The Streamguard at Barnhill was unchanged, far as Laura remembered. It was still a triangular monstrosity with four big, round towers and a small forecastle, all situated almost perfectly on a rocky peninsular in the river.

That river was the Tommel, which largely formed the northern border of Albernia. Instead of going the direct way back to Honingen via the imperial road, the two giant girls were taking a detour on account of the shiny metal necklaces around their necks that the evil black wizard d made them wear.

It had been Janna’s idea to look for a wizard who could maybe tell them more about these necklaces and perhaps even disenchant them so that they no longer posed a threat, enabling Laura and Janna to squish the evil wizard as soon as Steve and Christina were back with them. They were running a little late by now and they were both starting to become worried, but they didn’t want to pass on this opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

The problem was that despite Havena’s immense size and diversity in all respects, there wasn’t a single wizard there that they could find. It was very logical because magic was outlawed in Havena, the college of wizards there having been closed after some experiment apparently went awry and something like half the city fell into the ocean.

Nobody knew where any more wizards could be found either, because the Praios’ Church’s inquisition had either burned them or driven them into hiding. That was when Janna had remembered something Franka Salva Galahan had said about the lady who lived in the castle before them now. It belonged to a Fenwasian who was probably dead by now, but apparently his wife was a wizard.

“Come out, please, we just want to talk to you!” Janna hollered into the main keep for the third time already. “We need your help. Nobody is going to hurt you!”

She was leaning over the castle and rested a hand upon a tower, trying to get the lady out of there so they could talk. The last time they were here, Laura had been hellbent on squishing the lady and her children for the crime of being Fenwasians, and back then as well, nobody had come out.

It had been Janna who had made Laura spare the castle, if memory served. And it seemed to have paid off, if only that stupid lady would come out already.

“Here’s the deal,” Laura spoke loudly into the castle. “You’ll come out or I’ll pick your stupid keep apart bit by bit and shove it into the river afterwards!”

Janna made a disapproving noise, but Laura was getting fed up. She walked past Janna and simply stomped on one of the two smaller towers in the forecastle, crumbling the structure noisily and under expulsion of a lot of dust into a pile of rubble. Anyone inside was now dead.

“I’ve started to flatten your castle,” she announced. “If you don’t want to die you better come out now. We already know you’re in there, we have seen your light and we can see smoke coming from your chimney.”

Janna sat there with frustration playing on her face, “Laura, if she was in there you’ve just flattened her too, stop it already!”

“Oh, she’s coming out,” Laura promised. “Either she’s coming or she and her castle are going in this here river.”

She kicked the other tower in the forecastle so that it toppled over and plunged into the water. Absurdly, Janna held out a hand to catch it but it crumbled all into bits and pieces revealing two soldiers hiding inside. One fell into the river and was immediately gone from view whereas the other remained, positively terrified, on Janna’s hand.

“Whoa!” Janna made and plunged her other hand into the frosty Tommel to fish out the guy who had vanished, but she came too late. She reacted angrily, “God damnit, can you stop killing people for like five minutes, please?! It’s important we get this right! I don’t want to be that black wizard’s slave or something!”

It would certainly help shirk responsibility for all the murders they would probably still be committing despite Steve and Christina’s return. It was practically unavoidable. On their way here, Laura had made Janna eat people again, too, for time constraints.

The tiny soldier on Janna’s hand had found his feet again and was now running away, prompting her to tilt her hand against wherever he was going so as to keep him trapped. When he realized that there was no way out, he cowered inside her palm shaking like leaves with his knees all the way up under his chin.

Janna leaned her face down upon him, probably blotting out his sky like a massive talking billboard, “Is your lady in the castle?”

“No!” he shook his head after short consideration, but there was something off about the way he said it, a hint of defiance Laura did not like.

“Oh!” she made gleefully. “So it’s not going to be a problem if I do this?”

She set her foot against the central keep of the Streamguard, threatening to push it into the river.

“No, don’t!” the minuscule man jumped up with his hand outstretched as though he could have stopped Laura only with his willpower.

Janna sighed loudly, “So, she is in there. Thank you very much, little man, you’ve been a great help!”

“No, no, no!” he replied hastily. “She’s not! She isn’t! She isn’t home! It’s just that, such a nice castle, it would be a great waste if…I mean, it took very long to build. You are a Queen, are you not, and if you are then, you know…you know that, uh, building castles is very expensive and this one here is, uh, situated on a very nice cliff commanding the Tommel, so you can…”

“Tell me the truth,” Janna cut him off. “Is she in there or not, because if she isn’t, Laura is going to destroy the castle now.”

“She, uh…” he stared at her gigantic face before him, clearly hiding something.

Janna shook her head and looked at Laura, “Is this guy for real?”

“Let him go!” a voice called from the castle then, right up top upon the mighty battlements.

Some if not most castles had a bit of a romantic feel to it, but this one was all military, just like a modern bunker. Between two big grey merlons, a lady of middling age and appearance stood, her hair blowing in the wind that was chasing down the river. Laura meant to snatch her immediately, but Janna held her back.

“Are you the lady of this castle?” she asked before letting go of Laura’s hand.

The tiny woman steadied herself, “Yes! Now, what do you want?”

She was deeply scared, Laura could tell.

“Are you truly a sorceress?” Janna continued asking. “I mean, can you work spells and understand magic?”

The minuscule lady shook her head, “Whoever told you that is a damned liar! My lady is not a sorceress at all, no! Oh, I mean…”

Laura and Janna cocked their heads in unison.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Laura sighed.

The lengths these people were going to, to protect the lady of this particular castle, were nothing if not astonishing. The stubbornness of the Streamguard’s inhabitants was combining with all the other accumulated crap that weighed Laura down, much as it must have Janna. The constant walking, the cold, the wet, the short days, the insecurity and the uneasy sleep because of the ogresses and whatever else might be lurking out there, to say nothing of the wizard’s necklaces or what they had endured in the Farindel while shrunk and at the Fenwasians’ mercy. Laura felt more and more like she wanted some time off.

Havena had been nice, feeling like the weirdest kind of mix between Dublin and Rome with a sprinkling of Venice, but their visit had been short and busy and filled with regret for all the time they could have spent there instead of hanging out at the comparative shithole that Honingen turned out to be.

“This lady must be the absolute best liege in the whole world,” Janna commented half in jest. “Or maybe she has bewitched her people so hard they are willing to die for her.”

Laura was about to flick the impostor off the battlements when a new voice came up.

“Stay your hand!” it shouted. “I am Lady Isora, and yes, I am a sorceress! I am the mightiest sorceress in all the world, and if you both don’t step away from my walls then I will turn you to stone!”

A new lady emerged, better dressed than the first one, and considerably better looking. Dressed in a cloak of black velvet and fur and with long brown hair, the apparent sorceress stepped out onto the tower, waving her devoted servant back inside.

Laura’s eyes met Janna’s, “She’s bluffing, right?”

Magic was bewildering at the best of times. At the worst it was what she and Janna had just been privy to not far away in that awful enchanted forest, abject, bewildering horror and the contents of fever dreams.

Janna frowned, “Probably. I mean, if she could do it, she would’ve done it already. But let’s play it safe anyway, there’s no reason to antagonize her.”

“Uh, we’re sorry, mighty sorceress,” Laura started soft-soaping it insecurely. “We’re, uh, we’re here because we need your help.” She grasped the necklace under her shirt and pulled it out, the metal warm to the touch from her body, “We need to know about these medallions. Can you tell us what spell or, uh, what kind of magic is in them. I mean, what would happen if I took it off, for example?”

The sorceress squinted, “Just that, and then you’ll go? Do you swear it?”

She was betraying her bluff a little bit, Laura felt, but she still wouldn’t want to test the woman, “Yes, yes, we swear it!”

Isora seemed to grow in her resolve and reconsider, “Bring me back my husband and then I’ll help you!”

Laura’s and Janna’s eyes met again and Janna shrugged aggressively.

“I don’t know who he is!” Laura whispered sharply. “We’ve probably smushed him or eaten him or whatever!”

“We’re sorry, mighty sorceress, we don’t have the time!” Janna proclaimed. “We, uh, we saved one…this wouldn’t be him, would it?”

She put the soldier she had saved upon the tower next to the little lady.

“No!” the sorceress called. “But, well, I suppose if you are in a hurry. That thing around your neck is nothing but a large lump of metal! There is nothing arcane or otherwise enchanted about it!”

“Are you sure?” Laura asked perplexed, looking at Janna.

They had Isora check Janna’s as well, with the same result.

“Maybe she’s not a sorceress at all,” Laura speculated while they were continuing on their journey with more questions than answers in tow. “Maybe she was just lying, telling us what we wanted to hear so we’d go away and don’t kill her.”

“She didn’t know what we wanted to hear,” Janna replied while she also chewed on her lip as though she meant to eat it. “But maybe the black sorcerer is so mighty that she couldn’t see it. Maybe he cloaked it somehow, knowing how easy it would be for us to make any old wizard get rid of whatever he did to these things. Urgh, I fucking hate magic!”

Laura felt very much the same way.

“You know,” she said, “if you hadn’t eaten Dari, we could’ve had her kill the wizard for us.”

Janna rolled her eyes, “I didn’t eat her. I made you believe I did, so you would stop bugging me."

Laura felt a thrum of excitement in her chest, “Then she is still alive?”

Janna shook her head, “I said I didn’t eat her. I had her in my pocket and then I waited until you were asleep and I had my fun with her before I turned her into a grease stain.”

Laura could vividly imagine it. The grin on Janna’s face was speaking volumes too.

‘Poor little Dari,’ she thought. ‘Went through so much only to be squashed like a bug.’

“That was really dumb, though,” she reiterated her point. “It isn’t often that you come by someone who is so skilled. Even the black wizard seemed to like her.”

Janna shrugged, “One more reason to smoosh her. Anyway, I’ve mushed her up so fine that not even he could bring her back to life now, so stop bitching about it.”

Laura begrudgingly agreed but she wouldn’t give Janna the satisfaction of saying so out loud. She didn’t really want to start a fight either. She was too tired. They should have had a conversation about what to do after reuniting with Steve and Christina. But there were simply too many uncertainties just now.

‘If only that stupid wizard Furio were still alive.’

They walked silently for a long time, only stopping to ask peasants or villagers for directions, until Laura suddenly had Janna’s hand in her chest, stopping her.

“Ogre tracks!” Janna whispered and pointed with her finger to a trail of tiny footprints before them.

They were notably bigger than any of the human footprints in the snow, and more numerous too. Laura felt a sense of panic rush over her. During the ambush in the night, she had felt as though her final hour had come, to say nothing of the nasty scratch on her eyelid.

The two girls looked around, half expecting to hear the ogrish battle cry again, but there was nothing. The trail led east, basically straight to their destination after they doubled back from the Streamguard before heading south so as to avoid the Farindel as far as possible.

“Maybe they’re old,” Laura suggested, hoping to avoid another confrontation.

But Janna shook her head, “Not with all the snow we’ve been having.”

It had been snowing a couple of times more, not very much and not for very long, but too much for these tracks to be so obvious.

Then Janna pointed again: “Can you see the smoke over there?”

Laura was shaking, and not from cold. The smoke from multiple fires was coming out of another patch of forest. It did look somewhat thicker than the smoke coming from the farmsteads or villages around, indicating a larger fire such as ogresses would build.

On Janna’s direction, they laid down their blankets to keep from getting wet and then crawled like soldiers towards the source of the smoke, ready to get up and start stomping at a moment’s notice. But they were just charcoal burners.

“You gave us quite a scare!” Janna scolded the minuscule, soot-faced men who looked as though they might have said the same thing. “Have you seen any ogresses, per chance?”

The trail led past the patch of wood, Laura saw only now. The hunt was still on.

“Aye, they took our last camp!” reported the foremost man and pointed. “Back that way! Killed near half of us, they did! Will you hunt them down?”

‘No?’ Laura wanted to reply, but Janna had already agreed.

Then Janna stood and hovered her foot over one of the smoking mounds in which the charcoal burners were turning wood to charcoal.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked, seeing the frightened men back away with their hands raised.

“It’s bad for the environment,” Janna frowned, considering whether or not she should ruin hours of the men’s work and perhaps flatten them afterwards. “But I guess they have no choice.”

She took her foot back and continued following the trail, leaving Laura somewhat clueless.

“Sorry,” Laura murmured to the men below before quickly stomping on one of them while taking her leave, just for giggles.

She had to remind herself of how big she was to gain a little courage. They should count themselves lucky she didn’t squish all of them, although the affirmation of power she now felt made her regret not having done so.

Janna followed the tracks in the snow while Laura followed Janna. Powerful or not, she wasn’t keen on that whole spearhead removal all over again, which had been bloody and more than a little uncomfortable, not to mention horribly unsanitary.

At first it seemed as though the ogres had gone all the way back to Honingen. This made both girls pick up their pace. They were supposed to meet Steve and Christina back at the city today, and evening was already fast approaching. They were running late, in fact. Janna especially was getting worried and kept kicking herself over the issue.

“If these ogres get them into their hands...” she would say and let it hang there, untold horrors implied.

But that fear proved false.

There was a range of large, wooded hills, or else small mountains, not far from the city. It wasn’t large enough to warrant any particular mention. If the place had a name, they had never heard it. But they had seen it before, both from afar and in passing, a landmark used for orientation.

Laura found hills and mountains strange at her size. Those very tall rocky ones back in Thorwal had almost killed them, but they had been larger than these hills by a lot, being almost like a labyrinth of cliff-like walls that were exhausting to climb and difficult to navigate, not to mention cold, windy and practically barren. At ninety meters tall, a small, nine-hundred-meter-tall mountain was ten times her size, thus not particularly different than a large sand pile on Earth, except here, it could be steeper. She would also cause avalanches and landslides constantly, causing a cacophony of sounds that could deafen her even to Janna’s voice.

The hill range before them now wasn’t taller than a couple of hundred meters and covered in trees, and it was here that the ogre trail was leading.

“Hills and foliage,” Laura warned. “Pretty terrible combination if you ask me.”

Janna scoffed, “It’s only called foliage if there are leaves. We have their trail and the light is still good. Let’s go in there and kill them. If anything goes wrong, just do this.”

She suddenly stormed forward and while crushing trees and dislodging large boulders, she had climbed the top of the nearest hill in just a few leaps. A small foe wouldn’t be able to follow quickly.

“You ought to crush yourself,” Laura nodded at the utter devastation the move had caused upon the hillside. “You’re bad for the environment, too.”

Janna slid down coolly on an avalanche of earth, snow and logs, upright and with her arms crossed while letting gravity do the work and also demolishing the landscape some more.

“It’ll regrow,” she said snidely. “Unlike your fucking brain.”

Nothing that Laura tried could dissuade Janna and so they continued to follow the trail first along a narrow valley into the hills and then over and across the back of one.

There weren’t any people living here but there were a few paths that hunters or poachers might have been using, as well as evidence of a few campsites. Janna said some things about animals that might be living in this area when Laura spotted a small, funny-looking wildcat running away from her down the slope of the hill.

She crouched and pushed her hand on it quickly, burying the cute little fur ball in the snow before using her offhand to pry it out upon which it started hissing at her most adorably. It was spotted all over, covered in grey-white winter fur and equipped with a long, bushy tail, much more prominent than a cat’s.

“You caught a lynx,” Janna said after doubling back to check upon the holdup. “These are like super rare on Earth. You should set it free.”

Laura found it much more entertaining to let it run on her hand before trapping it, which wasn’t easy because it was so damn quick. When it suddenly jumped and started to claw its way down her blanket, she almost didn’t catch it in time.

“Seriously,” Janna insisted. “These things are super shy and they’re gonna be almost extinct because of their fur. Let it go now.”

Instead, Laura slurped it into her mouth. The lynx was smaller than a human, lighter and not so strong, but the mayhem it immediately unleashed was something she wasn’t prepared for. She had to hold her mouth shut with her hand or else she would have opened it on account of the tickling. When she swallowed it whole then, it was half by accident.

“Oh my god,” she coughed and laughed, the wiggling, panicking cat struggling down her gullet. “You gotta try that.”

She wondered if there was any human person still alive in her stomach. She had certainly swallowed a few whole earlier, but that had been hours ago, so they were probably dead and dissolving by now. Otherwise, those people would be in for another significant emotional event when a ravaging, kicking and hissing lynx joined them in their misery. The thought excited her.

‘If I swallow a bunch of people,’ she pictured it in her mind, ‘and then I get like wolves or bears or lions or tigers or whatever, then the people in my tummy would get eaten twice.’

She would have liked to share the idea with Janna but the bigger girl had already stormed off in rage over the lynx having become Laura’s protein. Laura lingered just a moment to see if there were any other endangered species she might ingest, but there was nothing so she moved on.

The idea of hunting had intrigued her and Janna in the past. They were very loud and so most beasts of the wild made away long before they came on, but every now and again they would see deer or elk, boars, wild goats or even wolves. Birds were also quite common. Sometimes animals could be distracted and not heed the coming danger, and sometimes Janna and Laura were simply too fast and they could maintain their speed for a long time. There were wisents in the woods which were basically European buffalo, and before the weather got so cold there were also hares, essentially wild rabbits that could run at amazing speeds and had brown fur and a short, white puff for a tail.

Laura realized that thinking about animals made her hungry, and wherever they ended up having supper the people would still need some time to prepare, so it would be hours before she would be full. Unless they would opt for eating people again, of course. For all her moralising, Janna had gobbled up several hundred people after growing big again, just to save time.

