She shatters the mirror, utterly and irrevocably, and she is pulled into the darkness. It draws her back to the place of her making, the place where she is Queen, the place where for all her adoring subjects she will be forever alone because he will never again be there with her.
This is the only way their story could end.
Her feet touch down on the stone steps of her palace. Their touch is nostalgic and anathema. She tugs her cloak more tightly around her supple frame. The chill air holds no discomfort for a native like her, but there is ice in place of her heart.
First sunrise illuminates the clouded horizon, but it is how it always has been: so dim and distant that her realm will never be cloaked in anything more than perpetual twilight, even a land blessed with two suns. She remembers the blazing heat of the light in that other place and it is too much for her to bear.
Surely everyone in the palace can hear her wails, but she pays them neither mind nor courtesy. She is their sovereign. Her suffering is their suffering. Let them cry with her. Dark goddess willing, she will drown in the flash flood of their tears.
But she is not so fortunate as that. Much later, when the second sun has joined its sister-brother in the sky above, casting down its paler glow on all who toil in the half-darkness, an attendant cautiously approaches her. She does not recognize this one's face, though the scroll of their tattoos bears some resemblance to attendants past. Has it truly been so long? Or else was everyone in her court banished—or worse—when she fled?
"Welcome home, mistress," says the attendant. "We are relieved at your return. After the slaying of the usurper, we were uncertain that any true-born of royal lineage remained to sit upon the throne. The populists have sued to form a council of regents. They make camp outside the south gate, though the entrance remains sealed as of first-dawn."
Midnight, Queen of Shadows, puts her head in her hands and dries her eyes. Always another conflict follows the last. Peace is a thing of fantasy, especially for her.
"Have you alerted them of my return?" she asks.
"We have sent a messenger," the attendant confirms. "He has not yet returned."
Her palace is not so large as that. If the messenger has not yet returned, odds are he will not be returning. The Shadow Tribes are pacifist by nature, but they have ways of making their displeasure known and imprisonment is favored among them. What's more, who can say how loyal her retainers are after the violent termination of a despot's brief (but not brief enough) reign. She needs allies. More than that, she needs space to think.
"Draw me a bath," she commands.
"Very good, mistress," acknowledges the attendant with a barely-concealed blink of surprise. "Do you have a preference of houses?"
"The third royal bathhouse will do," says Midnight, after a moment's consideration.
The attendant winces.
"I am sorry to say so, but that cannot be arranged," they demur. "The usurper, in a fit of pique, desecrated its pools and he has, we surmise, irreparably damaged its plumbing."
"Oh," the Queen sighs. "The fourth will do, then. I have no love for the second bathhouse and I have not the time for you to prepare the first."
"Very good, mistress," says the attendant. "Is there anything else I may procure to satisfy your royal needs?"
The list of potential answers to that question is very long, indeed, for when she pushes aside her sorrow she finds herself ravenous with many hungers. She examines the attendant more closely and finds them just as unshapely as most Shadows who are not of royal birth. That is not without its own appeal, but it is not what she desires at this juncture. They could be molded, had she time and patience, but she is short on both.
"Are any of my old retinue still to be found within the palace?" she asks, at last.
The attendant ponders.
"Only one," they say. "Your nurse-maid, Mother Gauss, was kept on by the usurper as a plaything. Her torments kept the palace up at all hours when he was in a foul temper. We unchained her upon his demise, but still she did not leave. It could be that she believed you would return. I suppose she was right, if that is so."
Midnight cannot suppress her snarl of reprobation, but her fury is impotent. The bastard is already dead. It is almost enough to make her wish that the Hero had not destroyed the usurper's master, for the latter's promise of resurrection would allow her to kill him all over again, but this time with tooth and claw.
"Send word that she is to meet me in the fourth bathhouse," she bids the attendant. "Make ready the waters and then make yourself scarce. I will follow anon."
"Yes, mistress," says the attendant. "It will be done as you say."
They do not bow. It is not the modern custom. They merely disappear into the gloom of the palace as Midnight looks back to the horizon, quickly enough that they do not see the tears begin to form again at the corners of her eyes. This time, she does not wail. These are tears of anger and regret and they will be borne in silence.
The fourth royal bathhouse is not as cramped as the third royal bathhouse, but it earns its lower place with the paucity of its colonnades and its egregious dearth of waterspouts. As such, it is much quieter than the third royal bathhouse. She considers that perhaps it was a boon that the usurper forced her hand, for she is here to rest and think, not to play.
