IAN NOGURI'S HEAD hung from the city's high gates for several days. A scroll writing was hammered into place beside his head by the Gold Cloaks who had strung up the head. The message was clear enough that one didn't need to rise up on tiptoes to read it.
[Do not fuck with Her Majesty!]
It was a disturbing deterrent against other revolutions, and even the Templar Abbot who usually called down rain and hail 'pon the sinners of the Capital tempered his preaching. No one wanted to be the bodyless head peering out with fly-infested blue lips at the carts of traders rolling in and out of the city.
Even those who weren't at the Amphitheater now knew of the story. It was a good story, complete with the tragic Nordic end. Nothing incited a legend more than a great man matyred for the cause. Rafel got his wish. Ian Noguri's few remaining loyalists made him into a sculpture.
They buried what they could find of his body which had been tossed down the Helmsley cliffdrop. Nowadays, they met secretly with little air signs as markers.
To hang a General's decapitated head off the city's walls was the cruelest shame. The rot was slow as the first fingers of winter was just showing. But somehow, when people lifted their eyes to it, it was their flare in the storm—at least to the Nonmagicals.
Rafel, on his return to Emberfall collapsed into his byzantine chambers often always shrouded in darkness.
"Aya Naamah. Bring our whore in!" He invited loudly.
And some ten minutes later, his lovely slave sauntered in pulling behind her a taller, enhanced gypsy. Mary Atwell only had a pair of tight boy shorts covering her pronounced hips. Her long tail wrapped her body from her flat belly upward to the generous swell of her breasts. Aya dragged her in by her new collar.
Throughout the night, Rafel and Aya took turns dominating the reptilian beauty. She sucked his cock. She rode him. Aya fisted her. Aya sat on her face. And once, Rafel tied her up to the antichrist St. Andrew's cross he had in a corner of his gothic suite. By the time he moved to touch her an hour later, good Mary's shorts were soaked.
Sometime at midnight, Rafel turned in the large bed to find Aya and Mary curled naked into each other, Aya's head resting in her sumptuous cleavage. Her fair skin was a lively contrast to Mary's milk complexion. Her crocodile scales glinted in the mild light.
Rafel did admit seeing a bunch of shadows traveling by his window that night. Like ninjas. Only curvier and semi-nude. But whether it was the feeling of being loved up by two of the hottest females alive, or the satiation of empty balls, Rafel chalked up the silhouettes now tiptoeing behind his long crimson drapes as sexy figures his mind had conjured up to lull him back to sleep.
Rafel soon heard eerie singing. And he did fall asleep.
He felt one of the female shadows fall over his face and something prick his neck. Between the brief opening and closing of his eyelids, he made out the starry vision of four women and a man. All of them were ethereally beautiful. Underwater beautiful. And it was actually one of them who was singing.
A siren.
Their clothes constituted just strips of beach wear one might wear to go for a dip. Their long hair was wet. Their eyes shimmered in blue water magic.
Mermaids!
His sexy ninjas were mermaids.
Why can't I fucking move? Rafel's senses were dulled, both by the singing woman and the injection of wolfsbane into his system—the kind specifically bottled in syringes for whales.
Rafel tried to turn on the bed, to reach out for Aya, to scream for Mary who'd rip these fish people apart with her crocodilian ferocity on awakening. But he couldn't move. He was immobilized. The single merman in the stealthy group bundled Rafel up in the immense white blanket of his own sleep, hefting Rafel up to his broad shoulders.
The merman was built powerfully. With the girl singing to keep Rafel hypnotized, the mermaids started out the same way they had come; silently through the curtains and out the window. They were kidnapping him.
Rafel blinked and blinked and tried to focus his system to engage, but it was really impossible under the voice of a siren.
Fucking mermaids! He cussed in his head—just before he succumbed to the inspiring music and blacked out.
By morning, when Aya awoke, she just thought her Lord Master was up and away on one of his morning jogs around the estate. After all, Ravenna was to be back from the Isles of Corynthia today, and knowing just how much the black-haired canary affected Rafel, she knew he would want a clear head for when the ship bringing his Little Raven home boarded.
The Corynthian Academy for Witches were giving a brief vacation through the long weeks of winter.
"Just for a fortnight, Ladies and Gents!" was Headmistress Shetty's promise to them.
Aya left Mary asleep in the bed and proceeded to the wide crystal bathroom to begin her morning like any other day. She maneuvered a few bread slices from Cora's kitchen harangue, dodging her friend's slapping hand. She descended into the dungeon base to check on their prisoner: Annabelle threw daggers at her with reinvigorated moon eyes. Finally, Aya ensured the Hounds were fed their daily dose of rabbit—alive.
She petted the giant Hellborn dogs as they crunched flesh and licked at blood.
They were all waiting; Aya Naamah, Corazón, and a few choice stewards of the Manor by the docks north of the Eldorian sea, the ports closest to Emberfall. In the horizon was a gray menace of cold and Aya surreptitiously rubbed at her arms. Winter in Eldoria was no joke, and being a child of fire, she was new to it.
