one to lean on. Sansa and Catelyn have each other up north. They have an entire blood relationship and a family rebuilding around them. You came back to Meereen by yourself. So I want to know. Do you actually want this? Or did we put a crown on you and call it a happy ending because it was easier than asking..."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she lowered her chin back onto her hand and closed her eyes. "That," she said softly, "is not a question I have let myself answer in a long time."
Okay. Okay, that is not a no.
I waited.
She drew a slow breath against my chest. "Honestly? I wanted it so badly, Haru. For so long. I cannot even put a year on when it started, because it feels like it has always been there. The hunger for it. The power." Her fingers moved on my chest again, an absent slow stroke. "When my brother was alive, I wanted it. He used to hit me. Did I ever tell you that? He would come into whatever room they had given us in whatever borrowed house we were staying in, and if he was angry about something, anything at all, he would grab me by the hair and pull until I cried, and then he would tell me I had woken the dragon, and I needed to be more careful. I was smaller than him and younger. And every time he hit me, I would think about being a queen one day. About having soldiers. About having the power to look at him and tell him to stop, and have him have to stop, because there were a hundred swords behind me that would make him stop if he did not."
My tails tightened around her without my permission and I held her a little closer against my chest. She made a small grateful noise and pressed in.
"And then they sold me," she said. Her voice did not break. It simply went flatter. "To Drogo. For an army that my brother needed to take a continent he was never going to take. I had never been touched. I had never even kissed a boy. And they put me on a horse and they walked me into a tent and they handed me to a warlord who did not speak my language, and they called it a marriage, and I let them, because what else was I going to do, run? With my brother holding the leash and a thousand horsemen between me and any direction I might have run in. So I lay there. And I thought about being a queen. I thought about it the entire time, because it was the only thing in my head that did not feel like dying."
I closed my eyes. I am going to find a way to bring her brother back to life, briefly, just so I can kill him personally.
"Danny—"
"It is fine." She cut me off.
"It is not!"
"...I know." She turned her face against my chest and pressed her forehead into my skin. "I know. I am telling you because you asked."
"I asked because I wanted you to be honest with me. Not because I wanted you to relive that for me."
"I am not reliving it." She tilted her face up just enough that I could see the corner of her mouth. There was something tired and wry in the curve of it. "I am telling you why I wanted to be a queen. Because once you understand how badly I wanted it, you will understand the answer to your actual question."
I waited.
She breathed in. Let it out. "I do not really want it anymore." The words came out level and quiet. She did not flinch from them. "I have it now," she said. "I have everything I dreamed about when I was a hungry girl crying in a borrowed bed. I have the soldiers. I have the city. I have ministers who scrape the floor when I walk past them. I have tax records and grain reports and farmers fighting over a calf in my throne room because the magisters cannot be bothered to mediate the small things. I sit on a dais and I make decisions and the people of this city look at me as though I dropped out of the sky to save them, and I, Haru, I do not feel anything when they look at me. I used to dream about that look, and now I get it every day, and it is not what I thought it would be. I am not happy. It is not warm. Even with my dragons…"
She laughed then, a tiny breath of a thing. She lifted her head again. Her eyes were wet at the corners, but she was not crying.
"That is the honest answer, my fox. I do not want it anymore. I wanted it because I needed something to want, and I won it before I figured out whether I actually liked it."
I reached up and tucked a strand of her silver hair behind her ear. She had a faint scar along the curve of her jaw, very thin, almost invisible. I traced it with my thumb, slowly, and her eyes closed.
"Then quit," I said.
Her eyes opened. She actually gaped at me. "Quit?"
"Quit. Walk out. Renounce the crown. Tell the magisters they can fight over Essos amongst themselves and good luck to whichever idiot ends up holding it. We can move all the former slaves to Westeros, there is plenty of room for them. We will find you another purpose." I curled a tail higher and let the tip stroke behind her ear. "Hell, Danny, you can be a princess in Kyoto if you want to. You could keep your dragons and let them grow up somewhere they will not have to watch their mother be miserable. None of my girls should ever be unhappy, Danny. Not on my watch. Not when I have the power to fix it and just have not."
She stared at me.
"I should have asked you this six weeks ago," I said. "Sansa and Catelyn have each other to lean on. You came back to Meereen alone, and I let you, because it solved a problem. That was not okay of me. I am sorry."
She kept staring.
Then her face crumpled, just a little. Not into tears. Into something softer. A kind of relief that did not quite have anywhere to go. "You absolute fool," she whispered.
"That is a yes to quitting then?"
"Shut up."
"Just clarifying."
"Shut up, Haru." She lifted herself up on her hands. Her hair fell forward in a silver curtain around both of our faces, closing us off into a small hot world of just her looking down at me.
"I cannot ever be mad at you," she said. Her voice had gone low again, but in a different way. "Do you understand that? You are everything of the fantasy prince this princess dreamed up as a little girl. I'm so glad to be bearing your child for you."
I lifted my hand and laid it over hers on her stomach. Her fingers laced through mine.
"I do want a wedding, though," she said quietly. "Soon. A real one. Because my child will not be a bastard. Not this child. Not after everything."
"Done…" I told her seriously. This world had a really strange stigma about bastards and if that's what she wanted, she would have it. "Pick a date. Pick a world to have it on. I will be there in whatever ridiculous outfit my new tailor Shuna decides is appropriate."
She laughed, a real laugh this time, low and warm, and then she leaned down and she kissed me. It was not a chaste kiss. There was nothing chaste about Daenerys this morning, with the night still on her skin and the relief of a confession still working its way out of her chest. Her mouth opened against mine, and her tongue slid against mine, and she made a low hungry sound into my mouth that traveled directly down my spine and lit up everything below my hips.
