Bellageist: Chains of a Demigod (Part 2)
Existential sci-fi dread plus knights, kings, dragons, and romance.
A big thanks to James Kenwood, Kathrine Elaine, Graeme McAllister, and two other non-stackers for the alpha read on this. Their feedback lent much increased quality to this post! Please check out their work, they are all fantastic writers.
Chains of a Demigod
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8
Part 9 (coming soon)
Part One Synopsis (2 minute read):
In part one of “Bellageist: Chains of a Demigod,” unknown powers dominate a primal world where infantile hominids, driven by fear and hate, fought with stone clubs under the threat of an unseen force that punishes hesitation with fire and death. Among them, a young mind named Nyl emerged into consciousness. Lacking context for her existence, yet driven by an innate aggression, Nyl demonstrated her disdain for weakness, slaying her own chieftain in a second “scenario.”
Between each victory the sun fled the sky and a soothing faceless voice spoke to her. It congratulated her feats and gave her the epithet “the Impetuous,” but sought to temper her expectations by mentioning her low odds of survival - an assessment provided without further explanation. It ended each conversation urging her to earn her true namesake: “Basilissa,” before saying: “Be born again.” From there Nyl would find herself in a new era with more advanced weaponry in an increasingly complex “scenario.”
Nyl rapidly matured between these challenges, her mind a magnet for injected knowledge. In her third battle, Nyl formed alliances with fellow warriors Garuna the Quick and Arcade the Steady, the first people she met who spoke clearly and seemed fully “there.” Her new companions shared insights into their recurring consciousness, providing Nyl with something more than her solitary aggression, “humanizing” her. Arcade has traveled to a dozen more advanced places while Garuna came from a past dissimilar to Nyl’s.
Nyl performed superhuman feats in combat that astounded her companions and many of the half-there “others.” She dodged arrows, threw two javelins at a time, ran over the tops of shields, and climbed the walls of a tower while wearing heavy armor. She surpassed the expectations of her size and displayed prowess on par with a demigod. Warriors everywhere adoringly chanted her name.
After this last victory the “voice” promoted all three: “Nyl the Ardent,” “Garuna the Swift,” and “Arcade the Unwavering.” The sun next rose green on these three over a fetid bog. A dragon roared in the distance, and so began Nyl’s fourth “scenario.”
Nyl’s pursuit of victory and acclaim is relentless. She remains confident despite knowing each sunrise heralds a challenge more difficult than the last. What she does not expect is how different this fourth scenario will play out. In part two and three of this series (coming out the 28th), Nyl learns more about her companions and discovers truths in this mysterious world she has been thrust into. Yet the answers she unearths will only lead to more questions.
Bellageist: Chains of a Demigod Part 2
Tired but exhilarated, Nyl stood victorious. Unlike the last three challenges, this battle had felt like a close thing.
The dragon’s breath and claws had scorched and shredded her coat of plates. A few panels hung awkwardly from torn leather sockets, flapping loose and pinching her even through her mail and linen-padded gambeson. She doffed her feather-capped full helm and let it splash into the muck. She pushed sweaty tassels of trailing hair behind her ears.
Pain in her shoulder elicited attention - she gingerly touched a blackened pauldron, pleased to find it sufficiently cooled enough to handle. For lack of a better tool, she sawed at its straps with her bloodied sword. She pushed on it until the wretched piece sloughed from her shoulder. The crisped metal piece plopped into the muddy bog at her feet.
Sight of the skin underneath dismayed her – a mixture of bleeding wounds and blistered, bubbling white tissue. The fabric of her padded gambeson had mostly burned away, but a smaller, still-smoldering portion remained glued to her tortured flesh.
“The beast nearly cooked you,” a deep voice observed.
Nyl could almost hear Arcade’s smile. Adrenaline waned and pain waxed, but Nyl still swelled with pleasure. Slaying the terrifyingly majestic creature had been no small feat, and she grinned.
Nyl gestured at it with her sword. “Twice it swept me from my feet. Once with its claws, once with its tail. It killed my horse. Yet here I stand while it lies dead.”
“And thrice it sought to torch you with its flaming breath.” Arcade dismounted his armored charger with a muddy thump and clank of plates. He walked to stand beside her. His blue eyes glinted from within the shadows of his horned helm and he said: “It seems impossible such a fiend could exist.”
“However it came to be, there is one less of them now,” Nyl said, smug.
