Page 18 of Tales from the Orc Chasm

Silver

Silver watched Nettle stare at her hands, the way her glow took over her whole being. She laughed, she shrieked in joy, her wings beating so rapidly they were a blur of glinting light behind her as she zipped around the chaos.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She was the pinkish gold hue of sunrise and sunset, she was a searing hot summer day bearing down against a cold, clear river. Every plant in the large, crumbling chamber seemed to turn and lift its leaves to face her, to sun themselves in her presence.

Silver knew that feeling all too well by now. He pushed himself to stand, feeling her zip past his cheek, the brief note of her laughter as she carved through the air.

It wasn’t just the plants, the very light in the cavern seemed to shift, shimmers and threads of light in every color twisting in the air, and then parted like curtains over a doorway.

Then she was gone.

Nettle flitted through the portal without a second of hesitation, diving straight into the center, leaving a trail of sparkles in the air behind her.

Silver almost called out after her, taking a few steps towards it, before his sense of self preservation took over. The crumbling ledge continued on in iridescent shimmer, but he wasn’t sure it would hold his weight. He stood at the edge and craned his neck towards the portal.

Silver had to blink several times before he realized what he was seeing.

Hundreds of fey were peeking out of lush living plants, grown into elegant shelters. It seemed partway between a forest and a castle. All kinds of mushrooms sprouted up between the fallen rocks, circling the doorway, blurring the line of where it started. It was odd, the way he felt he was in two places at once, watching their features overlap.

A number of the fey gasped as they saw her, dozens taking to the air to greet her, a swirl of glittering sparkles surrounding her, each calling out to her, “Lady Nettlewisp is back!”

Lady Nettlewisp.

She hasn’t said she was a noble Lady of the Morning Mist Court.

Of course she was. He hadn’t been able to picture it before, but this place was clearly suited entirely to her, she had a whole life and connections here. Everyone knew her name. He didn’t know all that being a Fey noble entailed, but he imagined it didn’t involve sleeping around campfires or looking for work in seedy pubs.

And now that her little detour was over, she was right back where she belonged.

She was so beautiful, especially with that wide, effervescent smile. She glowed. A bitter happiness bloomed in his chest. He was glad she found what she was looking for, truly.

A few dozen of the fey nearest the door stared at him, wide eyed and in shock that he was there at all, looking in.

“Silver!”

Nettle called out, wreathed in a neverending cascade of glittering sparks. She was looking at him with that wide, beaming smile.

“That’s my dear friend, Silver,”

she explained to the hundreds of fey surrounding her, and before he knew it, a quite literal handful of them were gathered around one of his boots, tugging him a step into the mushroom circle.

Several of them flitted up to his eye level, offering him acorn caps willed with mulled wine, others pushed little baskets woven out of pine needles, filled to the brim with berries, into his palm. A couple of them might have crawled into his pockets, by the feel of his cloak rustling.

She looked at him with bright, excited eyes.

He tried not to let his next words cut into her triumph of having her magic back, to not let the way his heart had sunk when he’d realized this was their parting moment. She had a life to get back to, and it was right here.

“Back to your Court, then?”

“I… well, yes,”

she said, and a little round of cheers went off, running through the towering trees, echoing through the mystical woods.

“Good. I’m… happy for you,”

he nodded, and tried not to grimace as the tiniest round of applause went off around his feet. This was no way to have this conversation, but he didn’t think he could ask her for a moment alone. There were so many eyes on the pair of them. Too many.

Nettle was silent for a long time, long enough that the little sounds of applause had faded entirely.

Silver cleared his throat and rummaged in his pocket, scooping up and tossing out the pair of fey that had invaded his personal space a little too closely. “Well, I have a long walk back.”

“Surely, you’ll stay for a while? We’ll have a feast to celebrate, I owe you that much,”

she said quickly, and even though she tried to keep her smile in place, he could see she looked confused.

Silver shook his head, and leaned down to scoop a few more coins up off the ground. “No, no. Consider the job paid for.”

Before she could protest, before she could persuade him to drink the fey wine, to step fully through the portal and spend a dozen nights feasting and experiencing firsthand the famed fey debauchery, he turned and left.

He felt like his heart might fall out of his mouth if he tried to voice any of the ways she was falling for him, bit by bit. Already he had to let what had been building between them go.

Each step back through the gauntlet, he insisted to himself she wasn’t his type. He preferred a more rugged girl, rubbed dirt in her wounds, sort. He didn’t care too much for shiny things, anyway.

The hike back from the depths of the Chasm was quiet and uneventful. He made it to the Hammered N’Aled Tavern a little after nightfall. It was the last evening of the winter festival in the village, candles burned down to little melted stubbs on every available surface, a handful of snow sculptures that didn’t look like much of anything outside.

Silver settled in at the bar, waving to Erryc for his usual pint. Erryc nodded and kissed the top of Fawn’s head,

Silver’s brow creased. When the fuck did that develop? He shook his head, deciding that he didn’t care enough right now to go find which barflies he owed money on that for.