Midnight unburdens herself of cloak and skirt and diadem before she peels off her second skin, that wrap of deepest black that hides her most fleshly assets from the world. The lesser members of the Tribes, those not of royal descent, tattoo themselves with night-black ink to resemble royals like her, garbed in their holiest of raiments, but stripped of false exteriors, Midnight's skin is unblemished by any hint of darkness. She is soft green-gray from her toes to her pointed ears, save the verdant peaks of her nipples and the faint bluing around the head of her cock, which will grow ever more virescent as grows her excitement.
Last to go is the silver band that gathers her fiery-orange hair, the very same color as twilight on the horizon of her realm and just as faintly luminescent. Were she to be meeting with anyone but Mother Gauss, she would not let her hair down, but she has no secrets from the old one, none at all. Her hair cascades across her back and over her bust, tickling in such a way that her nipples stand on end. She longs to pull at them, to stroke herself, to feel a touch upon her rightly body, even if it is her own, but the hot water of the bath will stave off those thoughts, if only for a little while.
She dives into the pool, down to the very bottom, pressing her palms against the jewel-encrusted floor, passing over the rubies and sapphires to linger on the emeralds, her favorites. When she surfaces, her mind is clear if not of doubts, then of self-delusions. She wonders if her Hero—for he was hers, for a time, was he not?—will bed the Princess. She cannot fault him if he does, for her heart was as one with the Princess's, however briefly, but the part of her least touched by light knows: it would be better for him if it were her.
Midnight's melancholy is interrupted by a flutter of curtains, indicating Mother Gauss's arrival in the fourth royal bathhouse. The nurse-maid bows without a word, sinking so low that she falls to her knees, keeping her weathered cloak loosely tented around her large frame as she puts her creased forehead to the ground. Her genuflection cannot hide the changes to her form. The usurper has truly been cruel.
According to Midnight's true mother, the Lost and Forgotten Queen of Shadows, Long May She Reign in Dreams, Gauss was once the favorite of her father's concubines. Such is the privilege of the Queen's Consort: to take as many lovers as they wish and to mold them to their whims—after all, it was not his seed that bore the royal lineage. Gauss was cultivated into the pinnacle of her father's objectified desires, thick-lipped and precariously buxom with a cunt that could swallow you whole, but he lost all interest after the Queen's silent departure. Gauss, now Mother, took Midnight under her wing and taught her all the ways of love, just as her father taught her (by contraindication) all the ways of rule.
It is the curse of Shadows to feel their passions as dimly as the suns that shine upon their realm, a curse subverted only by those who practice the secret royal arts in which Mother Gauss was so accomplished. Before her coronation, Midnight surpassed her mentor by every measure of both artistry and skill in those same arts, but even so, her time in the realm of light taught her that she still has so much more to learn. Her depths of feeling are yet shallow when compared against the Hero's. How she wished she could have stayed longer by his side, that she might prove as dutiful a student to him as she had in her youth.
"Rise, Mother," the Queen commands. "Shed your garments and join me in the bath. Do it slowly, that I may have a good look at you after so long apart."
"Are you certain, mistress?" Gauss questions. "One such as I am no longer fit to be gazed upon by one such as you. I beg that you would spare yourself an upset stomach."
Only one who had cared for her in so many ways would dare such impertinence, but Midnight lets it pass without reproach. She knows that Mother Gauss truly has her best interests at heart, though her fear is unwarranted. Midnight's stomach is stronger now than it was when she fled the palace. She has endured her own share of torture—and doled it out in equal measure.
"Strip, Mother Gauss," Midnight snarls. "I will not ask you again."
"As you wish, mistress," she assents.
Perchance she could be mended, but the usurper has left his mark.
Half of Mother Gauss's lips, those lush devices that so often suckled upon Midnight's nipples, are entirely missing, replaced by a whiplike scar that wraps around her cheek and up to her caved-in brow. Her whole left arm, whose nimble fingers so often stroked Midnight's cock to ecstatic completion, is shriveled like a grape in the sun, hanging limply on its stalk. Her bountiful breasts, Midnight's cherished pillow after an evening of studying the secret arts, are gouged as if by some terrible hammer and chisel and sag, three-quarters deflated from their once-grandiose and gravity-defying splendor.
Midnight turns away as her nerve proves less steely than she anticipated, unable to examine the havoc that must surely have been wreaked between her nurse-maid's legs. She waves, come hither, and only opens her eyes again when she hears the splash of Mother Gauss hitting the water.
She longs to swim across to her, to wrap herself within her embrace, but Midnight is no longer a child and such frivolousness cannot be abided. Instead, she floats in silence, perched upon an underwater plinth, smiling as she hears the distant rumble of the great palace furnace belching flame to keep her bathwater hot.
"There are populists on your doorstep, Princess," says Mother Gauss, breaking their uneasy peace.