Mmmph.
My cock, which had spent the last hour and a half being very politely behaved despite the fact that there was a naked dragon queen lying full-length on top of it, made an executive decision. It thickened against the smooth heat of her inner thigh in a slow heavy pulse, and her breath caught against my lips, and then her hips shifted, and she was rocking down against the length of me with the unhurried confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she had been able to do to me last night and was looking forward to doing it again.
"Ah," she breathed into my mouth. "You are insatiable."
"You are the one grinding on me, Your Grace. Or I suppose it's just Danny now isn't it…"
"Mm. Damn right it is!" she moaned.
I dragged my hands down the length of her bare back, fingers spreading wide over the small of her waist, and my tails released her shoulders to slide lower, two of them curling around the backs of her thighs, parting them just enough to let her settle properly against the hard line of my cock.
She gasped against my mouth and rocked again, slower this time, deliberate, the wet softness of her sliding along my length without taking me in. Teasing. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Hela is missing out. She left for the North chasing her undead army project.
I shifted my hips, and Danaerys lifted hers to meet me, and the head of my cock had just begun to part the slick lower lips of her when there was an enormous and frankly violently unwelcome pounding at the chamber door.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Daenerys froze with her thighs spread over my hips and the tip of my cock notched right at her wet entrance, and the look she gave the door over her shoulder was a look I would not have wanted aimed at me on the worst day of my life.
"YOUR GRACE."
The voice was muffled through the heavy carved door, but the panic in it was clear enough to come through stone.
"YOUR GRACE, FORGIVE ME, FORGIVE ME, BUT THERE IS, THERE IS A VISITOR, A VISITOR FOR LORD HARU, SHE WILL NOT WAIT, SHE WILL NOT BE STOPPED!"
Daenerys's mouth twitched. "Is the city on fire?" she called.
"NO, YOUR GRACE."
"Is the harbor under attack?"
"NO, YOUR GRACE."
"Is the pyramid actively collapsing?"
There was a small uncertain pause.
"NOT EXACTLY YOUR GRACE… But possibly?"
I burst out laughing. I could not help it. Daenerys dropped her forehead onto my chest and made a sound that was halfway between a groan and a giggle.
"What does not exactly mean," she called.
"SHE IS A WOMAN, YOUR GRACE, A WOMAN WITH GOLDEN HAIR AND, AND STRANGE EARS, SHE BARGED THROUGH THE GATES, THE GUARDS TRIED TO STOP HER, THEY ALL TRIED, SHE KNOCKED THEM DOWN WITH MAGIC! VILE SORCERY! SHE IS DEMANDING TO SEE LORD HARU, SHE IS COMING UP THE STAIRS NOW, YOUR GRACE, I CANNOT, I CANNOT KEEP HER OUT, I AM SORRY."
The voice broke a little at the end, the way a voice did when its owner had been running.
Daenerys lifted her head off my chest and looked at me.
I looked at her.
"Golden hair," she said with a raised eyebrow. "Strange ears…?" She started laughing. Her body shook against mine and rolled my softening cock against her in ways that were not helping me focus. "My fox," she said, "is your little sister pranking us."
I closed my eyes. I let my senses spread out.
No.
I knew what Kunou felt like across any distance. I knew her the way I knew the rhythm of my own heartbeat. If my sister were anywhere on this planet, I would have felt the warm bright pull of her, the small sun of her presence that I had been able to find since the day she was born. She was not here. She was not even on this world.
This was not Kunou.
I cast my senses out further, past the chamber walls, down through the levels of the Great Pyramid, and I found her almost immediately because she was not bothering to hide anything..
And she was an elf.
An elf I have never met. Coming up the stairs right now, asking for me by name?
"It is not Kunou," I said.
Daenerys's smile faded slightly. "Then who?"
"That," I said, sliding my hands down her hips and gently lifting her off me, "is what we are about to find out."
Getting dressed in a hurry was always a comedy of errors when you had ten tails to manage, and I had become very good at it out of pure necessity.
Daenerys was faster. By the time I had finished tying my obi, she had already pulled on a pale silver gown, twisted her hair back into something approximating a queenly arrangement, and stepped into the gold sandals beside the bed. She splashed her face at the basin, dragged a wet cloth across her neck where the marks of the night were a little too obvious, and gave herself one critical look in the polished bronze mirror.
"Acceptable?" she asked.
"Stunning!" I smiled at her.
We made the throne room in good time.Danaerys took her seat and I stood next to her.
The footsteps came almost immediately.
She walked in. The first thing I saw was the bare feet. The second thing I saw was the long blonde hair, falling almost to her waist in pale waves. The third thing I saw was the shape of her ears, swept back along the side of her head in long points that were exposed by the way her hair had been pulled forward over her shoulder.
The fourth thing I felt, before I saw it, was the magic.It carried that same weight Frieren had, that same depth I had felt the first time the silver-haired elf had walked into my restaurant and made the room feel slightly smaller without ever raising her voice. But it was not Frieren.
She walked the length of the throne room without bothering to look around. Her eyes were already on us. She stopped twenty paces from the dais. She tilted her head.
I spoke first. "Are you Serie?"
Her gold eyes flashed up to mine, and her brows lifted in a small surprise, and then her mouth bloomed into a wide, genuinely delighted grin that completely transformed her face. "Hah." She cocked her head. "That peace-loving fool Frieren must have talked about me. She always did have the worst inability to keep my name out of her mouth." There was an undertone in the way she said the name, though. Underneath the dismissive bite, there was something soft. The way someone said the name of a former student they had given up trying to be properly disappointed in.
