“Patience,” Holly said. “You have been very generous to us, husband, but you must give one more gift.”

  “Thelia?” he said.

  “Yes,” Holly said. “She is your wife and the new matriarch.”

  “Some matriarch,” he said. The last he’d seen Thelia, she had been playing tag with some gnomish children, giggling as they chased her on stubby legs, her impossibly spherical breasts bouncing like a pair of red balloons. Thelia had the best body he’d ever seen, period, and she was nice, but she had the attention span of a gnat and didn’t seem to care about anything other than dancing, singing, and giving massages.

  Thelia’s only other talent was shooting a small shower of sparks from her fingertips. But that didn’t make her a matriarch. It made her a glorified barbecue lighter.

  “If you give us gifts but not Thelia, the red elves will notice,” Holly said. “The red elves adore you, but Thelia is their matriarch, and that is a very powerful connection. More powerful than fear or loyalty or respect. More powerful even than blood.”

  “She’s the alpha,” Nadia said. “They’re her pack.”

  Holly nodded. “Thelia carries the fire.”

  Dan frowned, remembering how when Ahneena had died, a spark had risen from her, spun through the air, and plunged into Thelia. For a split second, Thelia’s eyes had glowed brightly, as if they were indeed filled with flames, but since then she had returned to her old self, seeming not like a matriarch but like a playful, bubbleheaded child trapped inside the body of a world-class stripper.

  “I gotta be honest,” Dan said. “As a third gift, she’s a bit of a letdown.”

  Holly had made such a big deal of the red elves’ legendary gift magic. Dan’s first two gifts—a bent needle and a rusty thimble—had followed the tradition Holly had predicted, a worthless item followed by a slightly less worthless object.

  Then Ahneena had given a spiel about the great tapestry and red elf history being stitched only in fire and had offered him the third gift, her granddaughter. Dan had grudgingly accepted at the insistence of Holly, who had filled his head with stories about third-gift magic that had made him expect something truly incredible, even epic, not a 4th of July sparkler with a great set of tits.

  “We shall see,” Holly said. “Perhaps the third gift will still unveil its power. Ula, fetch Thelia.”

  6

  Opening the Third Gift

  Holly leaned against table, masturbating lazily and watching her husband take his second wife of the day, doubling the size of their harem.

  A good start, she thought.

  Thelia had already been Dan’s wife in title, but now she would be his wife in every sense of the word.

  Ula and Nadia held the red elf’s upper body, suspending her in the air as Dan stood and pounded her from behind, making her pendulous breasts swing back and forth.

  Dan hammered the small red vixen, slamming into her so hard that the smacking of their bodies echoed off the wagon walls. With every powerful thrust, the little red woman jerked and cried out.

  This only made Dan thrust harder, snarling as he pounded away faster and faster, showing a side of himself that Holly had never seen before. He enjoyed controlling Holly sometimes, even liked to get playfully rough when she begged for it, but this was different.

  Ironically, Dan had been reluctant to claim his new wife. Something about her innocence had stayed him, that and her seeming lack of intelligence. Dan valued freedom and individuality above all else, and Holly suspected that part of him was worried about coercing his new wife into sex. Their marriage had been arranged, after all, and Thelia seemed young and innocent to him.

  He shouldn’t have worried about her youth—Thelia was a hundred years old if she was a day—or her innocence. The red elves treated the pleasure arts almost like a religion. And the whole notion of coercion was ridiculous. The silly little red elf was absolutely smitten with Dan.

  But Dan had resisted until Holly explained her theory.

  Then, when Thelia had entered the wagon, giggling about a butterfly she’d been chasing, Dan had gone about his duties like an executioner at the gallows.

  “You’re my wife,” he had told the bubbly red elf. “Are you ready to consummate our marriage?”

  Thelia had beamed at that. Yes, she had assured him, her eyes huge with excitement. She was ready.

  Thelia had started to giggle, but Dan spun her around, ripped her gown in half, bent her over the table, and went to work.

