Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"
CHAPTER EIGHT: Answers Breed Questions
"So, now what?" Damon squinted up through the canopy, enjoying the shade but also wishing he had a stitch or two of clothing. "I can... I can go home? I can just go?"
"I advise you wait until morning." Kamakshi spoke too soft to be a chieftain... she spoke as one cowed... as one owned. The contrast gave Damon a chill in his knees and spine.
"Sounds like Thato and Nahia want that cock of yours." Abhilash gestured vaguely, eyes scanning the Sidero who had watched their departure. She gave a thirsty glance to the stream a few paces to her right. "I need water."
"You will not want for warmth." Kamakshi shifted closer to him, even as Damon consciously stepped further away from her. "But my daughter is right -- now is a good time for water."
...
"Don't call me daughter." Abhilash grunted. "I am outcast."
"Better cast out than a slave." Kamakshi snorted in the manner that passed as a flat orkish affect.
"Now my fate matters to you?" Abhilash thrust an accusatory claw at her mother. "
Your
magic did this to me."
"And me, if all my daughters feel the same." Kamakshi shrugged, turning her shoulder toward her child as she knelt to drink from the stream.
...
"Now what are you two arguing about?" Damon demanded, flinching from the icy glare of yellow-gray and silver eyes from either female.
Right, I'm still only alive at their whim
.
"Are we at least permitted to salvage some clothing from the camp?" Damon leaned against a smooth-barked tree and crossed his arms over his chest. Scratching at his chest, his fingers trailed over the smooth skin where a gnarled scar had formed earlier in the day. The memory of pain pulled a grimace over his lips and he pinched the skin of his breast to be sure it was real.
"Did I heal everyone with that spell?"
"You think it healing magic?" Kamakshi looked at him with a canted eyebrow, a crouched predatory cat by the water. "I have seen healers -- you are something else."
"But..."
"No." Kamakshi shook her head. "That was not any healing magic I have seen. Perhaps it is
your
healing magic... I think your Wizard guilds would disagree with you."
"Then what?" Abhilash waded into the water upstream of Kamakshi and dropped bodily into the current. "The scar on his chest is gone, and the scars on my hand. What is that, if not healing?"
"Just so." Kamakshi stood from the stream and walked further into the shade of the Willow Wood. "All healing magic I have seen will leave scars. Deeper scars on deeper wounds. This is a different thing. Perhaps it
is
healing of a sort -- but it is unlike any I have known."
"And Kamakshi knows so much." Abhilash spat, scrubbing herself in the icy water to remove the stains of blood and sweat.
"Why are you bathing?" Damon looked down at himself, seeing the crusted flakes and streaks -- bits of dirt or grass here and there. "Well... why are you bathing
right now
?"
"You would wait until night, when the air is colder?" Abhilash sneered at him.
"I'd wait until I got home." Damon shivered at the idea of such a cold bath and wet skin through the night -- no blankets or warmth of fire to be had. "At least..."
"Yes, yes." Abhilash stood. "Fire, furs -- your
tribe
all around you."
"
I
didn't kidnap
you
." Damon snapped back, stomping through the brush further upstream and plunging through a tangle of reeds into thin, slippery mud that dropped him unceremoniously on his bare arse. "
FUCK
!"
...
Kamakshi raced to the human's aid, but Abhilash lingered in the water. The behemoth within was stirring but only sluggishly to Damon's outcry -- and the she-ork took it to mean that his person was in no great danger, or indeed even injured.
"He's still a clumsy whelp, shaman or no." Abhilash grumbled, plunging her head below the water and blowing air bubbles up to the surface -- enjoying the frigid stream cooling her body's wrath. She refused to admit that she still desired the damnable human, and the heat of her sex was nothing but the natural consequence of the day's bloodletting and Inkar's mating. A cold, too-thin blanket of comfort around her was knowing that Inkar was chief when Abhilash left the camp. If she lived, she could make a good chief... so long as she kept her head clear of her own rage at their mother.
"It's alright." Kamakshi called from the reeds, helping the human to his feet as he cursed and slipped again in the mud. "He fell in the mud."
Abhilash missed that bit, still spewing bubbles through the water and feeling the biting cold seep into her muscles like roots or creeping vines. She waited below the surface until her chest began to hurt for want of air before she surfaced and gulped a great breath. The hex lurking in her mind gave a jolt, as Damon began washing himself and his body's heat stripped away as fast as the current crossed his skin. Abhilash grumbled, and trudged upstream toward her charge.
"Out."
...
Abhilash shouted at him, jerking her thumb toward the bank -- he understood the posture enough to translate: "Get out of the water, stupid."