Her gaze dropped from my face. Then her eyes slid sideways, off me, and landed on Daenerys. And stopped. Her brows drew together into a small sharp line of concentration. Her mouth fell slightly open. Her gold eyes widened, and then narrowed, and then went wide again.
Serie's hand shot up and her index finger snapped out, and she pointed directly at Daenerys with the absolute authority of a woman declaring a verdict. "You!"
"...me?" Daenerys's eyebrows climbed curiously.
"You will be my next apprentice," Serie announced.
Daenerys's mouth opened slightly.
"Your latent magical potential is the most I have ever seen in a human," Serie continued, the words coming out faster now. "In all my apprentices, in every fool who has ever wandered into the academy with a letter of recommendation, encountered a fire affinity you are radiating right now. Do you have any idea how powerful you can be with fire magic? Do you have any concept? What is your name? Tell me about yourself? Where are you from? Have you ever cast a spell? Has anyone tested you? I am taking you. I am taking you back with me. We are leaving immediately!"
The torrent stopped. Serie stood there, finger still pointing, gold eyes fixed on Daenerys.
A long, full beat of silence passed.
Daenerys lifted her hand and pointed slowly at her own chest. "Me?" she said again. Her eyes slid sideways to me.
I shrugged at her. I had no idea what to do with this either. Well, my love, my beautiful pregnant dragon, I do believe you are being recruited. I had promised you we would find another purpose. I had not specifically considered apprenticeship to a possibly insane elven archmage, but I should have expected it knowing my life.
Daenerys looked back at Serie. She drew herself up with the careful dignity that she pulled around herself like armor when she was not entirely sure what was happening but was not going to let it show. "My name," she said, "is Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of My Name, the Unburnt, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains."
Serie waved a hand dismissively. "Too long. Cut it down."
Daenerys's eyebrow twitched. "I'm… Daenerys," she said, after a deliberate pause. "I have three dragons, who are children to me, all of them."
"Mm-hm. And…?"
"I am currently with child myself. Lord Haru's child."
"Mm-hm. Is that all? What about your experience with magic so far?"
"And as for magic." Daenerys's eyes flicked toward me again, and I gave her another small encouraging nod, because I was not about to interrupt this for anything in the world. "I have had encounters. I cannot say I have been formally taught. The encounters were largely unpleasant. There was a witch, a Lhazareen, who took a horse from me as payment and gave me back a stillborn child and a mute husband. And there were sorcerers in Qarth, the warlocks of the House of the Undying, who tried to imprison me and feed off my dragons. I burned them out of their tower with my dragons. I have not been entirely fond of the magical arts since…"
Serie's lip curled. It was an immediate, visceral, fully unfiltered curl of contempt, and it transformed her face into a thing of genuinely impressive disdain. "Sorcerers," she said, as if she had bitten into a lemon. "Pah." Serie spat the word out. "Sorcerers are fake trash. Fake trash, child. They do not use their own magic. They have no magic of their own to use, and that is the source of their entire pathetic ideology. They borrow. They borrow from demons. They borrow from 'elder' things. They borrow from creatures that should never be borrowed from, and they pay the loan in pieces of themselves and pieces of the people around them, and the things that lend to them always, always come to collect. Real magic. Real magic comes from inside you, out, and it takes nothing from anyone unless you choose to give it. It is a craft. It is a discipline. It is yours. It cannot be taken from you. It cannot be coerced from you. It cannot turn on you, because it is you, and it answers only to the shape of who you have become."
Serie slowly drew a breath. She fixed Daenerys with the gold of her eyes.
"If you agree to learn from me," Serie said, her voice quieter now and very intent, "I will guarantee, on my name and my line and the floorboards of the academy where I have stood for centuries, that you will never have trouble with sorcerers again. What do you say?"
Daenerys regarded her in silence for a moment. Then her lips twitched, and the dignified mask of Daenerys Stormborn cracked just slightly at the corners, and she let out a small breath of a laugh.
"Okay," she said. "I guess…?"
I felt my tails sway behind me before I noticed I was doing it. They moved in a slow pleased arc, the way they did when something good was happening to one of my girls and I had not had to lift a finger to make it happen, and I caught Daenerys's eye and saw her smile widen a little because she had noticed too.
The randomness of it felt good. It felt right. It felt like exactly the kind of pivot Daenerys had been needing, and the universe had simply walked it through the front door of her pyramid and slapped it down on the table in front of her.
I cleared my throat. "Speaking of how you arrived," I said, turning to Serie, "I would actually love to know how you crossed worlds—"
Serie's gaze cut to me. I stopped talking.
I felt the gentle inquisitive pressure of an analytical magic begin to slide across my body.
I felt the second probe almost immediately. It came from a different angle, more delicate, sliding underneath the first one like a thief checking the lock from a different approach. Then a third one, lighter still, attempting to taste the edges of my magicule signature. All three were happening at once, layered through each other with the kind of casual virtuoso multitasking that only came from a thousand years of practice. She was reading me like she was reading a book she had picked up off a shelf, and she was not even being subtle about it.
I blinked once. Then I activated Lord of the Kitchen.
I simply let the skill resolve itself across the small territory of my own body and a few feet of air immediately around me, and inside that bubble, I was the chef and everything else was an ingredient I had not chosen to use. Her probing magic, which had been sliding over my skin, simply ceased to be relevant.
Serie's eyes widened. I could feel her trying again, prying at the edges, hunting for the seam she had just missed. Then a fourth probe, sharper, almost rude. Then a fifth that tried to come at me from underneath, the way you would try to lever up a stone by getting beneath it.
All of them slid off. All of them found nothing to grip.