“Indeed. So far I have only fought other men. Its presence confuses me, but not so much as your prowess. I cannot believe you bested it with naught but your lance, your horse, and your sword, even though I witnessed this with my own eyes.”
“Do you carry a dagger?” Nyl asked, still tearing at her ruined armor.
Arcade shook his head.
Nyl continued to hack at her coat of plates with the tip of her sword, eager to be free of it. She shrugged her arms from its sleeves, but she remained a prisoner of the heavy coat at her neck and waist.
She heard Arcade cough and noticed him staring at the naked portions of her body.
Nyl found this attention half flattering, half frightening.
“A little help, please?” she said, terse.
Arcade’s eyes widened and he looked as if he had swallowed a fly. He then hurried to help untie the knots at her back. “Of course.”
Nyl felt Arcade’s firm hands working at the tied knots along her back – a steady contrast to the trembling exhaustion she felt. She caught his gaze briefly, his blue eyes sharp but containing warmth.
“You have a strong and certain grip.” Nyl meant to speak observationally but her words came out flattering.
“You are one to speak,” Arcade said, close enough for her to see him crack a smirk. “You are smaller than I, yet you have slain a dragon fifty times my size.”
“I did not slay it alone,” Nyl said as he worked. She looked again at the beast: three knight’s lances and more than a hundred arrow shafts protruded from its scaly hide, along with two-dozen sword cuts. “It would have been impossible without help. We once numbered thirty-eight… How many of us survive?”
Arcade said nothing. He doffed his helm to allow himself greater precision. He loosened Nyl’s coat at the neck, then worked next upon the ties at her waist.
“You are covered in goosebumps,” he said.
“I feel hot and wish to be free of all of it,” she insisted.
Nyl’s sweaty, tangled hair bobbed upon her cheeks and brow as Arcade tugged hard on the final knot. Her coat of plates fell heavily to the bog in a squishy eruption of muck. She swayed again as Arcade tore at her gambeson, its squares of mail at its neck and armpits jingling as he performed the rough work of releasing the linen garment’s buttons.
Nyl turned and looked around. She saw Arcade’s downward stare and felt herself blush. He saw this and averted his eyes.
Nyl, awkward now, hurried to count how many warriors still lived. They had started with three knights, thirty mounted archers, three squires, and two pages. She counted only 16 heads, a high cost. But the beast lay dead, and they had won. This was what mattered, right?
Yet the battle had ended and the sun had not fled the sky. The voice from the darkness should be congratulating her for this victory.
“Why does the sun still hang in the sky?”
“Muthar!” came a child’s shout.
All heads turned at the turbid clop of horses cantering through mud. Two young pages approached on their palfreys, the children surviving the battle by keeping to its outskirts.
Nyl increased her mental headcount to 18, then belatedly realized she had not seen the wings of Garuna’s knightly helm. “Garuna the Swift” had been true to her namesake: first to the battle and first to convince the dragon to land by threatening its clutch of eggs. First to drive her lance deep into the dragon’s body and the first to be snapped up in the angry beast’s jaws.
Last Nyl had seen her, the dragon had tossed Garuna into the air. Nyl had been too busy killing the beast and keeping beyond its claws to look for her friend.
Nyl shouted: “Garuna! Where are you?”
“She’s this way,” Arcade said, finding their companion first.
Nyl followed Arcade, equaling his haste. One of the pages, the one that shouted “mother” in the strange dialect of the not-quite-there, beat the companions to where Garuna fell. The page kneeled at Garuna’s side where she lay propped up against a rotten tree stump. The boy held Garuna’s sword hand in both of his own.
Nyl had only known Garuna for an hour, maybe two, though this short time comprised the greater portion of Nyl’s short life so far.
Nyl regarded her friend’s naked face for the first time. The woman had green eyes and braided orange hair. Despite grievous injury and blood loss, her bearing radiated noble strength, though her expression betrayed sad weariness.
A new word came to Nyl’s mind: beautiful. The concept applied to other things, like the brilliance of the sun or the jagged roll of mountain and hill. But in this context Nyl first recognized something deeper than the surface differences between men and women.
The other survivors gathered, some still with their horses, others on foot. They formed a ring of observers around the three companions and the page.
Garuna croaked her words past a bleeding lip: “Perhaps it is my fault the sun lingers. It pauses to… witness my death.”