Erryc nodded a greeting toward Silver as he began filling a tankard. “Back for another job? I’ve had some people asking about you. Heard there was a huldira further up in the Whispering Woods that needed slaying—”

“Not tonight. Someone else can take that one,”

Silver said, shaking his head. He knew it was doubtless better to throw himself headfirst into another job, to let the work fill his waking moments so he didn’t mope around uselessly. But the mere thought of going back out into the dark, the long, endless empty road, made him too tired to even consider it.

Erryc looked a little surprised, even a little concerned. “Everything alright?”

“Slept badly on the ground,”

Silver grimaced, giving his neck a little roll as if to suggest the pain lived in a different muscle.

“Oh, that’s the worst. I had a floor board that disagreed with me the other night,”

Erryc nodded sympathetically and slid the pint of ale down the bar. It passed over a faint stain down the length of the counter, left behind by the toadbird’s black ichor.

Silver found himself staring at it even as he lifted the tankard to his mouth. It made him think of that night he had met her. Worse, it made him think of her sitting in that glass, drenched in pollen wine, flaring bright and beautiful.

He swallowed hard, wishing he’d known what that had meant before. Maybe he wouldn’t have spent so much of his time with her being a prickly idiot.

Silver glanced up, realizing Erryc was still standing by, staring at him expectantly.

“So?”

“What do you mean, so?”

“Are you not going to tell me about the last job? What did the fey lady want?”

“Finished the job, end of story. I’ll move onto the next one, and,”

Silver interrupted himself with another swig of his drink. And so would she. They were just briefly passing through one another’s lives, a singular intersection of paths that went on in opposite directions.

“And?”

“And that’s it,”

Silver sighed with a bit of finality. Erryc always asked questions to keep him talking, and he appreciated that. It tended to be good for business to talk loudly about his adventures, and even occasionally charmed someone to his bed for the evening.

“Maybe the next one will have a better ending,”

Erryc shrugged.

“A better beginning, too,”

he muttered, and drained his drink in one long draught,

No shortage of concern in his expression, Erryc began, “You know, Silver, maybe the real treasure is—”

Silver belched, effectively cutting him off. “Being alone.”

Erryc nodded, taking his point. “Another ale?”

“No, bring me some of that sparkling pollen shit.”

Erryc stared for a moment, and seemed to think to ask a question, but closed his mouth when Silver lifted his eyes and met him with a glare.

“You don’t have to bother with the fancy glass, this time,”

Silver called after Erryc’s retreating back, before he disappeared into the storage room.

Silver sighed and sank a little further into his seat. He didn’t consider himself to have many friends. Perhaps some amount of his loneliness was his own doing. He wasn’t trying to overlook the one he had here, but this wasn’t something talking about could ease. A few more drinks might help, though.

He’d meant to stop letting people come along on quests, and this was just another example to prove he should have stuck to that. He’d grown tired of having to watch people leave when they didn’t need his services anymore.

What was it worth to keep wanting to be someone’s everything, when it left such a hollow in him to be discarded after being only one or two things to someone?

Erryc returned, dropped off that single delicate wine glass again, and fled down to the other end of the bar to speak with someone else before Silver could complain.

Whatever, he’d try the wine in the vessel it came in. Though, he’d had a thought or two about licking it off the little fey that had managed to occupy every inch of his mind.

It was sweet with a sharp little bite, the drink nipping back with every taste. He grimaced at the thought that it was just like her, in every way.

He set the drink down on the bar. He should have known better than to linger over the thought of her. It would be better to do away with all his thoughts of her, now that she’d gone back to be part of the Morning Mist Court again.

But he’d liked her. He had really liked her. She was magnetic, drawing his eye back to her every time she laughed or darted through the air. Yet so effortlessly elegant, it was in her long eyelashes and the curve of her neck when she glanced at him over her shoulder.

It wasn’t just that she had saved him almost effortlessly a number of times, or that they’d shared a firelit evening together.

She’d gotten under his skin. A taste of companionship, easy as it was exciting.

He’d likely have driven her away eventually, with all his chatter.

The bar creaked across from him as Erryc leaned against it. “Hey, have you heard something about a betting pool—”

“Absolutely not,”

Silver said, standing up immediately, taking his pretty drink outside for some fresh air.

Outside was cold and quiet, the sky a deep blue fading into purples, only interrupted by the black outline of the mountains, the Whispering Woods, the whole of the Chasm. As he rounded the building to the back where fewer patrons would stumble upon him, he noticed the moon was barely a sliver in the sky. It seemed fitting that it wasn’t able to light the snow.

Silver stood there for several moments, his breath clouding the night, hoping for a star that twinkled more than any of the others. When he found none, he stared deep into the glittering wine, specs of golden pollen settling to the bottom. When he stared into the murky depths of whatever grog was on tap, he never saw much but his own lonely reflection.

