For a Muse of Fire (Fanfic of Malia)
Originally written for Cohost as a fanfic of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
caffeinatedotter's Malia series.
For a Muse of Fire
They are not any longer mere adventurers. Too much walks in Malia's footprints, now, for that. They are heroes, well along the road that leads only to myth. Their deeds grow, cannot not grow as their reputation demands yet greater attention from yet greater powers.
And it is not just Malia, anymore. They are not the fearsome sorcerer Malia and her bodyguards, and indeed Malia herself scorned that idea from the beginning, all the more viciously after the prison. Each in their own way, the paladin, the archer and the berserker feel the unfolding within themselves of new things. New and terrible things, if they crease up wrong.
The paladin has a new God, since his own guilt and shame strangled the pearl-and-honey connection to the old. Now in his heart dwells a light of ruby and smoke, the light of a forge-fire burning low. He is unsure, and has not dared ask, if it is a creation of Malia's, or some old decrepit god she found and folded back to life, or even an aspect of herself. It loves as freely as the golden God he used to serve, but mocks his discipline and asceticism.
Now when he shrinks from passion for his companions his heart burns and the soles of his feet grow sweating warm – but on the battlefield, those who fight at his side find small wounds closing spontaneously, and when he passes through the poor quarters of cities, beggars' sores vanish and they find their shoulders wrapped in heavy new red blankets. Each time, some leave their alleys and join his train, and beg him for rituals, and services to perform, and for now all he can do is wait until the rose-deep god speaks through him.
The archer's eyes trouble her. When she sights down her arrows she sees in multiple, the perspective of the hawk above and of the arrow's tip and of the mouse that flees her enemy's bootfalls, and other things not so readily visual, the rippling of wind and heat and weather that must peel back around the arrow's flight. When she lets fly she feels the rush of air on her skin, and when her arrows strike true – she has not missed in months – her spine jars with whatever twist is imparted to the shaft by impact.
She has taken to wandering among the trees at night stops, begging, in a way pitiful in her own mind, for branches that are straight so that she need not cut her own; she long since gave up arrows fletched by any other hand. The first time, it was a drunken fit brought on by too late a night with Malia. Only when the trees began to answer did it become inescapable habit, and even then she struggles yet with her own horror at it.
The berserker took his changes with greater equanimity only because the long training to accept and embrace his rage had already forced a degree of comfort with internal monstrosity. Still, even he shudders in self-reflection sometimes, when he stands at the front of an army and roars and feels the voices of those around him wrapped into the sound. He has seen his own axe, long-shafted, yes, and with a blade broader than a man's head to be sure, cleave a mountain in two, and an ordinary forge-hammer he snatched in a moment of inspiration flatten to powder the black-stoned arch of a fortress gateway high enough to have accommodated dragons.
And so their deeds have grown, and with that growth, also their troubles. General crisis stalks the land, though it yet shrinks from their tread. To a kingdom's strategist, they are too powerful a piece on the board; to an archpriest too potent a sign; to a crofter or blacksmith or drover too bright a hope. Malia's sardonic wit is their only guiding principle, the sorcerer as likely to commit them to days repairing a fallen drystone wall through which sheep have escaped as to the tearing down of empires.
Opportunities for rest are rare, and privacy even more so. Only when they go where others dare not do they get to be alone together, and such environments seldom allow time for intimacy. This night, though, their exploits favour them.
The labyrinthine warren, riddled through half a mountain, had been the lair of a cult of lust whose emphasis was more on the cult than the carnal. When the barbarian had swept aside the slavering fanatics of the temple guard and the archer had picked off the prefects whose chants maintained the shield across the threshold, Malia had stood before the temple's maw and done a Malia Thing, and ripped the cult itself out of the caves, and of the suborned dedicants dwelling within. Their animating religion crumpled and tossed aside like wastepaper, the human survivors had staggered out into the paladin's care, leaving caves lushly furnished and with no taint but the lingering unease that inevitably attends Malia's works.
Only the four heroes yet brave the redeemed halls, while their train and the no-longer-cowed peoples of the local towns care for the cult's victims. In the upper reaches, the caves open to terraces carved raw from the cliff faces. Freshwater from deep springs, warmed in the mountain's molten heart, supplies luxurious baths. Bedchambers intended more for the cult's acts of worship than for rest promise deep, yielding satin for comfort and, with the hideous power structure of the priests removed, absolute clarity of intent.