“Hey, you wanna go eat?” she called after Janna who was standing three hills further on, looking at her feet.

Janna turned her head and seemed miserable, “Yeah, let’s do it. Come look at this.”

What made her agree to abandon the hunt was right in the valley beneath her. The ogresses had made a clearing in the trees and then made primitive huts looking like wooden caves, stacked trees with their branches intertwined to create space beneath them, and some rock slabs and dirt on top to keep off the weather. There was a stockade apparently for livestock or human prisoners too, but it was all abandoned.

“See how that fireplace has never been used,” Janna pointed to the stacked and ready-to-light bonfire in the middle of the camp.

“Did they hear us?” Laura suggested. “Maybe they're right over there.”

She pointed ahead, the same direction as a rivulet that was snaking through the valley.

Janna shook her head, “There's snow on the huts, look.”

It wasn't much but it was true. The ogres must have abandoned the camp hours ago. Janna muttered a curse and kicked through one of the huts, making trees fly all about. The inside was laid out with leaves and moss but didn't look as though it had been used.

“Maybe they liked civilization a bit too much,” Laura laughed. “Can't go back to living in the dirt once you've seen the city.”

The joke stuck in her throat and Janna didn’t laugh either. They both had been living in the dirt for months now and while it had been okay in the spring and autumn, now in winter it was becoming more strenuous every day, even though they didn’t feel the cold as bad as smaller beings. They still followed the ogre trail out of the hills until it became clear that it wasn't leading anywhere near Honingen.

It was leading north instead, north towards the Farindel.

“You wanna check on your friend up there?” Janna asked with a raised brow. “That injured guy with the bloody banners?”

“Albenblood,” Laura shook her head. “Too close to that damn forest. I'm sure they're fine.”

She wasn't sure at all, but she didn’t want to go there. She didn't like little Lord Ilaen enough to warrant him a visit, plus there were Garvin Blaithin's children in the castle and she didn't want to look at them again after accidentally squishing their father when she had gotten way too high on Mibeltube.

“You wanna get high?” She asked instead, but Janna waved off.

“We gotta make sure Chris and Steve are fine. And once we’ve done that, I guess it would be a bad idea to get all intoxicated given what happened last time?”

Laura couldn’t disagree with that and so they went to Honingen. They were late, to be sure. This was the day the black wizard had promised to deliver Steve and Christina back, but they didn’t know exactly at what hour this would occur and most of the day was already over.

“Uh, we should stop and eat somewhere first,” Laura said along the way, already looking for a village.

Again, Janna shook her head.

“This needs to end,” she said. “Today. We can’t go on like this, depopulating the landscape whenever we get hungry. We eat whatever the Honingers give us and if they don’t have enough then we go to Abilacht.”

“It’s gonna be pitch dark by then,” Laura objected but fell on deaf ears.

Strangely enough, the people who still remained at Honingen had never heard of Steve and Christina, nor had they seen anybody wearing strange clothes or a woman with black skin.

“Maybe we’re early?” Laura suggested in an attempt to lighten the darkness playing out on Janna’s face, but that too was a wasted effort.

“He fucking played us,” Janna growled, tearing with her hand at the necklace around her neck that she suspected would turn them into the evil man’s slaves.

There was nothing they could do other than lighting a big fire and waiting for the food to come through. This was when they were approached by a caravan of Novadi leading many large, covered wagons drawn by a myriad of horses.

They were all men and looked absurd. Dressed in turbans, pointy red-brown boots and the long-cut garb favoured by desert dwellers, they fit as well into the winterly Albernian landscape as an elephant into a tutu. They favoured sabres and maces, spears and round, painted shields and those warriors among them wore chainmail with ornamented plates of bronze and gold as well as pointy half helms of shiny steel and copper.

They were just such a one-to-one copy of medieval Arabs that it seemed like abject plagiarism, Laura noted not quite for the first time. Their skin was the same tone as well, and they had black hair and beards to a man. They even sounded Arabic in their thick accents, or at least their leader did.

He was portly and wrapped in fine cloths like some gigantic baby while on his head rested a gilded helm. He was also every bit as terrified as his men, all craven-looking, some waddling about as if they had soiled themselves.

Seeing her and Janna for the first time had to be somewhat of a near-death experience, Laura supposed. After all, for many, seeing them for the first time rapidly turned into the last time as well, and not in an amiable fashion. Then again though, knights and warriors and even some smallfolk had handled themselves much better than this lot.

They even had to be urged on by Ardan Jumian Galahan.

“Go on, say your part,” he told the Novadi in charge without looking up.

Ever since Laura had eaten his father-in-law, the young count of Honingen was very reserved around the giantesses, and Devona Fenwasian kept away from them entirely.

The Novadi man spoke in a high-pitched, weepy voice that Laura immediately disliked, “Nine-and-ninety blessings upon you, oh mighty ones of the north! It is an honour for one as humble as myself to be in your presence! We bring you greetings and an invitation from our mighty master, Caliph Malkillah the Third, Mustafa ibn Khalid ibn Rusaimi!”

The portly man bowed so deeply that his pointy, gilded helm slipped from his brow and fell but he caught it skilfully and placed it back upon his head as he rose. Laura wondered if she would feel the point if she crushed him barefoot.

Rather than expecting a reply, the man gestured at his wagon track, “We bring you these gifts! Please accept them as a token of respect from our master!”

Covers were pulled off, chests thrown open and a staggering amount of plunder put on display. There were two wagons piled full of carpets, another full of silks, chests full of gold, silver and gemstones, spices, dried and exotic fruit, some items Laura could not identify and then came the cage wagons.

Janna gasped in horror and Laura had to suppress a laugh when the first cage was revealed to be full of rag-wearing black people, slaves with iron rings around their necks. On Earth, the Arabs had practiced slavery to a far more extensive degree and far longer than Europeans had, a fact modern history teaching conveniently ignored. But the surprises didn’t stop there.

“These are trained slaves,” the Novadi leader who had not yet offered a name gestured to the next wagon with far fewer occupants who were nevertheless much better and more warmly dressed. “Teachers, advisors, singers, musicians and dancers!”

The eunuchs among the male slaves were all beardless and fat, the rest the men wise and capable-looking and the women were slim, beautiful and erotically dressed were it not for the thick blankets in which they had wrapped themselves. Laura’s belly rumbled and her heart beat a little quicker upon seeing them. It was still weird because she was aware that these were essentially human beings, but she couldn’t help it.

‘I’m gonna rub you in those spices and make you even hotter,’ she thought, her mouth watering.

But Janna had to ruin it, of course.

“We don’t want slaves!” it finally broke out of her. “Set them free, now, I demand it!”

Laura panicked a little when she felt what may be her last chance of a kicking, screaming dinner slip through her fingers.

“Speak for yourself, jackass!” she shot in English. “Those dancers aren’t going anywhere other than in my belly. I want me some of that oriental flavour, extra spicy.”

The look that played out on Janna’s face spoke of bloody murder but before they could fight, one of the slave girls started to unleash her own brand of fiery fury.

“What does this mean?!” she demanded with arms crossed before her chest, her speech heavy with accent and displeasure. “Does she not want us?! I can make men drop their seed in their pants without even touching them, you ignorant giant! You have not even seen me dance!”

‘Now there’s bravery,’ Laura thought full of admiration while Janna deflated like a holed car tire.

“You don’t understand!” Janna explained, gesturing at Laura. “She wants to eat you!”

It was a tad awkward for Laura when all eyes suddenly pointed at her. There were probably fifty or so Novadi men, at least forty blacks and perhaps twenty skilled slaves, not to mention Ardan and a few Honingers watching the spectacle. There were a lot of eyes.

Now it was the girl who had spoken who shrank down.

“Oh!” she made, her almond-shaped eyes big, dark pools in a sea of pristine white. “Oh, no, please! They told us we would dance for you! No, don’t eat me, please!”

“What do we need dancers for?” Laura smiled at the girl and gave her teeth a playful lick. “Especially ones that look so yummy.”

The girl broke down crying, her colleagues or whatever one should call them huddling around her. They were completely powerless. If it weren’t for Janna, Laura would have had the girl on her tongue already, see how she could dance there.

“No one will eat you, little one,” Janna tried to soothe the girl. “You’ll be set free and then you can do whatever you like!”

“In that case, I would like to return to the caliph!” demanded one of the wise-looking men. “I am an architect. I do not wish to dwell in this frozen land, repairing ramparts and gate houses! In my home I dined off golden plates and worked with the most skilled artisans. I will gladly trade in my freedom for a set of silk cushions, thank you!”

“Demand and supply,” Laura explained calmly when Janna looked like she was having another meltdown. “Very skilled slaves can expect to live pretty kickass lives. How about this, you can have these bottom feeders and play Martin Luther King, and I get to give these over-privileged ones a dose of equality. Also, you can have the gold and gemstones and whatnot to give to them, and I get the spices. I swear, those you free, I won’t even crush them by accident.”

“Okay,” Janna agreed much too quickly.

She probably hadn’t even fully processed what Laura had said.

“Heh, heh!” Laura laughed at the architect. “You can be my cushion, if you want. You are mine.”

Terror and distress swept through the skilled slaves like a swarm of mosquitos but the nameless Novadi leader looked pleased.

“And here we have,” he gestured for the cover to be removed from the last wagon, “lions!”

“Oh this is too perfect!” Laura chuckled when she saw the yellow beasts in their cage.

The animals were very angry to be exposed to light and cold, and captivity and climate seemed to have done a number on them too. They weren’t exactly stellar specimen and there were only three, a male and two females.

“Laura, you’re not eating any more endangered species!” Janna flared immediately.

Laura shrugged and gestured, “Look at them, they’re almost dead anyway! Huh?”

To both of their surprise, the fat man with the weepy voice was now weeping truly.

“I most humbly beg your forgiveness!” he cried out. “We had camel, fifty head! We had poisonous lizards and snakes! We even bought elephants from the Mhanadi, those watermelon sellers! But they all died! They succumbed to the cold and then we had to spend some of the gold to buy these horses! Oh, Rashtullah forgive me!”

He seemed even more distraught than the slave girl had been but there was no telling whether or not it was just an act. Laura certainly found it amusing, although she would’ve liked to know how raw elephants tasted.

“How big is an elephant to us?” she quickly asked Janna.

The other girl held out her fingers, “Probably like a small mouse?”

‘Gutsy,’ Laura thought and sucked in her breath. ‘But after some Mibeltube maybe I’d try one.’

It was time to go to warmer places anyway. The only question was how to get there.

“Yeah, fuckin’ eat the lions,” Janna belatedly conceded their last point of contention. “It makes me sick to see them this way.”

“Thank you for your gifts!” Laura addressed the pathetic weeper. “You may watch while we put them to good use. Oh, and thank your caliph as well! Uh, did he want anything in return?”

The man rose up immediately, revealing a tear-free face, “This is an invitation! Our master wishes nothing more than to host you at one of his palaces and do you homage!”

“Is this guy nuts?” Laura smiled a broad grin at Janna. “He wants us to come to him. What, does he think we’re like three metres tall?”

“Probably,” Janna chuckled before sighing. “Or he wants us to flatten some people for him. That’s kind of what they all want, isn’t it.”

“Hm,” Laura made happily before turning back to the Novadi. “We’ll see what we can do. Now, step aside please.”

In a marked switch of personality he started to bark orders in his native tongue, gone the weepiness and high-pitched tone. All his men, especially those on top of the cages, scrambled for their lives.

Laura peered into the cage that contained her supper while slowly and bloodily mauling one of the draft horses between her molars. Some people started to beg. Others knelt down and prayed to Rashtullah. The cages were made of forged irons bars and there was nothing else the tiny people could do. They were completely at her mercy.

Slowly and methodically, she started to arrange the baskets and sacks full of spices before her just like a tray in a restaurant. There were fewer people than she would have liked, and even fewer good-looking girls. She counted twenty- four prisoners among which seven were eunuchs, seven men of very diverse origins and ten women.

She didn’t want to eat non-eunuch Novadis, she decided. They had too much chest hair. She would eat the lions who were obviously hairier, but theirs wasn’t black and coarse and so akin to pubes. It was probably a bit silly, she resolved, so maybe she might still reconsider.

‘Now, about swallowing those lions.’

They were bigger than people and would probably put up more of a fight. All she could do was try. To test her throat, she picked a smaller draft horse, put it on her tongue and slowly worked it backwards toward her throat. Just when she forcefully swallowed she noticed that her human snacks had become silent and stared at her in complete and utter disbelief.

She winked at them and giggled when the kicking, screaming mare she had just gulped down was tickling her throat a little.

Meanwhile, Janna had watched with increasing scepticism but now started playing the big liberator.

“Everybody, step back from the sides I don’t want you to get hurt!”

They started freaking out in some ooga-booga tongue, evidently believing they now occupied a prime spot on Janna’s menu. It was a blessing Christina wasn’t there as a witness.

Laura acted quickly. With her fingernails, she pried open her slave cage at the top, bending the metal like shreds of tinfoil, and went inside wiggling her fingers until she had a fat, plump eunuch in her grasp. Her eyes fixed upon the black men in the other cage, she put him on her tongue, crushed him flat against the roof of her mouth until he popped, and put the gory but nevertheless still kicking result on display, inflicting shock and terror.

But there was one among the half-naked tribesmen who shouted at the others upon which they calmed and did as Janna had bidden. Laura was keen enough to see it play out so she swallowed her eunuch and sat back.

Janna crushed the cage between her fingers until one corner popped open from where she then pulled the whole, sturdy thing in two as if it was nothing, not harming anyone of the men. The one who had apparently understood immediately shouted at those who wanted to make a mad dash for freedom without the starting capital Janna wanted to impart upon them. This found her approval and she smiled.

“This is all for you,” she said and started to pile chest after chest of wealth before them. “You are rich now, and free! You can go wherever you choose and no one can stop you.”

The next guy with a knife might have some alternating opinion on that, Laura thought, but she said nothing.

Hilariously, the black men didn’t even look twice at the gold, silver and gems. They didn’t seem to know what it was for. Conversely, the talker, a tall, lanky guy with very dark skin and a shorn head spread his arms and started to call towards Janna.

“Goddess...make...free!” he shouted, his eyes scarily wide and his chest heaving with religious exacerbation. “Goddess...make...free!”

“Yes,” Janna agreed, a little awkward but also very moved by the display of gratitude. “Go on now, go live your lives however you see fit.”

“Goddess...make...free!”

Others started to copy the cry, butchering it into a cultish murmur and a movement started from the centre of the group as they rushed not away but towards Janna.

“Goddess...make...free!”

“The town is that way,” Janna pointed awkwardly. “You should use this gold to buy yourselves some clothes!”

“Goddess...make...free!”

There was much about this trip Laura would never forget but what unfolded next would be very near the top of the list, to be sure. Janna had her left foot under her right leg and was almost sitting on her boot while her right foot was placed firmly on the ground in front of her left shin with her knee up in the air. It was this boot that the freed, grateful slaves were now running for. And run they did.

“Whoa, you don’t have to do this!” Janna shouted and started to shift but it was already too late.

They were on her boot and under it, all over it with their mouths, scraping away the mud and pulped plant matter to plant kiss after kiss upon the brown leather. Laura was almost a little envious, although she would certainly have preferred to go barefoot in this situation. The little black men looked as though they were perfectly willing to make love to Janna’s foot while Janna was completely overwhelmed.

“Stop that!” she commanded when they started to go for her other foot as well. “If I move, I’ll crush you, stop it!”

“Communication breakdown?” Laura asked with a grin.

It took a fair amount of restraint not to start rolling on the ground laughing.

Janna exploded, “What the fuck are you looking at, take care of your own shit!”

That finally made Laura burst with laughter but she also found that one of her slaves had climbed the cage walls like a ladder and was almost at the top. It was the wise man who had wanted to go back to the caliph.

“Architect, huh?” Laura regarded him cruelly when he struggled between her fingers. “I bet you could work out how much weight I’m putting on top of you, but I don’t want to wait that long.”

True to her word, she lifted her right butt cheek off the ground, slipped him under it and sat down slowly. He had probably designed the most beautiful arches at his master’s palaces. And now he died, crushed flat between a young girl’s butt and a patch of mud made hard as stone by her weight. She didn’t feel bad about it.

After feeling him turn into pancake under her, she wanted to try the spice and belly dancer combination next but the shouts of “Goddess...make...free” were simply too distracting.

Janna had leaned back very slowly and lifted both of her feet carefully into the air where they now hovered. The problem was that her thick legs were undoubtedly tired after another day of walking and she could not put her feet down because the black men kept running underneath them with a speed that white people simply could not muster. She also couldn’t move quickly without shaking off those who were still on top.

“Just give them what they want,” Laura suggested. “Or better yet, slip out of those boots and see what they go for.”

Janna winced but there was hint of intrigue there too.

“That’s demeaning,” she said, forcefully dismissive.

Laura shrugged, “I wasn’t the one who told them to do whatever they pleased. I mean here you are, their goddess incarnate, you’ve liberated them from the yoke of the desert people, you’ve saved them from my feet and now you won’t even let them lick yours. Pff, and you call me cruel.”

Janna seemed taken aback, “You wouldn’t have eaten them?”

It was racism bait and Laura wasn’t falling for it, “Not after they’ve been all over your stinky stompers!”

Janna half suppressed a smile and retorted, “I keep very clean feet, unlike you!”

That was a bold-faced lie, obviously. Walking around all day in leather boots with no spare socks meant what it said, and Laura’s feet weren’t much better due to snow melting on her sneakers and making her feet periodically wet.