“I am sorry, Garuna.” Nyl looked and saw Arcade’s expression matched her own.
“Muthar…” the page said, weeping and shaking his head. “Wa con fex yoo.”
Nyl had never seen a child before. Like so many things, the concept of one existed at the extreme orbit of her consciousness and it took time to surface.
“What is this? Who are you?” Nyl asked the page.
“My… son…” Garuna wheezed. Her unfocused eyes fixed with sudden intent on the boy. “How do you exist? Why?”
“This is madness,” Arcade said.
Nyl appreciated his sentiment.
“Muthar…”
Arcade knelt opposite from the page to inspect the fallen dame. He lifted a flap of armor from Garuna’s side and peeked at the ribs beneath.
“She will not survive for long,” he said with clinical regret.
Nyl found herself keenly interestedly in Arcade’s facial features for the first time. Arcade’s shorter and curlier hair matched Nyl’s red color. A thick and oily tussle of it draped a strong brow and a neutrally grim face. White teeth and steely blue eyes added strength and charm to his countenance.
Handsome, Nyl thought, believing Arcade’s physical beauty a match for Garuna’s. She wondered if she looked half as attractive as either of them. The notion summoned startling thoughts of mating and childbearing; vivid concepts foreign to her until this moment. She found extensive knowledge of sex accessible in her brain, mental plants which sprouted to rapid maturity under rainwater-thoughts. Her unexpected awareness of lacking a partner provoked powerful emotions.
Arcade seemed half confused, half lost in thought, and Nyl wondered if similar notions raced through his head. She hoped it did, though what he might be thinking left her anxious.
Garuna wheezed, distracting Nyl, cutting off her whirling thoughts before they consumed her. Nyl refocused on her friend, ashamed to be thinking such petty things like beauty and coupling at a moment like this.
Garuna tried to rise, weak and failing, pushing less than an inch from the ground. Nyl’s hands came forth of their own accord, but Arcade and the boy were already at the Dame’s side and helped resettle her.
“Be still,” Arcade said.
Garuna resumed staring at the boy and said: “I’ve never wanted anything more… than to see you again.”
“You meet him for the first time and suddenly you know him?” Nyl said. She regretted her preposterous tone.
If Garuna heard her, she ignored it. “Be strong,” Garuna whispered to the boy. She closed her eyes.
“Muthar! Nu!” the boy pled in earnest. “Wok up!”
“Wait Garuna… I have questions.” Nyl realized how stupid she sounded only after hearing herself talk.
Garuna would die of her recklessness. She should have allowed Nyl, the better warrior, to take the lead. Nyl’s rational mind detested Garuna’s stupidity, but Nyl’s nominal contempt for weakness would not stick. She could not explain why, but Nyl felt nothing but woe and confusion at her friend’s imminent death.
“Still the sun hangs,” Arcade noticed, looking up at the foggy, dim, green-tinted fire in the sky. He retrieved Garuna’s sword, notched and coated with dragon blood, and laid it across the dame’s lap.
Arcade’s hand brushed Nyl’s as he positioned Garuna’s fingers over the hilt. A fleeting and accidental touch, but Nyl felt his care and determined strength through it.
This is the behavior of a good man and a true warrior, Nyl thought. She glanced at him, saw a subtle storm in his eyes, and briefly saw herself a poor imitation of him in comparison.
“She should be honored for her sacrifice,” he said.
Nyl’s mind raced with intrusive thoughts once more. The strange boy. Her friend’s mortal wound. The lack of the next scenario’s arrival.
Arcade’s handsomeness. She felt herself wilting, wishing he would look at her again.
Arcade spoke to the ground: “Nyl, we should get a cloak to cover your-”
One of the mounted retainers shouted an interruption: “Sha lurd eppruochas! Ell hoel sha kreng!”
Nyl stretched to her full height, tried to peer over the men and horses, seeking this newcomer. “What now?”
“I do not know,” Arcade said.
Nyl glimpsed the visitor between the horses and the shuffling crowd. A bearded, balding man wearing a crown and rich golden armor approached. Two menacing armored knights flanked him as guards. A long trail of a hundred other knights followed the trio, all holding high lances dressed in colorful banners. The shine of their heraldry and polished armor brought a great deal of color to the fetid bog’s desaturating darkness.
