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The torrent of mana that gushed forth from my spiritual vessel was like nothing I had ever produced or even experienced before. Even the colossal shockwaves of opposing mana produced in my most dramatic sword fights did not compare.
The wind from my wings blew back the cloud before me, revealing at least some of the Hamagaaran troops hiding below. And yet, despite the dramatic effect, it was not enough to brush it all away. The billowing fog bank began rolling back in the very moment after I pushed it back.
In the background, Sirth worked rapidly to summon her spirits closer, gathering around me, and I understood her purpose. Again, I pulled the Wind mana inward, as I raised my wings once more, sucking the immaterial substance of existence back into my vessel as suddenly as I had pressed it outward. It had the effect of accelerating the mist’s return, but also of breaking it apart, loosening the supernatural force holding it together.
The sky above me, in reaction to the mighty backwash I created, now lost the thin haze that it had held, a peripheral effect of the magic fog. The thin northern sun grew brighter, highlighting me for the eyes of the surprised soldiers below.
I beat my wings again, once more sending forth a flood of mana, while Sirth coordinated with me through her spirit friends to magnify the effect. Again, the fog rolled away, pushing back farther, but, to my frustration, the bank continued to hold its form, only losing a fraction of its substance.
It was, after all, a pretty crazy thing I was trying to accomplish, summoning a force of nature itself to blow away an atmospheric phenomenon.
The instant I had that thought, I felt that strange sensation, that unreality, once again. The sunlight acquired a golden tone and my skin lost the last of the dampness it had acquired from the mist.
“Fly normally for the moment, Junior Wife,” came a familiar voice. “Time is not passing outside for the moment, but you are midair, so it would be too unnatural for you to stop.”
It was true. I’ve yet to master Mother’s trick of hovering motionless in the air. Instinct demands that while I’m airborne, I be gliding or flying. But despite the feeling of motion all around me, I did not change position. Time was only passing within a handful of paces around me.
“Good,” she approved. “Now, let’s discuss that thought. You doubt that you can summon a force of nature to counter a force of nature, yet this fog is surely unnatural, is it not?”
I felt incredulous. Had this goddess shown up just to give me a lecture on magic?
Her happy chuckle filled my ears, then she tutted, “Surely not. I came to give you a small hand.”
Having finally become used to the situation, I cleared my throat, then pointed out, “But immortals don’t interfere with the mortal realm?”
“Normally,” she agreed. “But arranging for heroes and demigods, tampering with reincarnation through the Afterlife Organization, sending oracles… these are all interference of a kind. Our very job of supervising this world is interference. We just do so very judiciously.”
“And you are judging this to be a moment?”
“You are up against more than you realize. Those humans believe their fairy knight is providing this fog. The asura in question believes her boss is the one giving her that power. But in truth, his boss, the demon god Astaroth has chosen to send forth his carefully hoarded strength today to try to reach his goal. As he is putting his thumb on the scale, I am doing the same. When I release this Illusory Reality, you shall open yourself up entirely for a short space so I can work through you. And you over there, who are also my Junior Wife, I will be taking over your Wind spirits as well.”
-Who’re you sayin’ is yer wife again?
Eurybia’s laugh became even kinder and more indulgent in reaction to Sirth’s retort. The image of her sipping her tea in a garden in Oseri came back to me with that sound.
“My lovely captain, it was an accomplished fact long before your birth, and you can do nothing about it. You too are my beloved Junior Wife.”
– And you would be callin’ Kwelabi ‘Junior Wife’ too?
I couldn’t help but giggle at Sirth’s suggestion. To imagine the great, shaggy four-armed quasi-man, with an appearance more like an ape than a human, as any kind of ‘wife’…
Her voice grew outright merry. “We’ve had other Junior Husbands, so he wouldn’t be the first. We knew when we married her that Little Sen was born a being in near perfect balance of Yin and Yang. Her eldest mother chose to raise her in the feminine gender only because she has a slightly greater affinity for maternal love. She has alternated genders in her subsequent lives for good reason. We were always prepared to love a junior husband as well.”
Alternated? I considered the sequence of lives that Oranos had run me back through. I knew I had skipped a few when he shoved me forcefully back to Senhion’s but the sequence of the five most recent lives had been clear. Robert, Fan Li, Sirth, Kwelabi, Daq. That wasn’t alternating genders…
“He chose lives in which you held a young one in your hands, in order to persuade you not to kill an unfortunate child who was not in control of her own actions. In the process, he skipped lives where no such event occurred. An itinerant monk and a slave who died in childbirth are missing from that sequence. Your child survived and grew to adulthood, incidentally.”
It was an odd but very typical touch for Eurybia to mention such a detail. I didn’t know how to react to the news that a baby I didn’t know I had until just that instant had been born safely, but it was a good thing, so I decided to be thankful for it.
I didn’t comment on her choice to call Mára an unfortunate child, either. Instead, I considered the frozen army staring blankly up at me as I asked, “So you will release me now, and I’ll do another blast?”
“Before I release you, you must completely give over control of yourself to me, for the space of one upstroke and one downstroke. I shall take care of the rest. I can hold you for no longer than that, anyway, so it is safe for you to allow me. Proceed with your plan as soon as I let go.”
Nodding, I answered, “Understood.”