Despite the intimacy they have shared now for years, longer habit kept the men to bathing separately from the women. Refreshed, dressed in plain, comfortable linen and with the majority of their weapons left aside, the barbarian and the paladin make their way back through the drape-hung halls to the chamber Malia and the archer had appointed for their tryst. They have talked through their ablutions and now walk in companionable silence.
A hanging of red silk like caught heartsblood covers the portal they pause outside. Long since learned never to blunder into the sorcerer's presence without a pause to brace, the barbarian stops, meets the paladin's eyes and takes a breath. Then he announces their arrival through the cloth. Malia's invitation across the threshold strikes a shiver down his spine.
He lifts the drape and steps through, the paladin at his heels, into a scene of breath-stealing opulence. The room is broad, its far wall only a pair of pillars supporting the lintel of the opening onto a balcony on which a platoon of men could have mustered. Braziers stand lit along the sides of the room, red-orange light pouring like syrup across silk and satin, muslin and tulle, gold thread and the sparks of stitched-in, smooth-cut jewels. Bronze and dark glass toys strew the room like ornaments on tables and cases of mahogany. The ebony pillars of the bed's canopy frame a mattress that could have slept a dozen, heaped with cushions among which the suggestive links of gold-gilt chains snake.
In the open floor between the bed and the entrance stand the women, in finery that stops thought. The archer, her hair loose about her shoulders, seems clad in darkness itself, the fabric so fine and fluid that it hangs from her small breasts like cast shadow. Stars glitter in its weave, smaller and brighter than any jewel. At the hard, straight lines of her hips, a girdle of smoky indigo parts the cloth to fall to the insides of her thighs, its contrast with the cream-white of her bare legs stark. Nowhere is the dress fully opaque, and she wears nothing underneath.
Next to her, her small hand on the dense sinew of the archer's arm, Malia wears water. Wrapped around her like a peplos, it appears at once in constant flow and caught still out of time; at once translucent as a trickle over smooth rock and deeply unknowable as the bay that lies dark on the horizon. It courses around her curves, splashing where it crests or folds back on itself. Beneath it, the uncanny, scarless smoothness of her skin is as bare as the archer's.
Both women smile at their gobsmacked menfolk, matching expressions of near-predatory amusement, eyes roving unabashed up the paladin's body and down the barbarian's. Malia catches the archer's hand and lifts it above her head for her to twirl, dark streamers fluttering around her knees and ankles.
The archer catches the paladin's eye as she settles back facing them. "Malia folded me a dress from the night sky itself."
"And what happens if a sailor chances to need one of those stars to find home by?" The barbarian asks, gruff in his heat.
"Perhaps I'll get an unexpected visitor in my gown," Malia smirks, and takes her turn to twirl. A spray of freed droplets catches the light in her wake.
Somehow, despite starting fifteen feet away, when she comes back face-to-face with the barbarian she is in arm's reach. She presses a finger to his breast through the coarse cloth of his shirt, just above his nipple. "Your turn."
Instinctively, the barbarian tenses. He no longer fears Malia, truly, he trusts her too much for that. This does not put him at ease with the workings of her art. This time, though, there comes a gentle, warm, dry sensation, strange in its kindly familiarity, as his clothes unfold themselves from his body like fresh-cleaned laundry.
Then Malia stretches out a hand toward the nearest brazier. Just in time, the barbarian remembers to look away from her fingers. There is no getting used to the actual folding, no matter how many times he's seen it. Instead he watches his companions watch his body, proud and unabashed in the arousal already heavy at his groin.
Although the room opens to the high night air, a wave of heat sweeps around his shoulders. He cannot help but startle when he looks down to see flame licking from the curls of dark hair that cover his scarred, mountainous torso. The hair does not singe, though, and he is not burning. Fire flows over his body and limbs, like lit brandy on winter pudding but yellow-red, not the blue of alcohol flame.
The archer makes a deliberate, slow, descending whistle, a mocking imitation of the hoots with which the barbarian had once pestered tavern wenches. It is an old joke between them. The paladin watches him with characteristically complicated emotions written all over his face – the flush of desire, the cutting edge of his lingering, unconquered shame, and a touch of fear that only they who have long journeyed in Malia's company could recognize in one another. He knows it is his turn next.