  Dan snarled as he pummeled his new wife. Something had awakened a kind of darkness in him, Holly knew. This was not play. He was slamming into her, putting her in her place, breaking her.

  Holly bit her lip, surprised by a pang of jealousy. Then she smiled. This would certainly add an interesting wrinkle to the harem.

  She was just getting ready to slide onto the table and force the red elf’s mouth down on her sex, meaning to show Thelia where she stood in the hierarchy of wives, when Dan pulled out, growling like a beast. He grabbed Thelia by her jet-black hair, forced her savagely to her knees, and roared with climax, painting her pretty face with rope after heavy rope of hot seed.

  Thelia leaned back, thrusting her breasts upward and letting her head roll back. She smiled up at Dan with her eyes shut. “Mmm, husband,” she purred.

  Holly smirked. These red elves certainly are well trained in the pleasure arts. Dan almost split her in half, and she’s purring like a kitten.

  Holly would be certain to put Thelia in her place straight away. In fact, she thought, uncinching her robe. There was no time like the—

  But at that moment, Thelia’s pink tongue emerged, swept across her full lips, licking away a heavy mantle of milky seed, and her huge eyes flung wide open.

  The gold flecks within Thelia’s red irises wavered back and forth like burning flames. Thelia’s mouth fell open as the flickering golden flecks spread like wildfire, turning her irises into circles of raging flame. Meanwhile, the whites of her eyes shifted, turning red as dragon scales.

  Holly gasped. Dan had opened the third gift.

  Flames, spikey and glossy black as crow’s wings, spread across the red elf’s cheeks.

  Like the black flame tattoos of the great and terrible red elf warriors of old, Holly thought with a shudder. The same red elf warriors who dethroned my ancestors and drove grey elves to the brink of extinction.

  Thelia’s mouth closed then and curved into a satisfied smile. Reaching up with both hands, she swept the seed deftly from her face and smoothed it over her breasts and abdomen.

  “Will you help me up, sister-wife?” Thelia asked.

  Holly hesitated for a fraction of a second. What did this transformation mean?

  Then she regained her senses, forced a look of calm composure onto her face, and helped Thelia to her feet.

  Stepping free of the tattered remnants of her ruined shift, Thelia nodded thanks to Holly then turned to Dan. “Thank you for consummating our marriage, husband.”

  Dan stared down at her, looking wary.

  Ula grunted and stepped between Dan and Thelia.

  “What the fuck, little sister?” Nadia said. “Are you still… you?”

  Thelia’s smile cracked open and very Thelia-ish laughter tumbled out, lyrical and feminine and yet somehow chilling to Holly.

  “Yes,” Thelia said. “I am still me, but I am also more than I was. Much, much more.” She reached out and took Dan’s hands. “You woke the great fire within me, husband. I am filled with flame. A true matriarch. The True Matriarch.” She turned toward the door. “I must address my people.”

  She released Dan’s hands and crossed the room, then beckoned to them from the doorway. “Come, husband. Come, sister-wives. I want you beside me.”

  With that, Thelia stepped from the wagon and walked stark naked into the morning.

  Dan was the first to react, stepping into his pants and pulling them up. Glancing at Holly, he said, “The gift magic was real.”

  Holly nodded, straightening her robe. She had pushed Dan to aid the red elves, hoping he would earn a gift of legendary power. But now that Dan had properly accepted the third gift and activated its magic, Holly’s mind conjured a well-known grey elf proverb, one of the few they shared with the shorter-lived races.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  “What in Hades just happened?” Nadia said, shimmying into her jumpsuit. “Is it just me or does our bubbly little friend now have black flames tattooed on her face?”

  “And yellow flames in her eyes,” Dan added.

  They dressed and hurried outside. By the time they descended the stairs, Thelia was high above them, standing on the soot-stained tapestry lashed atop the war wagon.

  The matriarch spread her arms and sang a beautiful, haunting, wordless song that throbbed with emotion.