But this bait, Laura took.

“Let’s try it then,” she said. “See if they still go for your toes if you take those boots off.”

Janna sighed, “Laura, these are human beings. They have dignity.”

“If anything, they have a foot fetish,” Laura corrected with a nod at the increasingly desperate men calling for their goddess.

Janna grunted under the strain of having to keep up her feet.

“Is that like a cultural thing?” she asked. “Like are there any examples of where they worship feet?”

It was rare that an anthropology question made Laura giggle, but this one sure did.

“No!” she shook her head trying to erase the most absurd pictures forming in her mind.

“Then what the fuck is wrong with these guys?” Janna wondered at the black crowd still doing their level best to get flattened. “I mean, they could go to my ass, my arms, my elbows. What’s so special about my feet to them?”

“They probably like strong cheese,” Laura quipped before getting serious. “I guess it’s the only part of you they could naturally reach if you were standing. Also, kissing someone’s feet is associated with submission. They want to submit to you because they think you’re a goddess, and a good one at that. They know I’m evil, so I guess I’m not getting any of that enthusiastic toe-tonguing unless I threaten to kill somebody. Hey, you think Devona would mind if I made Ardan have sex with my toes?”

She was mostly not serious about it. They had agreed to leave Ardan and Devona alone as much as possible, but then again he was there and he was a strapping, tall, handsome boy in Laura’s age range. If Janna hadn’t been there, Laura would’ve had her fun with him, and his wife too. She wondered what it would be like to watch them make love to each other while she masturbated.

“I don’t think she could hate you any more than she already does,” Janna replied dryly.

‘Tough luck,’ Laura thought. ‘It’s not my fault she is so tiny.’

She looked down and spied the dancing girl from before, immediately going for her with her fingers. The little beauty kicked, screeched and scratched but was ultimately only able to delay the inevitable for a few seconds.

“Mh, feisty,” Laura chuckled while disrobing the girl bit by bit trying not to accidentally tear her to pieces.

When she was naked, the hapless girl found herself dragged front and back over Laura’s tongue before screeching as she rapidly descended toward the spices. Laura went for the reddest, most chilli-looking powder first, dipping the girl in and rolling her around to coat her. She looked hilarious afterwards.

Just by herself, the girl had a sweet taste to her, not very intense but nevertheless pleasurable, almost as if eating the distant scent of flowers. The flavour of a chewed person was much stronger, of course, but Laura felt a very personal connection when tasting someone’s skin unadulterated, especially a special someone’s.

Coated in the red powder, however, it was a different thing entirely. The stuff burned like fire upon her tongue when she slipped her involuntary dipping-stick past her lips. It was very intensive, but also very flavourful. She had always loved the actual taste of chili peppers and seen excessive spiciness as a sort of unavoidable circumstance one had to endure in order to get it.

She sucked the girl lightly for a while, enjoying the taste of home.

“Please!” the girl cried whenever she wasn’t drowning in saliva. “Please don’t eat me!”

“Those any good?” Janna nodded at the spices.

She couldn’t hear the little dancer begging for her life in Laura’s spit.

Laura took her out, dunked her in the powder again and held her so that Janna could taste her.

“A simple yes or no, maybe?” Janna prompted but Laura shook her head.

“You gotta try this. Plus, if your little worshippers see you do it, maybe they finally get the memo. You can’t yoga like this forever.”

Janna scrutinized the terrified little girl before her.

“Give me a different one,” she demanded. “This one’s got your drool all over it.”

Laura protested, “I’ve literally French-kissed you and now I gross you out?!”

“Food is different,” Janna said. “And I wanna eat her for real, I’m fucking starving.”

Laura pretended to be annoyed, tossed the first girl back into her mouth to suck on her and took another dancer. This one, she held so that Janna could lick her before coating her in the spice and letting Janna suck her from her fingertips.

For a moment, distant screams of terror could be heard as Janna mulled the girl around.

“Orgh!” she made then before her jaw turned the girl into a smoothie. “It’s so spicy! Mh, but with the blood and meat it’s much more balanced. Can I try the yellow?”

 “You got your own harem,” Laura laughed, hinting at the black men who had now begun to cheer.

Janna wasn’t happy, “What the fuck, I thought they would run away!”

Laura took the girl from her mouth again and rolled her in one of the other powders, “They were enslaved by the Novadi. And you’ve just eaten a Novadi. I don’t know, if you don’t want them on your feet maybe you should crush one of them.”

“Fuck this,” Janna said and sat up. “Help me get these guys off. If they want my feet so bad, they can have them.”

Laura’s girl went back into her mouth, releasing a very nice gingery flavour.

“They must be starving,” she chuckled while doing as Janna had said. “Toe-jam for supper, boys!”

Janna rolled her eyes but still had to join in the laughter. And true enough, while Laura’s involvement seemed to cause some initial irritation, once Janna’s feet were out of her boots, the freed slaves ran to worship them.

“You guys are so disgusting,” Laura noted while observing Janna remove the sweaty sock from her left foot while men were already kissing and licking it.

“This feels amazing,” Janna said dreamily while watching the men at and especially between her toes. “It’s cold but their tongues are warm. Take your shoes off. Oh my god, this one guy keeps crawling under my toe. You’re gonna get squished, little buddy!”

Amazingly, that was what she did. Her big toe came down and a pair of black legs went up momentarily only to fall back down a moment later never to move again. Janna could be hypocritical like that, always acting like a saint until she herself was having fun, and then a human life was worth less than dirt to her.

“And who’s gonna lick my feet?” Laura pouted, eager to get in on the action.

It wasn’t as if these tribespeople had a future beyond worshipping feet anyway, given that they didn’t even know how to use money. They were simply too far from home, and now they had rejoiced themselves into a position where two gigantic goddesses would play them to death with their toes, one by one, until they were all gone.

This wasn’t to say that they were the only ones acting stupid. A ragged, haggard, young local boy tried to help himself to some gold and gemstones, which he immediately regretted when Laura’s toes caught him.

“Aw, poor guy,” Laura cooed in her baby voice. “I sympathize with your situation but right now footsie wants to play smush-smush.”

Her toes manipulated him effortlessly. They twisted him around until he screamed and then they ripped him apart like hyenas falling upon a young gnu. The timing was a little awkward because the men Janna had just sent to worship Laura’s feet had witnessed the whole bloody murder.

Laura smiled at them evilly and they went back into motion. And Janna was right. Their little tongues felt incredible.

Not thinking too long, Laura finally swallowed the girl that was still fighting in her mouth and took a fresh one, got her wet, coated her in ginger, put her on her tongue and leaned over to kiss Janna and give the girl to her.

“Oh, ginger!” Janna made happily after the exchange.

But instead of eating the girl, she sucked her clean and pinched her between her fingers before taking her south into her jeans. Laura wondered briefly whether the girl knew or cared about the difference in the bodily orifices she was traversing, but Janna certainly wasn’t giving her time to ponder.

She herself was a little bit too hungry so she quickly spiced and ate all the leftover women and men from her cage and any horses she could reach, swallowing everyone and everything alive if possible. By the time she got to her lions she was already so good at swallowing whole horses that she wasn’t afraid anymore. The large cats roared and scratched and bit, but it helped them nothing. All three of them went berserk in her mouth. And all three of them were forced down her throat shortly after, tickling all the way down. They tasted like a zoo smelled, however, but she was willing to endure it for the kick.

Down in her belly, it was pandemonium. She could feel things walking, running, falling. And she could feel them getting weaker as her belly digested them.

Next to her, Janna was climaxing already. She had her back arched and both her hands in her jeans, and was releasing obscene sounds into the starless night. Her feet curled downward so that her toes scrunched everyone in front or between them. It was beyond her control and so the worshippers did not receive mercy from their goddess.

Laura looked at her own two feet and the men worshipping them. They had seen, and now they seemed to have second thoughts. She simply did what Janna had done, but consciously, grinding the men to mush between her toes, relishing the warm sensation. There were no survivors.

On the other side, a few had escaped certain death. But when Janna suddenly stood up they were mercilessly trampled flat under her soles while she stretched and rubbed her belly.

She mumbled something about having forgotten to eat before crouching and going for her share of horsemeat.

‘Yeah,’ Laura thought. ‘And I forgot to cum.’

A remedy for this problem was not easily at hand, however. She didn’t find the male Novadi who were still watching particularly arousing and pretty much everyone else had understood that it was unwise to stick around. Laura stood up and dusted herself off before starting to step on the Novadis, quickly wiping them out to a man.

They barely had time to complain before her feet flattened them.

“What are you doing?” Janna asked, disapproving but not quite condemning yet.

“Don’t want all this getting back to the caliph,” Laura gestured at the field of slaughter between them. “He might think we’re weird.”

Janna shrugged and went back to her horses.

“You forgot me!” a voice called from below.

It was Ardan Jumian Galahan, sword in hand, stepping out from the shadows and amidst the flattened Novadi. Laura hadn't known he was still there. Had he been among the others she would have accidentally killed him, no question about it.

“Ardan!” she called. “I almost crushed you, you little idiot!”

“Be careful!” Janna scolded from the side, unclear whom she meant.

“I thought you had gone!” Laura explained while crouching to pick him up. “It's late, come here, I'll bring you back to your wifey.”

Ardan looked at her palm on the ground without moving. He seemed utterly downtrodden and dark, no image of his former self.

“She's gone,” he said. “She has left me.”

Divorce was a thing in the middle ages, but it still surprised her to hear it, and it made her sad too. The two of them had seemed like such a sweet couple.

“I'm very sorry to hear that,” she withdrew her hand.

She felt guilty and didn't know what to do.

“Aw, why did she leave you?” Janna joined in from behind. “Was it because of us?”

‘Say no! Say no!’ Laura prayed.

Ardan lowered his sword between his feet and rested his hands upon the hilt, staring at the mud and crushed corpses.

“She lost our child,” he said, calmly but bitterly all at once. “And then she went back north to Farindel. Someone needs to protect the gate, she said.”

“Aw, goddammit,” Janna sighed, shocked.

It was the ultimate downer and put an immediate end to Laura's sexual ambitions. Masturbation would cheer her up but just now she felt she deserved to be sad.

Caring for the little people was a two-way street.

“Well, maybe she comes back!” Janna tried to be positive. “Maybe she's just looking for someone to do it. She found Herlogan's daughter before, right?”

Ardan looked over to her saying nothing. Laura sensed that he did not much care whether he lived or died.

“Listen,” she said. “We got all this gold and silver. We want you to have it. Spend it on your city. Make sure it becomes as beautiful and rich as it was, or more, even. Tell your people we're sorry for everything we've done. We'll...go away from here and try to be nicer in future.”

There was little doubt in her mind that she had caused Devona's miscarriage. And it tortured her.

Ardan said nothing. He just turned on his heel and went, not even taking his sword. He left it sticking in the blood-soaked ground.

“That was a fine speech!” an angry voice called from the sky. “But I sure hope you didn't mean that!”

It was the black sorcerer, riding a skeletal dragon, and behind him sat Steve and Christina.

-

“Out with you, Stonebreaker. You too, Ibn.”

He was one of Lord Ilaen’s men, disarmed and only following orders.

Retoban protested, “Why?! We're safe here!”

“The one who can speak said so, that's why,” the soldier replied in a tone that brook no argument. “Now, are you coming or must we drag you?”

The ogres had taken the castle. It all happened so quickly that Furio had not seen. As they tried to rush outside they had been forced back by those who retreated and been told to hide. It was their only course of action.

“Out, all of you out!” another man shouted outside. “Out or they'll crush the building and kill all of us!”

“What of Lord Ilaen?” Furio inquired quickly. “What of Lady Moraine and the children?”

“Milord's jumped off the walls,” the man's face hardened. “They ate the children. The lady is not in a good way.”

Furio sank down back on to the upturned bucket on which he had been sitting.

“He jumped?” Retoban inquired, aghast with the news. “Did he die?”

“Don't see how he could live,” the man said. “And the same will said of you if you don't move. The ogres will bring down the building, you inside or no.”

And with that, he went. The two colleagues looked at each other and made haste to follow.

They had practically been under arrest in the castle. Lord Ilaen had been behaving strangely and Furio suspected a link to the Red Curse.

‘He jumped off the walls and to his death,’ he thought. ‘Just like his mother. But what if he survived?’

What if both had survived? And what had happened in the Farindel that day the sky turned red? The Curse had been retreating since then, but it seemed to Furio that it was living on in Ilaen just as it must have in his mother.

Outside, the ogres awaited them, all those who had hidden. On the stairs, he saw Lady Talia of Albenblood-Lighthouse, the beautiful, graceful girl among the lesser noble ladies attending Lady Moraine. Washerwomen, potboys, craven soldiers, they all formed a long line walking into their doom.

Furio was a mighty wizard. He could kill an ogress with his Ignifaxius spell. He might even have been able to take on three of them, given a little luck, but outside in the courtyard there were more than twenty of them, all grim-looking, some laughing, some sitting and some killing.

They were all female, too. An ogress had the proportions of a woman, far as he could tell, except they were between ten and thirteen paces tall. This bunch had to be all of an ilk because they shared the same shoddy brown hair colour, a tad duller than chestnut. Because of their size and strength, most human-made fabrics were too fragile for them, and so they clothed themselves in the furs and raw hides of great beasts. Still, most of them wore little more than breechclouts.

He and the others were herded into the middle of the courtyard by Albenblood men who were now doing the ogresses’ bidding. A crushed corpse with the clear imprints of a large female naked foot was sharing the space with them. It was Ardwain, the leathery castellan.

Opposite them sat cross-legged a big ogress with a mane of brown fur for hair. She had Lady Moraine standing on her sternum with her arms and hands in the ogress’s mouth, picking her teeth for her.

It was gruesome.

“Stand over there, come forward one by one, you will all be asked the same question,” the soldier from before said.

There were simply too many ogresses, nothing one could do other than bow one’s head or die. It turned out that this was precisely the question the sitting ogress posed them.

She waved for someone to come forward and Lady Talia went first. Only then did the ogress pull Lady Moraine out, finally giving her a respite.

“Serve or die?” she addressed Lady Talia in a leisurely voice.

“Serve!” the beautiful, young woman answered with a curtsy, her head lowered.

But what horrible things this implied became clear only afterwards, when a laughing ogress took the noble lady by the waste and carried her aside. There, she was laid on her upon the dirty ground. Then an ogress placed a giant foot on either side of her and lowered herself to smother the girl’s face with her crotch.

It was a disgusting scene and it was merciful that the loin cloth hid the worst of the details. Lady Talia cried and fought back, but the ogress only laughed.

“Rashtullah have mercy,” Retoban muttered beside Furio when the ogress started to pleasure herself like a giant, wanton animal, using the little, fragile lady as a pillow.

An older serving man, a cook perhaps, rushed forward.

“Die!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Spare me this!”

The sitting ogress, so far the only one to converse in the common tongue, waved a hand. Another ogress from the side stepped forward and took the man. She was carrying him away but the sitting ogress told her something in their brutal, harsh tongue, and the other made her killing of the man into an example.

She took his torso in one, and his hips in the other hand. Like twisting the head off a rabbit, she turned the two halves of him in opposite directions, snapping his spine and then tearing him apart. She was immeasurably strong.

His guts and blood fell down onto the cobbled ground with a wet splash and the ogress chuckled. She tossed the man's lower half to another before finally ending his agonising screams by crushing his head between her molars for all the prisoners to see.

 “You won't all serve like this,” the lead ogress gestured towards Lady Talia beneath the now moaning and grunting behemoth crushing her. “But you will die like that.”

She gestured to the other ogress who was now tearing mercilessly into the man's torso with her teeth, snapping bones like kindling. Everyone she waved forward after that chose service, but that didn't mean everyone got to live.

Comely girls and young men were immediately abducted and taken to be used in the same manner as Lady Talia. The little lady meanwhile had survived her ordeal, only to be sat upon by the next big monster. The ogresses seemed as addicted to the practice as a moth was addicted to flame, and they cared nothing for the lamentations of their slaves.

Whoever was not comely enough, got a lighter lot. The ogresses seemed to have been marching for a long time and people were commanded to rub their feet or build fires to heat water, wash them and warm them. It was a demeaning task but seemed preferable to being smothered by a wanton monster's intimates and having her arse cheeks crushing down on one’s legs.

Those who were deemed too old or otherwise unfit to be of use were killed. A fat, grey-haired washerwoman was the first. The sitting ogress waved her hand and one of the others dispatched the woman with a stomp before kicking her broken body to the wall.

When Furio's turn came, he felt his knees shake and there was a sudden warm wetness running down his leg. He wasn't that old, and after a bath and a shave he looked even presentable again. But he had felt old for a long time, and he was scared that the crushing weight upon his soul would doom him now.  

The ogress who decided looked at him for a while. She had Lady Moraine on her feet now, scrubbing the dirt from between her toes. All ogresses were barefoot, but their skin was thick and so they were resilient against the cold. It was either that or they didn't know any different.

“Have you no tongue?” the ogress asked eventually and Furio almost collapsed realizing that he had forgotten to say the word.

“Serve!” it broke out of him, hoarse, his throat suddenly made of parchment. “Serve! Serve! I pray your forgiveness!”

She laughed lightly, “Hm, I do not know. I gave you a chance and you didn’t want it. What can you do?”

She could be almost eloquent when she wanted to, but apparently that wasn't often the case.

He thought quickly and saw the ogresses who had taken wounds during the storming of the castle as his escape.

“Healer!” he shouted. “I can treat wounds! Some of you are injured, let me see to them!”

“Those wounds are nothing,” the ogress dismissed him. “But if you are so eager, you can come here and kiss my feet.”

Like a mean-spirited wench, she translated the cruelty to her brethren who laughed themselves chequered over it like fools. Furio was just glad he was still breathing.

He rushed forward and embraced his new mistress' feet like a lover, kissing her skin without a hint of hesitation to condemn. He heard more laughter, and in a flash he knew that he might find himself soon beneath the foot he was kissing.

He was tall among men, but it was almost as tall as him, to say nothing of the rest of her, all bone and muscle but for her mane. He intensified his efforts by licking, the lover's kiss, the way he had kissed Rondria. When he closed his eyes, he could imagine her before him, her warmth, her body, her skin. She had been killed by an ogress as well.

“Do you have a name, foot licker?” the ogress asked from above with an audible grin, yanking him from his dreams.

“Alrik,” he replied after brief consideration. “Alrik Stonebreaker.”

“Alrik,” she echoed before giggling. “Alrik Footlicker! Go on now, I haven't told you to stop. Mh, that's it!”

She translated the jape of his new name too, earning more cruel laughter.

“All you lazy worms look here!” she commanded then. “Look how Alrik Footlicker is doing it! That's the way you do it!”

He could sense the anger from his fellow people as they saw him, but he did not care. Now they would all look like him and taste the same dirt, the same crushed grass, the same sweat and skin and the same hint of blood that he was tasting.

While he was licking and next to him Lady Moraine gagged as she started to do the same, the ogress waved the next person forward.

“Serve!” he heard Retoban's voice call out, high and quivering.

Furio felt relieved for some reason until he saw the shadow of the ogress' hand waving. He turned around.

“Live, my friend!” the alchemist called to him before he spread his arms and raised his voice to the sky as the ogress came to end him. “Rashtullah!”

“No!” Furio shouted and fell to his knees.

But the ogress didn't listen. She kicked the lanky Tulamid over without effort before placing her heel over his head and torso. She leaned into the step, so much so that a gush of red blood shot out from under it, painting the cobbles.

And suddenly, Furio felt the same. He was pushed over by the foot he had been worshipping like a dog and pressed into the hard ground with merciless fury. It was so strong that he couldn't move a limb and he felt his end as the pressure increased several times with no signs of ceasing.

But then, it lifted again, all at once.

“Did I tell you to stop?!” the ogress with the wild hair flared. “Get back to it!”

He scrambled, just seeing Retoban's headless, ruined corpse being kicked onto the pile of other refuse. His mind was spinning. He had trouble keeping on his feet. There was only the task at hand now, survival and nothing else. And still, it hurt.

‘He saved my life,’ he thought. ‘His name was Retoban the Blue.’

That he could not remember the Tulamid's full name shamed him deeply. But nothing was as shameful as his death.

‘Why?!’ he wanted to scream at the ogress. ‘Why was he not good enough?!’

Was it the silver in his goatish beard, his thin stature, his coppery skin? He would never know. With a wave of her hand, the ogress had destroyed untold alchemical wisdom, future discoveries, not to mention one of the nicest and most competent men Furio had ever met. He had faced losses before, of course, Fabrizio, Rondria, Captain Phillipe Lefleur. But none seemed so unnecessary as this one.

As the proceedings went on, the leading ogress became bored. Furio had worked his way up and down the sole of her left foot and had his tongue at work on the particularly sensitive skin between her toes when Lady Moraine was suddenly struck in the face and knocked backwards onto the ground by the other. The ogress was right-handed, and presumably right-footed as well, and it may have been only by virtue of this that the noble lady found herself as a release to vent the ogress' boredom.

Once on the ground, the ogress immediately stomped on her with the ball of her foot, leisurely so and without a lot of force but likewise without care. Furio heard bones snap and the air being knocked out of Moraine's lungs. She gave a gasp when the foot lifted off her, but the reprieve lasted only for a moment before it slammed down on her again, mostly with the toes this time, breaking more bones and crushing the lady's body like a trampled doll.

This time when the foot lifted, Moraine was no longer moving. But it still slammed down on her again, this time crushing her skull open under a giant toe. The monster hardly seemed to notice, not even looking as she flattened the highborn lady stomp after stomp until there were no more bones to break and her innards started to leak out under her skirts.

“Urgh,” the ogress yawned. “Footlicker, take her away.”

He tried not to look at the corpse as he did it, dragging the now disgustingly light lady towards the body pile. On his way back, the ogress barked another command in the ogre tongue, and several ogresses fell like wolves upon those few who still had to be put before the question. They howled horribly together, the ones who ate and the ones who were being eaten.

“Clean off the blood, Footlicker,” the lead ogress commanded.

Furio stared at the crimson streaks shining in the firelight before working up the courage to open his mouth again.

“No, not with your tongue,” the ogress scolded him. “Get water!”

It was a relief.

With hot water and a rough cloth he went to scrubbing, hoping against hope that the ogress wouldn't get bored again. It was a forlorn one, but this time she seemed more inclined to talking.

“Was he of your blood?” she asked, leaving little doubt as to whom she meant.

She sounded cruelly interested, wanting to torture him with her words.

“A friend,” he replied as steadfast as he could muster. “He was a very wise man from far away and he saved my life.”

“And now he's mush,” she finished, satisfied. “Does that make you sad?”

He chewed his tongue for a moment, swallowing a bitter gulp of rage, sorrow and fear.

“He died very bravely,” he replied. “I hope his god accepts him into his realm and rests his soul.”

The followers of Rashtullah believed in a sort of paradise for those who had led good lives according to their ninety-nine laws. As for Boron's realm, the theology wasn't without contradiction. Some said it was akin to sleep, which Furio found would be the most worthwhile option. Others said it was a physical realm of dark corridors, endless between black pillars as tall as the sky and beneath an impenetrable mist where souls were condemned to wandering forever but never felt discontent.

“You humans and your gods,” the ogress sneered. “Do they give you courage when you lick the dirt from between our toes? Do they comfort you when we crush your friends like insects? Do you pray when we eat you, or do you just scream?”

She threw her head back and laughed.

“Everyone does according to themselves,” he said, a stubbornness making him refuse to give in to her torment. “That is all.”

He could feel her eyes upon him as he continued to scrub Lady Moraine's blood from her toes, and it was a while before she spoke again.

“Tomorrow we'll build,” she finally told him. “We’ll use the walls as a foundation and put a roof over the whole castle. We'll lay out the yard with cloth and fur, and we'll live like you do, warm and dry and with nothing to ask for. We'll crush your peasants into submission to accept us as your rightful masters. And we'll eat what you grow and your livestock, and you if you don't do as we say. Hah, hah, hah, and we'll crush you and fuck you whenever we want! But not you, Footlicker. You are dirt. Your tongue belongs between my toes until the day I kill you. You're too dirty to go between my legs.”

“Argh, no!” he heard a woman cry out, and his heart sank when he saw that it was Talia.

How the blond, beautiful little lady was still alive, he could not understand. If truth be told he had almost forgotten about her despite being aware that she was passed around like a wineskin at a campfire among the ogresses. Her hair was slick, her skin naked, raw and glistening. She must have seen the Netherhells tonight and still she was fighting.

“Some of you really don't understand your situation,” the ogress said disapprovingly while holding Lady Talia still by her arms and legs. “She's lucky she's such a sweetling, otherwise we would have gotten rid of her already.”

She exchanged a few words with the ogress from whom she had received the girl but Furio could not tell what about.

“Don't just stand there, Footlicker,” the ogress said, already sounding like the tyrant she wanted to become. “She's completely full of it. Wipe her down.”

Furio took a fresh cloth from his pale of steaming water but when Lady Talia was stretched out for him twisting and complaining he could not move. She's was so beautiful, even after what they had done to her, that he froze where he stood like a statue.

“No!” she wiggled and twisted, now revolted by the thought of being touched by him.

He held out the wash cloth with a shaking hand, pleading, “Do it yourself, milady! Do as she says or she'll kill us both!”

She looked at him in disgust, “Have you no honour?!”

He shrank, looking at the cloth in his hand.

‘No,’ he thought. ‘None of us do.’

He had the taste of ogre foot still on his tongue. He could smell it on his breath. He wanted to break free, burn himself out of his yoke with fire and fury. But there were too many ogresses.

“I'm...sorry,” he stammered when the lady snatched the dripping cloth from his hand to clean herself.

“There, there,” the ogress approved. “Don't misunderstand, I like a struggle. But if you want to live, you must learn to do as Footlicker does. I'm giving you a chance. I'll not sit on you and do the work for you. You'll please me with your mouth and you won't stop until I'm done, or I'll put you down and ride you. And you won't get up again after me, you better believe it. It’s so much better without holding back, hm, hm.”

She leaned back and flicked away her loin cloth before opening her horribly long legs. Her female parts lay exposed, a bush of coarse hair on the outside surrounding a swollen, voluptuous, wet cunt. It was so big that Furio could have squeezed himself inside it whereas his cock would not even begin to fill her.

Despite the display before him, he felt no arousal. Only revulsion. He did not envy Lady Talia her task.

But before the abuse could continue, something else happed. There was a great, tremendous whooshing sound overhead, and a gust of wind blew through the yard that was so strong it ruffled everyone’s hair, almost guttered out the fires and blew the snow off the roofs and merlons, making it tumble around in the flickering light.

The leading ogress scrambled to her feet, her demands and commands forgotten. She barked new orders in her ogre tongue.

“What was that?!” Lady Talia asked, and either for warmth or comfort threw herself into Furio’s embrace.

“I do not know,” he admitted, hugging her like a little boy. “It was so fast.”

The ogresses swarmed out, some wielding human weapons that looked like tiny reeds in their hands. A young man who wasn’t careful wound up kicked by a running ogress who wasn’t looking down, catapulting him through the yard to where another ogress, walking backwards and scanning the dark sky above, promptly and inadvertently trampled him. Her heel crushed through his stomach and lungs, ending his life in a instant.

Furio grabbed Talia by the hand and pulled her with him as he made a mad dash for the gatehouse leading to the outer ward. His initial plan had been to run to the top of the walls so he could see what the thing was that had flown over their heads, but now his thoughts turned to fleeing.

The portcullis was down, however, and it would cause quite a ruckus to pull it up. And he didn’t know whether or not the drawbridge further on had been lowered. The ogresses had evidently climbed over the walls rather than going through the gate.

“Watch out!” Talia screamed when an ogress almost trampled over them.

The tremendous womanly monster was making for the gatehouse as well, but unlike them she was not looking as though she thought the portcullis was going to stop her. She bent down and shouldered against the thing like a drunkard shouldering into a very tiny door. There was a thunderous sound and the screaming of cold iron, but much to her surprise, it seemed to hold firm. The ogress rubbed her shoulder briefly, but then she stood on one leg and kicked against the portcullis, leaning all her terrible weight into it, once, twice, thrice. Finally, the sturdy metal gave way with a screech, tearing from its chains and falling out of the building.

The massive iron bars plummeted to the ground in the outer ward, the ogress already stomping over them. Furio knew that if they were caught fleeing, it might be the end of them. But this was too good a chance to pass up.

He pulled Talia with him, through the gate and after the fleeing ogress. There was a distance between the inner and outer gates, deliberately so in order to repel attackers if they overcame the drawbridge, and there were stables and a shed lining the outer walls. They ran as quickly as they could until the eleven-meter-tall monster suddenly halted, freezing them both in their tracks. She looked into the distance over the outer walls, and into the sky too. And she was listening as well, but there was still shouting echoing from inside the castle even though the leading ogress had begun roaring for quiet in two different tongues.

“Come!” Talia whispered hectically and pulled Furio’s hand, off the middle of the path and into the adjacent stables.

The wooden structure was empty, half smashed to kindling and straw, and it still smelled off the horses which the ogresses must have eaten. But it was a good hiding place.

The sounds in the inner ward seized abruptly. Furio and Talia cowered together next to a wall, their breath frosting in the last remnants of light. The hour had become late and away from the fires it was so dark that one could hardly see. They both strained their ears, listening for the ogress.

She was clearly not fleeing, otherwise her stopping did not make any sense. It seemed rather that she was looking for what she perceived had been an attack, although she might as well have been checking on the drawbridge.

The beast did not make a sound for another few seconds. Then she grunted, and finally trotted back. When she passed the stable, both humans held their breaths for a long moment, but she never stopped to look for them at all. Furio could see Talia’s teeth flash in the darkness when she smiled with relief before she fell around his neck in a long embrace.

“You need clothes!” Furio whispered and quickly went in search of something suitable, feeling like an idiot when he realized he was in a stable.

He found a dirty horse blanket, however, which he supposed had to suffice for now until he could share with Lady Talia what he wore and then look for more. It was obvious that their absence would not remain undiscovered forever, not with the personal interest that the ogress with the mane had taken in them, but when they arrived at the gatehouse they found the drawbridge up and the portcullis lowered.

“The nameless take them!” Talia cursed and began to cry. “We never should have run! They will kill us! She will ride me like a bunny rabbit until I’m flat!”

Furio stared apathetically at the barred way before them. An iron portcullis that would cause such a ruckus that it couldn’t possibly be missed, then the thick, wooden drawbridge and beyond a deep gulch with sharpened stakes at the bottom. They were all meant to keep attackers out of the castle, but just now they served only to keep them trapped. He wasn’t a particularly good climber and Lady Talia was naked and had no shoes.

But there had to be a way.

“Stay here,” he said and sprinted into the gatehouse, finding a candle lantern that he lit with an elemental manifestation on his finger to inspect the gate further.

When he was close to it, he noticed that the counterweights, large stones encased in iron, there to allow for easier lifting of the heavy bridge and gate, had been severed from their chains and were lying abandoned on the ground.

“Why was this done?” he pointed.

Lady Talia looked back the way they had come, seeing if their doom was already approaching.

“I do not know!” she hissed. “I am a chambermaid, I do not deal with these things! All I know is the giant queen destroyed it when she was toying with it and we had to pay a blacksmith to come and mend it!”

That spelled nothing good. Furio wondered if he might be able to burn through the portcullis with a strong Ignifaxius, but it seemed doubtful. If anything, he would only be able blast a small hole into it that would be too small to climb through, not to mention burning with molten metal and making a lot of light.

The drawbridge did work, however, as he had witnessed when first coming to Feyrenwall. It would be loud, but it seemed to him that lowering the bridge and raising the portcullis the normal way was the only option. He only had to raise the iron bars a little, too, so that they could climb through. And if they were pursued, he could light the bridge on fire. It all depended on how long it took.

Not wasting any more time, he went back into the gatehouse and climbed the stairs. He could see the repairs immediately and almost rejoiced out loud because whoever had done them had replaced the old two windlasses with a single one by which the bridge and the gate acted as counterweights for each other, opening and closing both at the same time. It worked because for opening, the iron grate had to move up and the drawbridge down, and vice versa for closing. The portcullis was the heavier one, so the lever that released the snag on the gearwheel would unfortunately not do all the work for him. But it was still better than he had feared.

It wasn’t so difficult and did not take very long, and soon he was confident that there was enough time. But then, the ogres shouted again, all at once and in a way he could not understand. Sweat was pouring from his temples as turned and turned that damnable winch and the muscles in his arms screamed until finally it was done.

When he was outside, there was no sign of the ogresses in the outer ward but Lady Talia did not smile at him either. Instead, she was looking up over the wall, and when Furio saw what was there it froze the blood in his veins in an instant. A dark, giant shadow was blotting out the sky, moving with an eerie stillness along the nearby Tommel.

‘Janna!’ his first thought was. ‘Laura! I am here! Don’t forget me!’

But the shape was different. The details of this giant creature were hidden in the darkness, but its appearance was broader, somehow, rounder, and there was something about the way it moved that gave Furio pause, as well as the swarms of ravens that were buzzing around it like flies. He realized that this thing, whatever it was, had been the reason for the ogres’ shouting even though it showed no interest in the castle whatsoever. In any event, the noise of the drawbridge was irrelevant now, but soon there might be panicking feet running all over them.

He grabbed the lady by the hand and pulled her with him, out, out into the night and away from here. They would hide somewhere, he told himself. Anywhere not completely frozen would do. Tomorrow they would find clothes and shoes for Lady Talia. And then he would see about leaving Albernia behind.

-

The dragon was a skeleton, all bones, not even skin, and still it lived and flew, soaring magically and majestically through the air. It was capable of hovering too, levitating there while only occasionally having to beat its bony wings, one of which was broken and had half snapped off. The tiny black wizard with the mouse-grey hair on its back looked a bit ridiculous by comparison, and Steve and Christina in their all-purpose spacesuits looked downright as though they had wandered onto the wrong film set.

Janna had her mouth still full of horses and dried fruit that she particularly liked, being able to identify dates, figs, nuts and several other things, but that wasn’t what was on her mind right now. She didn’t know whether to be scared of the black wizard and his undead dragon, or whether she should be explaining the scene of abject slaughter at her feet to Steve and Christina, illuminated by the great fire.

Just to be on the safe side, she quickly wiped her toes on one another to scrape off the bodies before slipping into her boots.

“I cannot begin to express how tired I am of you!” the wizard scolded them from his flying, unholy mount, speaking in the local tongue. “All the things I did for you, and you throw them away like filth!”

Janna didn’t know what he meant, and neither did Laura, but luckily he went ranting right on.