The barbarian looks back to the sorcerer, finding her admiring her handiwork. He feels warm, but cannot tell if it is the robe of flame or the pleasure of her eyes on him. Her smirk rises a fraction, and her eyebrow a fraction more. While he meets her gaze, she raises a hand and folds space around her fingers. Somehow the light there twists and turns back, so that the barbarian beholds himself in a fuzzy-edged oval mirror, almost floor-to-ceiling high.
Fire flickers across his upper torso like a rich, broad necklace of citrines, brighter in the grooves of his scars and over the peaks of his nipples. From the arch of his ribcage down, the flames hang in a sheet, their motion slowed to grace, wrapping loosely around the trunks of his legs and licking out in brighter tails to his ankles. Erect and high, his member rises from pubis transformed by flame to a nest of glittering jewels.
He twists, turning his flank to the reflection – which turns the opposite direction, disorienting for a moment – and watches the cloth-of-flame flatter the ponderous curve of his cheek and thigh. Malia steps up beside him, trailing a hand through his chest hair and, despite the fact that he towers a foot or more over her, kisses his cheek gently with no more than raised tiptoes. "A fire for the hearth of our hearts," she murmurs in his ear, while a spray of hissing sounds where her gown meets his.
She spins away before he can catch her in an embrace, laughter mingling with the splashes as her dress swirls. Dancing, playful steps bring her before the paladin, who somehow is already naked. The gentle light of the braziers catches the glisten of sweat on his skin, the tension in the slender lines of his face. He shifts foot to foot, bringing his arms forward as if to cover his towering manhood with his hands, and the barbarian watches as Malia stills him with a long, lingering, leering look down the length of his body.
Then she lifts her head, glancing around the walls. Despite his robe of fire, the barbarian feels the faint touch of chill at the base of his spine. If Malia has robed him in fire and herself in water, the archer's gown might count for air, and that meant-
The chamber seems for a moment to peel away from its own walls, almost like whatever it was Malia had done to the priests and their dark practice hours earlier. Something of the mountain whirls around the sorcerer, while the barbarian and the archer stumble on flat carpet. Wavering for balance, the barbarian misses the moment that Malia shapes the paladin's outfit.
When he looks again, the other man is cased in crystal, the veined quartzes of an unfolded geode, following every curve of muscle over his chest, out to his upper arms and thighs. For a moment the barbarian thinks Malia has done it to fix him in place, make a statue of him, but then he breathes, and the quartz flows over him, closer-fitting than any high courtesan's silk.
The effect steals the barbarian's breath, and the surge of his loins almost dizzies him.
Malia puts her hand up to the paladin's cheek, her pale arm reflected in the garment she has wrought for him. Though her touch is tender, her tone is wicked as she says, "The endurance of stone, to make sure you stay rock hard for us."
This time she lets herself be caught, laughing, as the paladin stoops upon her for a plunging, forceful kiss. Spray from her gown spills shimmering recursions of reflection across his shoulders. The barbarian starts forward, but the archer outflanks him, slapping him on the rump and then leaping into his arms.
Letting the fire of his robe move him, he bears her over to the bed and sets her down, hesitating for a moment in case his garment sets light to the spread. When it doesn't, he bends forward, his mouth on the archer's neck, then collarbone, then down to her night-shrouded nipple. It tastes of ice and moonlight, and her murmur of pleasure is the wind in winter trees. Her hand is at the nape of his neck, short nails clawing.
He presses lower on her body, the shade of her dress too soft to even feel like a barrier. The mattress yields as the paladin's weight lands on it, then again, much less so, as Malia's slight form settles atop him. As the barbarian reaches the archer's clit, she shifts, arranging herself some way or other to do something for one of the others.
The love they make that night swirls like the garb Malia has tailored for them. Beautiful as the fabrics are, they never obstruct. Where they meet they blend, while the four heroes entwine and entangle and climax and breathe and climax again. Their cries of ecstasy might reach from the open balcony to the war-camp below. Only as they sink towards sleep with the sky beginning to silver outside does Malia finally let her enchantment end, and they wake naked on silk that now feels like only a pale imitation of luxury.
caffeinatedotter's Malia series.For a Muse of Fire
They are not any longer mere adventurers. Too much walks in Malia's footprints, now, for that. They are heroes, well along the road that leads only to myth. Their deeds grow, cannot not grow as their reputation demands yet greater attention from yet greater powers.