Midnight has not been a Princess in a very long time and they both know it. It is what her nurse-maid calls her when she believes she is not living up to the legacy her predecessor left behind. Gauss may have been her father's favorite, but Gauss never loved anyone as much as she loved Midnight's own mother.
"I have every mind to let them in," Midnight muses. "What need have I for a palace or a throne? What need have I for subjects? I will have no heirs. I am the last Queen of Shadows. I fear only for what they will do to me, I who have kept them out for so long."
Mother Gauss crosses the pool on a great wave and places her hale fingers upon Midnight's cheek. It sends a shiver of weakness through the Queen, one which she ought to know to suppress, but she is just so tired.
"It was not you who kept them out," Gauss chides. "It was your father and then it was the damned usurper. You aimed to meet them at their long table, or have you forgotten?"
"I have not forgotten that I left the throne in the stewardship of my dear cousin, who now we call usurper," Midnight growls. "I have not forgotten the touch of his dark magic, spearing me through the back before I even passed the outer gates. I have not forgotten what he reduced me to, a slight for which I repaid him handsomely."
The nurse-maid's hand drops from the Queen's cheek and dips below the still-quaking water. She snakes her fingers around the base of Midnight's cock and squeezes, eliciting a groan of mostly-pleasant surprise.
"Your rod is as royal as your mother's womb," Gauss continues. "You are a true Queen of Shadows. You need only find a willing vessel and you will have your heirs."
Midnight swats at Mother Gauss's arm, freeing herself from her stimulating grip, and tips herself backwards into the depths of the bath. If her growing erection is to be her judge, she did not escape swiftly enough. She screams in lust and longing and a roiling cloud of bubbles precedes her into the air above.
"It is not that I cannot sire an heir," Midnight laments, from a safer distance. "It is that I choose not to. You do not know what I have been through on the other side. You were never cradled in his arms. If I cannot be with my Hero, I choose to be with no one at all."
"Then you are just as Lost as your sainted mother," Gauss cries in full reproach. "Throw wide the gates and let the rabble have their way with you as the usurper had his way with me!"
Midnight cannot look her nurse-maid in her sunken eyes. Her cock is equally embarrassed, shrinking with the sting of her rebuke. She swims to the edge of the pool and pulls herself onto the landing, never looking back.
"The fourth royal bathhouse is at your disposal, Mother Gauss," the Queen offers, charitably. "I shall take my leave, but I will see that the palace keeps the furnace blazing for as long as you wish to stay within its sanctuary."
"Wait, mistress, please," Gauss whispers, her voice rough with sudden regret. "I spoke with haste. I do not wish to be parted from you again. Not like this."
The Queen turns back and sits upon the ledge. She crosses her legs, locking away what waits between, but she does not bother to gather her hair, letting it drape around her body in sodden ringlets, quietly dripping upon the engraved and polished stone. When she forces herself to look at the other, what she sees there is an old woman done wrong by the wills of Fate and Hope and Matrilineal Autocracy in equal measure. She does not wish her ill. Quite the opposite. She loves her and she would love her even if she were not the closest thing to family she has left in this realm.
"What would you have me do?" she asks.
Mother Gauss takes her time, soaking in the salt and heat, crystalizing her words before she lets them pass her lips. Though, when she does speak, it occurs to Midnight that these ideas of hers have germinated well past their infancy. The usurper, it would seem, has given her an opportunity to think.
"There is a way that we may all get what we want," she announces, "but the path is narrow and you must be brave, mistress, or all will go to ruin. You must descend to the seventh dungeon where, if you slip around the final stair, you will encounter a sealed passageway. Your royal magic will allow you through, but only once and only you. Step carefully on your way down, for the caves beyond that door are wild and free as the stream that runs through them. Follow the stream towards its source and you will come to a grotto and within it find an interloper. She, like you, arrived from realms beyond our own. She, like you, wishes to leave for want of her love. Together, mayhap, you can leave this all behind."
Midnight's mind spins. An interloper from another realm? Not her Hero's, surely. The mirror was the only route in or out and it lay sundered for generations before the three-day past (and now it is irrevocably destroyed). How many realms are there beyond her ken? Might she find her way back to him by going the long way around? The possibility makes her throat catch and leaves her unable to consider it further. Of course she will descend. How can she not?
"What of the populists?" the Queen asks. "What of the palace? What of you?"
"I will open the south gate," says Mother Gauss, "and the rest will sort itself out, I suspect. They cannot harm me for I am long inured to pain. Should they decide to kill me, it will be a mercy. If I live, I will do what I can to live well, to show that your trust in me is not and has never been misplaced. There is but one thing I would ask, before you leave us forever like your mother before you."
"Anything, Mother," says Midnight. "Ask and it will be yours."