  From up and down the caravan and across the ruins of Fire Ridge, red elves hurried in Thelia’s direction, their faces shining with excitement.

  Gnomes followed, looking curious.

  Green elves came last, looking suspicious.

  Can’t blame them, Holly thought.

  Three hundred souls soon huddled before the war wagon, staring up at Thelia, burbling with excitement.

  “I am transformed,” Thelia called down to them. She stood with her legs apart. “Behold!” She spread her arms wide—and burst into flames.

  The red elves cried out, fell to their knees, and stared up at their matriarch with awe.

  Bright flames swirled around Thelia and pillared skyward in a spinning column of red and yellow fire.

  Within the raging conflagration, Thelia was completely unharmed, but the fire was nonetheless real. Holly could feel its heat on her face.

  Thelia smiled down at those kneeling before her.

  Holly was relieved to see that neither Dan nor her sister-wives had taken a knee. She didn’t know what, precisely, was happening here, but as a grey elf, she would never kneel before a descendent of Mooret.

  I’d sooner die.

  “My children,” Thelia said, her voice clear and musical above the crackling inferno, “I stand before you reborn as the True Matriarch, filled with fire.”

  “Filled with fire!” the impassioned red elves cried out, raising their hands toward her.

  “What manner of sorcery is this,” Dan grumbled in a low voice.

  “You know what it is,” Holly said.

  “Yeah,” Nadia whispered, “you really stoked her fires with that poker of yours. Now what do you say we find my urchins, make like smoke, and drift the fuck out of here?”

  That sounded like a good plan to Holly, though another, bone-deep part of her wanted to punch arrows through Thelia’s glowing eyes. If this meant what she was afraid it meant…

  But Holly steeled herself and shook her head. “Wait.”

  She had to know what this meant.

  “Rise, my children,” Thelia said.

  The red elves came to their feet, firelight shining in their eyes like religious fervor.

  “You, too, shall be transformed,” Thelia said, smiling down at them with her eyes burning brightly. “Tattoo your faces, warriors. We march to glory.”

  The red elves pumped their fists in the air and cried out triumphantly, sounding like enraptured warriors ready to charge into holy war.

  “Today,” Thelia announced, “we return to our ancestral home, Flame Valley, to spread the fire!”

  Holly’s hands rose involuntarily to her stomach as icy dread filled her.

  Not Flame Valley…

  Then, as if mocking her, the dead of the grove within the grove whispered to her out of memory.

  Child, child, child.

  And the voice of her grandmother’s decapitated head returned to her, echoing prophecy.

  Conceived in blood, born in war, raised in fire. The savior yet unborn.

  “The red elves rise again,” Thelia said.

  “The red elves rise again!” her people echoed.

  Holly’s hands dropped from her belly and tightened into fists. Was this her destiny? Their destiny?

  “But first we attend to tradition,” Thelia said, and the spinning column of flame corkscrewed down, collapsing into her.

  Turning toward Dan, Thelia explained, “We are the unscorched, the eternal flame, the children of Mooret who shall rise again, and tradition decrees that we burn our dead.”

  Stretching her arms out in front of her, Thelia splayed her fingers.

  Holly gasped as rivers of roaring flame rushed from Thelia’s palms, crackling over the crowd and striking the great pyre at the center of the courtyard. For several seconds, fire poured forth from Thelia’s hands, turning the pyre into a pyramid of flame.

  She’s a fire mage, Holly realized, and felt something crumble within her. After all these years, a fire mage again walks among us.

  The fiery streams cut off, and Thelia lowered her arms, smiling out at the pyre, watching the recent past burn and the distant past rise again like a phoenix reborn. Below her, gnomes and green elves cowered as red elves chanted, “Flame Valley! Flame Valley! Flame Valley!”

  7

  Here Be Monster Girls

  Dan sat at the table, scowling down at the map as the war wagon bounced over the rutted road.

  “Roughly one hundred miles to Liberty,” Holly said, tracing a network of roads north and east. “Then we’ll leave the main roads and enter the Wildervast.”