And it is not just Malia, anymore. They are not the fearsome sorcerer Malia and her bodyguards, and indeed Malia herself scorned that idea from the beginning, all the more viciously after the prison. Each in their own way, the paladin, the archer and the berserker feel the unfolding within themselves of new things. New and terrible things, if they crease up wrong.
The paladin has a new God, since his own guilt and shame strangled the pearl-and-honey connection to the old. Now in his heart dwells a light of ruby and smoke, the light of a forge-fire burning low. He is unsure, and has not dared ask, if it is a creation of Malia's, or some old decrepit god she found and folded back to life, or even an aspect of herself. It loves as freely as the golden God he used to serve, but mocks his discipline and asceticism.
Now when he shrinks from passion for his companions his heart burns and the soles of his feet grow sweating warm – but on the battlefield, those who fight at his side find small wounds closing spontaneously, and when he passes through the poor quarters of cities, beggars' sores vanish and they find their shoulders wrapped in heavy new red blankets. Each time, some leave their alleys and join his train, and beg him for rituals, and services to perform, and for now all he can do is wait until the rose-deep god speaks through him.
The archer's eyes trouble her. When she sights down her arrows she sees in multiple, the perspective of the hawk above and of the arrow's tip and of the mouse that flees her enemy's bootfalls, and other things not so readily visual, the rippling of wind and heat and weather that must peel back around the arrow's flight. When she lets fly she feels the rush of air on her skin, and when her arrows strike true – she has not missed in months – her spine jars with whatever twist is imparted to the shaft by impact.
She has taken to wandering among the trees at night stops, begging, in a way pitiful in her own mind, for branches that are straight so that she need not cut her own; she long since gave up arrows fletched by any other hand. The first time, it was a drunken fit brought on by too late a night with Malia. Only when the trees began to answer did it become inescapable habit, and even then she struggles yet with her own horror at it.
The berserker took his changes with greater equanimity only because the long training to accept and embrace his rage had already forced a degree of comfort with internal monstrosity. Still, even he shudders in self-reflection sometimes, when he stands at the front of an army and roars and feels the voices of those around him wrapped into the sound. He has seen his own axe, long-shafted, yes, and with a blade broader than a man's head to be sure, cleave a mountain in two, and an ordinary forge-hammer he snatched in a moment of inspiration flatten to powder the black-stoned arch of a fortress gateway high enough to have accommodated dragons.
And so their deeds have grown, and with that growth, also their troubles. General crisis stalks the land, though it yet shrinks from their tread. To a kingdom's strategist, they are too powerful a piece on the board; to an archpriest too potent a sign; to a crofter or blacksmith or drover too bright a hope. Malia's sardonic wit is their only guiding principle, the sorcerer as likely to commit them to days repairing a fallen drystone wall through which sheep have escaped as to the tearing down of empires.
Opportunities for rest are rare, and privacy even more so. Only when they go where others dare not do they get to be alone together, and such environments seldom allow time for intimacy. This night, though, their exploits favour them.
The labyrinthine warren, riddled through half a mountain, had been the lair of a cult of lust whose emphasis was more on the cult than the carnal. When the barbarian had swept aside the slavering fanatics of the temple guard and the archer had picked off the prefects whose chants maintained the shield across the threshold, Malia had stood before the temple's maw and done a Malia Thing, and ripped the cult itself out of the caves, and of the suborned dedicants dwelling within. Their animating religion crumpled and tossed aside like wastepaper, the human survivors had staggered out into the paladin's care, leaving caves lushly furnished and with no taint but the lingering unease that inevitably attends Malia's works.
Only the four heroes yet brave the redeemed halls, while their train and the no-longer-cowed peoples of the local towns care for the cult's victims. In the upper reaches, the caves open to terraces carved raw from the cliff faces. Freshwater from deep springs, warmed in the mountain's molten heart, supplies luxurious baths. Bedchambers intended more for the cult's acts of worship than for rest promise deep, yielding satin for comfort and, with the hideous power structure of the priests removed, absolute clarity of intent.