“I told you not to go to the Farindel, but no, you had to go! I told you the ogresses were not your foes, that they could help you, but you let them run away. I flew over them on my way here. I wanted you to learn how to control them and learn their tongue so you could rule the great ogre army like gods! But no! And you killed Dari. Can you even begin to fathom how this inconveniences me?!”

He looked at Janna on the last point and she felt a pang of guilt in her side.

But then a voice in her head, different from the wizard’s, said, “Kill him! Be free of him! I will throw him into the air and you smash him! I will be kinder to you! Kill him and be mine!”

It was eerie even without the voice’s tone which sounded so evil, near and hateful that it raised the hairs on her neck and made her shiver.

“Who said that?!” she spun around her own axis, irritating everyone else.

“Will you shut up?!” the wizard flared, but when she looked she saw that he had meant his dragon. “I swear, I’ve had enough of these monstrous servants. They have minds of their own!”

“Yo, yo, guys!” Christina called down in a most wavering English. “Can you get us off of this thing or what, it’s freaking me out!”

The wizard could speak English before too and somehow he looked as though he wanted to crack a joke but then he slumped in his bony seat on the dragon’s spine and sighed.

“Huh, you all have minds of your own, I suppose,” he said. “Perhaps I should be clearer in my instructions.”

Laura piped up timidly, “Y-yeah! Like, how were we supposed to know what to do with the ogres when you don’t even tell us?!”

“It won’t happen again,” the wizard smiled dryly. “Let’s get your friends off my dragon so you can care for them. Can you acknowledge please that I have kept my word? Hm?! When I hover your hand, will you try to kill me?”

“No!” Janna declared immediately, her eyes fixed on Steve.

He looked pretty much like she remembered him, although in her dreams he had always been bigger, but he was every bit as cute. She held out her hand.

“Ah, you see, I don’t think I can trust you,” the wizard declared, even though far as Janna was concerned he was wrong.

She bit her lip, countering, “So, the shoe is on the other foot. You don’t trust us. What do you have to worry about, I’m still wearing your necklace!”

“Oh, those!” he laughed. “Ah, those are just plates of metal. Metal from your ship, mind you, so you may want to keep them for memory’s sake, but they aren’t cursed.”

Janna had to swallow hard when she realized how she and Laura had been tricked. She pulled the medallion off her head and looked at it, a crude, beaten piece of stainless steel. She flung it away in disgust.

“What do you mean?!” Laura complained. “If they’re not magical then why did they grow with us?!”

The wizard didn’t even look at her, “They grew with you, because they were on you when you grew.”

“So you’re saying we could’ve worn a bunch of clothes and they would be big now?!” Laura went on. “Why didn’t you say so, do you know how fucking disgusting it is to climb into the same filthy clothes every day?!”

That made him laugh, “Oh, I see! Another oversight for which must needs I apologize. Well, if you feel this way, then perhaps you’d be interested to know where the other half of your spaceship went?”

Laura’s jaw dropped and she spoke in English, “You’re fucking kidding.”

“I’m not!” the sorcerer replied. “Alas, it landed in a somewhat inconvenient location. It’s in the middle of the desert and very much in disarray, your belongings spilled and strewn all over. Tell me, what’s the use of those shoes that carry a long spike at the heel? Are they some sort of weapon?”

Janna looked at Laura, “You packed high heels?!”

Laura shrugged defiantly.

“Of sorts,” she replied to the wizard. “They make your legs look longer, but that’s not the point. Can you please tell us where?”

“The Novadi know,” he chuckled with a look down below. “I suppose you can’t ask these ones, but as it happens there’s something you could do for me down there.”

“First you give us Steve and Christina,” Janna demanded firmly. “I promise I won’t do anything to you.”

“Oh, you better not,” the wizard grinned when suddenly there were footsteps approaching, louder and heavier than any Janna had heard in a while.

When she turned, she fell to her knees and from there on her arse, and then she crawled backwards hearing herself scream.

For a split second, the sight of a male her size intrigued her, just the sight of someone tall, flat-chested and with broad shoulders. She recognized the suit and felt a vague sense of familiarity to him. But then it all swung the other way.

“My I present,” the wizard called out, “the Jake! Granted, he does not talk much anymore, but he is so much better looking!”

He was a bloated, rotting corpse, the water in his body making the most disgusting sounds, everything puffed up and inflated, black blood crusting on his pale, green skin especially around the deep, black hole in his forehead where ravens appeared to be flying in and out, eating his brains. The smell coming off him made Janna gag until she retched, loosing a fat puddle of vomit onto the crushed Novadis, raw meat upon raw meat, mixed with bile.

Laura on the other hand flew into a more productive motion. She leapt for the fire and pulled out a long, burning fir before running right at the giant zombie and plunging it like a dagger into his throat. A thick gush of black liquid came out of the broken skin and the tree snapped off, but that was all. Jake just stood there like a statue, unaffected, the flames doused by his blood.

“Ah, please,” the wizard complained. “He smelled bad already.”

He gave a gesture with his hand, and suddenly the zombie turned, striking Laura with the back of his hand so hard that she was knocked to the ground. Before she could get up, he was on her, moving heavily and clumsily, his hands around her throat, throttling her to death.

She was croaking and squeaking, trying to pry his hands off but he was much too strong for her.

“No!” Janna cried out. “Leave her be! Tell it to stop, we’ll do everything you want, please!”

Thankfully, the wizard waved again and his monster let go, righting itself back into an unmoving statue. Laura fell on her face, wheezing and clutching her windpipe.

“I didn’t want it to be this way!” the evil sorcerer argued. “But you keep forcing my hand! You know, a certain acquaintance of mine keeps telling me I should kill you both and turn you into Jakes, too.”

“No!” Janna crawled onto her knees, begging. “No, please, we’ll do anything, I swear it!”

“It would be easier,” he pondered aloud in reply before giving in. “But I don’t want to summon any more demons. They’re exhausting in their own way and every one eats a little bit of your soul until there’s nothing left but madness.”

Janna’s chest was heaving and she had to wipe the tears from her eyes to see.

“I didn’t want it to be this way,” the wizard repeated sadly. “I wanted us to be friends!”

“Yes!” she cried, her voice breaking. “We’ll be your friends! We’ll do whatever you want and we’ll never betray you!”

“Is she okay?” Steve called down in English with a look at Laura. “You better do what this guy says! He turned your pilot into a zombie!”

“Urgh,” Laura stirred, sitting up, her voice raw and bitter. “Thanks, Steve, I hadn’t fucking noticed.”

She looked up at the mighty, bloated Jake towering over her before leaning aside to spit. Janna breathed a sigh of relief.

“We can never be friends now,” the black wizard said and shook his head. “I did it all wrong.”

Laura stood up and groaned, “Nah, that’s alright, it was my bad. Silly misunderstanding. Uh, how you been? How’s the old evildoing treating you?”

It was brave and it seemed to salvage the situation as the wizard suddenly broke out into a fit of manic laughter. He seemed to enjoy the absurdity of it, but Janna was still too shaken to manage a smile.

“Oh, the evildoing is getting more complicated with every new front that opens,” he replied after calming himself. “I have trodden loose many small rocks but for them to become an avalanche they all need to roll at the same speed.”

“Sounds like you need a downward trajectory,” Laura spoke as if she knew what he talked about, desperately trying to be funny or at least interesting. “But what do you do if things are on the up and up?”

It was too cryptic and awkward, so the effort failed, but the black wizard still gave them a chance to redeem themselves.

“I’ll send the Jake away,” he promised. “He stinks anyway, and he’s the only thing that will keep Varg in line. She will harass the Garethians from the north and draw more forces to her. My easterly lines need some help but I’ve been busy with you lot.”

“So you want us to go east?” Janna inquired quickly so as to leave no doubt of her loyalty and the chance to get away from the undead monster.

What he said implied an attack on the Garethian Empire, but that mattered only marginally at this point. If the choice was murder or be murdered, shameful as it was, she would gladly opt for the former, no hint of a question.

“No, no,” the wizard waved off. “There’s something happening in the Horasian Empire. The Emperor has died and there is some confusion about the succession. I need you to sort it out.”

That didn’t sound very evil, Janna recognized, but then again, there was a civil war going on there, so any sorting out would probably involve a lot of squishing.

“Anything specific?” she asked. “Do you want us to trample all the temples, make the people worship the Nameless, anything like that?”

She was being serious, but he laughed heartily in her face.

“I will leave the details to your imagination, Janna!” he roared. “I’m sure you already have some ideas! But I need you to go somewhere else first, if you could. You see, the Novadi caliph has a nasty weapon. One might almost call it demonic. I want you to destroy his liquid sand golems.”

This was nothing short of bewildering, bordering on the Kafkaesque.

Laura spelled it out, “His what again?”

The wizard sighed, “His liquid sand golems. Like all golems, they are demonic creatures, but rather than stone or clay, these ones are made from quicksand. They are impervious to all weapons but higher magic and you can only hear the faint sound of running sand when they move. They can go through any door or any hole, and they kill by smothering their victims in their bodies. The caliph uses them as assassins, you see, and I don’t want to die with a handful of sand in my mouth. You should fear them too! If one crawled up your nose it may well kill you, so be careful.”

“I’ll try sneezing,” Laura replied dryly. “But if they’re liquid and made of sand, how do we kill them?”

“Well, stepping on them won’t do you any good,” the wizard explained. “You have to kill their master. Find the caliph and crush him, and you should probably flattened his court wizards too, just to be on the safe side. That would give me rest.”

Laura shrugged, “Consider it done. You won’t begrudge us if we go to that spaceship and pick up some of our things, right? Please!”

‘Again with the clothes,’ Janna thought, but even she had to admit that it would be nice to have some fresh underwear every once in a while.

By this point, she couldn’t even remember what she had put in her suitcase.

“Only if you promise not to die of thirst,” the wizard allowed. “As I’ve said, it landed most inconveniently. Well then, who of you will take Steve and Christina? I’m sure you have a lot to talk about.”

“I will,” Janna said at once and held out her hand.

“This fucking guy,” Laura mumbled after wizard, dragon skeleton and giant zombie had gone off back to the north.

Janna agreed, “Looks like we’re no longer the biggest meanies around, eh. Are you alright?”

Laura’s voice still sounded strange after being choked.

“Wasn’t my first time,” she replied before they both turned their attention to their tiny friends.

They were minuscule, shivering there on Janna’s hand. If she held them too close to her stomach they vanished under her tits like the mites they were. And still, when Janna looked at Steve, she felt that sense of longing, and the feeling of wanting to be wanted. She was very glad he seemed physically unhurt, even though she worried for his mental state.

“What about you guys?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

They didn’t answer at once, exchanging a quick glance instead. Then Christina unloaded.

“What the fuck was that?!” she screeched, gesturing upwards. “Why did it take that guy to save us and why didn’t you fucking kill him?!”

It was very unfair.

“You saw him,” Laura started haltingly. “He had Jake, our pilot. Motherfucker almost killed me.”

“And the ogres said they would kill you if we tried anything,” Janna added. “We sent like medieval elite special forces to get you out, but they got killed. Then we sent the world’s best fucking little assassin to do it covertly, but that failed as well. And then we ran into this guy. He said he’d rescue you if we did evil things for him in the future, and that was kind of the only option we had left. We’ve been thinking about you guys every day since...”

“Since we learned of what happened,” Laura finished quickly.

It wasn’t so much a lie as an oversimplification in Janna’s mind, but it did its job a little too well. Christina started sobbing uncontrollably before breaking down, babbling things no one could comprehend. Steve put his arms around her and embraced her intimately, which made Janna bite her tongue with jealousy.

“Shhh,” he made. “We’re safe now. It’s all over. We’re okay.” He looked up at Janna, “We’re okay, right?”

She quickly pulled her tongue from between her molars and nodded her head, “Mh-hm, of course, why wouldn’t you be?”

And then he kissed Christina.

It was not on the head, not on the cheek, but on the mouth, again and again, like lovers. Janna felt her heart drop in her chest and land in her now empty stomach where it made her feel like she might retch all over again.

‘Who does this bitch think she is?’

“Here, take them,” she said quickly before shoving the tinies into Laura’s hand, breaking all conventions and making them scream and tumble.

It was either that or drop them, or close her fist and crush them both to paste. She had to turn aside and blink her tears away so as not to be discovered.

“Whoa, what’s with her?!” she could hear Steve object to the rude way in which she had handed them over.

Laura took it lightly, covering for Janna with a joke and a distraction, “She doesn’t like interracial, I think. Wow, are you guys a couple?”

‘Say no, say no!’ Janna thought.

She pretended to have a cramp in her arm, shaking it and kneading it with her hand.

“Sorry, guys!” she tried to sound sweet and unhurt. “It snuck up on me!”

Whether Laura bought it wasn’t important now, but at least Steve seemed to be convinced.

“Well,” he said, his arm around Christina’s shoulder while she held his hand, “we were always kept together, you know. Traumatic experience, I guess. And kinda one thing led to another.”

That relationships based on traumatic experiences didn’t statistically last long wasn’t really a solace for Janna. She was so mad that she wanted to scream. She was angry at Steve a little bit, but what he said made sense. A man had needs, obviously. It was Christina who had shamelessly abused the situation to her advantage.

“Were you treated well, did they torture you?” Laura pressed onward.

Janna tried not to think of how they must have shared a bed comforting each other, telling each other stories, and fucking like rabbits to cope with the stress and the long, uneventful days in captivity. It hurt too much.

“Nah, they treated us like royalty,” said Steve. “It was bizarre. Makes sense, though, I mean…since we were hostages. Yo, those ogres are super scared of you guys. Their queen is this red-haired monster who likes to impale people on stakes, but no one can speak about you in her presence. They made like a ton of giant weapons too, to fight you guys.”

“I don’t think that matters now,” Laura frowned. “We’re supposed to go south. That evil guy said so. We have to do what he says or he’ll kill us, and it involves some nasty shit.”

She looked at Janna and flashed the quickest of covert winks. Apparently, Laura had already forgotten her earlier promises to Ardan. But at least they had an excuse for when they had to be cruel.

“Really?” Steve said. “I thought, you know, other than the dragon and that whole zombie thing he seemed like a pretty cool guy!”

He was not joking.

Laura grinned, “Oh, I felt the same way, till his fucking monster tried to murder me!”

To see her talk, however, one almost wouldn’t believe it. She had gotten over it extremely quickly.

Janna felt shut out of the conversation. She didn’t know what to say. It was like going to parties with Laura. She would always flirt and get the guys, and Janna would sit there like an idiot, getting approached by second raters and drunks. She had never been so in-shape as now, but her social skills had not been steeled like her body.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Steve said in an admiring tone. “But you seem pretty cool about it.”

Laura laughed predictably, “Oh, we’ve been through a thing or two. Have you ever been in an enchanted forest?”

Now Christina spoke up, completely closing the circle without Janna, “When I was little, my mom took me to this old-ass place that had like display cases with these German folksy tales? Dude, that was scary as fuck. You could scan a QR-code and make them dance with lights shooting from their eyes and like…”

“That’s not what she meant!” Janna snapped, turning all their heads.

She had spoken too loudly and too harshly, ruining the mood. This reunification was going the way it had in her worst nightmares and it was pulling out the rug from under feet.

“I’m sorry, I’m fucking tired,” she mumbled and turned to go.

She wanted to roll herself into her sleeping bag and cry. If she had had a dog or something to cuddle, but of course that would be impossible. She thought  about abducting a random person from somewhere, someone to talk to and unload her woes. She could crush him afterwards so he would never tell anybody.

But Laura had other ideas.

“Hey!” she rushed after Janna and put a hand on her back. “What’s wrong?”

Janna had to lie when the tears started rolling, “It’s been a bit much today, I’m sorry!”

“Aw,” Laura cooed. “Come here.”

It was awkward hugging with the two tinies on Laura’s hand sandwiched between them, but Janna felt a little better for Laura being there.

“Oh, we got news too!” Laura cheered into her hand. “We’re also a couple!”

The rollercoaster ride never ended, it seemed. Janna could have slapped her while Laura laid her head on Janna’s breast and gleamed.

“Wow, congratulations!” Steve said, thoroughly taken aback. “I never knew you guys were, uh…anyway, that’s great!”

“Yeah, that’s great!” Christina echoed.

‘You fucking bitch.’

“I always thought, you were a lesbian,” Janna sneered down at the black girl.

Christina had always worn a short haircut and dressed in a tomboyish way, but now she had a half-fledged afro. Steve had a passable haircut, which must have meant the ogres had provided that for them too.

“Well, I had girlfriends,” she admitted, not taking the hint.

Steve grinned wide and shook his head, “That is so freaking hot!”

Christina laughed and slapped him playfully before kissing him, making Janna’s blood boil.

Steve looked up, “Hey, you guys fit so well together. Look, Laura’s head is precisely the same size as one of Janna’s titties!”

It was true, which made Laura look a bit ridiculous.

“Hey, I’ve got a small head!” she laughed while snuggling her face deeper into Janna’s T-shirt.

“What are you doing looking at her tits?” Christina asked Steve, not clear if she was still joking.

This, Janna liked.

“Look around,” he gestured, defending himself, cornered by Laura’s and Janna’s bosoms. “There’s literally more tits here than space!”

“And yours look kinda small,” Janna added, which was superfluous because to Christina, one of her breasts was the size of a small house.

She imagined dropping one on top of the little black thief and be rid of her. Laura had killed Valerie, but at least there had been some sort of justification. It would be easy to arrange for a little accident involving Christina, but this was something Janna still shied away from in her mind. She didn’t really want to murder her.

