Preamble
Cloudberry Chronicles is an erotic web series that follows the eponymous adventures of Cloudberry, an elf on a mission to save her homeland and bring peace. It predominantly features lesbian, pansexual and polyamorous characters who are both cis and trans for your reading pleasure. It contains scenes of mild peril and fantasy scenarios where coercion may be a sexual feature, eg. kidnapping and slavery (all stories come with content warnings).
Each story is a fully contained adventure, and the beginning of the smut (if you want to skip the lore and get right down to business) is marked in bold.
CC is written by dresspockets, a non-binary, polyamorous, switchy sapphic minx who wanted to see more diverse LGBT+ representation in fantasy elf smut.
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Cloudberry Chronicles Part I: The Joy of Justice
CW and themes: fantasy, predicament play, horror, magic, peril, transformation, lesbian, temperature play, ice, sybian, melting, oral
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When Cloudberry was a baby, the land of her birth was thrown sideways into a war it didn't want, with a country it had never heard of. The dark elves rose up from the caverns beneath their feet, and they didn't stand a chance. The peaceful stability of the surface kingdoms was shattered overnight. Most had thought the presence of great underground cities filled with a violent, shadowy folk to be nothing more than a myth -- they were wrong. The spider riders and the necromancers swarmed over the surface, merciless and cruel.
Thrown into a fugitive, nomadic lifestyle, the snow elves, called in their own tongue the LumenvΣki, travelled across the land - from high mountain to boreal forest - forever trying to stay one step ahead of the dark elf hordes. The snow elves fought back with gruella tactics, collapsing their tunnels and crushing their spider-mounts.
Now Cloudberry had passed her 124th birthday, and lived 123 years of her life under war. And she was ready to end it. After joining the mage-scouts she gained proficiency as a mage, bending the harsh elements of the snow kingdom to her will. She had devoted her entire life to protecting her kith and kin, never looked up from her books or rested for longer than a night of sleep. She never had time for friends, for play or for... love.
Word had spread of a Drow artefact which, if obtained, could turn the tide of war.
And she was going to be the one to find it.
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The harsh cold bit at the exposed part of her face. It had been hours since she has felt the tip of her nose. The blizzard continued to howl around her face, whipping the fur on her hood and threatening to tear it off her head. She had dressed warmly in several long robes, and as she trudged through the snow the colours of her many layers swirled around her ankles.
"It should be somewhere around... here."
Her foot touched ice beneath the snow, and for a moment the flurry cleared and she was able to see that she was standing at the edge of a large, iced-over lake. With a few deft movements her snowshoes were replaced with ice skates, her trailing robes tied up around her waist like a multicolour sash. She took a moment to brush the snow off the page of the open book she was carrying, revealing a map with faintly glowing outlines (and a glowing dot, marked 'me'), before closing it with a sharp thump and setting off over the ice.
The wind tried to blow her off course, but she was a seasoned skater and her forward crossovers kept her from losing momentum and veering too sharply aside. Eventually her goal appeared through the dazzling white -- an island, and on it, a weather-beaten ruin of an ancient temple.
A Drow temple.
It was a small, square construct barely larger than her room back at the mage's keep. One wall was practically missing, and the remains of tree roots, long-dead from the harshness of the climate, clung to the remaining walls and trailed across the floor.
The sound of the howling wind was muffled in here, and it felt eerily quiet. She could clearly hear her breath for the first time in days, and her heartbeat.
It took only a moment to locate the trapdoor and clear away the brittle roots enough to open it. She changed her boots yet again, from ice-ready blades to tough climbing shoes. It was a long way down, and she wasn't about to mess this up.
As she clambered down the dank and narrow staircase, one hand on the frosty wall and the other holding a conjured magelight, she thought through the plan one more time.
The Drow queen started this war because an ancient artefact had gone missing from her court, and she blamed the snow elves of stealing it. This same artefact, she hoped, was the one she was now heading towards.
The stairwell opened out into a broad, well-lit cavern of blue ice, and she realised for the first time that the stairs were not made of temple rock, but pure ice. An ethereal glow pulsed from deep within the walls, and high above her stalactites bigger than she was filled the far away ceiling. The cavern had retained some heat beneath the permafrost, not enough to be considered pleasant or even warm, but enough that her massive furs were more of a nuisance than a help. She took them off, and felt free to stretch in her loose academy robe.
Her reflection gazed back at her from a thousand different places, caught inside the multifaceted sheets of ice. She stared at her form as she crossed the frozen floor. A half-elf girl with tight, curly ginger hair stared back at her. She had often been teased for that hair, so human in its origin, and so bright and fiery next to the more demure and pallid snow elf tones. She kept it short, and her long pointed ears peaked though the top. This is how she got her nickname -- with her hair so red she looked just like an arctic cloudberry. She had put on her finest robes at the start of this adventure, but they were now starting to show signs of wear and tear -- there was patches on her sleeves and her hem was pale and frostbitten. She stuck her wand, a beautiful sprig of silver aspen, into her belt and carried on.
Near the farthest wall, where the glow seemed strongest, was a raised dais with a basin in front of it, and what looked like an ornately carved throne. Not a very comfortable seat, she thought, looking at its saddle-like shape and strange, bumpy textured surface. She consulted her book.
"The Joy of Just-Ice is one of the Queen's most beloved of all her royal ritual objects. It grants the wearer a complete and utter love for Just-Ice. Once worn, the throne of Just-Ice will set the wearer free."
She thought about the odd spelling of the word Just-Ice. Her Drow language skills were perfect, she thought, and she was fairly certain it was probably just a regional variant of the word 'justice'. If she could only bring this back to the Drow Queen, she would surely remember her love for justice and honour, and stop attacking her people. Yes, this had to be it.
She adjusted her robes and brushed the snow off her shoulders before walking up the dais steps to the basin. It was a marvel, completely carved from the ice of the dais. Channels cut into the floor led into its centre. She could clearly look down and see the words engraved into the bottom: