A Half-Told Tale (closed for Obuzeti)

The elven lands never went so cold. The rain never half like ice.

The Eldest Woman said it turned the humans' blood. And with their blood, their gods. Until it meant no great thing to slay a people. Cerid remembered being rocked next to a fire, delicate fingers run through her hair as names of dead were recited for such a long time they formed a lullaby.

She had failed.

Cerid shuddered, determined to shift past one more stand of trees and find...something akin to shelter amidst a storm that chased her ankles so aggressively she could only pin it on the power of the King's mages. She'd seen the maps, but it had been months since then. Cerid could half recall that there were villages to the north and west of the Castle. But she was only on foot and there had been no wagons that were fit to catch to make any sort of distance since she'd run madly through the tunnels below the kitchens. To take one now without a single coin for a willing driver or the strength to overpower an unwilling one was impossible. Yet another bit of her own cleverness to endure was the question of whether she'd gone north or south to begin.

Her body was beginning to shake beyond her ability to stop it as the chill of the water sunk down into her flesh. One more stand. A prayer to the Eldest Woman to find a warm bed. Cerid kept moving amidst the dark bodies of the forest.

She did not expect it, but over the ridge, as the woods opened up into an expansive plain, she saw the first structure since she'd left the city behind. A cottage. There was a fire lit inside.

It mattered not who lived there. It mattered not that they would not want her there. Cerid approached.

The rains he'd seen over the western hills had settled on the valley. He'd set out before dawn to make sure that he had meat to last the storm out - taken a deer, a strong buck, twelve points. It had been a clean shot through the neck at three hundred twenty-six paces, from his nook halfway up an oak, where he'd sat overlooking a brook for hours. Another hour, spent dressing and skinning the game, and he'd dragged the body on a litter back to his cottage built against the Giant's Wail - the cliffside that had been scarred by lightning, sometime long in the past, so that it held the impression of a face and mouth.

The meat, freshly salted for storage, goes into the cool mouth of the cave. It hangs from a leather sack tied to an overhead crag to hold it off the ground and out of the reach of scavengers. The bones he begins to carve into more arrowheads. The rest lies undisturbed, awaiting further use. There's no part that he can't put a use to, properly dried and stretched and cured.

It's amidst the grinding of his fourth arrowhead that he hears the knock, with no footsteps to presage it. The knock comes from halfway up the wooden door - about four feet from the ground. An awkward place to reach for a human, but not a child, a dwarf, or an elf. The first two he'd hear coming, would not face the wild alone, soaking in a rainstorm.

He glances at the rain through the tiny window slit. Still pouring, still ice cold. The night is still and dark, and not even the wolves howl tonight, all bundled into their lairs to survive the crawling cold.

No one deserves to die alone.

The man stands up; strides to the door, opens it. In the shadow of the entryway he looms, standing well over six and a half feet, tall as a moose at the shoulder and nearly as broad - a mountainous mass of muscle that peers down at his visitor with pitiless grey eyes. A leather cuirass spans his thick chest, archer's bracers his forearms, and thick moccasins muffle his step to nothing; fur breeches insulate him against the cold, and blend in with the dark soil and wood of the range.

He stares down at his visitor. Elf, female. Small. Delicate. Beautiful. Dying. Her breath flutters in her lungs like a bird, shuddered by the cold. Her lips and fingertips are blue from the loss of heat. She will die soon, alone.

He steps aside, and holds the door wide so that she can come into the cottage. It's a small front room, maybe ten feet square, with a fireplace set against the rock wall, the smoke funneled by heat-hardened timber upwards and out. The wind dashes it against the rock as it rises and snuffs the smoke trail out. The rest of the room is soft furs on the floor, and a log carved into a long, low table, where his work sits: the tools of his craft. Arrows, arrowheads, the longbow, and the knife, bone-white and gleaming in the firelight.

The chill of the night is chased away by the heat of the fire.

"Come inside," he says. His voice is hoarse, unused to speech; deep enough to rumble.

She shivers towards him, a mere five feet in height, wobbling as she struggles to take the step over the threshold. It occurs to her, distantly, that perhaps she might have made a terrible mistake in stopping here. The wisdom of some other self she might borrow, but never claim for her own. No. Heat. Fire. Food. Maybe she could do as she had never done, and slay a human off the battlefield. Take all this and recover in security. Punish the one for the deeds of his master, for her own clutch of sorrows.

This man, the distant, wise self intones, as it observes his body and his home surrounded by tokens of beasts he had felled with equanimity, would not be a good choice for a first try.

She shakes her head just enough for the sodden grey hood to slip back and reveal what her height might not, the tell-tale points of her ears, each continuing another two inches through dark red hair held in a style that perhaps twelve hours ago might have been elegant. Now, it was sopping plaits, loosened braids, tendrils dripping rain down her neck.

As she haltingly steps towards him and towards the light of the fire, as the cloak parts, there's no doubt the elf is a woman. She's been well-provisioned in that regard. A woman elf, wild as all the tales, with daggers sheathed at her hips, gray velvet beneath a finely cured set of brown leathers that held tightly to the lithe frame of her body. An inscrutable expression holds steady across her face, but she does not look...kind. Indeed, she cannot see how frightening she appears, how blue her already moonish skin had turned, a visage of an undead creature come to feed on life, but Cerid, with animal intuition, knows how near death finds her. She can hardly think beyond clawing at the pewter clasp to draw off the wet anchor of her cloak and all these things at once leave her muddied feet to fumble. She falls towards him, enduring the weight of her pack pulling her sideways, with more grace than was warranted. Elflike, but only by the thinnest of margins.

“I...” Her arm reaches out to steady herself against his own, soaked cloak and torn sleeve reveal a shockingly dark bruise that emerges in the size and shape of a human man's grip.

Her weight falls against him and shifts the man not in the least; her head lands square against the breadth of his chest, her frame tiny against his own. Her skin is cold as death and she does not shiver - her muscles no longer have the energy to generate even that last erg of heat. Red hair spills out from beneath the cloak, and momentarily distracted, his head turns as he stares at the unusual color. His curiosity is birdlike, steady, and after a moment he shelves it to reach past the elf on his doorstep and unclasp her cloak with the hand she does not lean on, then hanging it from the outside of his cottage on a protruding timber.

"Come," he says again, hoarse, and his arm settles about the little elf's waist and lifts her without struggle, letting the door swing shut behind them. The chill air of outside is replaced by the dry heat of the fire with the clay-sealed door closed against the environment, and the hunter takes two long steps across the room to set the elf down next to the crackling fire. It's banked against the rock wall in a fire pit, a careful arrangement of stones separating it from the wooden frame of the cottage.

He scoops one of the thickest furs, a bear's winter coat, and sets it about the elf's shoulders; the hydrophobic material will never hold water, and she can work some heat back into her bones without drenching it through as she did her cloak. It'd be better if she took off all the wet clothing, but he cares not to talk more; when she passes out he'll see to her health. It likely won't be long.

Wordless still, he settles beside the elf at the fire, an enormous mass that moves silently even this close to his bulk. In the dim red firelight, he takes a pot of water and sets it over the fire to heat, adding a mixture of leaves that will steep a weak flavor in and act as a muscle relaxant. Tea and treatment both at once; the flavor is terrible, but bracing.

"I pledge your safety," he says, soft, the words a subterranean rumble against the crackle of the fire. He stares into the blackness over it, preserving his night vision. "Rest."

Cerid blinks slowly, now planted on the floor, right under the power of the fireplace. Her senses overpowered by the scents of medicinal herbs, the inescapable security of a wall of stone, the heat that swam around her. There was something familiar in all this. Something she recognized as not unlike home.

Her legs are outstretched in front of her as she is bodily planted into the furs. A haze pulses around her as she feels the almost instant change in temperature. Cerid reaches for her boots, but the knotted laces require dexterity beyond her. She eventually pulls them free, but afterwards, her body feels like it had been stolen by the wise woman, and she was left with a ragged doll.

In her mind, she laughs when he speaks, though she feels his voice before she hears his words. Her safety! A laugh that gives way to the physical truth. She was now past the place where humor mattered. Whatever this human wanted of her, she had no power now to defend against it. Whatever he intended, that was her fate. It didn't matter now if he spoke cruelty or lies.

Even before this tea began to steep and darken, sleep began to pull at her. She and this human stranger had hardly shared more than a few words. Escape the palace and Fenomin's gaze only to be...where was her pack? This was madness.

She sat up, and let the ale-brown of her eyes focus and meet his, draw his eyes up from wherever he'd left them lingering over her, let the fire bring out the green corona in her iris. He had a noble expression on his face for whatever the fuck that was worth.

“I will sleep on your floor, human. But know this, if I live, whatever you do to me, I'll give it back in threes.” Her threat comes out through chattering teeth, but she does not break the stare before laying back down on the floor and curling her legs up to herself beneath the heavy fur.

The man does not respond; he considers instead, his gaze steady and staring as it rests on the side of her head. It is very likely that she will take ill if she remains in her wet clothing - on the other hand, she is hostile and likely to become provoked if he does something to separate her from it. He decides that safety and health are not quite the same thing, and that her ill-thought decision is not yet his problem. He remains at a distance, instead.

The rite of hospitality his father had taught him demands a day's housing, a meal, and safety. The first and second are assured; the second he can now provide. As the elf drowses off he rises and seeks the leather bag hung within the cave, drawing a leg of venison out. He sets it out on the rock galley for the elf whenever she wakes - he expects it to be many hours yet - and pours the tea into a pair of glazed clay mugs; not as elegant as a proper cup, but far more durable, and he cares nothing for appearances. The hibiscus gives it a bitter flavor, but it warms the bones and soothes aches, which he has enough of his own without considering his guest's needs.

Host rites seen to, he returns to his fletcher's work, crafting arrows and arrowheads from rowan and bone, affixing them together with carefully-daubed bits of heated gristle that binds them together once cooled again.

She will live, or she will not, but he has done his part and what she is willing to accept.

He glances at the window-slit at the storm. As it stands, it's likely to last another day or two at minimum, the heavy monsoon drifting up from the wide coastal plains of the south, where great storms blow up from the Coal Sea and thrash through the tall grasses of the plains. He can smell the distant actinic sharpness of thunder, and the groaning storm wind that whirls past the cliff, whistling through the Giant's Wail to produce its namesake.

No hunting, not for the next two days. Not while the storm howls.

She dreams of nothing at first. Then, a softness opens in her mind. A dream parts itself from memory and illuminates the image of a tree studded with pale peach blossoms and chains of pale pink slip-thin bindweed flowers. Wirra, wirra, alemethil! She can smell honeysuckle and the honeyed fruits of the emerra tree. Sweeter and softer than any apple she'd been told to praise the Lord King for providing. She wears little but some cream-colored lacework shift and is without fear as she follows the swelling voices that sung for the dancers who would be opening the festival. Cerid passes deeper into the stand of trees to find its source.

As she moves within the confines of the dream, her location shifts into a smoky hovel, an acrid smell of urine invades her nose, she turns her head with a gag to see two hounds mating rapaciously in the corner. Wirra, wirra, ANTEMNUM AUSTERUS...a rumble, a purr, a stentorian invocation, as she struggles to leave the way she came, the door is blocked by a faceless man who towered over her. He holds a blade in one hand and a spellbook in the other. He looks down on her, raising his arm to cast a spell...she spins to run away, to find some other door and in the dream, one does appear. But as she passes back into the sunlight, a bramble catches on the lace, pulling the dress from her as she runs until she finds her way back to the Sunrest Tree. There she kneels, naked, reverently, though what she prays for is not in a language her conscious mind understands.

The dream breaks and Cerid wakes against her will, breathless, unsure if she had slept, though the stillness of the room indicates some time has passed. Her thoughts instantly return to the book she had meant to steal and the chapters she'd gotten away with. They'd not be pleased. They'd not...she did not need to hurry back to their disappointment. The hunter had surely turned to his own bed.

Elven healing qualities might have drawn her back from the brink, but that was all they did. Her throat dry and scratchy, Cerid glances about. Her eyes alight on the cup the Hunter had laid out for her and she rises from the floor to creep towards it. It is cold, certainly, and pungent, but not unpleasant. As its effects begin to work its way down her throat, she feels a sudden pang of...not appreciation, not thanks, but of surprise. The king had his own hunters. Why had they not found her here? Why had she not already been dragged back to see the King's Justice, or whatever he called it these days? What powers, she considers as she downs the rest of her cup, did this simple hunter have to keep a cadre of mages and trackers from turning up at his door?

She shrugs to herself, but the slight movement disgusts her as the leathers cling on her clammy skin. She pressed her tongue into her cheek and sighed. If he'd intended to bed her against her will, well...her clothes would need to be dried anyway so she could get out of here as soon as the rain let up. Best to...she began untying the leathers at her waist and peeling them down.

A strange thought sticks with her as she steadily undresses and re-situates herself into the still warm nest her body had made beneath the furs with her daggers, scabbarded but at her side. She recalls, unbidden, the tender pressure of the hunter's hand on her hip as he lifted her from the doorway. She thinks of this just as her mind succumbs to the herbs in the tea.

When he reemerges from the cave, the elf has stripped naked - for what, he cannot say, especially now that the fire has burnt down to coal and ash. The heat holds within the clay-insulated walls, but within some few hours it will dissipate again, and he will have to add to it from the stockpile.

He moves closer, a looming shape against the midnight, and brushes two fingers across her brow. Cool, clammy - but not hot with fever. How, he cannot say. Elves are magical things, and he knows little of their ways. Perhaps they cannot take sick at all, their mortal flame banked low by agelessness. Her red hair drapes over her neck and collarbone delicately, then falls across the rich velvet fur. He stares with undisguised curiosity at its loose curls.

Lightning cracks far overhead, the darkness of the cottage lit by a harsh beat of light, and he is abruptly aware that her eyes are open, fixated on him. Brown, tawny, like a hind's, without the roundness of terror. Wildness, and wariness. Like an animal's.

The lightning passes, and they are left to see each other by the dim light of coal and star.

His fingers drift from the elf's brow down along her cheekbone, their backs tracing along her cheekbone in the gloaming. Her hair runs past his touch with the softness of silk, before he draws back and seats himself on his haunches, the posture oddly reminiscent of a large cat's.

"How do you fare?" he asks, voice soft, with the growl of a purr somewhere in the back of his throat on each syllable, grinding the r's and sibilants. It's a deeper noise than any human throat comfortably makes.

Balanced on the balls of his feet as he watches his guest without shame or distraction, it occurs that perhaps such is a poor descriptor for this solitary hunter anyways, pale eyes matching her own without fear.

Her instincts awake before she does as he approaches and casually sinks down to her level on the floor. As she feels the slight vibration of his touch becoming a confident friction of his hand against her flesh, her eyes bolt open. It is still evening unless she's slept through all the day and turned again to darkness, the curative power of the elves to stabilize had stilled all shaking. She feels steady within herself and even though the proximity of hunter's outsized form as she lays, prone, protected solely by the bear's offering is terrifying, she does not fear him.

Indeed, his countenance is strange to her. The furnishings of a man who survives on what he kills for his own food, the orange glow of the fire filling the room, even the rhythm of the storm overhead all made a certain sense to her. Here, as he looks down at her with a tenderness she ought find repugnant, but instead only registers her as a tenderness. The soft, dry, half-whispered quality of his voice coils around her...how could she sit like this with him...let him touch her so flagrantly and not draw her blade?

The mage had learned what happened when she was held against her will. But this...

As his eyes investigate her, gauge her, test her, Cerid finally offers up a terse response.

“I live. Thank you for...seeing to that. You have been kind to me, human. I expected...does it not bother you that you shelter an elf?”

There is a new taste in her throat, though, that she recognizes only as she speaks her thanks. This recognition brings her to sit up and pull away from him, gathering the fur up under her arms, only by swift movement does she manage not to completely expose herself in the process.

His head tilts, stare sliding to focus upon her ears, pointed and shaped in a way that soft human cartilage cannot mimic; the hardened aural shell improves their hearing and provides preternatural balance through a thickened semicircular canal and vestibule in the ear. The anatomical knowledge slides through his brain like a whisper beneath the flat plain of his thought.

"No," he says, after a pause. The words are throaty and deliberate. "Anything deserves better."

He does not use traps. No deaths of exposure, held and maddened by uncaring steel to bleed out into the snow. The very thought is disgusting - a hunt is swift and sure or it is not at all. The kill is clean, and the spirit passes free without mangling. Neither does a long death of cold or hunger appeal; a wolf takes the weak to end their suffering as much as feed its own. Nature is not without mercy, and neither is he.

When she sits up, the bearskin near-slides from her shoulders, revealing a pale swathe of skin over one shoulder that draws his eye naturally. He blinks, long and slow, then glances back to match her gaze. There is never any embarrassment or shame when he looks to her body; he does not smile or leer. There's something unabashed and natural in his interest, but neither does he voice it. Instead he inclines his head to the window-slit, where the storm still rages outside. Full night has now fallen, with twilight passed and early morn now on approach.

"The rains still fall," he says. "Fall storms linger long. Stay."

Each word is carefully enunciated. His speech is articulate - but the words are pared to the bare minimum, shorn of excess. Rather, the language comes from the angle of his body: turned towards the elf, seated and balanced, attentive. She is the most interesting thing in the room, and his faint fascination is apparent.

Cerid gazes at him as she takes in the meaning of his words. The meaning of his body's energy uncluttered by drink, or smarmy affectation, a sincerity that holds her in her spot. When he looks at her, it is as if he was absorbing the idea of her, as if someone might ask him to draw her from memory. When he looks at her now, a dull pain begins to pulse insistently between her legs. Against such circumstance, the wiser version of herself is not to be found.

She stops clutching at the fur, letting its edge slip to settle at her waist, baring, save for the crimson canopy of her hair, the full firmness of her breasts to him. White ink tattoos lace over her shoulders, nearly invisible against her pale countenance.

“I am in danger. I have displeased your King Horis. I have...upset...his guard of mages. I do you no service in staying here.” She hears a subtle intake of breath, and allows her hands to drift up to cup and squeeze her chest. She looks back at him, no sign of antagonism or seduction playing on her face, merely an awareness that he wanted to see them uncovered. “You've a name, hunter? I would not call you human again if something else is available to me.”

His eyes follow the edge of the fur as it sinks beneath the generous curve of her breasts, and then fixates on her rosy areola - follows the delicate traceries of her tattoos. His stillness is fascinated and without shame as he watches the elf gently take the weight of her bosom in her hands.

The man rises from his heels to a kneel, as he shifts forward. One hand covers her own, dwarfing it in size - his hide is callused and roughened by trail and weather, and it brushes over her own sensitive skin with uncommon care, thumb caressing the soft underside of her breast. The other rises to touch her face; again, gentle, cupping her cheek and following the path of a red lock of hair down across her graceful neck. He watches the gentle flush of warmth in her body, captivated by the way it blooms across her collarbone, heating her beneath the skin.

"All things die," he says, at once acceptance of danger and reassurance. In his forests there is no living thing that can stalk and slay him, no magic that holds sway over the steady wash of brook and breeze. "I am Caedan."

His hands slide from their caresses down to either side of the elf's waist. His hands can nearly encircle it with their broad spans, but for now they simply rest on the supple curve of her hips, a natural embrace though their bodies be parted.

"Why?" he asks, curious, and his head inclines enough to brush his brow against the elf's cheek; a curious, almost canine gesture of affection. His hair is unbelievably soft, a thick black mane that plaits over one shoulder with a hemp braid in some complicated pattern. It glimmers in the dim light and slides like silk against her skin.

She leans back, arching her back as he leans in to hold her. She lets her breasts fall free, giving way to the affection in his touch as a stream finds a river. The elf moans out her pleasure into the otherwise quiet room.

As he settles against her, she answers him, a sober composition in her flush features, “All things die, but some have an easier time of it than others.” She pauses, reflecting as his hand strokes circles along her hip, mentally editing a saga down to a single phrase. “I'm Cerid, a Raven for a elf clan you will never have heard of. Especially not now. I've tried to do something important, Caedan. I've tried and failed. Spectacularly.”

“For this, there will be a punishment fit to the crime. But not necessarily one tonight.” She runs her hands over his muscled shoulders, the scruff on his jaw, lets her fingers stroke and play through his hair, all the while gently massaging his scalp. Moments pass in this loose embrace before she takes his head and draws his face towards hers.

Inescapably close now, her eyes meet his, earnestly, before closing slightly. Last night's cornflower blue lips have entirely replaced by a parted, dewy rose. She whispers, “Do you want to kiss me?”

Caedan's stare is as steady and inquisitive as ever, but he nuzzles into Cerid's touch unabashedly. Goosebumps ripple his skin under her touch - he cannot recall the last time anyone touched him at all, let alone with this careful deliberation and affection. When she asks her question, her eyes meet hers again as he considers.

Then his head angles to the side and he brushes his lips against the elf's, a questing, gentle brush that sends sparks down his spine and prompts a contented hum deep in his chest. His mouth returns to hers, lingers; lips sliding together in soft nips and suckles as he experiments with what is pleasurable. His thumbs work over the soft protrude of her hipbones, fingers sinking ever so slightly into the pliable flesh.

Then his hands sink to cup the elf's buttocks and the wide curve of her hips, then lifts her with silent ease. The hunter settles back now, legs crossed and seated, and draws Cerid up into his lap for ease of access; the fur now falls to her shins, and Caedan tilts her head up with one hand as he readily resumes the kiss, the other palming one wide hip to hold her supple body against him. His erection stirs in his hunter's leathers, hardening against the softness of her thigh atop his clothing, but he pays it no mind - he's lost in a world of soft skin and soft lips for now, intoxicated by this rare feast of the senses.

It seemed impossible to ignore and then impossible to remember the breadth of his body until he splayed her legs to wrap her around him and keep her in his lap. There was a reason the men of the city told filthy jokes about bedding an elf. And this Caedan's rough, sturdy form only raised the challenge.

His lips, though, did not demand conquest and it was her tongue that danced over his, slowly, assuring them both he found it amenable as she kissed him ever more deeply.

She had never...

She'd completed the caldaris, a woman's service to the elven People once she came of age. To be endlessly available to the endlessly disappointing rutting of her clansmen. It needed to be right, as the stories the Eldest Woman told, a match to please the ancestors that sought to be borne again. If it were right, the woman would get with child. If she were a good servant, the child would live when she bore it. A year was nothing to her long-lived people, but she had begged to be put to some other use. The Ravens, a warrant for death among the humans though they were, at least, would mean some peace from the endless, fruitless, disinterested fucking.

It had been a long time since desire had occurred to her.

Now held aloft on the thick, muscled thighs of a human, she found that dull pain at the meeting of her thighs begin to grow stronger. As he held and spread her hips open the pain turned to ache, to a clutching, grasping need to be filled. Her hips shifted subtly, lightly, the muscles in her ass tightening enough to let her inch a bit closer to him. What was less subtle was the cock she felt stiffen beneath her.

Caedan's hand leaves the elf's cheek to cast his jerkin from his shoulders, leaving him bare-chested against her own swelling breasts. He has a curly mat of hair, fine and downy, that trails down the meaty centre of his pectorals and over granite shelves of muscle, a taut belly that bends not at all under her touch. The hair trails away to a thin whisper just over the line of his hips where his breeches cut off the delicious view - brown curls peeking over the edge where they've slipped just an inch.

His other hand sweeps around the luscious lobe of her asscheek to palm it firmly, pressing her against his stiffening cock through the thin fabric of his pants. It rests hard and insistent against the juncture of her thighs, as his two longest fingers reach down past her generous globes to rub against her lower lips, parting and stroking them with indomitable assurance.

Caedan's chest presses forward, leaning Cerid back against the steady backrest of his arm as he steadily strokes away at her widened cunt. He holds her gaze still, unblinking and intense, no focus or attention spared for anything else but this naked elf in his grip. "Open for me," he says, softly commanding, as the words brush between their mouths still faintly touching as their lips brush with each word.

Two of his fingers pushing inside is all that it takes to make her feel a stretch, there is discomfort, but it is quickly followed by relief and then a bodily despair when he pulls them free to make his next request.

She smirks, tilting her pelvis up and leaning back to improve the angle of his view. Relying solely on his strength to hold her, she draws her knees up and back towards her body, moving the hinge of her body her body so she is fully on display. Then, she forms v of her index and middle fingers to pull open the reddened lower lips. The tender, bulbous nub of her clit has begun to bulge after his attentions. A quick swipe of his index finger confirms the moisture beading and pearling in and around the soft folds of her cunt. With her free hand, she runs her hand through the hair that covers his chest, letting her fingertips linger a moment where it becomes a thick trail continuing below his leathers before stroking down his arms to the bracers strapped to his forearm.

Cerid glances as he studies her pussy with his eyes and then again with his fingers, wanting to know him to know her in every way possible.

Heat begins to gather behind Caedan's gaze as he explores and fondles her spread cunt, thick fingers probing inside of her as he watches for each squirm and rock of her hips - cataloguing what causes each reaction, burning the image of her sinful, sexual body into his memory. Both of his hands have sunk to cradle her asscheeks, spreading the full lobes with his grip. With her wet folds spread for his attentions, moisture begins to steadily drip onto his strained breeches, his cock jumping with each wet droplet until he finally growls in frustration.

With a shift of his powerful hips, the hunter lifts Cerid from his lap and lays her back amongst the soft furs, sliding along her supple legs until he takes hold of her knees and spreads her luscious form wide, legs spread for his pleasure, breasts bobbing with each rough breath as he stares down at her bare form.

His teeth bare in a rumbling, possessive growl, and he shifts long enough to jerk the drawstring of his breeches, pulling them low to reveal a hardened, bobbing manhood, near as thick as Cerid's delicate forearm. Caedan leans down and covers her body with his own - chest to chest, lip to lip, heated skin sliding on heated skin - and presses his cock against her dripping cunt, sliding the iron shaft against her sinfully soft lips, glorying silently in the maddening sensation. The rumble in his chest vibrates through Cerid's own body, a ceaseless tremor, as Caedan's tongue darts out and leaves a broad swipe over the elf's graceful neck, tasting her.

Cerid feels the pressure of the floor under her spine, matched in firmness by her lover whose strength of body began to press her down against its unyielding surface as he lets his cock get coat in her juices. She feels the heft of his sac pressing against her, as his shaft was trapped between their bodies. She can't deny to herself how much she wants to take him, let him, for the first time, fill her completely.

She rocks slightly beneath him, encouraging his already obvious instinct to thrust against her. Then, after what feels to Cerid as an eternity, he sits up between her open thighs and begins to push his meaty, swollen, oversized head against her already constricting opening, shifting and angling to find some form of comfortable approach, though that was deniably a fool's errand. A sucking noise followed, but he kept pushing down into her, letting her hips rise and coil. Cerid's cries beneath him were less clear now, pleasure, but a pleasure chased by anxiety as the thickest part of him was yet to come and between the waves of warmth, sharp spikes of pain ran through her as her ruby-colored lips strained at his ingress.

A normal man would have bulled ahead, thrust and damn the consequences - but Caedan is too enamored of the entire experience to hurry; the thick head of his cock spreads her cunt but does not push through, rocking the fat tip against her in steady waves as the elf's wetness works down his throbbing length in hot droplets. His broad thighs press against the underside of her own, spreading Cerid's legs wide with the pressure of his weight as he relentlessly rocks against her.

The hunter keeps that steady pressure on as his head draws back, hot stare working down the flushed elf's face, along the gentle arc of her throat - one thumb follows, tracing the graceful line along her fluttering pulse. He leans in and presses callused lips to that rapid beat as his hands trail down her sides, following the faint groove of her tattoos wherever he finds them. He's exploring again, lost in the fantasy of this lovely creature's body, even as his cock presses against her wet folds and, so gently, parts them, letting her body take what it can as slow minutes pass.

"What feels good?" Caedan asks in that soft and hoarse voice, nuzzling against Cerid's cheek; some of his hair has slipped loose, and the raven tresses fall and mix with her own crimson locks in breathtaking array. He maps her face and body with deliberate patience, as he would follow game in a hunt, exploring every nook and cranny with a mind for memorization and faultless intensity. "What can I give you?"

The thick head of his cock finally slides between her spread lips, fat and satisfying, and his hips roll in a gentle circle as he explores the new sensation with insatiable curiosity, the elf's soaked nether lips suckling on his glans hungrily.

“This. This feels good. This is what I want. You, inside me. All of you.” She pushes herself towards him in the moment his hips guide his member deeper into her heat. She bites at her lower lip as she wills her walls to relax, to stretch a bit further, and pulls absently at her jutting nipples to serve as some form of physical distraction.

Her eyes look up towards the slight dome of the ceiling, the floorboards, anywhere rather than Caedan's face, the sight of his body bearing down on her, the subtle sound of his grunting as he takes her as his own was driving her mad. She'd never found herself so close just from the head of a cock, without even the feeling of a rod embedded in her cunt.

If the caldaris had been like this...she'd never have left her bed.

Caedan nods, eyes intent, and his hands pin the curvaceous elf to the floor - one on her hip, one on the opposite shoulder - sinking inch after inch of fat cock into her grasping pussy. The penetration is slow and relentless, burying the thick member deep into her spread body; his careful exploration and control is rewarded by her body taking everything he can give until his pelvis bumps against her buttocks, shaft fully sheathed inside her sex.