I let one corner of my mouth lift.
Sorry, magic elf girl. You can't get my secrets that easily.
Then, slowly, the wide-eyed shock on her face began to crack, and underneath it bloomed something that I had not actually expected to see on this pale impatient elf at all. It was a grin. It was a real grin, an enormous, deeply pleased, slightly feral grin, the kind of expression that I had previously only seen on Aela's face when she spotted a particularly large bear at the edge of a tree line.
"Hah," she said. Then, louder, with delight. "HAHAHAHAHA!" She rolled her shoulders. She lifted her chin. She planted her bare feet a little more firmly into the polished black floor of the throne room. "Those cookies you made," she said. "They were delicious!"
"Thank you!" I said with pride.
"I want to fight you," Serie suddenly said bluntly. Out of nowhere.
I blinked. "Nani?"
"I want to fight you," she repeated, with the air of a woman who had just remembered the most important thing she had come here to say, "and then I want to invite you to help me judge the First Class Mage Exams as my co-examiner."
"Those are two extremely different sentences…"
"They are part of the same proposal. The fight is the interview. The exam is the position. You will not be selected for the second part if you fail the first, and you will not fail the first because you are very obviously not going to fail anything. We will fight. Right now!"
Her bare feet shifted on the floor. The gold of her eyes had deepened, gone hot and electric in a way that was very much not academic any longer, and the hair at her temples lifted slightly with the static of magic gathering in her. The long sweep of her braid stirred in an absence of wind.
"Right now!" she said again, and this time it was not a request.
I had time to think.
Daenerys sat beside her throne with one hand still resting protectively over her stomach, and the old stones of the Great Pyramid groaned as if they could already tell something stupid was about to happen.
I had options.
Lots of them, actually.
I could have suggested tea.
I could have done the responsible thing.
I looked at Serie. She stood in the center of Daenerys's throne room barefoot, golden hair loose around her face, eyes bright with the kind of excitement that made ancient magical monsters either very fun or very expensive to deal with.
She wanted this. A fight. A real one.
Fuck it. We ball.
I glanced at Daenerys.
Her violet eyes narrowed. "Haru..."
I winked. "Be right back."
Then I moved. The floor exploded beneath my feet.
CRACK.
Serie's eyes widened. That was satisfying.
Her hand came up faster than almost any mage I had ever seen though. I was impressed. A barrier snapped into existence between us, a layered hexagonal shield of golden light and impossible script, so dense with magical formulae that most armies could have exhausted themselves against it for an hour and accomplished nothing except bruised pride.
My fist hit it.
BOOOOOOM.
The impact flattened the air. Every window in the throne room shattered outward at once. The floor buckled in a spiderweb beneath Serie's bare feet.
Her barrier held.
Because I let it.
The force did not stop just because the shield survived. Serie shot backward like a cannonball.
The first wall vanished behind her in a storm of black stone and dust.
The second followed half a heartbeat later.
Then the third.
Then the fourth.
From inside the pyramid, it sounded like some furious god had decided to punch a straight line through royal architecture.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Serie flew through the Great Pyramid, through ceremonial chambers, through empty halls, through one unfortunate storage room full of amphorae that exploded into wine mist, through the outer wall, and out into open air over Meereen.
Behind me, I heard Daenerys make a small, "What the fuck..."
You know, I don't think she's ever actually seen a FULL display of supernatural power compared to the other women in my life. Even when I stopped her dragons in Westeros that was mostly me just yelling at them. I guess now she had…
I launched myself after Serie through the ragged tunnel my punch had made.
The city blurred beneath me.
Meereen was awake now. Bells rang. People screamed. Unsullied formations scattered in the streets as chunks of pyramid stone crashed down in distant courtyards. Drogon roared somewhere outside the city, angry and confused, his massive wings beating against the morning sky.
I ignored all of it and chased the golden streak of Serie's barrier as it crossed the city wall and kept going.
She hit the desert several kilometers away. The impact threw up a column of sand and stone that rose like a newborn mountain.
FWOOOOM.
I landed in front of the crater a second later, feet sinking a few inches into sun-baked sand. The desert stretched around us in every direction, empty and bright beneath a merciless blue sky. The city was distant enough that even if Serie decided to get dramatic, Meereen would probably keep existing. I wasn't going to let anything hurt Danny.
The dust cleared. Serie stood at the center of the crater behind her cracked barrier. Her robes were dusty. Her golden hair had lost some of its neatness. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were glowing. "You almost killed me, you bastard!" She was smiling though.
I rolled my shoulder and grinned back. "No, I didn't. I held back enough that you wouldn't die," I said.
For half a second, the world went still at my words. Then Serie laughed. It started small. A breath. A tremor in her chest. Then it grew, bright and delighted and more than a little unhinged. "No one," she said, "has ever so blatantly underestimated or looked down on me."
I raised a finger. "Technically, that's probably not true. You are very old."
"Do not interrupt!" Her eyes narrowed, but the smile stayed. "And yet, somehow, you are the third person to do so today!"
"Busy day for you then..." I said. I wondered which of my cheeky girlfriends she met at the Fox Hole before coming here.
"The dragon woman dismissed me. The goddess of MAGIC ignored me." Serie lifted her hand, and the cracked barrier around her dissolved into motes of gold. "And now a fox tells me he decided exactly how much force I could survive!"
Ah, so it was Irene then? That made sense. But I didn't know which Goddess of Magic she meant, since the Fox Hole brought in more than a few of those actually.
I spread my hands out in a challenge dramatically like I was an anime villain. "Was I wrong with my words?"