The king raised his hand, and he and his large retinue came to a halt. His eyes lingered on the slain dragon, a sight that brought a beard-curtained grin to his face. The king’s expression turned haughty again as he searched the faces nearby.
Spotting Arcade, the king goaded his horse into motion. His long retinue of armored knights held back with only his two bodyguards accompanying him. The knight on the king’s right wore a helmet akin to the leering face of a demon. The other wore a helmet topped by a crest shaped like a sunburst.
The knight-guard on the king’s right raised his demonic visor and revealed a stern face. He commanded Arcade: “Kneel before the king.”
Arcade knelt.
The king nodded at Arcade’s display and dismounted. His fine deerskin boots, at odds with his other more martial attire, sank into the muck, causing him to grimace. But his smile returned when he looked again at Arcade’s humble position.
The king rested his hands on Arcade’s shoulders and bid him to rise. “You slew the dragon?”
Arcade stood. “I helped kill it, your majesty.” He regarded Nyl and gestured to her. “But the dame here is the main reason we survive. Her name is Nyl, and she performed the lioness’s share of the deed.”
“Dame Nyl,” the same guard said from atop his horse. “Kneel before the king.”
Nyl hesitated, wondering who these people were, what their purpose could be. Her short life had been nothing but tests and she assumed this to be more of the same. Somewhere in her mind existed the feudal obligations associated with the current setting. Not memories, exactly, more like borrowed ideas, items she digested less readily than she had her sudden expertise with lance and horse.
The king’s brow, already raised at Nyl’s nakedness, rose ever so slightly higher at Nyl’s delay. His two guards’ hands wandered to the pommels of their swords and their horses pawed the mud.
Nyl sensed the power and symbolism of the man, even if she could not directly explain it. She knelt.
The king’s shoulders seemed to fall. A small movement, perhaps a light breath of relief. Unlike Arcade, he did not touch her naked torso, instead gesturing to her: “Rise, Dame Nyl.”
Nyl stood.
“I did not recognize you as a knight given your…” the King shrugged and smiled apologetically.
“State of undress, sire?” The sunburst guard on the king’s left said his first words since the king’s arrival.
Three “real” individuals, Nyl thought when the second guard spoke. She had come to associate wholeness of mind with fluid speech. Those who were “not quite there” always conversed in that guttural, slower dialect. Arcade had informed Nyl the “whole” ones became more common in these more advanced stages.
Nyl looked at her companion, and his confused expression surprised her. Clearly he had seen nothing like this before.
“What is your name, my king?” Nyl asked.
“Silence!” the demon-helmed knight chastised, his chest swelling and his fists tightening on his reins.
The king held up a warding hand, calming his knight. He turned it into a gesture aimed at Nyl. “Dame Nyl. You enjoy battle. Take pleasure in victory. Yes?”
“Yes,” she answered. Nyl felt oils leak from her blisters and seep into neighboring cuts. Her pain increased with every breath she took.
The king studied Nyl and Arcade, assessing them. He nodded to himself and held out a hand. Snug around his middle finger sat a golden ring set with a large, red gemstone. “Kneel again. Swear yourself to my service, and kiss my ring. In exchange, I shall take you both away from this benighted place and bring you to war and glory.”
Nyl dipped to kneel.
Arcade’s hand shot out quickly, halting Nyl with a grab of her good shoulder. “What of Garuna?”
Nyl had already forgotten Garuna’s injury, and felt guilty at her impulsiveness.
The king’s focus changed to Arcade, and then to the fallen knight beyond. He tossed his head to his left and waved two fingers forward in command. “Sir Roland?”
The knight with the sunburst helmet, Sir Roland, dismounted his horse, pounding into the ground with a squelch and a rattle of armor. His spurs jingled as he did a career-horseman’s shuffling, wide-legged walk over to Garuna.
The king and the friends waited while the guard knelt to check on the fallen Garuna.
Roland raised his visor to peer at her. He then removed his gauntlet to feel for her breath with the back of his hand. The guard’s brow arched, then his eyes narrowed. “Not quite dead, your majesty, but close to it,” he pronounced.
“Muthar,” the page who claimed to be Garuna’s son whimpered with hope.
The king’s lip curled with empathy at the boy’s pathetic sobs. “Make certain of it,” he said.
Roland nodded. He removed his other gauntlet and offered them to the crying boy to hold. The boy only had eyes for his mother, stroking her limp hand in his. The guard smacked the boy lightly on the cheek with the leather cuff of his gauntlets. The boy’s training took over and he finally took hold of them.
