#original femslash

Merry had a headache.

The evening before had been a stressful one. They’d needed her down at the university research center for a strong spell, and she’d played protection for them for hours. It had been a fine piano with a bright, clear tone and keys that gave pleasantly beneath her fingers, but spells of that length and magnitude were never easy. Her fingers had cramped and her temples had ached by the time she was finally dismissed for the night.

After a night like that, all she’d wanted to do today was drowse in bed and listen to birdsong instead of a piano’s dulcet tones. Unfortunately, she needed a little thing called money if she wanted to eat food.

And Lys wasn’t a terrible student, all told. Merry had worried a bit the first time she’d walked up the manor’s rambling path to find a set of marble stairs that went higher than her entire cottage did, but Lys wasn’t one of the silly, spoiled children that Merry had come to know all too well through her piano lessons.

Lys was a proper lady, polite to a fault and almost irritatingly standoffish at times, but she was anything but spoiled. She applied herself to her lessons with zeal, and Merry could tell without even asking that she always did the practice work that she assigned to her. It showed in every scrawled equation, every sweet note, every spell that quivered to life from the vibrations of hammered wire.

Her eyes lit up with joyful understanding every time Merry introduced some new bit of theory, and those long fingers of hers were delicate on the manor piano’s aging keys. She loved the puzzle of it all, Lys did, and while she wasn’t one of the wunderkinds Merry assisted at the university, she could more than hold her own against tough spells.

No. Lys wasn’t a bad student at all. On a good day, Merry quite looked forward to their lessons. To the careful, quiet scales. The barely restrained excitement as Lys led her through the ideas she’d had throughout the week. The table piled high with notes and questions and the hesitant beginnings of what might become a composition.

This, however, was not a particularly good day, and Merry did her best to hide the way each tremulous note was a dagger against the back of her eyes.

She glanced over at Lys to make sure she was still utterly consumed by the piece she was practicing before taking the opportunity to massage at her temple. The researchers at the university were bright, too, exceptionally gifted, but they pushed too hard. They were willing to go all night, writing and weaving and breathing life into magic that Merry wouldn’t be able to comprehend if she tried, and they expected their pianists to do so as well. She’d managed to contain the effects of their spells within the protection charm she’d played, but only just. Explosions wanted to be seen, to be heard, and she’d had to play loud and discordant to coax them back within the spell circle.

She could hear echoes of those jangling notes even now in the song Lys played, sweet as it was. Ugh. She should have prepared a tincture before she’d left. She couldn’t focus at all.

Then the tenor of the notes changed, just a bit, and Merry found herself relaxing a bit into her chair. It was softer now. Quieter. Waiting, but with purpose.

It was easier to bear like this.

This wasn’t the song that Merry had assigned to her, not anymore, and she frowned as she tried to place it. It wasn’t one of the ones in the beginner’s songbook, or even the intermediate one that the two of them had started together at the beginning of this year. It was, she realized with a pleasant sort of shiver, something entirely unique.

She could see neat little dots in her mind’s eye, notes and ties and accidentals all jumbled together, and she finally recognized the tune. It had been written down in Lys’s notes on the table.

“Did you write this?” she asked, quiet, her voice only just audible over the sound of the song.

A slight hesitation, a tremble of the keys. Then, “Yes.”

Merry frowned. “This isn’t protection magic,” she said. “Is it?”

She opened her eyes just in time to see Lys shake her head. “No.”

It was sweet and light, this tune. It didn’t have the gravity needed for a spell of protection nor the fervor needed for an attack. There was nowhere to weave strong, fierce magic. Only a sort of lightness that soothed the ache behind Merry’s eyes.

“What is it?” she asked curiously. She’d be able to puzzle it out herself if she listened long enough, but maybe if she were lucky, she’d get Lys talking. It was a rare treat to coax the woman out of her shell long enough for a real conversation, but sometimes if Merry got her going about her music…

Lys didn’t say anything, though, just let her fingers glide over keys she’d come to know like an old friend met only recently, and Merry allowed herself to watch.

It was her job, after all.

Merry let herself observe the slope of Lys’s shoulders, the tiny crease between her brows as she concentrated. The way she bobbed her head to a silent count, mouthed the words of a spell that she was too inexperienced to play silently.

She was lovely when she played, really.

It was some sort of coaxing spell, Merry thought. Healing, perhaps, or maybe growth?

Even as she thought it, she realized what was happening around her. She’d been so focused on Lys at the piano that she hadn’t even noticed the flowers, pale and graceful in their pots, beginning to grow. They’d been pruned so carefully, so delicately, but now they wound up and out of their enclosures, unfettered and alive, and they started to trace patterns against the aging stone of the pillars around them.