The hunter grinds his hips against hers again, rolling them in careful consideration of the sinful soft wetness of her cunt gripping him. He draws back out halfway - settles back between Cerid's spread thighs with just as deliberate a pace, filling her once again with that broad cock. His eyes close and he swallows as the sensation causes his shaft to jump inside her, muscles twitching in his thighs as the dizzying pleasure makes his head spin.

"Take it, then," he murmurs, husky, and now begins to fuck her, truly, hand clasping over her generous cheeks and driving the elf's hips up into each driving stroke, his speed patient and deliberate but shoving his full length into her cunt with every thrust, hilting his hips against her thighs and ass. Each thrust is accompanied by a nibble of her lips as Caedan absently seeks out her lips with his own again, capturing her bottom lip and gently sucking on it, almost playful amid the mating.

“Fuck, yes, yes.” she responds in hisses, that melt into Elven words he cannot understand. Her arms and legs flail at her sides to help her endure. She realizes that three males of her kind laboring together couldn't match his girth. This was insane. To think she could attempt to take a human cock without being ripped apart. She couldn't...it was too much. No, the madness was in thinking she could turn away now.

There is pain, keen enough for a moment to make her wonder if she'd truly been made a woman before this, but then, as he withdraws and thrusts again, and again, and again, the heat burns away the suffering under his size as fuel for a greater pleasure. She listens to the give and take, the almost music of her patter of squeals and screeches punctuated by the masculine noises he gives out as he finds purchase to penetrate her to his very base, pushing towards the entrance of her womb. It is extreme discomfort and then, finally, her walls no longer fight him, instead, she feels them clamp and grip against the pulsing stone-hard cock, urge him to pump even harder, to stay.

As he begins to kiss her, she can hear the frothy suction as he churned within her slit. He can feel, she thinks, the tension in her. Cerid knows she's going to cum sooner than she'd like, so she concentrates on stroking his tongue, on returning each kiss sweetly, almost chastely. All the while ignoring the naked crush of his body into hers.

Caedan settles into a steady rut, each thrust of his thick cock pounding the elf down into the soft furs at her back - the wet impact of their bodies echoing around the tiny room, as her liquids drip from her sopping pussy to run down her trembling thighs. Each drop of his hips buries his full length into her body: spreading her, impaling her upon a tremendous shaft her body was not made for. If he feels the need to cum rising, it does not show; he is as studiously enraptured with this facet of sex as any before it, content to simply fuck Cerid relentlessly for the pure pleasure of it, without an endgame. One broad hand palms a heavy breast and molds it in his grip, rolling the diamond-hard tip between callused fingers.

Rather, he's seeking hers, curiously following her body's signals as he angles his hips down and curves each rocking thrust up, seeking each blissful twitch and shudder that makes her body bow and bend beneath him. His pelvis mashes against her aching clit, pubic hair tickling it with their wet curls, as he drives the elf from first Trade Common to Elvish and to finally just wordless grunts and squeals, following the beat of her wails with his hips in syncopation as he fucks her to completion, cock slamming into her until her walls shake and shudder around him.

Eyes wild, he stares at her, still rocking his thick shaft within her with quick jerks of his thighs, as he drinks in her ecstasy with absolute focus.

Cerid shudders as though a creature in its death throes, her arms suddenly slung over his massive shoulders to pull them closer or else to cause some break from the insistent pressure.

The darkness of the room disappears for an instant in her clenched-close eyes, turning as white as though she was staring into the noonday sun. Then a cascade of wiry stars tumble down her vision. As she bucks in desperate orgasm, the slight edge of her fingernails rake along his back down and to the rise of his buttocks, as far as she is able to reach. When she finally feels as though her mind has returned to her, she smiles up at him, still looking dazed as if she'd been struck by lightning.

“You're good at this. Maybe nobody's told you, but...you are very good in bed. In...bear.” she laughs throatily, pulling her hands around his waist, bending and straining from her prone position to reach and fondle his balls. They feel heavy, gravid and slick from the constant flooding of her cunt. Her small hands slide over and massage them through the hair. This time she pays his sort of undistracted, undivided attention to his reaction.