The great ship bringing in tides of the [C.A.W] students from the misty isle was barely anchored before Aya heard Ravenna's screaming. She stood at the helm of the approaching frigate. She was waving wildly. She was willowy in a flowing blue frock. The cold wind in her hair and clothes, she resembled a wind sprite upon the gale.
"Aya! Cora!" Ravenna laughed excitedly.
It had been a long month away. Her hair was longer now. Black as the smooth pebbles in a dragon's lair.
Once at home in Emberfall, Ravenna could no longer hold in the question bubbling on her lips, ever since she'd docked. She had tried not to show she cared that Rafel wasn't present at her landing.
"Where's His Grace?" she asked promptly.
"Oh! His Grace, huh? They have made a Lady out of you after all." Cora teased and rubbed shoulders with Ravenna.
She stopped smiling when there was no forthcoming answer. Aya too voiced her own concerns.
"I'm surprised as well. We were in bed together last night, but this morning when I awoke. . .he wasn't. I figured he was out on the grounds somewhere. You know how much Lord Master loves his serenity. But now, I don't know. Have any of the stewards seen him since? The gamekeeper?"
Ravenna left Aya and Cora to contemplate and begin questioning the Manor's many attendants as to the Lord of the House's whereabouts. She hurried up the grand spiral staircase from the foyer to his wing of the mansion. She paused briefly at his chamber's door.
Memories of one particular hot night teased her mind. But she made sure not to go there. She was only here to check on him, she convinced herself.
Inwardly, she was glad though. She knew Rafel might be cold and ruthless to others, but he'd never miss her coming-home party.
"Lord BlüdThïrste? Sir Rafel?" She rapped on the door.
When there was no answer or a shuffle within indicating one, Ravenna's protective instincts kicked in. She pushed open the door and rushed in. The chambers were tidy, opulent, beautifully dark, erotic, spacious, but empty of one handsome redhead.
"Uh, Guys?! Come in here a sec!" Ravenna yelled down the stairs.
She heard the sound of pounding feet just as Cora and Aya spilled in through the door. Some other stewards flanked them from behind, including a few buzzing fairies. Everyone at Emberfall was worried. Rafel was not a cruel Lord, even for all his darkness. For him to go missing inspired his attendants to want to take up their pitchforks and cleaving knifes.
"—I don't think His Grace went jogging," Ravenna finished, her sweet green eyes on the colossal dressed bed.
Aya tried to move forward but Cora stopped her.
"Wait!" She put out her hand, slowly kneeling to the floors as her blue eyes caught on something. Cora's irises were sharp as ice. If anyone hurt Rafel, she would grind them all to ash.
"Are those footprints?" Aya leaned down also, zooming in on Cora's line of sight.
"Yes." Cora replied. "Bare foot prints."
"The cleaner must've missed a spot then?" Ravenna peered in too. She left her words as a question.
"Nón, dear. Elena doesn't miss spots." Cora intelligently replied. As a former pro wrestler, her tracker senses were acute. She put her hand out to touch the glittery imprints left on the cadwold gray floors. There was no dust. Cora spoke again thus,
"These footprints are not human. Else, Elena's vacuum cleaner would've seen it cleaned. See how they're watery at the sides? Every magical creature leaves an imprint of their passage. Ghosts; shifts in the wind. Wild Shapes; paw and claw marks. Hellions; the smell of ash and sulphur. Fae; fuckin' flowers. These watery marks around the footprints are. . ."
"Mermaids." Ravenna finished for her.
Cora lifted her blue eyes, nodding. At that instant, righteous fury filled all three women at the same time. They had dared, the slippery water folk!
"Yes, love. Mermaids." Cora replied, rising to her feet in calm wrath. Her eyes were melting glaciers in her face—an avalanche waiting to happen. "They must have snuck in through the wards at some auspicious moment in the night. They have taken His Grace."
Ravenna tutted. "Such a grave mistake on their part."
Aya Naamah smiled darkly, her fangs shimmering down. Cora squeezed her fingers into a fist, just as she did in the ring before delivering her killer southpaw.
"We'll need the Hounds," she said. "—we are out to gut some fish."
Meanwhile, Rafel was just waking up about a thousand miles away from Emberfall and the bunch of loyal furious femme fatales preparing to come save him.
Where am I?
He was still strapped to the merman's Atlantian back. As he looked up, he caught sight of brown sands, exotic palms and coconut trees that stretched out as far as the calm blue sea beyond it. He was on a beach. A lonely one. The merman and his group were walking, walking into the water.
The tide was up to their ankles.
...their knees now.
In broad daylight, Rafel gulped at the model shapes on the mermaids. Their light bikinis were in warm summer colors and it seemed winter never reached this part of the world. The swish-swish of their hips were even lovelier than this new paradise. If they hadn't kidnapped him from his bed, Rafel had half the mind to spare their lives.
He blinked away his daydreaming when the woman with the purple flood of hair, in the front of the group instructed, the water up to her orange bra straps and lapping at her surreal glistening skin.
"Toss him in."