“It’s so great to have you guys back!” Laura said, interrupting the tits conversation. “But we should really go to bed now.”

While Janna fed the fire with more trees, Laura went to Honingen to arrange for blankets and some food for the little ones. Janna had lost her supper and had a hole in the belly, but she didn’t want to leave Steve and Christina alone any longer than necessary. She didn’t even eat any peasants when she went to get wood.

Their sleeping arrangements were relatively uncomplicated. Steve and Christina would sleep closest to the fire, then Laura and then Janna. This allowed Janna to keep an eye on the two lovebirds when she peered out from under her eyelid just over Laura’s head. She wanted to know whether they would be having sex or what they would be doing.

“Okay, if anything attacks you, you scream,” Laura instructed their classmates. “Just make as much noise as you can. We’ll come and save you. Also, please don’t walk around. I’m serious. You don’t want to get stepped on by us, believe me.”

They should be relatively safe between the giantesses and the great fire, but there was always some danger. Janna and Laura had briefly discussed moving camp to Abilacht, but it was simply too dark.

“Speaking of which,” Steve addressed the elephant in the room, meaning the crushed corpses in the field nearby. “What’s up with those guys?”

Laura reacted before Janna could make up a different lie.

“Bad hombres,” she said. “You don’t know the half of it. We were at a different city, right? And we just came back here, and we see these guys murdering, raping, pillaging, you name it. We have an arrangement with this city like before, food for protection. So we kinda had to, I mean…we drove most of them off but you can’t make them run unless you give them a seriously good reason. I can show you where they’ve cut me, look.” She held her hands into the firelight, showing the wounds sustained in the ogre ambush, many red dots and red lines. It was pretty clever. “There was no reasoning with these guys and they were armed to the teeth. You wanna see one? I’ll show him to you.”

She leaned, indicating her willingness to go get one of the corpses to prove the truth of her words, but Steve frantically waved off.

“Hey, I never said you killed innocent people!” he complained. “I was just interested, is all! I mean, you don’t do that, right? You don’t just step on people for no reason?”

In retrospect, perhaps the justifications had been laid on a little too thick.

“Of course not,” Laura shook her head. “But with this wizard guy…he wants us to do some pretty messed up things and if we don’t, then his zombie thing will kill us.”

“Well, that’s fucked up,” Steve conceded. “But how would he know?”

“He just does, okay?” Laura spread her hands in an impotent gesture. “We don’t know how. He’s super powerful, and yeah, he’s super fucked up. The guy is downright crazy. Did you guys get what we were talking about with him?”

If Steve and Christina had learned the common tongue then Janna and Laura would have no more method of covert communication.

“A little bit,” he said after looking at Christina. “Why does he wanna be friends with you guys so bad?”

Laura drew circles with her index finger on the side of her head, “I told you, the guy is loco! He’s forcing us but he wants to make-believe he’s just asking us a favour and we comply. I don’t know, maybe he gets off on it or something.”

Except for the last part it wasn’t really far from the truth, Janna felt, but she didn’t like that Laura had essentially created a carte blanche for herself to be evil. Incidentally, had Valerie heard this excuse and seen the physical evidence of the threat, perhaps she would still be alive rather than bitching herself into Laura’s digestive system.

They agreed to call it a night but even after Laura was hard asleep Janna still peered under her eyelid at Steve and Christina, not even allowing herself to go for a pee. The fact that they were together was incomprehensible to her, as well as intolerable. Something would have to be done but it couldn’t be so drastic that Steve would hate her. She really didn’t want to kill the girl either, but her mind just kept coming up with ways in which to make her disappear.

Eating her by accident would be a hard sell. Stepping or sitting on her would be too brutal, and perhaps a tad too quick, too. She wanted her to suffer. Hiring or forcing some local person to do it with a knife was probably the safest course of action if Janna could kill the catspaw before anyone else could question him, but that would simply be too impersonal. If somehow, Christina fell into her boot…but that would be hard facilitate.

Then she saw Christina peak up from her blankets. She was whispering something that Janna couldn’t understand, and then Steve’s head came up as well.

“Guess so,” he said softly.

Janna was as taut as a bowstring. Oh, how much she wanted to be in Christina’s place.

“Did you buy that story about the bodies?” the black girl whispered.

Janna found the question offensive, even though of course it was perfectly justified. Steve didn’t respond right away.

“What difference does it make?” he asked after a short while, also whispering.

“What difference?” Christina’s answer was sharp. “I think it makes a pretty big fucking difference if those guys were just some randos!”

Again, Steve took his time, cleverly avoiding getting pulled into a heated altercation.

“I don’t think it does,” he said. “We’re stuck here either way. Throwing accusations around is just gonna make everybody miserable, and we really don’t want to get on their bad side. Don’t you remember Val?”

Christina looked as though she was chewing on what she had heard, and Janna did the same. She didn’t like it, and there was no knowing what exactly he had meant about Valerie.

“Also,” Steve went on before Christina replied, “you gotta seriously stop antagonizing Janna!”

Janna pricked up and had to breathe calmly to keep herself from moving.

Christina spread her arms in protest, whispering harshly, “What the fuck did I do to her?! She looks at me like I killed her puppy dog or something!”

Janna had to tone down the jealousy, that was for certain. She made a mental note of it.

“I don’t know,” Steve swayed his head from side to side. “Just be nice to her. This is hard for her too.”

‘He loves me,’ Janna thought for a gleeful moment before reason kicked in and she had to admit that it probably wasn’t true.

But he liked her. He cared for her. That was a good start.

 “You know this one time,” Steve began to tell a story, “at the spaceship, she took me to the lake so I could take a swim. We were fooling around. Some locals came by and one of them wanted to race me. When I won, this fucking guy attacked me. I don’t know, I think he wanted to drown me or something, completely nuts.”

‘Don’t do it,’ Janna shivered and prayed in her head. ‘Don’t share this with her!’

She wondered whether she should make a sound, pretend to wake up or something, but she didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping.

“Anyway,” Steve went on like a train wreck in slow motion, “we ended up fighting in the water. The guy drowned, I don’t even know how. There were a few locals who had seen the whole thing and they got totally pissed off at me. I got scared, you know. I didn’t want to be branded a murderer.”

“You aren’t a murderer,” Christina said quickly. “You only defended yourself, right?”

Steve’s head swayed again, “Yeah, but for an anthropologist, it isn’t the same thing. Killing an indigenous person, even by accident, gets you your own Wikipedia article with like literally nothing else on it. So I panicked. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

‘No!’ Janna screamed in her head. ‘Shut your fucking mouth, you idiot!’

But he didn’t, “So I asked Janna to kill them all and get rid of the evidence.”

Christina gasped, she recoiled and her hand went to her mouth. Janna remembered every bit of it, how she had dug a hole with her hand and played coy before putting earth on top of the struggling villagers and then sat on them, crushing them in their grave. She had gotten to taste Steve’s cock after that. It had been wonderful, and now it was ruined.

“Did she do it?” Christina asked aghast.

Steve shook his head, “Of course not. She gave me a lecture on conduct and ethics and she scared me a little bit, but that was just part of the lesson. She’s not a bad person, Chris.”

Janna realized that she had forgotten to breathe until she almost fell unconscious.

‘Steve, you sneaky, little liar!’ she cheered in her head.

He had to really like her after all.

“I never told anybody this,” Steve said timidly. “Please keep it between you and me.”

Christina excused herself, saying she had to go pee, but Janna hardly heard it. Steve had lied for her, to his supposed girlfriend. And he had called her a good person.

She laid back and stared into the sky, happy. She even blew a silent kiss toward Laura’s brow.

Feeling the tension go, her other feelings returned. It was simply too late to do something about her hunger, but she had to go take a piss before sleep would come. She had been holding it for what felt like hours.

‘My, what a coincidence!’

She turned her head, seeing Christina walk away from safety in search of some bushes, and an evil plan formed inside her mind. What she would actually end up doing, as in, how far she would take it, she was still in knots about. But the opportunity was there.

She feigned a yawn and sat up, stretching and crawling from the warm embrace of her sleeping bag in nothing but her underwear. It was damnably cold, but she had to keep steady and act as if she was too sleep-drunken to notice anything.

“Janna!” Steve called a warning up at her when she walked around Laura and went straight for where Christina was. “Janna, watch out, Christina is over there! Janna!”

Her feet thudded heavily upon the ground and she rubbed her eyes with her thumbnail pretending neither to hear nor see. It would be so easy to turn the black girl into a grease stain now and shirk the blame. It would be quick, aye, but the sheer terror Christina had to feel when seeing Janna approach was good enough.

Christina had already seen her and started to call and wave, “Janna, hey, down here! Hey! Hey!”

Janna stopped her murder plans mid approach when Chris started to run away from her. She scratched her butt, considered for a moment, and pursued. She could have crushed the girl, but that would simply weigh too heavy on her mind. Instead, she decided to give Christina a bath.

It took her two more steps before she was over the frantic runner, gently brushing the tip of her toe over Christina’s head to make her fall. Then, she squatted.

She couldn’t look so it was a little uncertain, but the frantic pleas she heard spurred her on as she pulled her panties aside and started pissing.

“Janna, no, no, please, I’m down here, please-urgh!”

She circled her hips in order to cover a larger area and when she heard Christina’s cries turn into a gargle she knew she had hit her target.

“Ah,” she sighed pleasurably, fully letting go of her bladder.

It was a bit of Russian roulette, though. She didn’t want Christina to drown in her urine, but she also didn’t want to stop pissing on her. Towards the end, she felt merciful and turned her stream aside, but the fact that she couldn’t hear anything was very worrying. She couldn’t stop her act, however.

She also hadn’t brought anything to wipe herself off, and there was so much pee that it had touched both her feet now.

“Janna!” Steve called frantically from behind, sprinting. “Janna, what are you doing, stop!”

She pretended to wake up, rubbing her eyes and quickly covering her crotch with her panties.

“Steve?” she asked, suddenly realizing how wet she was between her thighs.

She could have taken him right then and there and gotten herself off with him. Maybe she should have pretended to think she was dreaming, rub out an orgasm with him while making Christina watch, if she hadn’t drowned in piss, that was. But it would be too harsh.

“Janna!” Steve called. “Christina is here, you have to look out!”

“Sorry, I just woke up,” she lied. “I was taking a piss. Where is Christina?”

“I’m here!” an angry, disgusted voice called, and Christina emerged from a behind a bush, wading out of the expansive puddle of urine, dripping wet from head to heel and steaming.

“Oh my god!” Janna gasped, trying her hardest not to break down giggling. “Where you taking a piss too? I didn’t see you!”

“I was fucking calling your name, you cunt!” Christina screamed as she started crying.

“I was sleeping,” Janna began to explain. “I thought I was dreaming, to be honest. I only came to when Steve called me. Oh, I’m so sorry, are you full of my piss?”

“Oh, gosh,” Steve made, shocked and revolted. “Oh, no!”

“Don’t just fucking stand there!” Christina cried like a toddler who had shat her pants. “Help me!”

“We gotta get her some water,” Steve said but Janna already spotted another opportunity.

“Ew, I stepped into it!” she announced, withdrawing her feet from the puddle and letting it thump down hard next to Christina to punish her some more. “Gross! I gotta go clean up too, I’ll just take her with me. You should go back to bed.”

Not waiting for a reply, she just picked up Christina and went for the pond around the ruins of Galahan Palace. It wasn’t very far.

There, she put the pitiful little girl down on the bank and left her waiting while she first got her feet clean, also breaking the ice. It was bloody cold, but inside her chest she was still glowing.

She also noticed a certain arousal she felt toward Christina. Not as strong as for Steve, but simply the fact that they knew each other. She had had an orgasm earlier, but that had been with a local, relatively speaking, someone she didn’t know. The belly dancer had not survived the ordeal, but with Chris she would cum harder even while having to restrain herself.

‘Just the two of us now,’ she thought. ‘I can do whatever I want with you. Too bad you’re drenched in my pee.’

She had to be careful not to say these things out loud.

“I’m really so sorry,” she said again without meaning it. “You know, that’s why we told you not to go wandering. To be honest, I could’ve stepped on you just as easily.”

‘I let you live, toy. Be grateful.’

Christina only stood there, shivering and sobbing.

“You believe me, right?” Janna pressed on testing the waters. “I really didn’t see you.”

She had put Christina purposefully close so as to intimidate her, so the little black girl could feel just how much Janna towered over her and how her weight pushed the frozen bank under her feet slowly into the water.

When Christina said nothing, Janna dealt her a gentle flick on the back, “I’m talking to you!”

“Y-yes!” Christina shouted, shaking. “I-it wasn’t your fault!”

Janna nodded, “I just wanted to make sure you understood that. So let’s get you clean.”

Originally, she had wanted to let her wait longer, but she needed the girl clean for her next trick. She took Christina with her fingers. Smiled and then simply submerged her into the ice-cold water.

Christina screeched like a fox on a stick before only bubbles were coming up from between Janna’s fingers. She was enjoying it a bit too much, she knew, but she still kept the girl submerged a little longer than necessary. There was absolutely nothing Christina could do about it. Then, once out, Janna shook her off, allowed her a few breaths and dunked her in again just as she wanted to start complaining. She wished her around the water more this time, to make sure she was clean.

“Cold, isn’t it,” Janna asked after pulling the coughing, wheezing girl from the water.

To give Chris a respite, she dumped her on the bank again before pulling away her own panties. She was considering whether or not she should tell her love rival to stay the hell away from Steve, but if she did that, the cat would be very much out of the bag and she feared the finality that might come from that.

She tried something else instead.

“Is it true, did you really have girlfriends?” she asked.

“Y-yes!” Christina nodded, shivering much worse than before.

“Laura is always nagging me for a threesome,” Janna grinned. “I mean, if you want, we would be totally open to that. And we’d be real gentle.”

Fucking Christina to death with Laura together somehow seemed pure and beyond reproach. After all, she participated willingly and if things got a little steamy one could lose control in the moment. People died all the time during sex, even at the same size.

“I don’t think so,” Christina smiled apologetically, speaking in a voice much higher than her usual one.

“Well, think about it, at least,” Janna offered before making to pick her up. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any tissues. Do you mind?”

She didn’t wait for a reply but simply took her, and then used her to wipe herself clean. It was hard not to start masturbating but for the clinging cold. Had it been warmer, maybe Janna wouldn’t have been able to constrain herself, but even still she used Christina liberally, wiping pee and arousal off her vagina before cleaning the girl in the lake and going right at it again.

“Thank you for letting me do this,” she told the shivering girl when everything was done. “It’s super annoying without tissues. But let’s not tell anyone about it, hm? It’s a little bit embarrassing.” Christina shook so hard that Janna genuinely worried a little, so she made another offer, “Should I put you in a warm spot?”

“No!” Christina shouted. “I’m f-fine, th-thank you J-Janna for g-getting me c-clean!”

“Okay then,” Janna smiled. “But seriously, don’t tell Steve about it. He would get mad if he knew I used you as toilet paper. You didn’t like it, did you?”

Christina shook her head vigorously.

“Phew!” Janna made. “Wouldn’t wanna cheat on Laura. She would get real angry with you and I think she might just, you know…” She made a squishing sound with her tongue before adding, “Just don’t tell anyone about it.”

Pretty happy with herself, but also quite cold, she went back to the fire. Christina was delivered to Steve who helped her undress and started to dry her clothes on stakes he had built from fallen branches. And Laura was still sound asleep, so Janna snuggled up next to her and waited for sleep to overcome her, thinking of all the fun she would be having the next day.

The next morning she awoke almost with a song on her lips, and before anyone else too. She made sure Laura was tugged in warmly before sneaking, as far as that was possible, over to their two little friends. It hurt her to see them this way, Christina’s head on Steve’s chest, his arm around her for protection. But he was just doing his job, being a good boyfriend. It was Christina who was to blame.

She leaned over them, watching, wanting to place a kiss upon him. That would have hit Christina too, however, so she held back. The black girl’s clothes were put on stakes closer to the fire, and she considered inadvertently stepping on them and grinding them into the dirt. But she would have to calm it a little, especially after what she had done last night. It was actually time to be nice to Christina for a change, if only to create diversion.

With this in mind, she dressed and went off to the city.

Honingen really wasn’t so great anymore, she found, with all the damage and the depopulation. But for the items she wanted, it was still good enough.

She addressed the next best group of people at random, “A wonderful morning to you, people of Honingen! I’m going to need a few things.”

While they scrammed to work off her list of demands, Ardan Jumian Galahan came out, seeing it as his duty to mediate between her and his citizens. She had demanded a fine fur cloak, fresh bread, soup, bacon, a hunting horn, a warm jacket befitting a nobleman as well as a sword, belt and scabbard.

“You can have mine,” Ardan offered flatly, by which he meant not only his weapon but also his fine, green doublet.

Janna still remembered how he had stuck his sword into the mud and walked off, and she felt a little sorry for taking his things but had to concede at the same time that they were probably the best available. Absurdly, the search for the items Janna requested turned up all manner of Galahan possessions that were looted from the palace after the ogresses had torn it down.  

“This is mine,” Ardan recognized another one of his swords when a runner came to deliver it.

The same was true for the next sword, an ornamented battle axe and a star mace, as well as several clothing items.

“This belonged to my grandmother,” he said about a beautiful, warm cloak made from the fur of minks.

“Oh,” gasped the man who brought it. “Begging pardon your lordship, we, uh, found it!”