Roland felt up and down the sides of Garuna’s armor with a veteran warrior’s calloused hands. He gasped sharply and yanked his right hand away. He checked his palm, seemed to find he had not been cut, then found and lifted the broken shard of armor Arcade had previously discovered. He peered into the wound and made an ugly face. He looked to his king and shook his head.
“The dame suffered a deep puncture into her viscera. She breathes, but her entrails hang bare to foul air. She may be nursed to wake again, but it would be a mercy if she did not. She is beyond the help of a chirurgeon.” Roland snatched his gauntlets from the white-faced page, returned to his king, and promptly remounted his horse with an efficient swing of one leg.
The king drew the companions’ attention once more: “Her loss need not be your own. You slew a dragon on my land. Great reward and a feast in your honor awaits you in my castle. Swear fealty and we shall leave this place.”
Again, Nyl reflexively made to bend her knee.
Again, Arcade halted her. He gripped her shoulder firmly, almost possessively.
Nyl bristled under it. “Let me go!” she snapped, but his piercing eyes fixed her to the spot.
“I prefer not to lose Garuna, but I especially prefer not to lose you. Do not leave us.”
Nyl shoved his hand away, but the heat of it lingered. His assertiveness calmed her restlessness. His loyalty to their friend pulled her in a way she did not understand.
Nyl looked back at their fallen companion, had never felt so torn. Garuna would die. This saddened her, but nothing could change this. Arcade still lived, however, and his recalcitrance troubled her.
“She will die whether we stay or go. Why do you hesitate?” Nyl asked him.
“This is a test,” Arcade said. “The gods scrutinize our loyalty.”
“The ‘gods?’” Nyl mused. She supposed the loaded term fittingly described the mysterious energies that punished weakness, or the voice that spoke to them between trials. “If this is a test, perhaps they wish to see what we value more – the strength to push on, or our concern for the helpless dead.”
Arcade’s eyes narrowed at Nyl. “Garuna still lives,” he said. “We should question this mysterious boy and learn more.”
“My patience is not infinite,” the king insisted politely. “My duties as king are as vast as my lands, which makes me a busy man. Make your decision. If you will not serve me, you must go. The death of the dragon is more than sufficient payment to allow you passage through my land still bearing your arms and armor. But I must impress this upon you: vassalage under me will not be offered a second time.”
Nyl had considered the possibility of fighting this man and his knights, but borrowed knowledge told her kingship did not transfer in such a barbaric way. Besides, even she could see she would not survive the wrath of the king’s men, especially with her injury and lack of horse and armor.
“Can Garuna not join us?” she tried.
“I grant hereditary land to my vassals. I am not wont to grant land to this son of hers, whose valor I could hardly know.”
“We could kill the boy,” Nyl said.
“Nyl!” Arcade said in shocking recrimination.
“I am loyal to Garuna. Not a ‘son,’ whatever that amounts to,” Nyl said defensively, though she cringed under his ire.
Arcade’s face paled and he opened his mouth, but the king interrupted him:
“An interesting proposal. But the boy must live. His murder would violate my laws.” The king offered his ringed hand once again. “Twenty more breaths I shall delay, then I will remount my horse and the offer will expire. Swear fealty or depart my realm in honorable peace.”
“Very well,” Nyl said.
“No!” Arcade protested.
Nyl gave him a sad look, her pain real. She shook her head and said: “Goodbye, Arcade.”
Nyl knelt and kissed the ring.
The king smiled. “Grand!” He drew his sword and laid it bare on Nyl’s good shoulder. He hesitated at Nyl’s injured shoulder, and gave it the slightest, gentlest touch possible.
Nyl bit her lip in pain.
“Sorry,” the king apologized sheepishly.
“It is no trouble,” Nyl grunted.
“Repeat after me: ‘I shall defend your lands and uphold your laws, lest my titles and lands be revoked.”
Nyl repeated the words at the ground, studiously and shamefully ignoring whatever face Arcade must be making.
“I swear to defend your lands and behave graciously to you in accordance with my laws,” the king said.
Nyl started to repeat the words.
The king leaned close and whispered: “That part was just for me.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Sir Bertrand, give the dame her sword,” the king said.
“She already holds one, sire,” the knight with the leering demon helmet said.