Despite the intimacy they have shared now for years, longer habit kept the men to bathing separately from the women. Refreshed, dressed in plain, comfortable linen and with the majority of their weapons left aside, the barbarian and the paladin make their way back through the drape-hung halls to the chamber Malia and the archer had appointed for their tryst. They have talked through their ablutions and now walk in companionable silence.
A hanging of red silk like caught heartsblood covers the portal they pause outside. Long since learned never to blunder into the sorcerer's presence without a pause to brace, the barbarian stops, meets the paladin's eyes and takes a breath. Then he announces their arrival through the cloth. Malia's invitation across the threshold strikes a shiver down his spine.
He lifts the drape and steps through, the paladin at his heels, into a scene of breath-stealing opulence. The room is broad, its far wall only a pair of pillars supporting the lintel of the opening onto a balcony on which a platoon of men could have mustered. Braziers stand lit along the sides of the room, red-orange light pouring like syrup across silk and satin, muslin and tulle, gold thread and the sparks of stitched-in, smooth-cut jewels. Bronze and dark glass toys strew the room like ornaments on tables and cases of mahogany. The ebony pillars of the bed's canopy frame a mattress that could have slept a dozen, heaped with cushions among which the suggestive links of gold-gilt chains snake.
In the open floor between the bed and the entrance stand the women, in finery that stops thought. The archer, her hair loose about her shoulders, seems clad in darkness itself, the fabric so fine and fluid that it hangs from her small breasts like cast shadow. Stars glitter in its weave, smaller and brighter than any jewel. At the hard, straight lines of her hips, a girdle of smoky indigo parts the cloth to fall to the insides of her thighs, its contrast with the cream-white of her bare legs stark. Nowhere is the dress fully opaque, and she wears nothing underneath.
Next to her, her small hand on the dense sinew of the archer's arm, Malia wears water. Wrapped around her like a peplos, it appears at once in constant flow and caught still out of time; at once translucent as a trickle over smooth rock and deeply unknowable as the bay that lies dark on the horizon. It courses around her curves, splashing where it crests or folds back on itself. Beneath it, the uncanny, scarless smoothness of her skin is as bare as the archer's.
Both women smile at their gobsmacked menfolk, matching expressions of near-predatory amusement, eyes roving unabashed up the paladin's body and down the barbarian's. Malia catches the archer's hand and lifts it above her head for her to twirl, dark streamers fluttering around her knees and ankles.
The archer catches the paladin's eye as she settles back facing them. "Malia folded me a dress from the night sky itself."
"And what happens if a sailor chances to need one of those stars to find home by?" The barbarian asks, gruff in his heat.
"Perhaps I'll get an unexpected visitor in my gown," Malia smirks, and takes her turn to twirl. A spray of freed droplets catches the light in her wake.
Somehow, despite starting fifteen feet away, when she comes back face-to-face with the barbarian she is in arm's reach. She presses a finger to his breast through the coarse cloth of his shirt, just above his nipple. "Your turn."
Instinctively, the barbarian tenses. He no longer fears Malia, truly, he trusts her too much for that. This does not put him at ease with the workings of her art. This time, though, there comes a gentle, warm, dry sensation, strange in its kindly familiarity, as his clothes unfold themselves from his body like fresh-cleaned laundry.
Then Malia stretches out a hand toward the nearest brazier. Just in time, the barbarian remembers to look away from her fingers. There is no getting used to the actual folding, no matter how many times he's seen it. Instead he watches his companions watch his body, proud and unabashed in the arousal already heavy at his groin.
Although the room opens to the high night air, a wave of heat sweeps around his shoulders. He cannot help but startle when he looks down to see flame licking from the curls of dark hair that cover his scarred, mountainous torso. The hair does not singe, though, and he is not burning. Fire flows over his body and limbs, like lit brandy on winter pudding but yellow-red, not the blue of alcohol flame.
The archer makes a deliberate, slow, descending whistle, a mocking imitation of the hoots with which the barbarian had once pestered tavern wenches. It is an old joke between them. The paladin watches him with characteristically complicated emotions written all over his face – the flush of desire, the cutting edge of his lingering, unconquered shame, and a touch of fear that only they who have long journeyed in Malia's company could recognize in one another. He knows it is his turn next.