She took that as the final challenge. Her mana erupted around her. One moment Serie's power was restrained, sharp, compressed, dangerous but contained. The next, she let it go. The air became heavy enough to taste. Sand flattened in every direction. Stones rose from the ground and trembled in place, vibrating until some of them cracked apart. The sunlight dimmed around her, not because clouds covered it, but because her mana became so dense it distorted the space between her and the sky.
A golden aura expanded outward in a perfect circle.
Ten feet. Fifty. A hundred. Three hundred. Five hundred.
The edge of it rolled over me like the pressure wave of a nuclear blast, hot and cold and sharp all at once. Hundreds of layered spells spun around her body, not yet cast but prepared, each one a killing instrument polished by centuries of practice. I saw offensive magic, defensive magic, perception magic, anti-demon formulae, barrier inversion techniques, spatial distortion, curse-breaking structures, curse-making structures, binding spells, disintegration arrays, gravity wells, heat compression, and things I did not have names for.
Frieren's power was a deep lake. This elf was a vast ocean. They were not the same and I couldn't help but grin.
Wow, she is much stronger than Frieren. It's not even close.
Serie's raw magical output was ridiculous. It was a lot more refined too. She had enough power to give a lot of gods back home a very unpleasant afternoon. Maybe not the top monsters, not Sirzechs or Ajuka or Amy-chan after she ate Apollo's solar domain, but plenty of divine assholes would walk into a fight with Serie and leave as a cautionary tale. Assuming they left alive at all.
My ten tails lifted behind me. Blue foxfire flickered to life along the tips, curling upward in ghostly streams.
Serie noticed. Her grin turned almost savage. "I will show you why underestimating me is a mistake."
My pupils became slits. Demon Lords did not back down. Even mostly peaceful ones. Even ones who preferred making soup to throwing hands. Especially ones who had just been challenged by an ancient war elf with enough mana to turn a country into an ashtray.m "Show me, then."
Serie raised one finger. The first spell appeared above her. It was a star.
Not metaphorically.
A sphere of condensed light formed in the air, small enough to fit in my palm at first, then expanding to the size of a house in less than a second. Its surface rippled with white-gold flame, and the heat rolling off it turned the top layer of sand around us into glass.
The spellwork inside was obscene. Gravity compression. Light amplification. Thermal collapse. A miniature sun, unstable by design, meant to detonate forward rather than outward.
Serie flicked her finger.
The star fell toward me.
"Kkh." I inhaled. My lungs filled with magicules and desert heat.
Then I breathed blue foxfire.
FWOOM!
The stream of flame hit the falling star head-on.
The world turned white and blue.
For an instant, there was no sound.
Then the explosion arrived.
KRAKKA-BOOOOOOM.
Glass sand shattered for hundreds of meters. The shockwave tore a trench behind me and split the crater around Serie into jagged petals. My foxfire ate through the core of her artificial sun, not extinguishing it so much as cooking it down into something harmless. The unstable star collapsed inward, screaming like a kettle before bursting into harmless sparks.
Serie's eyes shone. "That flame destroys magical structure…?"
"It cooks it," I said. Because my flames were for cooking.
"That is not an explanation!"
"It is to me," I replied smugly.
She laughed and clapped both hands together. The ground beneath me vanished.
A circular section of desert about thirty meters wide simply ceased to acknowledge gravity properly. I felt my feet lose contact as space inverted, turning up into down and down into sideways. A lesser fighter would have been tossed helplessly into the air and then crushed between folded layers of local reality.
I stepped on a platform of foxfire and jumped. The spatial fold snapped shut beneath me with a sound like teeth.
CHOMP.
"Rude," I called down.
Serie was already casting again. This time the spell manifested as black spears. Hundreds of them. No, thousands. They filled the sky above me, each one longer than a man and packed with disintegration magic. Their tips did not shine. They absorbed light. That was usually a bad sign.
Serie pointed at me. The sky fell.
SHHK. SHHK. SHHK. SHHK.
I crossed my arms and let the first dozen hit.
They struck my shoulders, chest, throat, arms, and stomach, and shattered. Some kind of disintegration magic crawled over my skin, tried to find purchase, and burned away against my aura like snowflakes landing on a forge. A few cut my shirt. One managed to nick my cheek before my regeneration sealed it.
I glanced at the tear in Shuna's custom tailoring.
My smile disappeared.
Serie noticed. "Oh?" she said.
"That was a good shirt... I paid a premium for it!" Not really because Shuna was happy to be my tailor for free, but still!
The remaining spears descended.
My tails moved. All ten of them. They blurred into golden arcs tipped with blue fire, swatting, crushing, catching, and incinerating the spears before they reached me. Each impact popped like fireworks. Black shards rained down and dissolved into smoke before hitting the ground.
POP. POP. POP. POP.
I spun midair and snapped three tails forward.
Foxfire gathered into crescents. "Let's see how you handle this." I kicked off the air and whipped my tails down. Three blue arcs screamed toward Serie, each one wide enough to cut through a castle wall and hot enough to turn steel into vapor.
Serie raised both hands. Seven barriers formed in front of her. Not one behind another. Seven different concepts of defense occupying the same space. Physical barrier. Magical barrier. Heat barrier. Spirit barrier. Spatial redirection. Curse filter. Impact dispersal.
My foxfire hit!
The first barrier evaporated.
The second cracked.
The third caught fire.
The fourth held for a fraction of a second longer than I expected.
The fifth twisted the attack sideways, throwing one crescent into the desert where it carved a canyon of blue glass half a kilometer long.
The sixth dispersed the remaining force into harmless sparks.
The seventh survived untouched.
Serie looked very proud of herself.
I landed lightly on the sand.
"Not bad."
Her eye twitched. "Not bad?"