The nurse-maid swims into the shallows and climbs the leading steps. There, she bows again, falling to her knees and planting her forehead upon the stone, but her obeisance is misdirected, for she faces away from her Queen. Mother Gauss reaches back and between her legs with her one good arm and spreads the lips of her cunt as wide as she can hold them. They are scarred and tattered, as Midnight feared they might be, but somehow their glory is not diminished. Her hole is as ripe and flushed with alluring pink as it has ever been and a dewy slickness has already begun to gather along her inner edges.
"Overwrite the usurper's marks," Mother Gauss begs on head and knees. "Let me never forget that I was once and shall ever be your most devoted servant. Brand me with your rod and bring me absolution."
Midnight's cock leads the way, straining so turgidly that it threatens to escape her delta, but she is its mistress, not the other way around, and she holds tightly at its reins. One last time, she dives beneath the surface of the pool, so that she might emerge like the dark goddess herself from the depths and climb the steps behind her subject. Gauss has been kind, positioning herself just so in order that her Queen might stand upon the bottom step, her feet and ankles submerged in hot bathwater, and discover her cock precisely in line with its intended target.
Not one to eschew her mothers' lessons, she moves languorously, tracing her long fingers over the nurse-maid's round and shapely rear, around the rim of her puckered asshole—a particular delicacy, but not the one on which she is compelled to feast—and over the folds of her cunt, collecting a sample of her now freely-flowing wetness. She licks her fingers and it tastes just as sweet as in her memory, a small dignity the usurper was not able to rob from her. Dipping her fingers in a second time, an act which makes Mother Gauss squirm with tantalizing impatience, Midnight rubs circles around her own nipples, making them shimmer like jewels in the stately gloaming of the fourth royal bathhouse. She considers calling for the unfamiliar attendant, who even un-molded could offer a set of pearly teeth to the proceedings, but she realizes that she never learned their name. Ah, well. Any good future will not lack for teeth.
"Please, mistress," Mother Gauss moans, intuiting that her Queen is stalling.
Midnight nestles the bulbous head of her cock among Mother Gauss's folds, running it through them once, twice, three times until it is good and coated, and then she pushes inside.
What a thing it is to be so enveloped. In her magicked, cursed form, she was rendered a doll, without cock to fuck or tits to milk, and o, what torment that was. She imagines that it is not Mother Gauss whose dark hole she spears, but her Hero's. Midnight spied it many times, as he bathed in her presence, foolishly thinking her an innocent. She conjures him spread before her, howling as her meat sword pierces his abdomen, coupling with her in triumphant release.
And then the fantasy is over and she is fucking Mother Gauss and that is enough.
She bottoms out with a wet slap, her thighs colliding with her nurse-maid's ass with all the force of a bottled tempest, but Gauss holds her ground, grinding back against her Queen, wordlessly begging for more and harder. Midnight is only too willing to oblige. She finds her rhythm quickly and it is staccato, allegro, feverish and turbulent. After so long without any loving contact, it is a marvel that she lasts as long as she does. Her seed boils in her loins and she does not curtail its eruption through either will or mechanism. It bursts out from within, depositing itself into its receiver, painting Mother Gauss's insides the faintly-glowing color of twilight.
That is not the end, for how could it be after so long without a receptacle for the Queen's vaunted lust? Unflagging, she goes on and on, displacing the first load of her seed with the force of her thrusts before spraying out another. She climaxes another three—or is it four?—times before she feels her stamina begin to wane.
Mother Gauss, who was roused from silence into great clamor around the time of Midnight's second orgasm, has gone quiet again. The viscous fall of their intermingled fluids dissipates as it mixes with the churning bath around the Queen's feet. Midnight lets her down gently, unscrewing her cock from its all-but-permanent place deep within her ravaged cunt, and carries her into the open bath. Was she ever this light? Such things have little meaning in a realm of perpetual dusk, but Midnight cannot help but notice the reversal as she gently bathes her nurse-maid with the nurturing touch that she herself would otherwise have been denied.
When Mother Gauss has been safely laid out on a poolside cot and left in bliss-laden slumber, the Queen dons her former nanny's cloak, which fits a bit too loosely, but lacks all the royal designs that stain her own. She leaves behind her second skin, for after so long trapped within a form she did not choose, she will never again hide her true self. She leaves behind her diadem, too, for after so long caught within the machinations of would-be gods and tyrants, she will never again hold herself above another.
The only piece of her old accoutrement she retains is the silver ring that once bound her hair. It was a gift from her mother and she will not be parted from it. Thanks to a quirk of Shadow make, she can expand or contract its diameter at her whim, so she widens it a little and slips it over her wrist to wear as a bangle.
Thus disguised—or, rather, thus unburdened—she departs.