It was a little like joy and a little like love, the shy blossoming of a tiny bud into something beautiful and raucous and lovely, and Merry felt her eyes widen as her headache receded bit by bit by bit.

She was up on her feet now, wandering closer to the plants that Lys had coaxed into freedom, and she ran her fingers gently along one pale bloom.

Next to her, she could see Lys shiver.

“A growth spell,” she murmured. “This is complicated magic, Lys.”

If they were smart, the eggheads down at the university would jump at the chance to study a spell like this. But they weren’t, were they? They were always after important advances. Life-changing ones. Not flower arranging.

But Merry felt changed. Just a little. But changed nonetheless.

“I know,” Lys said, and Merry could hear that melancholy in her. That longing that had always hidden beneath polite words and tight smiles. Merry had always heard it there, had sensed it, but had never sought to pry. It wasn’t her place, as Lys’s music teacher. “I felt complicated when I wrote it.”

Perhaps it had been, though, as her friend. As the person responsible for guiding the art, the magical light inside her.

“It’s lovely,” Merry said, and she stepped closer so she could peer over Lys’s shoulder at the music that she’d perched on the piano. She pointed, her finger hovering just over the parchment. “There. This part in particular.”

It was a lovely little crescendo, and Merry could see how it was quietly encouraging life, growth, experimentation. Freedom. This part here was what the flowers were responding to, and it had really been very cleverly done.

Merry remembered feeling that little spark of inspiration before, that little thrill inside when she wrote something bright and new and clever. She hadn’t felt that in a long time, though. It had been stamped out long ago. 

These days, Merry didn’t write spells like that very often. Those weren’t the charms that got a woman hired, after all. They were for play. Fun.

Happiness.

Merry smiled. “Very good, Lys. I love it.”

Lys’s fingers stumbled, and Merry could see the way that she stopped mouthing her spell as she bit down on her lip. It was a very pretty pink that spilled out across those cheeks, framed by soft curls and dark lashes. “Thank you,” she said softly, then looked up over her shoulder so their eyes could meet. “I wrote it for you, you know.”

Oh. Oh...

Merry realized all at once that she was framed with flowers, both of them were, and petals were just beginning to fall from their soft blooms. It was… hell, it was dead romantic, was what it was, and she felt her own cheeks beginning to heat. “I see,” she said softly.

And she’d had another message in her mailbox that morning, another summons to the university and another summons to some rich old windbag and another summons to a mage who was going to make her life absolutely fucking miserable tomorrow.

But today… For now…

Merry gathered her skirts around her as she sat down at the bench by Lys’s side, and allowed herself to smile, pleased, as Lys looked at her with wide, wide eyes. “May I?” she asked.

Lys nodded, her hands stilling against the keys, and Merry took care to let her fingers brush hers as she took her own position.

Accompaniment. It had been a long time since she’d played accompaniment. “From the top, then,” she murmured.

Osinyra’s moonglow filled the cupboard, banishing every shadow. Her feathered wings blocked the entire doorway, which she had to stoop to get through, for with her height and her horns she far surpassed its size. Her pitch black eyes with their full-moon irises gleamed, her lush, darkly painted lips curved in a smile, her pale skin a stark contrast to Ihrone’s own, a reminder of how unnatural, how inhuman, she was. As if it were possible to forget.

Ihrone let out a groan of despair as the Moon King’s daughter crouched before her.

“Well, now,” Osinyra said, her voice a low purr Ihrone could never get out of her head. “What precious bloom is this I find concealed so shamefully?”

Four days the moon was dark, allowing her to descend from the Moon King’s palace, and tonight she had come to find Ihrone. Again. Otienne would be furious, as she always was when Osinyra did not place her first and foremost in her attentions—as she always was when Osinyra expressed any interest in Ihrone at all.

Osinyra took hold of her chin, lifting her head. She tried to turn away, but Osinyra was so very, very strong, and her claws were so very, very sharp.

“All wrapped up for me. Such a thoughtful gift.” Her gaze was intense, and Ihrone knew she was admiring the mismatch of her eyes; one silver as the moon, one brown as the earth. Moon-touched, such difference had her titled, a blessing of beauty and intelligence, and she would rather have been cursed with ugliness and a dull mind if it would have kept her from Osinyra’s interest.

Osinyra gently tucked a wayward strand of hair behind Ihrone’s ear, then traced a claw through the tear tracks on her cheeks, following their path along her jaw and down her neck. She caressed the embroidery on the high collar of Ihrone’s dress, examining the pattern of Jhesk sea birds that flew from her neck to her sternum, picked out in white over a delicate gradient of blue linen. Ihrone expected to have her dress torn away soon—Osinyra had no conception of the cost of such things; of the expense and explanation incurred by need of repair or replacement. She, like Otienne, cared only about what she could take. But Osinyra didn’t rend her garments or even undo any of the fastenings. One hand cupped her small breast, squeezing.