"Pretty good?"
"You insufferable animal!" she clicked her tongue in annoyance. She snapped her fingers.
A magic circle wider than a building appeared beneath my feet. The runes spun too fast to read. The air inside the circle dropped in temperature instantly. Frost spread over the glassed sand, then turned black. My shadow stretched wrong, splitting into five, then ten, then a hundred versions of itself, all of them reaching upward with clawed hands.
Binding magic. No, more than binding. It was trying to define me. Classify. Name. Reduce. Force my body and soul into categories it understood. Monster. Beast. Demon. Spirit. Yokai. Demon Lord. Fox. Male. Living. Edible. Killable.
Lord of the Kitchen stirred inside me. My domain did not like theft.
I looked down at the spell. "That's cute."
Serie's expression sharpened. "Move, then. If you can…"
The shadow hands grabbed my legs, arms, waist, throat, and tails.
For a moment, they held. Then I flexed. Blue fire rolled down my body. I treated the binding spell as an ingredient added without permission to my kitchen. Bad texture. Overly bitter. Structurally impressive, but far too controlling. Needed reduction.
The shadows shrieked.
"SSSSKREEEEE!"
They boiled away from my skin, not burned exactly, but rendered. Their conceptual hooks melted down into nothing usable. The magic circle cracked beneath me.
Serie's eyes widened again.
I stomped once.
CRACK.
The entire spell shattered. But it seemed like she was still trying to take me on.
A beam of concentrated white light lanced from her fingertip and struck me in the forehead.
The desert behind me exploded.
For a few seconds, there was only pressure. The beam pushed me backward, carving twin trenches under my feet as it tried to drill through my skull. It was a rejection spell. A line of magic designed to erase whatever stood in its path by convincing reality the target had already been destroyed.
That was annoying.
My hair blew back. My ears flattened. My skin tingled. The beam did not pierce. I raised one hand and wrapped my fingers around the light.
Should someone be able to casually wrap their fingers around light? Absolutely not. But I was built differently.
I squeezed and the beam cracked. I pulled, and the spell tore free from her control in a long white ribbon, whipping through the air between us. I gathered it into a ball in my palm, compressed it, seasoned it with foxfire, and threw it back.
Serie's face lit up with delight. She did not dodge. She countered with a spiral of violet magic that unfolded like a flower made of knives. My stolen light spell hit the violet spiral and detonated.
BOOM!
Serie slid backward across the sand, her bare feet carving twin lines through the glass. Her robe fluttered wildly. Her hair whipped around her face. When the smoke cleared, her cheek was cut and bleeding.
She touched the blood with two fingers. She looked at it. Then looked at me. Her smile was terrifying. "Wonderful."
"Most people say ow…" I pointed out dryly.
"Most people are boring!"
"You need more exciting friends then! My life is anything but boring!"
Serie lifted both arms. The sky changed. Above us, dozens of magic circles opened in layered rings, each one a different color, a different structure, a different style of death. Red circles full of flame compression. Blue ones humming with freezing void. Green ones carrying poisonous wind sharp enough to strip flesh from bone. Gold ones radiating holy destructive force. Black ones that made my instincts bare their teeth.
The desert darkened beneath the canopy of spells.
I looked up. "Okay," I said. "That's a lot."
Serie's voice rang across the battlefield. "Try not to die, fox."
The circles fired.
Everything happened at once.
A pillar of red flame crashed down first, wide enough to swallow a city block. I stood inside it and let it break around my body, the heat licking over my skin without finding purchase. My shirt finally gave up and burned away, which made me sigh. A spear of blue void followed, freezing the air so completely that the flame turned into glittering red ice before shattering. I caught it with two tails and snapped it in half, scattering frozen nothing across the sand. The green wind hit next.
I did not let that touch me.
Poison was annoying and against everything I stood for as a chef. A wall of foxfire rose in front of me, and the wind screamed as it hit the flames, toxins burning into harmless sparks. The smell was awful, like rotten herbs and bad decisions.
Gold lances rained down from above, each one aimed at a different vital point. I ducked one, punched another, let three hit my shoulders, and caught the last between my teeth.
"Wha—" Serie paused once again at the absurd display.
I bit through it.
CRUNCH.
The holy lance shattered in my mouth and dissolved into warm sparks on my tongue. "Needs salt," I said.
For the first time, Serie looked genuinely offended.
"That was a sacred purification lance!"
"Still needs salt..."
The black circles activated. My instincts roared. The spells that fell from them were not beams or flames or spears. They were mouths. Invisible to normal sight, probably. But I could see them. Hungry gaps lined with curse-teeth, each one trying to bite into my soul and tear away pieces. Demon-killing magic, maybe. Or something older from her world's war against monsters. They came from every angle, silent and vicious.
I stopped joking. Foxfire erupted from all ten tails. The flames formed fox heads, each one snarling with blue jaws and slitted eyes. They launched outward, meeting the curse-mouths in midair.
The battlefield filled with biting things.
"SNAP. SNAP. CRUNCH. KRAK."
My foxfire devoured her curses. Her curses tried to eat my flames. For several seconds, the air between us was nothing but jaws and teeth and blue-black sparks raining down like burning insects.
One curse slipped through and bit into my left forearm. My arm blackened from wrist to elbow. Serie's eyes flashed with triumph. Then my regeneration surged, magicules roaring through my flesh. The blackened skin cracked and fell away as new skin formed beneath it. I flexed my fingers. "Huh," I said. "That one stung…"
Serie breathed out slowly. "Only stung?"
"Pretty good sting."
Her smile returned, smaller now. More focused. "You are absurd."
"I've heard that one too plenty of times!"