At first she treads carefully through the halls of her ancestral home, but soon she discovers that its halls are mostly empty. She ducks into a shaded alcove just the once to let this morning's attendant pass her by. They are engaged in hushed conversation with another of the palace help, this one tall and slim but no more molded than the other. By their route, they are on their way to the fourth royal bathhouse, but in no particular hurry. She doesn't think they will bother to chase after her, but best she left when she did, all the same.
She finds the secret passageway behind the final stair, just as Mother Gauss said she would. The runes that lock its gate part smoothly for her, recognizing the essence that transcends her costume, and close shut just as swiftly and silently behind her, leaving her in the dark. She does not mind. She was born in darkness and she has always called it friend.
With only the luster of her illuminant coiffure to see by, she follows her ears more than her eyes, stepping carefully (as instructed) and going whichever way the stream sounds loudest. The way is long and winding and she hardly imagines she could find her way back to the palace above, but again she does not mind. She has become accustomed to one-way journeys.
Eventually, the way ahead grows brighter, but not long before she turns around the final bend and entered the promised grotto. The small pond at its center is lit from within and shines an ethereal golden-blue. Motes of sparkling light hang in the air, hanging around the stone-drip columns that stretch from ceiling to ground, though whether they are the product of nature or magic, she cannot say. None of that matters, anyway, because the Queen's attention is fully arrested by the interloper who floats casually several feet above the surface of the water.
She is a living statue, flesh pale as white marble with a body that is surely her sculptor's crowning achievement, though her proportions are strange. Her tits are heavy and round, each one the size of Midnight's ample pair put together, and they defy gravity as easily as the rest of her, but her waist is narrow and her hips, however shapely, are barely wider than that. From her thighs on down, she narrows, each leg ending in an uncomfortably spindle-like foot that seem, together, like they could barely manage to balance the body atop them. Perhaps that is because she has no need to stand: four wings, each a wide sheet of rippling light that wavers through the air on invisible currents, sprout from her back, although from the way that she hangs there, haughtily suspended, they seem almost more an ornamentation than the cause of her buoyancy.
To Midnight's great appreciation, she is entirely naked but for a casual draping of wildflowers on the vine, each blooming flower more salaciously purple than the last, that wrap around her in such a way that they highlight more than they hide. The various shades of pink and purple in the flowers that adorn her are echoed in the variegated strands of her triple-braided hair, which hovers behind her like three swinging tails.
"My kind is drawn to places like this," says the interloper, unprompted. "Fountains of life in unfound places. We wait within them until a Hero attends us. Are you a Hero?"
The word causes Midnight's heart to skip.
"I am no Hero," she admits. "But I knew one, for a time. I was his closest companion. We saved both our worlds."
"And then what happened?" asks the interloper.
"I left him," says Midnight. Simple as that.
The interloper laughs, but there is no gladness in it. It is a sad and chilling sound, like the release of great terror, but somehow it puts a manic smile on both their faces.
"We are the same, then," says the interloper, almost weeping. "We are the very same. I was a Hero's companion. I loved him, in my own way, but I could not stay with him for I knew he could not love me as I was. I fled along the roots of the Great Tree, passing through many realms, accumulating strength and wisdom to match my courage, but by the time I became what I am now, I was far too lost to find my way back home."
"I know the way," whispers Midnight, "but it is closed forever. There is no going back."
The interloper drifts closer, leaning forward, drawing so near that Midnight can feel her warm breath on her cheeks, so near that she can almost taste the floral tang of her pale lips.
"I am called Compass Rose," she says with a sigh. "Just Rose will do. And you look like a Princess to me."
"Not a Princess," Midnight chuckles. "I am not so fair. But I was a Queen, not so long ago. Now I don't know what I am. A traveler, I suppose. Would you like to leave this place?"
Rose twirls away, somersaulting head over heels, limbs artfully flailing in such a way that she leaves no part of her sculpted body to Midnight's imagination as concealing her vines trail and dance like festival ribbons. She comes to rest in the air cross-legged and cross-armed, propping up her massive breasts—which, despite their stony appearance, squish luxuriously across her forearms—and spreading wide the cut of her cunt, whose frilled lips part to expose deepening shades of hidden blue. It may just be a trick of the fairy lights in the grotto, but Midnight believes she spies dew upon those petals.
"Together?" inquires Rose. "Not as companions to a Hero but to each other? To follow the roads of light through darkness, wherever they may take us, none but Great Death to break our fellowship?"
Her focus shifts as she speaks, dropping from Midnight's eyes all the way down to her delta. It is no wonder, really: Midnight has been hard as a rock for some time, now. The verdurous head of her cock has formed a waterfall, whose ichorous stream will soon reach the edge of the spring and intermingle with the waters that are the very blood of her forsaken realm. This is her offering, may it be sufficient.