Her voice grew slightly darker. “I can influence things here due to your presence, Junior Wife, but it saddens me that we can do far less against other parts of the Demon God’s plans. By living on your side of the barrier between realms, Astaroth holds an advantage over us, after all.”
With a feeling of alarm growing inside me, I asked, “Great Senior, what do you mean by that?”
“Just know that we have done as much as we can. Our husband led you to rush the opponent’s plan, and the three of us have helped elsewhere as we could. Now it is your turn to do what you can. Just… spare us some forgiveness if we should not succeed…”
Those words could not have raised my stress level higher, but the golden light began fading, forewarning the return of Objective Reality. I had no time to worry about it.
By all rules of common sense, I should have hesitated. Thinking about it in retrospect, without my expanded mind, the idea that I just turned my body over to her is mortifying. This wasn’t one of my previous incarnations after all; it was an immortal who was orders of magnitude more powerful even than me at my strongest as Senhion. But in that moment, I think some of Senhion’s innate trust in her was alive and well inside me. I accepted the idea without question.
Casting all barriers to my mind away, I opened up to Eurybia, and felt her presence flooding into me.
I thought I had been prepared for it. Or to be more accurate, I didn’t understand how much I needed to prepare for, in the first place.
It was the feeling of a deep embrace beyond imagining, of the sheer intimacy of a tongue-tangling kiss, of hands caressing every inch of skin, of fingertips massaging me from head-to-toe. No, none of those phrases even begin to describe it. She didn’t merely take over my body, she poured into every part of me completely. I could feel her soul and spirit filling me, carrying a strength far beyond even what Senhion ever wielded. I became in charge of both Sirth’s spirits and the sigils being managed by Kwelabi as they went dormant due to Eurybia forcing my mind to expand to the limit of my spiritual vessel.
A feeling welled up within me, one that mortified me. In my life as Tiana, I had been somewhat prudish, but even she couldn’t resist her fairy sensuality one hundred percent of the time. That is to say, she had occasionally explored her body’s sensitivities like any teenager would, and when her life became mine, I did it from time to time as well.
I hadn’t expected that this immortal’s consciousness flooding into me would cause the same sensation.
“It’s unavoidable, Junior Wife,” she answered as I felt a wave of pleasure overcoming me. She gave a slightly apologetic chuckle and explained, “My presence is going to overwhelm your nervous system one way or another. It’s either this or pain. I chose this.”
Even though I was now more ‘Little Sen’ then Tiana, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of shame. Dire things were afoot, and the goddess had already warned me that the evil god plans extended elsewhere, which surely meant extending to Mother and the King and possibly Rod and even Amelia. Yet here I was, indulging in masturbation?
“It isn’t masturbation, Dear,” she chided me. “It would almost be sex, since your senior wife is causing it, but it isn’t that either. Besides, if you see it that way, I fear you will see it as rape later, so please remember that this is simply your body unavoidably reacting to overstimulus, which I am molding into pleasure to avoid scarring you with pain.”
Even worse, it was getting where such things go way too fast. I was getting to the finish line in practically no time at all!
Unable to respond, I simply thought as hard as I could to her my dearest wish for her to finish before I reached orgasm, while an embarrassing moan escaped my lips. How could she do this while I was in front of thousands of soldiers? Was this some kind of humiliation play?
“They are frozen in time and not witnessing it, and I’m not doing it to embarrass you, Junior Wife,” she responded, sounding slightly hurt. “I’m ready. Time shall flow normally now.”
As she promised, the billowing fog again moved below me/her, and the soldiers came out of stasis, as she drew my/her wings upward while pulling a wave of mana far beyond what I had managed into my/her spirit, a melange of Wind mixed with a dose of Fire. At the same moment, the tsunami of pleasure broke open and rolled through me.
Naturally, Wind is my element, so I can pull it in with both my spirit and yours, she explained, somehow communicating it rapid-fire in the space of a single wing-beat. Gaia has management over Fire, so I can only draw the quantity of that element which you can manage on your own. It’s enough for this task, though. I only need to burn away the mist.
My/her wings stroked downward, pouring mana powered with divine strength, in a blast of desert-hot wind that rolled outward across the ground, shoving the fog away, sweeping the land clear like a titanic broom, leaving the astonished ranks below staring up at me.
It wasn’t just soldiers, though. That crowd included many military beasts, including large monsters such as trolls, and one impossibly large wolf.
I felt Eurybia’s presence drain away from my body like a receding wave. The other sensation drained away as well. A bit too late, if you ask me.
“I’m not going to forgive you for that for a while,” I muttered as I fought off the post-coital exhaustion and grasped Durandal’s grip.
I could feel his bewildered reaction to my words and realized with gratitude that he hadn’t been conscious during my little interlude. I wasn’t about to explain myself anyhow, so I whipped him out of the scabbard and added my spiritual voice to my spoken words, to amplify them throughout the field before me. These people who were my opponents anyway were just going to have to suffer my embarrassed wrath in Eurybia’s stead.
“I am Tiana of the High Forest, Princess and Knight of Faerie and Sword of King Owen the Second of Orestania! I bear arms alongside Aenëe of the Old Grove against the enemies of our lords! You who march in service to demons are our sworn enemies until the end of this conflict!”