“Very good. We can skip that part, then. Welcome to my service, Nyl! You and your men may all enjoy seats of honor at my table tonight.”
The retainers that had helped slay the dragon raised their arms and cheered, then chanted her name:
“Nel! Nel! Nel!”
The king turned to look at Arcade and offered his ring. “And you, sir knight?”
Nyl finally remade eye contact with Arcade. She expected fury but saw only sad disappointment on his face. Disappointment and… yearning?
Arcade broke eye contact and gazed at poor Garuna.
“I will assign the page to one of my men, if it helps,” the king promised. “Perhaps with training he will rise to his mother’s greatness.”
Arcade refused to look at the king, stared now at Nyl once more. Pain flickered across his handsome face. He knelt slowly, his eyes lingering on her, then turned and kissed the king’s ring.
“Magnificent!” the king said, repeating his impromptu ceremony less awkwardly this time.
Nyl shivered, affected equally by the cold over her naked chest and the sadness on Arcade’s normally stoic face.
“Dame Nyl shall ride in my coach,” the king commanded.
“No need,” Nyl protested. She felt in a sudden mood for self-punishment. “Grant me a horse.”
“Your strength inspires,” the king said. “But you will do as I command. The air in this bog is foul. I will not have my newest vassal perish from infection. Squire!”
A broad-chested, athletic young man in a cloak and shirt of mail emerged from the long line of the king’s knights. He rode up on a trotting horse.
“Yas, yoor mojasty?” the beardless youth asked.
“Dress Dame Nyl in your cloak. It is a long journey home, and it is best we do not stress the men with the dame’s beauty.”
“Yas, yoor mojasty.”
The king turned to Nyl and smiled apologetically. “Ours is an unusually jolly court, with much said in jest, especially to the ladies. You will get used to it.”
Nyl allowed herself to be covered in the cloak. While the squire tied its knot, she overheard the king order his guards to spare three of the dragon’s eggs and destroy the rest. Nyl refused the squire’s offer of his horse. He shrugged and walked his horse while guiding her to the king’s coach.
The coach bounced and squealed along a muddy trail for hours. The sun hung high in the sky. Nyl, used to quick transitions from one battle to the next, hardly noticed, even when the trail flattened and dried and became a proper road.
She stared at her dirty, bloodied hands, and pondered the choices she had made. Her short life had so far seemed fairly straightforward, but at this moment she looked back on her past actions and now wondered why she did the things she did. Why am I the way I am?
The more she stared at her hands the less real her skin appeared. Instead, it looked…
Alarm elicited rapid blinks. When her eyes refocused, the impression disappeared – she had normal hands again.
But curiosity took over. She stared intently at them once more, attempting to see again what she thought she had briefly glimpsed. But no matter how intense her gaze, the vision did not repeat.
She gave up and let her head fall back against the coach’s cushioned seats. She suffered the rest of the journey in silence, deep in contemplation.
Before sleep overtook her, she had one last thought:
Metal. Her flesh had looked like metal.
Nyl woke to the sound of knocking and feminine voices.
She rose and spied two young females of slight builds waiting outside the coach.
“Melode,” one said in the unwhole people’s dialect. Both maids averted their eyes and curtsied. One then opened the coach door.
Nyl stepped down and was escorted through a castle’s bailey. Judging by the height of the walls and width of the keep, she stood within a mighty citadel. The maids took her through a side door into the castle’s keep, down a flight of stairs, and into a steamy chamber with a tiled floor.
A person-sized heated copper tub awaited her, already full of hot water. A red velvet curtain, tall enough to reach the ceiling, split the room in half. The thick divider muffled giggling girly voices on the other side.
Nyl eagerly stripped her borrowed cloak and made to step in the water. The maids halted her and helped a sheepish Nyl untie her plated chausses and padded pants first.
Properly disrobed now, Nyl entered the water. The maids immediately set to their silent work, first drawing water with ladles to pour over her head and body, then scraping away dirt with coarse sponges. One maid lifted Nyl’s legs above the water one at a time to cleanse her lower body. The other maid hovered at her side with tweezers, her grip on it insulated by a clean linen cloth. With these she determinedly plucked filth, scraps of linen, and dead tissue from Nyl’s shoulder wound. Nyl suffered the painful treatment quietly, intrigued how the maid regularly held her instrument over a candle’s flame between each tuft of skin she uprooted.