"That is my intention," Midnight intones, "and thus I swear."
The astonishing creature swims down through the air, bringing herself level with Midnight's lower half. She reaches out one pale hand and catches the drip from her cock on her fingers. She rubs her fingers against her thumb, as if inspecting their viscosity. She puts both fingers and thumb into her own mouth, blue-white tongue snaking between the digits. She shivers from her ears to her toes. And then, at last, she crosses the final distance and wraps her lips around Midnight's cock, enveloping her fully, head and shaft, in one flying swallow, her throat holding the bell-end with otherworldly force—both hard and soft, all at the same time—and her astonishingly malleable tongue wrapping fully around the column.
It is all Midnight can do not to come at this first contact, but she holds on the dizzying precipice until, all at once, Rose begins to move, clenching and unclenching her powerful throat, uncoiling her tongue and wrapping it back around in the other direction, and reaching her hands around to grab both spheres of Midnight's ass and squeeze. Without a sound, for lack of breath in her lungs, Midnight spews her royal seed directly down Rose's pristine gullet. Apparently needing no air, herself, Rose swallows every drop without complaint or hesitation.
This being the half-dozenth time that Midnight has spent herself since second-dawn, she is not surprised to feel herself go soft in Rose's mouth after the last volley leaves her.
"No, that won't do," Rose chides, detaching. "I need more from you if we are to be companions."
Midnight gathers herself to protest, but her words of defense are silenced by Rose's mouth closing over her own before she can spit them out. Rose's lips are cool, but just like the rest of her, they are much softer to the touch than they appear to the eye. An unnecessarily lewd sound bubbles up from within her, her defiance transformed into reverence as their tongues play at sword-fighting and their exhalations crash like ocean waves upon each other's shore.
Rose, unlocking their lips and nearly triggering another tantrum from the former Queen, snakes around Midnight's body, shucking off her ill-fitting robe with little care as she lets her own leafy covering fall away in the flurry of her wings. She rains cool kisses down Midnight's spine, marking her route down to her asshole, which she parts with a wiggle of her long tongue. Rose all-too-nimbly wraps her blade-like feet around Midnight's shoulders, but she can do little but hold on to them under the overwhelming wave of her attentions. She doesn't even notice the moment when her feet leave the ground.
What Midnight does notice is her cock, rising again to prominence as Rose's tongue probes the depths of her ass. It would not take much, she thinks, for that tongue to bring her to another orgasm, so thickly and deeply does it stretch—and, in truth, it has been far too long since she came from a thorough ass-fucking—but she doesn't know just how many shots she has left in her and she doesn't want to disappoint.
"Please, mistress," she whimpers, unconsciously echoing her previous lover.
Rose disengages and moves up between Midnight's legs, disentangling her feet from Midnight's clutches as she does so. It is at this point that Midnight realizes she has left the earth behind and floats several feet above, cradled in whatever magic field keeps Rose aloft—because it certainly isn't her wings, no matter how they move the air.
"Would you like to fuck me, Midnight, Lost but Not Forgotten Queen of Shadows, Long May You Remain by My Side?" Rose rumbles, her voice like thunder.
Midnight's first shock is replaced by another.
"You know more of me than you let on, Compass Rose, Faerie Queene, Unwed Daughter of the Timeless Forest," Midnight hisses, her heart like lightning.
Rose giggles, pirouetting and stealing a kiss as she tumbles by. She takes hold of both Midnight's nipples and tugs, bringing their flesh together with a groan and a clap.
"Your Mother Gauss told me much about you in her visits," Rose confesses. "More than enough to make me hope our ways would one day cross. Had you taken up your old throne, I think I might've had to pay you a visit, but thankfully you saved me that indignity. But how, pray tell, could you know of me? None of my kind make your realm their home."
Midnight slips her hand between Rose's legs, sending three fingers into her blue depths, and watches giddily as her wings wink out, one by one, her concentration broken and all pretenses laid bare.
"His realm had one like you," Midnight explains, "though she differed both in form and disposition. I watched her when I was his shadow. I was jealous of her beauty and feared the way she caught his eye. Oh, the way he touched himself when he thought I was asleep. We could not share physical space, then, or I would have made my feelings known, however cursed my form. And then, when we could at last be together, it was too late. Only duty remained."
Her challenge met, Rose leans close, nuzzling her face against the nape of Midnight's neck. Without further interrogation, she wraps her hand around the base of Midnight's cock, angling its head towards her opening, overflowing with dew and fingers.
"Wait," Midnight interrupts.