He hadn’t expected their night together to be particularly special to her, but when he’d realized their time together was at an end, it was far more disheartening than he’d been prepared for.

“Excuse me,”

the sweetest voice he’d ever heard rung out, clear as a bell, “Is this seat taken?”

Silver barely blinked once before he saw the shower of sparks that came with her ashe descended out of the air. Nettle sat down on the rim of his drink, kicking a foot across the surface of it, sending a few sparkling drops scattering. Gods, he didn’t even care. There was enough gold in his pocket from the fey spring that he could buy a whole cask of it, pour it out and buy another.

“I– Nettle,”

he stammered, unsure how to respond. He hadn’t thought there was even a small chance of her following after him.

She settled primly on the glass rim, her soft thighs creasing against it. “What happened to ‘Firebug’?”

“Sure,”

he said slowly. “Bug.”

Her mouth opened for a retort, but she paused, her gaze narrowing at him. It made a brief smile tug at the corner of his mouth, though it came with a twist of pain, like trying to flex a broken toe.

Nettle lifted one gossamer wing, giving it a slight shake. More delicate than a butterfly's wing, spun of dewdrops and spider silk and sunrise. Bits of her fairy dust drifted off it, specs of pink and gold.

“Silvertongue,”

she returned to him after a beat. Her eyes seemed unusually bright, as she said softly, “You left. You barely even said goodbye.”

He closed his hand into a fist at his side to keep from reaching out for her.

“I had to make it quick. I hate long, drawn out goodbyes. It makes leaving all the worse than it already was,”

he admitted, throat tight around the words. “It’s better I didn’t stay. I would have accidentally stepped on someone, it would have been a whole thing.”

He wanted to leave it at that, but her lower lip trembled and he blurted out, voice hoarse, “I thought if I stayed a second longer, I’d have fallen in love with you and been broken hearted when you decided you were done with me. I mean, you were already done with me. The job was done, we move on, that’s how it goes.”

He had thought it would be like tearing his heart out to admit it to her, but the way her expressive wings twitched and her face softened,

He knew he was a fool, a bounty hunter confessing feelings to a noble lady, a towering orc and a delicate fey, completely unsuited to each other, but he didn’t care. He had known the ways they could fit together perfectly, and it was the only thing he wanted now.

“You were home. That was what you wanted,”

he insisted, a little less fervently. He hated that a note of hope slipped into his voice. He couldn’t afford that.

She shook her head, and his treacherous heart skipped a beat.

“You left, and I realized I didn’t want to be there. Living in a court I'd long outgrown, that was why the passion in my life had faded. Going back there wasn’t going to fix anything. And when I thought about going after you…”

she trailed off, but she didn’t need to speak the thought out loud as a coppery flare ran up her cheeks. “I really enjoyed getting to know you. I’d like to keep getting to know you.”

Silver blinked back at her, stunned. He was at a loss for words.

Instead, he held her stare, lifting the drink to his mouth. Her wings fluttered to steady herself she lowered herself into his drink.

Silver suppressed a smile, badly.

“You know… there’s a crypt not too far from here. It’s got a lock I haven’t been able to pick,”

he offered, voice low and soft. He gave the wine glass a little shake, swirling the contents of it around her.

“I suppose I could do you the favor. I mean, if you need the help,”

she offered in a low, sultry voice. She pulled her little flower-petal dress off, letting it float away in the wine.

“You’re sure? It’s awful dangerous,”

Silver asked, tilting the glass a little.

She slid down to the rim of the glass closest to him, her body mostly submerged in the drink. The way she pressed the softest parts of her against the glass as she rested an arm on the rim made his cock grow long and hefty in his pants.

“That’s ok, you can protect me.”

“Volunteering my services, now, am I?”

“While you’re at it, you should buy me another drink when we go back inside,”

she hummed, flicking a few drops across the surface.

He raised a brow to that, and lifted the glass to his mouth. Nettle grinned, and rose out of the wine, her glow reflecting against where her body was coated with it.

Her delicate little thighs parted as she placed her foot, no larger than the pad of someone’s finger, against his chin. He could just glimpse her cunt, rosy and wet for him. She was so close he could smell her arousal, sweet heady scent of her stealing the rest of his thoughts.

She climbed over the rim and hooked a knee over one of his tusks, and Silver parted her folds with the tip of his tongue, finally tasting her.

She moaned as his tongue dragged through the crux of her legs in a long, heavy stroke. Silver couldn’t help but lick over her belly, up to graze the impossible softness of her breasts, to catch the almost imperceptible points of her tightened nipples.

She rolled her hips needily against his lip, trying to grind her pleasure against his mouth.

Her wings twitched as he traced the tip of his finger up and down her leg. Her glow flared again under his touch, at the thought of more adventures to come.

“You know, I never aspired to be a doormat.”

“And yet life has provided you inspiration?”

Silver grinned wide. “I’ll drink to that.”