Page 15 of Cruel As A Tree (Chaos God Sugar and Spice Companion Shorts #4)

Then I saw her, perched on a branch, her feathers dripping down from her as they rippled with flame.

Its feathers were liquid lava that flowed down its body, accenting the long, slender neck reminiscent of a peacock.

It had a delicate head with huge eyes that sparkled as it tilted its beak to the sky to sing.

Though it looked like a living creature of flame, the branch it sat on seemed unaffected, not burning or charring.

"What could attract something so beautiful to a place so horrible?" I asked, still whispering.

"They are creatures of Chaos, too fragile to survive in the Mundane, and they are drawn to only one being," Lorthion said, his voice holding a tone of awe. "The Chaos God has returned to the Magic Realm."

I'd heard people talking about something like that at the school before I escaped.

That one day the Chaos God would return to fight the Order Goddess and there would be a great battle where good would finally triumph over evil.

The problem was that what seemed like the people who insisted they were on the side of 'Good' and used that as a reason to demand that other people give up control over their own lives, were the ones who did the most evil.

We stayed there until the song finished and the Phoenix vanished into the forest.

Then we continued our walk until we got to the huge treehouse in the gorgeous clearing.

It took all of two seconds to realize that Veveron was fine and didn't want to see me.

She didn't want anyone to bother her in her nesting chamber.

So we left to go meet Lorthion's friends.

It was another long walk through the forest, with a couple of stops to snack on fruit that seemed to be growing everywhere.

I didn't recognize most things, but there was a delicious cherry tree that had soft pink cherries. Eventually we got to our destination.

"I don't see anyone," I said as I looked around the small lake.

I could see most of the circumference of it, and there was a possibility that his friends were lurking on that rocky outcropping on the other side of the water, but it seemed strange when the spot we were at had a nice sloping dirt beach with several trees in a circle that were grown with a zigzag near the bottom that shaped them into perfect benches.

There was a stack of towels on a boulder that sat right on the edge of the water.

"They arrive," Lorthion said, pointing at the water.

There were bubbles on the surface of the water where he was pointing.

Suddenly, a woman burst from the water, lunging up into the air up to her hips as she tossed her hair back like a mermaid breaching the surface.

She had a mask covering her face, clear and see-through, and was wearing a brightly colored wetsuit.

As she settled back down in the water to her shoulders, she smiled and waved at me, and I lifted my hand and waved back.

Then another head popped up near her, and another, but they weren't wearing masks.

The individuals had intense skin color, with stark white on their faces and chests and black on their backs.

The woman swam towards us with big breast-strokes until she got to a place where she could stand, then she waddled forward.

When her feet came free from the water, I could see she was wearing big flippers.

She pulled off her mask, revealing dark skin and a big grin as she pulled off her flippers and crossed the distance between us.

Behind her, a merman and a mermaid, both bare-chested, beached themselves on the shore with a sudden surge of water.

I caught a glimpse of them grabbing a towel off his rock, and then the woman was in my face, grabbing my hand.

"Hi!" she said, her voice breathless as she took in deep, rapid breaths as if she had just been doing an intense workout. She released my hand. "I'm Susan. Welcome to freedom. How did you get out? The Sirens didn't rescue you, that's for sure, or I would have met you already."

"Susan, you must greet the Forest Lord with respect," one of the male mermen said from behind her.

"Oh, she's fine, Lorthion doesn't mind, do you, Lorthion?" the mermaid said as she rubbed the towel on her tail.

"I do not mind," Lorthion said from behind me, his voice coming from higher than normal and sounding a little more gravelly, but I was too distracted by the fact that the mermaid had a towel wrapped around her like a toga and was walking up to me on two legs instead of a tail like she arrived in.

"That is way better than shifting into a werewolf," I said out loud.

The mermaid grinned as she strode up next to Susan.

She stuck out her hand. I took it, feeling that her skin was hot against mine.

"I'm Orcalia. This here is Dumpster Fire.

" She gestured with a thumb over her shoulder at the male merman who was now on two legs with a towel around his waist. He had hold of a rope and was pulling a large chest out of the water and onto the shore.