He wasn't certain how perfect the translation might be -- but it spoke highly of orkish inflection that such a short command could be so deeply nuanced. Slogging stiffly up the muddy bank, Damon rolled his shoulders and hugged himself as the cold sent shivers from his knees to his nose. Kamakshi walked just behind him, taking to her new role too swiftly and Damon felt on-edge every time she reached for him or stood closer to him.
"Can you two just... leave?" Damon found a mossy log, still being retaken by the soil below, and sat down. "For true, and I know it is against the right of hospitality -- but this... all of this has been blood and war and madness..."
He ranted for several moments, occasionally stuttering his words or slurring, and criss-crossed his own thoughts back and forth as he talked through the enormity of what had happened in a few short (or abysmally long) days. The attack; the mating bed and Billsby's death; being strangled (he returned to this many times, staring angrily at Abhilash each time); Kamakshi's brief time alone with him (which he skimmed-across like a water bug); his decision to drown himself (at which he wept openly several times); what little he could recall of his sickness or fever; waking up covered in the foulest dried offal he'd ever known (which he repeated to them nearly as often as Abhilash's nigh-infinite efforts to throttle him lifeless); and the last day of deranged sex and violence. Abhilash reckoned he would repeat himself, but by the time he'd spent his enthusiasm: he'd apparently been strangled to death more than a dozen times and broken his way through mountains of shit for the last moon.
"You forgot the light." Abhilash grunted, when at last Damon relented -- panting with his head in his hands.
"What light?" but he didn't really care what she said, at that point. He refused to even look up.
"The light shining in you when you confronted Kamakshi." Abhilash stooped into a crouch before him and put a hand on his knee. To their equal amazement, he didn't flinch away. "Looking at you was like staring at the sun."
Kamakshi only nodded, which Damon just noticed from the corner of his eye as he lifted his head.
"And, I care not what you say passed between you..." Abhilash looked at them both, back and forth. "Whatever it was: not words."
"That's not how I remember it, at all." Damon's eyes widened in disbelief. A glance at Kamakshi yielded only a limp shrug of her dark shoulders.
"Wizards go mad with magic, it is known." Kamakshi splayed her hands in a weak human apology and self-absolution. "I do not recall it the way either of you say -- yet I see the truth in both."
"Abhilash?" a voice from the plains, still blocked by underbrush and trees, cut into their conversation.
...
"Here, Nahia." Abhilash stood, her eyes searching and her arm waving slowly overhead. "We are here."
"Ah, there!" At first, Damon thought it was Nahia, but... "Nahia, this way, I see them."
...
"How do you tell them apart?" he grumbled, desperate to complain.
"How do you tell your hands apart?" Abhilash looked down with a faint smile. "Or your balls?"
"If you had two-hundred moons to know them, you would know them apart." Kamakshi laid a hand on his shoulder. She had meant to be reassuring, but Damon flinched under her touch and hissed as though she were burning him. Something about that reaction made her withdraw her hand, while Abhilash gave only passing notice. The "small twins", as Damon identified them, of Nahia and Thato emerged (or entered?) into the narrow space between trees and brush where Damon was sitting. The small clearing was now packed with ork flesh, habitually and predictably naked, and Damon was near eye-level with hairless crotches of purple and brown shades all around. His cock noticed, as well... try though he might to convince it otherwise: it saw a glorious opportunity to make up for lost time.
"Dammit." Damon groaned, cradling his head, again.
...
"I want to try his cock." Thato raised her chin defiantly at Abhilash, expecting some sort of rebuff or challenge to be leveled at her.
"So, ask him." Abhilash chuckled, gesturing down at the bemoaning human male. She could laugh aloud at his unease, and she felt glad that his prick did not agree with his summation of matters.
"But... he doesn't speak the..." Thato groused, crossing her arms over her breasts and fretting her lip with her teeth. "I ask you, and that is enough."
"Thato, no." Nahia caressed the other's shoulder and back. "Kamakshi said we must desire him, for the magic to work."
"You are guessing, child." Kamakshi chuckled at the assumptions being made. True, she'd needed to make many during the past few days -- but her daughters were now in open water, floundering and directionless.
"And you are his slave,
mother
." Nahia snarled at her progenitor, her voice a cold wet slap in the face that stunned Kamakshi. It left her wide-eyed and dumbfounded.
"Hey, human-whelp-shaman..." Thato hummed and purred at Damon, and his puzzlement was obvious.
...
"What the fuck is this?" Damon demanded, searching all four faces and hoping for a translation of how shouting had become purring. "Seriously? Right now? They want sex