“Left alone to wither in the dark. How disgraceful,” Osinyra murmured, leaning close. Her black tongue darted out to lick the tears from Ihrone’s cheek. She flinched away, but there was nowhere to go; all she could do was cower against the wall, which only made Osinyra laugh.

“No running, my sweet Scholar. There’s never any running. You seem weary, though. Would you like to lay down?”

A clawed hand wrapped around her throat, and Ihrone let out a muffled shriek as Osinyra tossed her to the floor like a rag doll. Her back jarred at the harsh landing, a wave of disorientation scrambling her senses as her head bounced off of the hard wooden boards. Her arms, pinned beneath the weight of her body, screamed for mercy, but though she squirmed and thrashed like a wild thing, it took just one of Osinyra’s delicate hands to hold her down.

“Worry not,” she said. “I am most grateful for my gift, and my manners are as fine as any mortal princess. I shall display such gratitude accordingly.”

Her tearful cries of protest went soundly ignored as Osinyra tugged up her dress, and she shivered at the touch of a moonlight-cold hand on her thigh, whimpering at the scratch of claws over her skin. Osinyra’s restraining hand shifted over her breast, groping greedily and, to Ihrone’s blushing shame, her nipple hardened at the force of the touch. Osinyra toyed with it through her dress—despite being blunted by fabric, the teasing and tugging nonetheless provoked a humiliating pulse of pleasure between her legs.

“Oh, my Scholar. Have you been thinking of me as you languished here?” Osinyra showed her sharp teeth in a smile as she teased at Ihrone’s entrance. One finger, miraculously clawless now, slipped far too easily inside. “Have you been wishing for my touch since last we parted?”

Ihrone shook her head furiously, then bit down on the gag as a second finger joined the first. Her arms were numb, her legs bent at a painfully awkward angle, yet heat still coursed through her at Osinyra’s ministrations. It entangled itself with the rippling panic of being unable to move, making her chest tight, her stomach tense. It wasn’t fair, she thought, as she tried to wriggle free of Osinyra’s grasp. It wasn’t fair, she didn’t want any of this, had never asked for any of it. Otienne was the one who desired the Moon King’s daughter, not her. Why should it be that a divine princess found her so irresistible?

Osinyra’s claws dug into her breast. “Cease your struggling. I’ll think you a poor gift if you can’t lie still, and I’ll have to rescind my gratitude.”

She didn’t want to be a good gift; she didn’t want to be any gift. Ihrone tried again to wrestle free, but it did no good. Osinyra held her down and worked her fingers faster, three of them now, and they were slick, Ihrone could hear it; slick and wet and fucking her exactly as hard as she hated. She couldn’t keep from moaning when Osinyra painted that slick up over her clit, her hips bucking into the touch despite herself.

“Ah, how harmoniously you sing for me, my moon-touched treasure,” Osinyra crooned. Her fingers returned to Ihrone’s cunt, driving into her, curving up to hit that most exact of places that overpowered every discomfort with unbearable pleasure. “I do so love to watch you reach such exquisite heights, but alas; you could not fulfil my simple request.”

Ihrone sank her teeth into the gag as orgasm began to crest within her—then stopped abruptly in a sharp flash of pain. She howled, sucking in great, useless breaths through her nose. Her clit felt severed; had Osinyra cut her? What mutilation had her defiance brought upon her? She thrashed in place, awash with hurt and confusion and broken desire as Osinyra withdrew her fingers. She wiped them off on the gag, then settled Ihrone’s skirts back into place. Something glowed in her other hand, some shining, pulsing thing, like a captive star.

“I shall return what I have stolen when next we meet,” she said. “Until then, you shall have but a shadow of delight, in consequence of my disappointment.”

Her orgasm. Osinyra had stolen her orgasm, made it a tangible thing and taken it away. It was a horrific act, a wicked violation—it was a feat of such great magic Ihrone could not suppress her awe. Osinyra kissed her cheek.

“There are some few hours yet before dawn. I had best pay a visit to our beloved princess before the day steals me away.” She stood, immaculate, immortal, her long dark hair stirring in some unfelt breeze, and tucked Ihrone’s orgasm into the bell of her sleeve. “Miss me all the hours we are parted, my sweet Scholar.”

The cupboard door closed behind her, leaving Ihrone once more in the dark. She lay limp, aching with terrible need, the smell of her own traitorous desire thick upon the gag. She squeezed her sticky thighs together, but all that came of it was a dim idea of satisfaction, far off as sunrise.

It wasn’t fair. She’d never asked for any of this. Ihrone rolled to her side, curling up as best she could, and wept until finally blessed exhaustion came to drag her into a deep and dreamless sleep.