"Dumpster fire?" I could feel both of my eyebrows reaching for my hairline. I wasn’t sure if I hoped he picked that name for himself or not. If someone else gave it to him he was mean, but if he gave it to himself that made him a walking red flag.

"I'm Devonic," Devonic said. "I still don't know what Dumpster Fire means, but the fact that all the Mundanes make faces when they hear it can't be a good thing."

“I know what it means!” Orcalia grinned.

The chest was all the way on the shore now, and he dropped the rope, turning towards us and bowing deep from his waist. "Great Lord of the Forest, we come bearing gifts and tribute to aid the growth of your forest, and to bring news.

One of the Seals has been shattered and the Dungeon begins to expand.

We have word from a rescued Mundane that a Lycan was able to shift without the Blood Moon. "

The smell of fish and seaweed wafted through the air, unmistakable as it wafted from the large chest.

"He's back!" Orcalia threw both her hands in the air. Then she kicked one leg up so high her shin almost hit her own face. "Heeeeeeeee's back!"

"Um," I said, taking a step back from her wild movements. I bumped into a tree, barely glancing at it out of the corner of my eye to see that there were now two new tree trunks on the shore.

"Orcalia, chill out a little,” Susan said. "She might have just escaped yesterday. You are way too intense for this moment."

"Don't mute my light, make your own brighter instead!” Orcalia wiggled her hips and stuck her arms both out to the sides, shaking them as if she had pom poms. "This is the perfect moment for that dance that Carey taught me."

"At least move away so you don't accidentally clobber me again," Susan said.

"C H A O S Chaos!" Orcalia chanted, moving her arms around wildly and kicking again.

Even so, she moved a good distance away from us and began to dance.

As she moved, her gestures became less cheerleadery and more sensual, with her hips curving, her ass shaking, and at one point she dropped down to her knees and flipped her hair back, giving a sultry look up behind me.

She wasn’t looking at me.

She was directing those sultry eyes at Lorthion.

I felt a spike of jealousy. He wasn't mine. I had in fact rejected and held him at arms' length, but that didn't stop the feeling from flooding into me, intense and irrational. I glanced over at him to see if he was staring at her.

He was a tree.

Or more specifically, an ent.

The two trunks I thought were trees were his legs, merging together into a single trunk to form the center of his towering body.

Branches came out with long arms and fingers, and his head was adorned with a canopy of leaves.

His face was made out of wood, generally about where a face should be on a giant.

I glanced back at Orcalia to see her twerking while looking back over her shoulder at him.

It was impressive how she managed to get a full jiggle through her butt by really engaging her lower back muscles and letting her rump relax with the twitch.

I didn’t know mermaids would be able to twerk.

Then again, I didn’t even know there were mermaids until now.

I hadn’t seen any at the school and the dramatic two tones of their skin coloring made them hard to miss.

I tore my eyes away from her gyrating rump to look back at Lorthion. He was still a giant tree creature, and wasn't looking at her. His gaze was out at the surface of the water.

"She'll calm down in a bit," Susan said quietly.

“She is only recently considered an adult by her people and these tributes are considered one of the safer missions that one can take.

She was like this last time we came to deliver a tribute.

She thinks she is going to convince Lorthion to accept her as his Forest Lady even after he rejected her the first time. "

He rejected her? Another one of my unconscious assumptions came crashing to a sudden stop.

Part of me had thought that he was so intense about me because I was the first woman he'd ever seen.

I hadn't met any other people in his forest, and getting over the wall was difficult to say the least. I only ended up in his forest at all because Veveron had directed me there, so it didn’t seem to me like he would be crawling in women who might appreciate his attention.

Now my assumption was turned around. There was evidence that not only did he have other options, one of the options was coming on to him so hard that the edge of her towel was flipping up with her twerk.

I focused my eyes on Susan, noticing that Devonic behind her was staring at Orcalia with a look of utter longing on his face.

“You seem perturbed by her behavior,” Lorthion said, his voice rumbling. “I will ask for them not to send her again.”

“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked, watching him closely.

“She is exciteable and eager and this is a safe place for her to try out more extravagent behaviors,” Lorthion said. “Her attempts to attract me continue to fail and she will learn and move on.”

"What, you only like Mundanes?" I asked, raising an eyebrow up at him.

"Only like Mundanes?" Susan repeated, her tone incredulous. “How could he like any of us? He's a tree."

"He... what?" I asked. "Lorthion, is this your real form?"

His leaves and branches shook a few moments before a rumbling laugh erupted from him.

"No," he said, his voice deep and booming with the length of his erect wooden form.

“Oh I’m sorry,” Susan said. “I assumed you weren’t a shifter because you always look like this. I really need to stop making assumptions.”

“I told you already Susan, he can be really hot," Orcalia said, coming back over to us, her face flushed. "First time I visited, he was all sexy looking with these furred legs and antlers, but the second I started hitting on him, he turned into this and hasn't changed back since."

"You said that you thought trees were ugly," Lorthion said.

Orcalia sighed. "Is that why you rejected me? I don't think your trees are ugly. Your forest is so cool."

“It is not the reason,” Lorthion said.

“Then why?” Orcalia said.

"Orcalia, you promised," Susan sighed. "You said you wouldn't do this."

Orcalia ignored Susan as she walked up and put her hand on Lorthion's giant leg, staring up at him as she leaned her breasts against his leg. "Give me a chance. We could be so good together.”

She was so forward. It was impressive and at the same time made me feel uncomfortable, like I was watching a trainwreck in slow motion, not knowing what to do to help but knowing that the results could end up in tears.

"No," Lorthion said.

Orcalia reached out and wrapped her arms around his trunk leg, pressing her face into his leg.

"Let go of him," I snapped, my feeling of discomfort welling up as I reached out to grab her arm and pull her back. "No is a complete sentence, and you need to back off already."

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Orcalia said, yanking her arm out of my grasp. “Only Lorthion can tell me to go away.”

Lorthion let out a sound like wind rustling through leaves.

"I desire another," he said. "Even if I didn't, I would not choose you. I have known you since you were a little sprout and I cannot think of you in another way. To watch another grow from their youth is to see them as kin. You will always appear to me as a bud that I am unwilling to pluck.”

"Come on, Orcalia." Susan grabbed her other arm, and we both walked her to the water. Devonic came with us, his face withdrawn as he looked down at the dirt under his feet instead of anything around us. “You heard the man. You have to listen this time. We should leave now."

Orcalia’s shoulders slumped. “But I like him so much.”

"Thank you for your gifts," Lorthion said. "But Devonic, I request another."

That seemed to snap Devonic out of his funk for a moment as he turned back to face Lorthion. "What is your request?" he asked, bowing low.

"My forest is overburdened with ripe fruit," Lorthion said. "Please send harvesters to come and take it away."

"Yes, Great Lord of the Forest," Devonic said. "We will come and relieve you of the bounty."

Orcalia and Devonic vanished into the water, leaving Susan pulling on her flippers and getting her mask ready.

She tapped on said mask with one hand. "I'll bring you one of these and show you the way next time," Susan said.

"You're welcome to visit us anytime, but you should make sure you have a Siren escort as the tunnels can be confusing the first couple of times trying to get around them.

We have a bunch of the Mundanes in a cute little conclave in the Siren city if you want to join us, and if you want to get back to the Mundane, we can get you a portal back. "

Her eyes slid over to Lorthion on that one.

"Oh, Lorthion already helped me with that," I said.

A smile broke out on Susan's face at those words. "Good," she said. Then she was gone after the others.

"I must distribute the gifts they brought throughout the forest," Lorthion said after a moment of quiet. "The nutrients from the waters do a great deal to help the spread of my forest."

"Do you want some help?" I asked, looking over at him. I didn't really want to help him with a bunch of stinky old fish and seaweed, but the offer had come out of habit.

He smiled at me, his bark crinkling. "No, I wish to do this work on my own. Go home. I will join you when you come back through the portal and call for me."

"Alright," I said, nodding my head, feeling relieved.

I had a lot to think about, and I couldn't let my mom do all the work preparing dinner on her own.

"I'll see you soon," I said.