Ardan did not punish the man. In fact, he seemed to be glad to part with all these things that reminded him of a past that was so much better than the present.

“Could I ask a favour of you?” she bent down to the little count. “If it’s not too much to ask, I would like you to teach the basics of sword fighting to someone.”

She would have accepted it if he had refused her. But maybe he didn’t know that. It all took a bit longer than she might have liked, because the preparations necessary before two men could hack at each other with swords turned out to be quite extensive, but it turned out alright.

She took the gifts and food back first, hoping that the reaction would be worth all the trouble.

“Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas, you guys!” she cheered at them.

They were already awake but Laura still grumbled and turned back around.

“Is it Christmas?” Steve asked perplexed. “Do they have Christmas on this planet?”

Janna sat down heavily and gleamed, “Of course they don’t. Or, I don’t know. We never asked. We should probably ask. What’s important is that you guys need some warm clothes, especially you, Christina.”

The black girl was still naked and wrapped into her blanket like a little brown sausage. She looked at Janna with a mix of fear and pain.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “These suits insulate pretty well, actually. Well, unless you get dunked into ice-cold water. That was super dangerous, by the way, you could have killed her.”

Janna tried not to take the temporary setback too personally.

She whispered so that Laura wouldn’t hear, “She was drenched in piss! It was the only option. Also, you guys got the same shots that we had, right?”

Before going on a spaceflight, several shots of cross vaccinations against pretty much all possible pathogens where mandatory.

“I’m not only talking about fever,” Steve said firmly. “Her heart could’ve stopped, she could’ve drowned, seriously, don’t do that again!”

“I won’t!” Janna promised, taken aback by the onslaught. “I’m sorry, I was super tired and freezing. I just wanted to get it over with. Was I a little too rough with you, Chris?”

Christina was visibly intimidated but still nodded.

“A little rough?” Steve called her euphemism. “She said you dumped her in a lake and pushed her under. She said she couldn’t breathe!”

Janna hid her mouth behind her hand, feigning shock.

“Oh my gosh, Chris!” she gasped. “Why didn’t you say anything!”

Steve all but yelled, “Because you scared her, Janna!”

Janna felt like they had had this conversation before. The logical step now was for her to play hurt, but she wanted to try something else.  

“Oh, come on,” she sighed. “You guys know I’d never do anything to hurt you. I thought tearing off the band aid in one go would be better than waiting half the night to get hot water. This is the Middle Ages, you guys. If Chris would’ve preferred to spend three hours in my piss then she should’ve said so, I’m not a mind reader.”

Laura turned around, showing her usual, dopey morning visage, “Yo, somebody is trying to sleep over here. What are you guys so worked up about?”

“I sorta sleepwalked to take a piss last night and I hit Christina,” Janna explained quickly so as to frame the issue in her favour.

“Ew!” Laura frowned, quickly looking whether there was pee anywhere near her.

“It wasn’t here, it was over there somewhere,” Janna gestured.

The spot had turned into a swamp before freezing over, looking surreal and disgusting now. It was a tad closer than she would normally relieve herself, but her excuse stood.

“Seriously?” Laura looked at Janna, sleep-drunken and immediately annoyed. “Does that mean you pissed on her? How could you not see her?!”

Janna chewed her lip, “It wasn’t on purpose, okay? I was asleep!”

Laura looked at Christina, “And you couldn’t shout, or something?”

“She did, apparently,” Janna intercepted the question. “I was just totally spaced out. I didn’t hear her.”

“Jesus,” Laura said with a visibly grossed-out look at the black girl. “Did you get her cleaned up, at least?”

“That’s sort of the problem,” Janna admitted. “They say I was a little too rough on her. I mean, I was…too rough. Chris and I had a breakdown in communication.”

Laura looked at Christina again, unable to stifle a little giggle, “Are you alright? Aw, you poor thing!”

“That’s not funny, Laura,” Steve shot at her when Christina started crying.

Laura clearly disagreed.

“It is, though, when you think about it,” she said. “You’re actually lucky. I mean, I’m pretty sure I told you guys explicitly not to take any walks, didn’t I? What were you doing over there in the first place?”

“She went to pee, alright?!” Steve snapped. “She didn’t even mean to go that far, she was running away from Janna!”

“I think I got a solution,” Janna interjected to cut the blame game short. “Here.”

She lowered her hand with her items.

“Soup and bacon?” Laura laughed. “Or did you mean the sword. How’s that helping?”

“They’re all important,” Janna replied, annoyed. “Steve, come here and pick up this horn, please, I don’t wanna crush it.”

He went to do as he was bid, climbing onto her hand first.

“Whoa!” he made. “Is all this for us?”

“That’s why I said Merry Christmas,” Janna pouted a little over her ruined moment. “Let me explain one by one. Pick up the horn and blow into it.”

He looked at the sword like a little boy in a toy store, hardly even looking at the hunting horn when he picked it up. She had known he would like the sword best, and he would like it even more when Ardan came for his first lesson. She wanted to be perfect for him like that.

“Phhhlrgh!” Steve blew into the horn as hard as he could, but the pathetic fart that came out made Laura laugh so hard that she fell backwards into her covers.

That wasn’t how Janna had planned it, but she had to laugh too. It was too funny.

“Okay, maybe you need some practice on that,” she admitted. “But once you can use it, you can toot whenever you need help. We can even predefine, like, different toots for different situations.”

The horn even had a sling by which to carry it conveniently. It was a brilliant idea.

“Aha!” Laura made. “You and your damn tootin’! But seriously, don’t blow that thing in the morning or you’ll get fucking flattened!”

There had been that herald whom Janna had mistaken for an alarm clock once. Still, it was a mean thing to say.

“It’s a good idea, Janna!” Steve said. “We’ll just need a second one for me!”

He jumped off her hand and ran to deliver the horn to Christina, as if she was more important than him. Amazingly, though, the black girl had no trouble producing a long, clear and beautiful sound on her first try.

“Highschool marching band,” she explained with a little levity returning to her. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

She could even produce a melody on it, like the cringy cover version of some pop song. Janna hated it.

“What do you want next?” Steve asked after climbing back onto her hand.

Of course, he was looking eagerly at the sword, but he couldn’t have it yet.

“I’ve got a jacket for you and a cloak for Chris,” she told him. “But you guys said you didn’t want them, so I guess they’re going into the fire.”

Steve looked at her in regret with his hand behind his head, “Wait a minute, I didn’t mean that!” He threw the jacket over himself and then picked up the cloak, giving a whistle, “Whoa, this is like…this looks like it would cost as much as a car where I come from! Babe, check this out!”

‘Don’t call her that,’ Janna thought when he held up the cloak for Christina’s inspection.

“That’s super nice, thank you, Janna!” the little black bitch piped up.

It was a bit too robotic for Janna’s taste but she smiled all the same.

“Soft, warm and thoroughly absorbent,” she said, hinting at last night. “It’s perfect for you.”

The look on Christina’s face told her that she had understood, and when Steve brought her the cloak, she didn’t seem so happy about it anymore. When Steve tried on the Galahan doublet, he looked like a little lord. Even the size was okay. Janna felt proud.

“These old garments are so weird,” he reported. “It’s so puffy. I feel like I’m wearing a Halloween costume. Thanks, anyway. Where did you get these things from?”

It raised a contentious issue.

“From the city,” she smiled. “Don’t worry, I didn’t force anybody to give up their family heirloom or anything like that.”

“But who would willingly part with this?” He wondered after finally picking up the sword.

He wrenched it out of the scabbard and tried a few swings, looking like someone who had never swung a sword before. His inexperience became more physically apparent when he decided to pose with it while sticking it into the ground next to his foot, all the while still standing on Janna’s hand.

“Ow!” She winced and Steve landed hard on his arse when her arm jolted.

Laura laughed herself sick again.

“Janna, I am so sorry!” Steve proclaimed to her on his knees.

She had to giggle too.

“It’s fine, we’ve got thick skin,” she told him. “Just don’t cut yourself!”

Her sudden movement had also spilled some of the soup, but it was okay. Steve was as in love with his sword as she had hoped.

“I think that’s a bad idea,” Laura chuckled. “He’s more of a danger to himself than anything else.”

“I agree,” Christina concurred, albeit completely without humour. “Swords are dangerous and we don’t know where it comes from. You should give it back.”

Janna had to bite her tongue again to keep calm. It was good that hoof beats heralded the arrival of Ardan in that very moment.

“We may not always be there to protect you,” she reasoned quickly. “There’s war almost everywhere, everybody is armed and more than a few of them are willing to kill you for your shoes. Steve needs to learn how to use this thing, and as it happens, I found him the perfect teacher.”

Ardan knew how to make a knightly entrance, to be sure. Him, Lovgold and a few Abilachter Riders circled around Janna in a noble trot before arriving in formation to her left, an arm’s length away from her. They had gambeson protective gear, blunted swords and shields.

“Ooh, who’s that guy?” Steve inquired and wanted to climb off Janna’s hand, a thing she quickly prevented with her thumb.

“Ardan Jumian Galahan,” she answered. “He’s the Count of Honingen and your teacher. And since you guys don’t have anything for me, I’m getting a kiss from you.”

She tried not to smile but it was hard, and the look on Christina’s face was pure gold. She acted innocently while quickly lifting Steve to her face and presenting her cheek to him. It would have been better on the mouth, but too conspicuous, not to mention that she was liable to gobble him up.

Laura remained unconvinced, “We’re gonna be on the road soon. Do you want to take Ardan with us? Does he know?”

“We’ll find other teachers,” Janna dismissed the concern while still waiting for Steve’s kiss. “He can’t go running, so I thought this way he gets his exercise and he learns something that may well save his life in the bargain. All we need to get him is a sparring partner.”

“You’re the best!” Steve exclaimed happily, putting as big a peck on her cheek as he could muster.

It felt wonderful, but she yearned for more.

“Do I have to kiss you too?” Christina asked from below, her eyes sparkling.

Janna considered for a moment whether or not she wanted to pile on another humiliation. It would be the funniest thing in the world to tell her to put that fur coat on so she would make better toilet paper, but of course that was out of the question.

“Calm down, it was just a joke,” she waved off, forgoing the opportunity. “I brought you breakfast, by the way.”

To her surprise, that earned her another peck from Steve, two in a row now.

Mentioning food made her remember that she herself still hadn’t eaten, but she wouldn’t miss Steve’s first training session for all the food in the world. She felt like a soccer mom, or more like a soccer girlfriend.

‘Not girlfriend yet, though,’ she thought with another look at Christina.

The black girl wasn’t even exceptionally pretty or hot or anything. She also wasn’t ugly per se, however, and of course she possessed the undeniable advantage of not being a hundred metres tall. Try as Janna might, that was a thing she couldn’t undo. Perhaps Steve would never really love her. Perhaps the only way to be with him was by being his friend.

But that wasn’t enough.

Her train of sorrow was interrupted when Laura finally started to go about her morning routine.

“How long is this gonna take?” she asked while Steve was being put in his protective gear. “I was kinda thinking, you know, quick breakfast and then we get going.”

“What’s the rush all of a sudden?” Janna gestured at her. “Let him have some fun. You forget they were prisoners for like…”

She had to think. A month? Two months? A few weeks? Time had flown by and so much had happened. She kept mixing up events in her head and there was so much she couldn’t even remember anymore.

“Alright,” Laura conceded, putting on her shoes. “Just make sure he doesn’t get hurt.”

“If they hurt him, I’ll break their legs,” Janna smiled.

With Laura gone, she switched sides, laying down on the sleeping bags behind Christina so that her boobs were dangerously impeding upon the little girl.

“How’s the soup?” She asked downwards with a grin that was perhaps a tad too menacing.

Christina shuffled away from her a little bit while clutching the blanket to her chest.

She called to Steve, “Babe, can you get my suit, please? There’s guys all over the place now and I’m not wearing anything!”

“I got it,” Janna smiled, plucking up the suit, a white tank top and the tiniest pair of beige panties from the stakes nearby.

She was very tempted to throw them onto the smouldering ambers, but she ended up just giving them to Christina and providing cover with her hand. It gave her an opportunity to check out her competition.

“Could you look away?” Christina requested when she noticed her gaze. “I’m not prude or anything, but you’re really close.”

Ardan was already showing Steve what stance to take so she felt safe playing a little.

“Sorry,” she cooed, making her breath wash over her opponent. “You guys just look so cute. You’re so tiny, I could gobble you right up. Hrgh!” She gave a little growl and flashed her teeth for emphasis, finding that toying with Christina was fun for its own sake, “Have you thought about that threesome?”

“No, thanks!” Christina said firmly and showed Janna her back.

She had a well-shaped little butt, but Janna still liked her own better. And Steve clearly liked thick women, which made her happier than anything else.

With regards to the training, Ardan was a very patient teacher. He praised Steve’s progress early on, but when it came to the practice fight that was supposed to end their lesson there was something decidedly not working. Steve did not really attack, even though Ardan wasn’t hitting back at him.

“I don’t want to hurt him!” Steve explained through gritted teeth, clutching his sword and shield. “I mean, what if he dies?”

The combatants looked slightly ridiculous in their white gambeson gear, but this was a serious issue.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” Christina declared. “I would rather you not be violent anyway. Not everyone has to be a stone-cold killer.”

Janna wondered whether it was a jab at her.

“He’s well protected and also he could beat your ass if he wanted to,” she held against, seeing a chance to ingratiate herself to Steve more. “You’ll never get good with it unless you give it a try!”

Steve lunged and swung high, but mid-strike the strength seemed to go out of his arm and it all turned wobbly. Ardan caught the blow on his shield without even looking, giving Steve a questioning glare instead.

“I cannot teach this man,” he declared. “He fights like a woman.”

Lovgold and the riders started to laugh.

“Oh, please,” Janna heard Christina sigh, but Steve did not appear to have understood.

“He says you fight like a woman!” Janna translated. “Will you let that go unpunished?”

Steve shrugged, “He’s right. And also, that’s sexist.”

Janna wanted to burry her face in her hands.

“Steve, you’re wasting this guy’s time,” she said. “Hit him already.”

He tried again, but this time Ardan beat the sword out of his hand with a lazy counter blow, making it clang noisily and land with a metallic thud in the dirt. It was humiliating.

“Ardan!” Lovgold cheered. “Well struck!”

Janna looked down, “You know this is serious, right? I’m not joking, it’s a complete jungle out there. If you ever get caught without us, they’re gonna slit his throat and rape you to death.”

With that, Christina seemed to finally understand the situation.

“Hit him, babe!” she urged. “Pretend like he insulted me or something!”

He spread his arms, “But didn’t you just say...”

She interrupted him harshly, “Stop being such a limp-dick son of a bitch and hit that man!”

Steve seemed to be physically blown backwards by her words and all but ran to his sword.

“You know why he’s like that, right?” Christina spoke softly. “He told me yesterday before you...” She had to breathe and steady herself for a moment, “Before our little mishap. He told me about the thing he did in the lake.”

“Oh!” Janna made, shocked over the realization.

She knew Christina didn’t know the full story, but she had connected the dots better than Janna.

Before them, Steve was faring much better now, catching Ardan by surprise and driving him backwards.

“Yield, yield!” the young Albernian called. “Very good. Now defend yourself!”

He began hacking at Steve savagely and drove him back in turn making Steve grunt with exertion. Janna had to admit that it looked horrifying and she became increasingly worried. The martial and the barbaric were close cousins, but men liked this sort of thing for some reason, even if it got them killed.

“Good job, babe!” Christina clapped encouragement after he had gone down to Ardan shouldering him in the chest.

Steve righted himself with a grunt.

“You gotta try this, guys, it’s super exhausting!” he said, pulling off his helm to reveal wet hair. “How did I look?”

“Like a handsome punching bag!” answered Christina. “Now give it to him, woo!”

Janna wanted to eat her alive.

“He’s so cute, isn’t he?” the black girl went on. “I don’t know what happened, I never even looked at him twice, but then, bam!”

A bam was also what Steve received from Ardan, namely the edge of his opponent’s shield against his head. But he got up right away and didn’t seem injured.

“Your shield is as much a weapon as your sword,” Ardan said. “Never forget that.”

Christina shouted, translating, “He wants you to hit him with your shield!”

Janna looked down again, “How come your local tongue is so much better than his? Isn’t he the anthropology major?”

Christina smiled but kept looking at Steve, “Maybe we should’ve swapped. I could always do languages pretty well, but I wanted to study something with animals, so...here I am, trying to save my grades!” She was sardonic about it, as they all were. “When you guys didn’t come back, I was so sure we were gonna die,” she went on, still not looking. “And we almost did, actually. Dari saved us from the chopping block. Do you remember her?”

Now she looked at Janna, their eyes meeting.

“Mh-hm,” Janna nodded, her mouth suddenly dry.

She could still see Dari before her inner eye begging for her life, and she still remembered how her body had felt when it squished. She had completely forgotten the little assassin had been there when they had left Lauraville never to return.

Maybe murdering her had been a mistake.

“Then why did you kill her?” Christina asked. “I heard that scary wizard guy say so. First I thought I misheard, but I don’t think I did.”

“Yo, did you see that?!” Steve suddenly called out. “I hit him!”

He had still gotten knocked on his arse, but Ardan was holding a bloody nose, red streaks running down his fingers.

“Great, babe!” Christina clapped. “I think that’s enough for today!” She turned to Janna again, “Well?”

“Uh,” Janna made, unable to come up with a quick lie. “It’s complicated. Did you know she was an assassin? Anyway, she murdered people, innocent people, and I put an end to it.” She considered whether or not it was enough and decided to add a little more, “I didn’t know she saved you guys.”