The barbarian looks back to the sorcerer, finding her admiring her handiwork. He feels warm, but cannot tell if it is the robe of flame or the pleasure of her eyes on him. Her smirk rises a fraction, and her eyebrow a fraction more. While he meets her gaze, she raises a hand and folds space around her fingers. Somehow the light there twists and turns back, so that the barbarian beholds himself in a fuzzy-edged oval mirror, almost floor-to-ceiling high.
Fire flickers across his upper torso like a rich, broad necklace of citrines, brighter in the grooves of his scars and over the peaks of his nipples. From the arch of his ribcage down, the flames hang in a sheet, their motion slowed to grace, wrapping loosely around the trunks of his legs and licking out in brighter tails to his ankles. Erect and high, his member rises from pubis transformed by flame to a nest of glittering jewels.
He twists, turning his flank to the reflection – which turns the opposite direction, disorienting for a moment – and watches the cloth-of-flame flatter the ponderous curve of his cheek and thigh. Malia steps up beside him, trailing a hand through his chest hair and, despite the fact that he towers a foot or more over her, kisses his cheek gently with no more than raised tiptoes. "A fire for the hearth of our hearts," she murmurs in his ear, while a spray of hissing sounds where her gown meets his.
She spins away before he can catch her in an embrace, laughter mingling with the splashes as her dress swirls. Dancing, playful steps bring her before the paladin, who somehow is already naked. The gentle light of the braziers catches the glisten of sweat on his skin, the tension in the slender lines of his face. He shifts foot to foot, bringing his arms forward as if to cover his towering manhood with his hands, and the barbarian watches as Malia stills him with a long, lingering, leering look down the length of his body.
Then she lifts her head, glancing around the walls. Despite his robe of fire, the barbarian feels the faint touch of chill at the base of his spine. If Malia has robed him in fire and herself in water, the archer's gown might count for air, and that meant-
The chamber seems for a moment to peel away from its own walls, almost like whatever it was Malia had done to the priests and their dark practice hours earlier. Something of the mountain whirls around the sorcerer, while the barbarian and the archer stumble on flat carpet. Wavering for balance, the barbarian misses the moment that Malia shapes the paladin's outfit.
When he looks again, the other man is cased in crystal, the veined quartzes of an unfolded geode, following every curve of muscle over his chest, out to his upper arms and thighs. For a moment the barbarian thinks Malia has done it to fix him in place, make a statue of him, but then he breathes, and the quartz flows over him, closer-fitting than any high courtesan's silk.
The effect steals the barbarian's breath, and the surge of his loins almost dizzies him.
Malia puts her hand up to the paladin's cheek, her pale arm reflected in the garment she has wrought for him. Though her touch is tender, her tone is wicked as she says, "The endurance of stone, to make sure you stay rock hard for us."
This time she lets herself be caught, laughing, as the paladin stoops upon her for a plunging, forceful kiss. Spray from her gown spills shimmering recursions of reflection across his shoulders. The barbarian starts forward, but the archer outflanks him, slapping him on the rump and then leaping into his arms.
Letting the fire of his robe move him, he bears her over to the bed and sets her down, hesitating for a moment in case his garment sets light to the spread. When it doesn't, he bends forward, his mouth on the archer's neck, then collarbone, then down to her night-shrouded nipple. It tastes of ice and moonlight, and her murmur of pleasure is the wind in winter trees. Her hand is at the nape of his neck, short nails clawing.
He presses lower on her body, the shade of her dress too soft to even feel like a barrier. The mattress yields as the paladin's weight lands on it, then again, much less so, as Malia's slight form settles atop him. As the barbarian reaches the archer's clit, she shifts, arranging herself some way or other to do something for one of the others.
The love they make that night swirls like the garb Malia has tailored for them. Beautiful as the fabrics are, they never obstruct. Where they meet they blend, while the four heroes entwine and entangle and climax and breathe and climax again. Their cries of ecstasy might reach from the open balcony to the war-camp below. Only as they sink towards sleep with the sky beginning to silver outside does Malia finally let her enchantment end, and they wake naked on silk that now feels like only a pale imitation of luxury.
no subject
Damn! I'm not sure I actually read the whole thing before. This is beautiful!
no subject
no subject
I could see them vividly in my mind's eye, so good work! The description of the crystal as silk-like really stuck in my head
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Thank you for posting so many stories. I'm looking forward to reading them all.
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