The feminine giggles past the curtain increased in frequency and volume. The pain of the maid’s shoulder treatment began to annoy Nyl, and the unseen girly merriment inspired a further rise.
“Who is over there?” Nyl asked.
The maids exchanged a look of uncertainty.
Before either spoke, the laugh of a more masculine voice gave Nyl her answer.
Nyl felt a sudden horror, a feeling that swiftly converted to rage. She slapped both her attendants away, stood, and marched to the curtain, dripping and naked. She threw the divider aside.
“Arcade!” Nyl said his name like a curse.
Arcade’s delighted face transformed to surprise. He looked ten times as handsome as Nyl had thought him just hours ago: clean, wet, dumb, and embarrassed. He clung to two wet and naked young women standing on either side of him. From one his lips had clearly just parted, and from the other he withdrew his hand that had been scrunching one of the girl’s heavy breasts.
Nyl felt her face turn red. Many emotions swirled in competition that moment. Her heart beat hot, hard, and high in her chest, choking her. Her stomach sunk, heavy like a rock. Anger overruled all other sensations, but breathing became difficult, as if her passion sought to stretch her into two pieces. She failed to push indignant words through her tight throat and slack jaw.
Arcade’s pleasure evaporated under Nyl’s scrutiny. He shrugged out of away the maidens’ embrace, their hands sliding from him, drawing Nyl’s attention to the lengthy… thing… flopping between Arcade’s legs.
Seeing “it” in its current state angered Nyl further.
Nyl finally managed to draw enough of a breath to speak: “How dare you!” her voice quivered with rage, and she ran out of wind amidst the last syllable.
Arcade looked suitably embarrassed, but also confused.
Nyl recovered her breath, pointed at the two girls attending him, and shouted: “Get out!”
The girls flinched at Nyl’s yell and hurried to obey. Both bent to gather up shed garments and fled the room.
“Nyl?” Arcade asked. He looked indignant, now.
“How could you choose me, then permit… this?”
“Forgive me!” Arcade pled. “This is all very new to me!”
But Nyl had no more words for him. She spun and slipped between the wall and the heavy curtain, throwing the fabric back into place.
Separated again, she gripped the curtain tight. The choke remained in her throat.
“Melode?” one of the maids on her side asked.
Nyl assessed the two girls. She felt desperately hollow in her heart, even more hollow between her thighs, a sudden emptiness newly discovered. The absurd thought of jumping on one of the girl’s faces to fill the void crossed her mind, gone as soon as it came, Arcade’s naked muscular body flickering through her imagination again a moment later.
It is all too much.
“Dress me!” Nyl said impatiently. She hoped she had been loud enough for Arcade to hear. She wanted him to know she was about to leave, wanted…
I know not what I want.
The maids hurried at her command, not bothering to fully dry her. They threw a linen shirt over her head and pulled shorts of similar cloth up over her loins. They attached ankle-length leather chausses to her legs, secured by a cord around her waist. They stuffed her feet into luxurious wool socks and calf-high leather boots with leather strings for fastening. They finished by slipping a martial-looking, belted leather jerkin over her shirt. It had clearly been constructed for a fit and feminine frame, though she could tell it had been fashioned for form over function, fitting overly narrow at the waist and hiking up her chest to make it appear half-again its regular size.
Nyl did not give the maids the chance to buckle the belts down the center of her jerkin. She stormed out from their grasp and escaped down the hall. Nyl found herself desperately listening for Arcade’s footsteps behind her, then banished the thought in a mental rage.
She fastened the belts herself, eager to occupy her mind as she fled all prying eyes. The task did not take long.
She stopped, looked behind her, found herself alone. She had no idea where she should go.
Her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She disappeared into the shadow of one of the hallway’s many supporting columns.
She raised a wrist to her mouth and bit it, choking back sobs. She thought of Garuna, pathetic and weak, leaning on the tree stump. She thought of Arcade’s many faces: angry, sad, outraged, enchanted.
Her attempts at restraint failed utterly. She sank to her haunches and drenched her knees in tears.
The next thing Nyl knew, she woke in a bed upon a pillow drenched with tears. She was still in the castle, still dressed in the clothes the maids had put on her.
And through a window outside, Nyl saw that the sun continued to hang high in the sky.
Part 3 comes out in one week, Friday the 28th. Thanks for reading!
Chains of a Demigod
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8
Part 9 (coming soon)
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