She slips her wrist out of her silver bangle and places the ring over her cock, nestling it around the base and beneath her testicles before she cinches it down, just enough to restrict all flows. It's the best thing she can think of to make this all last as long as possible. She's given up on her future once already—before she starts thinking about the possibility of a new day, she wants to fuck like there's no tomorrow.
Thus girded, she lets Rose press her head to her sopping cunt and with a soft slurp, she slides inside. Rose didn't seem this tight when she used her fingers, but Midnight considers that maybe more parts of her than her tongue are miraculously pliant. She goes slowly, her head pressing through pulsating rings of resistance, until at last she reaches her limit and their deltas meet. Rose twines her narrow legs around the small of Midnight's back, knotting them together as they gradually revolve, untethered from anything solid, two bodies orbiting one another in their intimate embrace.
"I cannot replace your Hero," Rose whispers into Midnight's ear. "Nor can you replace mine. But maybe, if we go together, we can move on from these worlds without them. Would you like that? Would you like me to fuck you like I wanted to fuck my Hero? Would you like to fuck me like you wanted to fuck your Hero?"
"Yes," Midnight groans. "I do, I do. You first, then me."
Rose bites her lower lip as Midnight begins to move within her, holding her by the hips and drawing her up and then back down again along her shaft. With nothing to push off against except each other, her strokes are gentle and deliberate, but that only makes them that much more shattering. She can feel the way Midnight's cock throbs with each unsteady heartbeat, all her body's forces marshaled in singular, pumping purpose.
"Why do we need to take turns?" Rose mewls.
"Because to fuck you like I wanted to fuck him," Midnight says, jerkily, her thrusts building in intensity if not in speed, "I'm going to need to switch holes."
Emboldened by this revelation, Rose begins to match Midnight's thrusts, moving her belly and her ass like a dancer, meeting and opposing each upward jab with a downward catch. The sound of their bodies, damp with exertion, echoes off the walls of the grotto, making it sound almost as if they are not alone, deep underground, but rather in a great hall full of other lovers, joining and parting just like them.
"Not yet," Rose calls out in warning. "Let me come, first, then you can fuck me however you like."
Her eyes are closed. Midnight's heart falls as she considers what must be playing out behind her eyelids. It isn't her cock that she wants inside of her—it's her Hero's. She wonders if they were similar, their two Heroes. She will need to ask about him, someday, if she dares. She cannot fault her, though. She knows in just a moment she will be doing just the same. In fact, she thinks, why not start right now?
Midnight closes her eyes and just like that, it isn't Rose who rides her cock, but the Princess, stripped of all but her royal jewelry, body striped red from the lash of Midnight's whip, now indistinguishable from a common whore, rutting and crying at the run of a thick cock through her snatch. The fantasy is unkind, born of jealousy. She knows that she could not ever have fucked the Princess, no matter how mingled their souls, but what is duty worth when it costs you everything?
The Princess arches her back in a sudden spasm, orgasm coming on hard and fast, but Midnight does not relent. She pulls out her cock and takes her by the wrists, spinning her around and bending her over the sill of the castle window. Any soldier in her employ need but look up to see their beloved leader's tits, bouncing in the breeze.
She plants her feet and ploughs back into the Princess's cunt, releasing her wrists and grabbing two handfuls of tit-flesh by which to pull herself deeper and harder in. In this, her fantasy does not easily mingle with her reality, for the Princess never had a rack anywhere as full as Rose's. She blinks and finds herself in a situation not much less strange. The castle arch on which the Princess braced herself is in truth sibling stalactites beneath Rose's pale palms. The flagstones into which Midnight digs the balls of her feet are in fact just stone, the natural uneven formation of the cave's ceiling. They are upside down and a long way up, only the pond far below to break their imminent fall.
"Don't stop," Rose gasps. "Fuck me, Hero. Fuck me until Time stops."
Midnight doesn't stop. She closes her eyes and drives herself back in with renewed ferocity. She imagines the Hero is there, standing beside them, watching with envy, fingering his own hole, cock dripping, eyes begging to be fucked. He will have to wait his turn. He deserves to be left wanting, just as much as the Princess deserves to be punished. How dare she steal the happy ending that Midnight earned? The Princess does not love him. The Princess did not fight alongside him. The Princess did not bleed for him.
And yet the Princess will have him, in the end.
She realizes now that for all her ravenous appetites, she held back on Mother Gauss. She'd caught her rage and her angst in a bottle and corked it tight. Not any longer. She breaks the bottle open and unleashes it on Rose. If she needs forgiveness, she will ask for it later—she can no more stop herself now than she could when this awful day began.