  She slid her finger west from the small town of Liberty into a sprawling green region that made no sense. This section showed no roads, no rivers, no towns. No details at all. It was simply a massive green void labeled Wildervast. The only other clue to its contents was the ominous phrase Here Be Monsters etched below the region’s odd name.

  The Wildervast shouldn’t be there.

  Until now, Dan’s new world had made a kind of crazy sense. State College was way different than it had been in the old world, but aspects were still the same. And glancing at the map, he saw countless parallels to his former reality: Route 80, the Susquehanna River, and of course Harrisburg, home of that colossal asshole, the Duke of Harrisburg, who had hired Roderick’s Raiders to fill his ranks with unwilling conscripts.

  But the Wildervast had no real-world analogue. The massive green blob seemed to have bubbled up out of nowhere, not replacing north central Pennsylvania, but pushing its components aside and changing the shape of the state.

  A hernia of terra incognita.

  He couldn’t wait to explore it.

  Not that he had confessed that to Thelia, of course.

  Thelia had come to him after the burning of the pyre, just as the caravan was pulling out of Fire Ridge, and thrown herself at his feet, distraught. The fever of fire and prophecy had passed, leaving a naked and submissive girl wishing to make amends with her husband—and clearly aware that she, on her own, could not lead her people across a perilous wilderness.

  “Please forgive me,” Thelia had begged, kneeling before him. “It wasn’t my place to choose our path. I should have consulted with you first. But I was engulfed in flame.”

  Dan stared down at her bare red body for a second before responding. Her forehead and breasts were pressed to the floor. Her shapely arms were thrust out before her and crossed at the wrists, just as her ankles were crossed beneath her luscious heart-shaped ass. Her naked supplication stirred the darkness in him, and he was seized with the desire to punish and pleasure her here in front of his other wives.

  But for as much as he wanted to explore her submission, he knew that he had to see to more important matters first. He had opened the third gift, and the third gift was fucking terrifying. Whatever had happened to Thelia, she had just channeled some major shit out there, spouting epic prophetic lines and torching the pyre like some kind of human flame thrower.

  The red elves had been mesmerized, ready to kill or die for their True Matriarch. Which was fine and dandy for them—but not for Dan and his other wives. He was the Lord and Master of Fire Ridge, not Thelia’s servant. She couldn’t boss him or his other wives. Or the gnomes and green elves, for that matter.

  Dan would always listen to Thelia, just as he listened to his other wives. All of them had their areas of expertise.

  He was the man. This didn’t make him smarter than his wives—not by a long shot—but it did make him the head of the harem.

  When faced with a difficult situation, he would listen to all of them. Sometimes, he would take their advice. Sometimes, he would side with one against others. Sometimes, he would reject all of them and go with his gut.

  Then, when he was finished listening, and it was time to speak, his would be the final voice.

  Anything else would lead to conflict and chaos. And Thelia needed to understand that before she had another pillar of fire moment.

  “You’re right,” Dan told his kneeling wife. He let his aggravation show. Exaggerated it, in fact. “It wasn’t your place. You might be the matriarch of the red elves, but I am the Lord and Master of these people. These are my wagons, my horses, my people. You are one of my wives, my third or fourth, depending on how you look at it. And while I value your opinions, I will be the one who decides our direction.”

  “Yes, Master,” Thelia said, giving her round, naked ass the slightest wiggle. “Perhaps you should… punish me?”

  Internally, Dan growled, wanting nothing more than to play Thelia’s game. But he knew that this was another kind of power play on her part.

  “No,” he said. “I must talk with my first and second wives.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  He sent Thelia off without comfort or closure, simply saying that someone would inform her later of his decision.

  But truth be told, he had already made his decision before Thelia had come to him.

  They were heading to Flame Valley.

  Definitely.

  In a T&T-based universe, this invitation to adventure was about as subtle as a war hammer to the back of the head. Wielded by a storm giant. On steroids.

 

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