I launched forward. This time I did not move at full speed. I wanted to see her reaction. Wanted to pressure her, not end it.
Serie raised one hand and layered barriers in my path.
I punched through the first.
CRACK.
The second.
CRACK.
The third folded around my fist, trying to trap it. I rotated my wrist and released foxfire from my knuckles, blowing the barrier outward from inside.
FWOOM.
Serie vanished.
Teleportation. She appeared above me with a palm already aimed down. A column of gravity hit my shoulders.
The sand beneath me cratered. My knees bent slightly. The force increased. Ten times. Fifty. A hundred. Enough to flatten a fortress and pulp anyone inside it. I looked up through the pressure.
Serie's hair floated around her face from the mana output. "You ready to kneel yet?" she asked viciously.
I grinned. "Nope." I straightened. The crater deepened as I pushed against the gravity, back rising, shoulders rolling, tails spreading behind me like a fan of golden defiance. Blue fire ran along my spine and down each tail until the entire desert around me glowed.
I jumped. The gravity column shattered around me. I reached her before she finished teleporting again. Her barrier snapped up. My fist stopped an inch from it.
For one breath, we hung there in the air, me grinning, her eyes bright and wild behind a shield that could have stopped a meteor.
Then I flicked the barrier with one finger.
PING.
A hairline crack spread across it.
Serie teleported away immediately.
Smart.
The barrier exploded a second later.
BOOOOM.
She reappeared on the ground, breathing slightly harder now. Her mana still burned like an ocean under a storm, but I could see the shape of her calculations shifting. She was adjusting. Reclassifying. Trying to find the right box to put me in.
Good luck.
I landed across from her. The desert between us was ruined. Glass trenches crossed the sand in every direction. Craters overlapped craters. The air smelled of ozone, burned minerals, magic, and my own foxfire.
Far away, Meereen still stood.
That was nice.
Serie lifted one hand to wipe blood from her cheek. Her tongue flicked out, tasting it from her finger with the distracted air of someone confirming she was, in fact, still having fun. "You're holding back," she said in annoyance. Her eyes narrowed. "Why?"
I rolled my neck, listening to the satisfying pop. "Because if I go all out, this desert stops being a desert and starts being a historical event."
Serie laughed again. "Arrogant! Prove it!"
My ten tails ignited brighter. The flames changed color at the core, blue deepening toward white.
Serie's mana surged in answer, the aura around her expanding again, crushing the edges of the crater outward. Spell circles unfolded behind her like wings, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, layered in impossible geometry.
My blood heated.
My grin widened.
Okay, Serie. Let's see how much of a war elf you really are.
I raised one hand, palm upward.
Foxfire gathered above it, spinning into a small blue sun. The blue sun above my palm tightened. Foxfire did not usually behave like normal flame, but this was something denser than a fireball. It spun above my hand in a perfect sphere, blue-white at the core and deep sapphire at the edges, its surface rippling like boiling glass. The desert around my feet began to melt again, sand turning glossy and black beneath the pressure of it.
Across from me, Serie smiled like I had just offered her the best birthday present of her very long life. Her golden hair floated around her face in the storm of her own mana. Her bare feet hovered an inch above the glassed sand now, and her eyes glowed with ancient, delighted violence.
She looked tiny.
She felt enormous.
I could already imagine the aftermath. Meereen's people staring into the desert at a new glowing canyon. Daenerys standing beside me with one hand on her stomach and that flat look women gave men when we did something catastrophically stupid and then tried to explain it with a shrug. Yasaka finding out somehow and asking why her son had decided to remodel another continent.
Serie lifted one finger.
I grinned and raised my foxfire higher.
Then something hard smacked me in the back of the head.
BONK.
"Ow!" The blue sun vanished as my concentration snapped. Not exploded, thankfully. Dispelled. The sphere collapsed into harmless sparks that rained down around me like fireflies. I reached back and rubbed the spot between my ears, wincing. "What the hell?"
At the same time, Serie went very still. A dozen black swords had appeared around her. They did not fly in from anywhere. They were simply there, hanging in the air with their tips aimed at her vitals. One at her throat. Two at her heart. Several at her stomach and spine. More hovered near her limbs, positioned to pierce joints, arteries, and magical channels if she twitched wrong.
They were Hela's. Black as a moonless grave, edged with green light, and radiating the kind of cold killing intent that made even Serie pause.
A shadow passed over us. I looked up. Hela floated down from the sky in full armor.
Her black helm framed her face in sharp antler-like curves, making her look every inch the Goddess of Death and future nightmare of Asgard. Her green eyes burned beneath the shadow of the helmet. Her cape drifted behind her despite the lack of wind, and more black blades orbited lazily at her back like obedient wolves waiting for permission to bite. She landed between us with a soft crunch of glassed sand beneath her boots.
Then she looked from me to Serie. Then back to me. "What in the Nine Hells happened here?" Hela asked. "I was gone for a mere few hours."
I lowered my hand from the back of my head. "Hi, Hela."
Her eyes narrowed.
I smiled.
It did not help.
She turned her glare toward Serie. "And who is the crazy elf radiating killing intent?"
Serie looked at the swords aimed at her body, then at Hela. The ancient elf's expression was not frightened, exactly. More intrigued in the deeply unhealthy way powerful people got when presented with new and exciting methods of murder. "I am Serie," she said. "I am a mage."
Hela stared. Then she looked at me again. "Why is the tiny barefoot mage trying to kill you?"
"We were just sparring."
Hela's silence was physically painful.
The black swords around Serie tilted closer by half an inch.
I raised both hands. "What? We were."