The Princess—in Rose's voice—begs incoherently for Midnight to keep going. She does not ask for it harder—she cannot imagine being fucked harder than this. Midnight feels her seed boiling, yearning to be released, but the silver ring is as resolute as her cock and there will be no end for any of them until she wills it. She locks eyes with her Hero, making him watch her face as she makes his Princess climax again. She watches him jerk himself off, spraying his own seed all over the castle floor, a necessary waste for his complete humiliation.
When the Princess comes a third time, this one jagged and frayed along its edges, a sign of her overwhelm as clear as the way her voice goes dreadfully soft, so quiet that Midnight can barely hear its murmurs of repentance and joy, Midnight decides that she/he has waited long enough. She releases the Princess, unsheathing her cock from her cunt, and bids the Hero take his place in front of her with no more than a shake of her regal countenance.
He drops to his knees, eagerly licking his Princess's juices from Midnight's shaft, marveling at the way her member seems only to grow larger and harder with every passing moment. After a time, she grows impatient, and grabs him by the hair, pulling him to his feet. Knowing truly his place, he climbs up on top of her, his cock drooling a mix of seed and lubricant across her gray belly, and positions his asshole neatly and perfectly above the tip of her cock.
She does not wait for him to descend of his own volition. She has waited far too long already. She grabs him by the throat and pulls him down upon her.
By all the goddesses of light and dark, his ass is tight. The might of his resistance is so intense that her concentration breaks and the illusion fades.
Midnight sees her hand around Rose's white throat and feels something catch fire in her chest, something she can hardly put a name to, but the Rose puts both her hands on Midnight's cheeks and wipes away her shameful tears.
"Keep going," Rose insists. "Close your eyes. Take what you need."
The Fairy, Midnight recognizes, is a creature of giving. She would give everything of herself to help someone in need, even if it meant giving her life. Midnight does not need so much as that, but she needs a little more. She closes her eyes and does as she is told.
The Hero is brave and does not wince as she pushes the second half of her cock up inside of him, though he grunts appreciatively when she bottoms out.
"Little Hero can save the world but can't take a cock up his ass," Midnight taunts.
The Hero says nothing—he so rarely does—but the look in his eyes says everything she needs to hear. She pulls him close to her, ignoring the incongruent feeling of his giant tits pushing against her own (but enjoying the way it feels, especially when their nipples roll over each other), and takes his ass in both hands. She moves him tenderly, at first, guiding him up and down her length, trying not to flex too often until he better adjusts to her girth, but her sweetness does not last long. Need and anger alike flare within her and she abandons caution, counting on his legendary resilience to withstand whatever damage she might cause in her exuberance.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, Midnight opens her eyes. As self-indulgently satisfying as her fantasy is, finally seeing the Hero writhe on the end of her cock, his Princess over-fucked on the ground at their feet, she does not like its bitter taste. She was never a creature of vengeance before the usurper. That was what he made her into, both physically and metaphysically. But she has already enacted her revenge upon him. The usurper isn't coming back, any more than her Hero is, so why is she still acting like she has something to prove?
Rose smiles from ear to ear as their eyes meet, truly meet, and Midnight realizes: this is better. Her cock is bottoming out in Rose's ass. Her tits are mashing against Roses's tits. Her fingers have found their way to Rose's clit. This is so much better than anything that might have been, because it is real, not just a fantasy.
She doesn't have to fuck like there's no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow—and she won't have to face it alone.
"Do it, Midnight," Rose urges. "Come in my ass. Let yourself go."
With a little feral giggle, Midnight does just that. She touches the silver ring and as it expands, all her barriers fail. Her orgasm is harder than any she has felt before, she thinks, although that may just be a romantic notion. It would be fitting if it were true. There is no doubt that even in all her time with Gauss she rarely released so much seed all at once, let alone all into a single ass, but Rose seems not to mind. She jubilantly convulses with each successive shot, until she can contain no more and it begins to leak around the edges of their meeting. Midnight watches the first drip fall into the pool, far below, and then she blacks out.
When Midnight comes to her senses, she is floating on the surface of the golden-blue water. Her body is buffeted by the slight currents of the spring below, setting her to gently revolve like the hands of a clock. She wonders how much time has passed and then she decides she does not care. Let those who walk beneath the light of a sun—bright or dim—worry about such petty concerns as the passage of minutes and hours. She is ageless and immortal and she has found another just like her in all the ways that matter and together they will be free.
Rose emerges beside her, bounding up from deep beneath the water like a dolphin, only she never touches back down. She floats above Midnight, body over body, and showers her forehead with kisses—a better fit than any diadem she once wore. When her kisses begin to move southward along Midnight's body, threatening another round of play, Midnight catches her by the hands and steadies her in place.
"Will you go with me?" she asks. "Will you show me the way?"
"From now till Great Death," she answers. "By light, through darkness."