She prayed that Christina would buy it and ended up being surprised by the extent to which it worked.

“Shit!” Christina gasped. “Damn, I didn’t know that either! Crazy!”

“It’s a crazy world,” Janna confirmed. “And if I’m not totally wrong, I think it’s getting worse, lately.”

-

Captain Leonard Leonardo pulled on his uniform to straighten it out. His crew was already leaving the coven chamber going about their business, none looking as groggy from hyper sleep as he felt. He had gone into stasis hungover, and now he had woken up the same way. He could still taste the whisky and the vomit in his mouth.

“Sir, we have received a type nine distress call,” Pilot Thomas Mamsteen informed him at once, handing him a chart full of useless information. “It was coming from a Curie-class vessel bound for a terrestrial planet in star system x-ray four five eight two three five Juliet fourteen.”

“Jesus, Thomas,” the captain handed back the chart without reading it and set himself into motion. “It’s a little early for all that, just talk to me in English.”

“It’s a research vessel, Sir,” the pilot explained, something in his voice unnerving the captain, a certain urgency. “Their original call said they were responding to another distress call, so we could have potentially two vessels needing help, Sir.”

“What flag are they flying?” the captain asked as they entered the bridge.

“Captain on the bridge!” the communications officer by the door shouted immediately, and everyone sat up at attention.

“Carry on,” Captain Leonardo groaned while pulling himself to his seat before strapping himself down.

“My spaceship!” Mamsteen said after strapping himself down in the front of the bridge, taking control of the vessel from assistant pilot and weapon’s officer Zak Abraham. “UN, Sir. They are part of the space exploration program at Dunwich University, Dorset, England.”

“Those guys,” the captain nodded. “What’s it with British vessels and distress calls these days.” He was referring to the deuterium freighter HMS Truss which had experienced engine trouble and was currently being towed by their vessel. There had been some kind of powerful electromagnetic storm causing all manner of outages throughout the universe. Leonard’s ship, the Hintermeyer, had been hit too and lost her long-range scan capabilities. “So, these are students, kids,” he recognized. “How many on board?”

He himself was already thirty-one but his crew was mostly comprised of men and women who weren’t actually much older than university students either, kept youthful by sheer endless time in stasis as they patrolled the vast emptiness of space. The Hintermeyer wasn’t a great assignment.

“A Curie-class carries three souls per vessel, Sir,” Mamsteeen informed him.

“Three,” the captain echoed. “Jesus. Have we called them yet?”

“No, Sir!” Communications Officer Floyd Brown said behind him. “Do you want to broadcast a message? We are two minutes out.”

Two minutes out meant the time required for the message to reach its destination. It was relatively close, so the captain nodded and reached for his headset, holding the microphone in front of his mouth.

“Curie-class vessel, Curie-class vessel, this is Bezos-class destroyer USS Hintermeyer!” he said. “Curie-class vessel, Curie-class vessel, do you read, over?”

There was a silence on the bridge as they waited. For some reason he could see Thomas Mamsteen in front of him shake ever so slightly in his seat, something weighing on his mind.

“No reply, Sir,” Brown reported after four minutes had passed.

“Maybe they’ve lost power,” the captain said. “Keep broadcasting.”

Mamsteen turned around, his face pure darkness.

“Sir,” he said softly. “A type nine distress call is a vessel crashing onto a planet surface. I don’t think we are going to get any reply.”

Leonard had to grit his teeth as he remembered. He wasn’t good with numbers and all those codes confused him to no end, but he had learned all of it at some point in flight school.

“They’re no longer broadcasting the distress call?” he turned around to see Floyd Brown’s face.

The young black officer shook his head.

“Jesus,” Leonard said. “So, they’re dead.”

“We don’t know that, Sir,” Mamsteen cautioned. “That program flies to planets that are thought to support life, many even inhabitable to humans.”

The captain leaned back in his seat, considering what to do. Far as he was aware, there had never been a situation like this before. He certainly never had to deal with anything like it.

He went through his fading black hair with a hand before wiping his face, “What planet did they crash on, do we know?”

“Yes, Sir,” Mamsteen said. “It’s Saturn Seven.”

“Saturn Seven?”

The name rang a bell, he had read it somewhere before. He reached next to his seat, opening the box where he kept his papers, finding the current mission folder and opening it up. They had received orders some time ago to go to a certain planet to conduct a number of routine scans. Hadn’t it been for HMS Truss and her engine trouble, they would have gone there already. And yes, Saturn Seven was precisely where the mission report said they had to go. He had wondered at the time about such a specific name for a planet in the middle of nowhere. Usually, they just had code for names.

“It’s our original destination, Sir,” Mamsteen confirmed flatly.

The mission stated that they were supposed to conduct short-range scans of the planet and little else, not a thing about the planet itself, just a warning to stay as far away from it as possible.

“Well that’s useless,” he commented and put the folder away. “Pull up the factsheet for Saturn Seven, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

“Aye, Sir,” Mamsteen went to it right away, but nothing appeared on the screen. “Um...Sir, this is strange. The file won’t open.”

“Brilliant,” Leonard felt himself yearn for another drink already. “Does anybody here know anything about that god damn planet?! We could have six kids stranded down there!”

Mamsteen was hard at work at his workstation, “Sir, the log states that we conducted a long-range scan of Saturn Seven some time before the electromagnetic storm.”

“Well, that’s better than nothing,” Leonard allowed. “Let’s see it.”

But again, Mamsteen faltered, shaking his head in frustration, “It’s not there, Sir. I don’t understand. It leads to a directory in our database that does not exist.”

Leonard felt himself slip into anger, “Jesus Christ, man, this is an emergency situation! Who authorized that scan?!”

Mamsteen looked to his right, “Zak Abraham, Sir.”

The weapons officer had been quiet the entire time and Leonard hadn’t paid him any attention. He was a small man with chestnut hair and sat there seeming deeply in thought, his index finger brushing over his lips repeatedly. He was the brooding, quiet type who never said much other than the occasional comment, but these were so witty and precise at times that Leonard regarded him as the smartest man amongst his crew.

Just now, however, the lack of effort and straightforwardness irritated him.

“Mister Abraham,” he said, calmly but with some weight behind it. “Would you care to elaborate?”

The young man pursed his lips, “It’s classified, Sir.”

Words could not describe the volcanic rage erupting in Leonard’s chest.

“Classified!?” he screamed, spittle flying weightlessly through the air. “Did you hear what I said?! We could have six kids down there, fighting for their lives! I don’t give a crap about your classifications, you will open me this fucking file or I will strap you to a nuclear torpedo and launch your ass into space!”

Finally, Zak Abraham turned to give him a look, but it was one of insolence.

“You don’t have the authority to see these files, Sir,” he said. “I cannot show them to you or I would face disciplinary action.”

“Oh, you’ll face disciplinary action, alright,” Leonard fumed. “Let’s see, insubordination, failure to render assistance in an emergency, failure to answer a distress call, failure to follow the prime directive and failure to being a fucking human being!” He could see the young man’s face harden as his pride took a dint, but Leonard wasn’t quite done, “Mister Mamsteen, set a course for Saturn Seven and prepare for hyper travel. And confine Mister Abraham to his stasis coven until further notice.”

“Aye, Sir,” Mamsteen replied before there was yet another snag. “Uh, Sir, the mission report says not to get too close to that planet?”

“I know, dammit!” Leonard beat his armrest with his fist. “But until Mister Abraham here sees fit to un-fuck himself we have no choice but to fly blind!”

“There’s an anomaly!” Abraham finally broke his silence. “This never should have happened. We have safeguards against this sort of thing, these students should never have been anywhere near that planet without setting off all kinds of bells and whistles!”

Leonard could smell deep-state government bullshit. He had googled all about it before being posted to the Hintermeyer, years ago. The fact that his own weapons officer appeared to have a higher clearance level than himself alone spoke volumes.

“And who the fuck is we, exactly?!” he asked. “And what does this anomaly do?”

“We don’t know,” Abraham shook his head, conveniently ignoring the first question. “We scan it whenever a vessel is in the vicinity, every twenty years or so, just to keep an eye on it. We have to do it via a short-range scan because on long-range scans it simply appears as rings, hence the name. The anomaly interferes with the electronics of any ship coming too close to it. That must be how two vessels crashed on to that planet.”

“Uh-huh,” Leonard made, slowly connecting the dots in his hungover mind. “So you’re saying, there’s nothing we can do.”

Abraham pressed his lips together before finally turning to his workstation and sending a file to the big screen. The picture was blurry but it appeared to show a planet that looked almost like Earth but for differently shaped landmasses.

“Is this it?” Leonard asked. “I’m not seeing any rings.”

“Exactly, Sir,” Abraham stared at the screen. “This is the last long-range scan I conducted before we were hit by the storm.”

Leonard felt a confidence return to him, “So, it’s gone?”

“It appears so, Sir,” Abraham replied. “But, Sir...if these students survived the crash – and that’s saying something – but I’m afraid...I’m afraid of what they might find on the surface.”

The captain took a moment, forgoing on easy jab at the subordinate officer.

“Why?” he finally asked. “What is there on Saturn Seven that it needs to be kept secret?”

Abraham looked as though he had seen a ghost. He wiped his mouth with his hands, mulling something.

“This is a type nine emergency distress call,” Leonard said slowly, helping the young man think in the right direction. “I don’t care if you’re CIA, FSB or if you have sold your soul to the Chinese. The prime directive says, we have to go to Saturn Seven and see what we can do. If there is any information, any whatsoever, that can help us save these kids...”

He trailed off, thinking of his daughter. They had not talked in years for him, decades for her. It was this damn post and the endless time spent in stasis. She was twice as old as him now and certainly looked that way. She had become a professor, a mother and so much else and he hadn’t been there for any of it. He could feel tears burning at the edges of his eyes and an insurmountable yearning for a strong drink. Hyper sleep did not only ruin the relationship with ones loved ones, but it also made it exceedingly easy to be an alcoholic because it froze every molecule in one’s body. It had started with drinking after every successful assignment, but it had turned into drinking all the time just to get by.

Somehow, he felt as though if he could save these kids, maybe he could save his own life. That was stupid, of course, and he knew that. But maybe it could help him get off the Hintermeyer and rekindle his relationship with his daughter, stop drinking, pick up a hobby. Maybe he could even find a new spouse and have more children.

Biologically, he was only thirty-one, but he felt like such an old man.

“Sir?” he could hear Mamsteen ask insecurely.

His vision was as blurry as that damn long-range scan on the screen. He had to blink away his tears.

“I…apologise,” he said, dabbing at his eyes with the sleeve of his uniform until Floyd Brown reached a tissue over his shoulder.

There was an air vent in the storage compartment full of minibar-sized bottles of whisky, vodka and gin. Perhaps the specifics of the planet weren’t that damn important. It was either an uninhabited one like millions across the universe, or it was some secret military base. That option seemed to make a lot of sense.

“Do we have an instalment there?” he asked. “Something secret, experimental in nature?”

Abraham looked at him, “We? Negative, Sir.”

“Chinese then,” he guessed, trying to make light.

The Chinese owned everything, so it didn’t make any difference. And the Russians did not have any bases this far out.

“It’s not a military base, we think,” Abraham replied, breathing heavily. “It’s hard to explain.”

As a child on Earth, long before his life had gone so horribly wrong, Leonard had once lit a firecracker. It was one of those memories for him that were hard burned into his brain, like his first kiss. His coolest uncle on his father’s side had taken him by the hand and given him a lighter, but that wasn’t important now. Abraham looked precisely like that firecracker, just before exploding, nothing there but a tense kind of stillness.

“I’ll go to jail for this,” the young officer said before manipulating his workstation, duplicating his screen onto the big one.

He was in a file directory that Leonard had never seen before.

‘Projekt Ubermensch follow up,’ it read.

At first, Leonard found the typo strange, but then he saw the dots atop the big U. They weren’t looking at English writing. The folder was full of black-and-white-thumbnails, text file reports and scanned documents. He could identify the swastikas before anything else.

“What is this?” he breathed, not even sure if anyone could hear him.

“I’ve tried to make sense of it,” Abraham said while scrolling through the folder.

He clicked on a picture revealing a UFO with a swastika on it, Nazi soldiers looking up at the space craft juxtaposed with technical drawings of what looked like a similar vessel.

The name Viktor Schauberger stood out in typewriter print at the bottom and Leonard realised that he had seen it before, long ago, on a meme site.

“Oh, come on, you don’t believe this garbage,” he said. “This Nazi UFO conspiracy bullshit is all nonsense!”

Abraham swayed his head, “Yes and no, Sir.” He clicked the picture away and opened a PDF, some photographed Nazi document with annotations by a translator, before lowering his voice, “The Germans didn’t call it Saturn Seven. They called it Dere, Erde backwards, German for Earth. It was part of Projekt Ubermensch, which means...”

“Project super-human,” Leonard fell in to show he wasn’t stupid. “So, what, this is some Nazi moon base? I thought they lost the war!”

Abraham pursed his lips, “It depends, Sir. Certainly from our perspective, but not if you ask the SS Paranormal Division.”

Leonard felt as though he was the butt of some very elaborate joke.

He cracked up chuckling, “The what?!”

Abraham highlighted some writing on the screen.

“SS Paranormal Division,” he said again. “Originally, the planet was meant as a second Earth, a place where the Germans could replenish their soldiers and build factories far away from allied bombing. It fell under Herman Goering and the Luftwaffe until certain discoveries put it under the auspices of Himmler and the SS.”

He clicked away the document and opened another image file, black-and-white and hardly more than a snowstorm other than some black thing that looked vaguely like a flying dragon. The internet was awash with pictures like that. He clicked that away too, only to open a scene of several SS-officers posing with tall, slender lizard people holding absurdly large gemstones the size of ostrich eggs.

Leonard laughed, “So, they found space Jews. I would have thought they wouldn’t get along.”

It was too absurd to take it seriously. This had Photoshop written all over it.

“No, Sir,” Abraham shook his head. “They brought in Jews from Auschwitz and Dachau for slave labour when they started to recreate Earth’s natural environment on the planet. They brought in other races as well, thinking that the Aryans would naturally take their place at the top if left to their own devices. We think they wanted to repeat history to prove their ideology. That’s probably where the name comes from, but we’re not certain.”

“So it was some great, racist experiment?” Leonard asked. “How would that help them win the war?”

Abraham licked his lips, “Well, Sir...far as I have read, I don’t think that was what the people involved with this project wanted. They didn’t care. Far as they were concerned, they had found something much greater on Saturn Seven than anything they could ever find on Earth.”

Leonard rubbed the bridge of his nose with a finger, “And what was that?”

“Magic, Sir,” Abraham replied. “At least that’s what it says in their documents.”

The captain closed his eyes, “So, you’re telling me there’s a bunch of Nazi wizards down there, hanging out with lizard people and slave Jews, doing what exactly? I really hope those students got their sensitivity training because this sounds like one hell of a diverse planet.”

Abraham knew he was being mocked. He stared at his hands and his tone betrayed that he knew how unbelievable it all sounded. But still, he went on.

“We don’t know what’s still down there,” he said. “The later documents are becoming increasingly nonsensical and erratic. They started writing in Latin. We know there were thirteen officers originally responsible for the project, but the name of one of them has been physically scratched off of all the documents retroactively, like the devil himself. Magic isn’t the only recorded paranormal activity, mind you. There’s talk of...things. And then they all went crazy. They were talking about ascension to godhood. And then nothing. This is the last document we have.”

He clicked onto another file, revealing a scan of what appeared to be parchment inscribed with golden letters from a quill and illuminated with colourful pictures, clearly not from the same time period.

It was a colossal intelligence cluster fuck. The CIA, other intelligence branches, and certainly the military were prone to lose their heads every once in a while. There were five-star generals, to this day, who believed in aliens, despite hundreds of years of space travel and not a single trace of evidence.

“Alright,” Leonard decided to put an end to it. “I hope nobody here is taking this seriously. We have up to six real students potentially shipwrecked, and I want everyone as sharp as they can be. Mister Brown, keep broadcasting our message and have the computer wake us up in case of a reply. Mister Mamsteen, I want hyper travel to Saturn Seven now, call everyone back into their covens. Someone scrape that shit of my screen and go to red alert. We’re responding to a type nine distress call, everybody! Dismissed!”

“Ay-ay, Sir!” it rang through the cockpit, but Zak Abraham was still sitting there like a dog in the rain.

Leonard felt for him, despite everything.

“Sorry, kid,” he said, unstrapping himself. “This is too serious. If you think we’re going to run into space Nazis, you can ready a couple of nuclear torpedoes. Other than that, I advise you not to get in my way.”

Regrettably, the young man did not move.

“Isn’t it ironic?” he asked. “You don’t believe me and yet we are flying there with Nazi technology.”

He opened a new file on his workstation for the last time, a brown-white picture of some twelve-hundred-pound German gizmo.

Scribbled on the photo, it said, ‘Hypertransversalgerät Eins.’

Leonard shook his head, “Get a life. And get in your coven. That’s an order.”

He prayed for a dreamless stasis, and that perhaps his hangover would magically cure itself when he closed the door to his coven. The first wish came true.

It felt like blinking, but the noises told him already that much had changed. He could hear the alarm blaring and red lights flashing in the coven chamber. And they had gravity.

“Hull breach,” the mechanical voice of the computer reported. “Please brace for impact.”

Then he heard the massive explosion that could only have been the deuterium freighter blowing up.