Hela's helmet dissolved into shadow, revealing her wild black hair and an expression so flat it could have served as a dining table. "I am sorry for striking you," she said, not sounding sorry at all. "But you were about to ruin my future sister-in-law's kingdom."
"Only part of the desert… Okay, maybe a large part of the desert." I sighed. "Fine. Possibly a historically significant amount of desert."
Serie made a small sound that was suspiciously close to a laugh.
Hela's gaze remained locked on me.
"Also," I changed the subject, "Daenerys isn't going to rule Essos anymore."
Hela blinked. For one beautiful moment, all the murder drained out of her face and was replaced by pure confusion. "What?"
"She wants to do something else with her future now."
Hela stared at me. Then she looked toward the distant city. Then back at me. "I was gone for three hours. I left you in bed with a pregnant queen, went north to investigate an army of frozen corpses, and in the time it took me to do that, you apparently seduced an elf into trying to vaporize you, destroyed several miles of desert, and convinced the Queen of Essos to abdicate?"
"Technically, Serie seduced herself into trying to vaporize me."
Serie lifted her chin proudly. "I requested a fight. He accepted!"
"See?" I smiled at my death goddess.
Hela pinched the bridge of her nose. Then she paused. "Wait." Her gaze sharpened. "You said Daenerys no longer wishes to rule?"
"Yeah."
"Hm." Hela tapped one finger against her lips. "A pity. My blonde sister would have made an excellent queen." There was a beat. Then the corner of her mouth curled. "She was excellent in bed, at least. A true queen of the silken sheets." Her green eyes gleamed as she shivered, slow and sinful, like the memory had physically run its nails down her spine. "She was. Gods, the sounds that woman makes when properly encouraged. Mmm..." The soft moan went straight through the battlefield like a thrown dagger.
Serie stared at her like she couldn't believe the woman that just stopped her was saying all this out loud.
I coughed into my fist and tried very hard not to remember Daenerys arching between us, silver hair tangled in silk, breath breaking as Hela's mouth moved lower.
Serie cleared her throat. The sound was small, but the magic behind it made the air snap back into focus. "The girl is now my apprentice," she said.
Hela turned toward her slowly. "Is she?"
"Yes."
I shrugged when Hela looked at me. "Daenerys has apparently got absurd magical potential and fire affinity. Serie called sorcerers fake trash, promised to teach her properly, and Dany agreed."
Hela absorbed that. Then she laughed. "My sister loses a crown and gains a terrifying elf tutor before breakfast." Hela looked almost proud. "Good for her."
Serie's eyes flicked between us with open impatience. "I am disappointed that the first true fight I have had in centuries ended so soon."
"Sorry," I said. "My girlfriend bonked me. I don't want to get bonked again so we have to stop here."
Hela's lips twitched.
Serie continued as if I had not spoken. "However, I have a feeling I will have many more people to spar with now that I have discovered the Fox Hole."
"You have no idea," I replied with a toothy grin.
That made her smile again. "I am taking my apprentice and her dragons home," Serie said before continuing in my direction. "The mage exam begins at sunrise. I expect you to be there as my co-examiner."
I stared at her. "When did I agree to that?"
"When you made cookies that proved your magical culinary theory is worth examination."
"That is not how consent works…"
Serie turned away like the conversation had ended because, in her mind, it clearly had. A circle of gold formed beneath her feet. She looked over her shoulder once. "Do not be late." Then she vanished. The air snapped shut behind her.
A heartbeat later, I sensed her reappear inside the Great Pyramid, right beside Daenerys.
I rubbed my temples. "She's going to steal my pregnant girlfriend."
Hela stepped closer. "Our pregnant girlfriend."
I looked at her.
She lifted one eyebrow. "What? I like her… I like all of the women you have in your harem," she said shamelessly.
Her smile was pure sin. "And you enjoy that too. Watching your women enjoying each other and you at the same time…"
I did not have a good answer. Hela floated the last few inches down until her boots touched the ruined glassed desert beside me. She stepped into my space. "I have a lot to catch up on," she said, her voice lowering. "Because I am confused..."
"You and me both." My fox ears twitched on top of my head as I muttered.
Her hands slid up my chest, her palms dragging over bare skin since Serie had burned my shirt away earlier. Her fingers paused over a few shallow marks from the fight, then traced them with possessive interest. "You are scratched..."
"I'm fine." Everything would be healed in a few minutes. I intentionally let a lot of the attacks land to see Serie's power anyway.
"I know you heal fast." Her eyes darkened. "I still dislike seeing my future consort injured."
That did something warm to my chest. Then she leaned up and kissed me. There was nothing gentle about it. Hela kissed like someone who had spent a thousand years starving and still had not decided whether love was food or war. Her mouth crashed into mine, hot and demanding, tongue sliding past my lips with a soft, hungry "Mmm..." that vibrated against my teeth. Her fingers curled against my chest, nails biting just enough to make my tails flare behind me.
I kissed her back just as hard.
Her body pressed flush to mine, armor cold against my skin, mouth warm, breath unsteady. One of my tails curled around her waist before I could stop it, tugging her closer. She made a pleased little sound into my mouth, half moan and half laugh.
"Mmh... greedy fox."
"Possessive death goddess."
"Correct."
I grinned against her lips.
She bit my lower lip.
Not hard enough to hurt.
Hard enough to make my cock remember exactly what we had been doing before she vanished north.
"Hela..."
She pulled back only far enough for her green eyes to meet my gold ones. "Yes?"
"We are in the middle of a destroyed desert."
"And?" Her lips were still wet from our kiss. Her pupils were slightly blown. Her fingers were still spread possessively across my chest.
I sighed. Then I laughed. "I didn't think making some cookies would result in this crazy morning."
XXX