WinterWhereof

4.02 - The Prize, a Favor

Zoey drifted to consciousness with a becoming-familiar warmth pressed into her. Cracking her eyes open, the sight of Rosalie’s platinum-blonde hair met her. Zoey was snuggled into her, playing the big spoon. She sighed in satisfaction and hugged Rosalie closer.

For a while she luxuriated in Rosalie’s warmth. In her girlfriend’s warmth. The word made her heart skip a beat. It would do that for a while.

Soon enough, Rosalie stirred too.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Zoey murmured.

“Mm,” Rosalie repli...

2.10 - ❤ Illusion Training

Natalie closed the bathroom stall door, heart pounding. She could feel the heat on her face, radiating from her. Why was she so excited? And how suspicious had she looked, fleeing through the hallways in her rush for privacy?

Maybe they’d assumed she’d worked up a sweat? That she was flushed for a normal reason? She hoped so.

Swallowing, finally in the freedom of a private bathroom stall, she took stock of her situation. Why was she doing this? Sure, the idea to use her illusions in a lewd way had merit as a unique, ...

2.09 - Discovery

The endless drudgery of classroom academics wrapped up at three p.m., and—as the schedule indicated—next up was extracurriculars. Despite what the name would suggest, they weren’t optional. Everyone was required to enroll in at least one, though more could be taken if chosen.

Natalie didn’t intend on picking up any pointless hobbies, not in an official capacity. Honestly, she didn’t understand the people who did. Drama, art, band, and so on, weren’t pursuits to be disrespected, but as a delver? Surely people had be...

4.01 INTERLUDE - GNAWING

Sol’othuan, Fourth Herald to the Devourer—or as Sol called her, Mother—strolled the vine-encrusted hallways of crumbling stone, intrigued at the novelty of the world her people had invaded.

She had always been curious—her people called it ‘sentimental’—for her kind. Even the lesser worlds they conquered were fascinating. This one? Unique even to that standard. Fractured, with such curious, artificial structure imposed onto it. Workings of a Prime, possibly several in tandem. Fascinating.

It felt, to be honest, a tra...

2.08 - Class

“However,” Instructor Lauer monotoned, “that’s far from saying preparation and study is useless to a first-time delver. No two runs are the same, but certain frameworks can be applied to aid the neophyte in a successful dungeon run.”

Natalie hadn’t thought it possible, but Instructor Lauer was making delving sound boring. The dungeon was the most incredible phenomena on the planet, a labyrinth of infinite complexity and variance, a structure described as sentient by some scholars, and all...

3.31 ❤❤ Post Date IV

[ Content disclaimer: Distension, excessive cum, etc ]

Rosalie held true to her promise. She made Zoey suffer.

It was mostly made up by how Zoey got to do what she wanted. Rosalie attended to her needs carefully and with enthusiasm. For nearly an hour, Zoey thrust between or into her thighs, tits, hands, mouth, and pussy. The last one—full indulgence—she avoided after the first time. Being inside Rosalie was too exciting, and exciting meant painful, considering how the band of metal on the base of her cock was stoppi...

2.07 - Beaumon

“Wow,” Liz exclaimed when they’d returned to the sidelines. “That was incredible. I mean, you didn’t even use a spell. You said you had one, right? An illusion?”

The first half of the praise had actually managed to have Natalie pleased with herself. That feeling sagged away as the bubbly girl finished her statement. Liz was more impressed that she’d managed to flounce Elliot without using her ‘spell half’ of her class than the dominant victory itself.

At least it had been that. A dominant victory. They�...

3.30 ❤ Post Date III

Normally, Zoey would try to hold off on how quickly she let the euphoria pooling in her stomach grow, either for her partner’s pleasure or for her own, but in this instance, as Rosalie bobbed up and down her cock, filling the air with loud squelching noises, she let Rosalie’s hard work yield fruit. She basked in the sensation, not holding off at all, letting Rosalie’s tight throat-muscles massage her length and coax that burning pool of heat closer to its apex.

The oral-fixation stud worked away on Rosalie as much as her tongue a...

2.06 - Spar

Back before Tenet, Natalie’s fights had been with blunted weapons and thick sparring pads. Because, obviously, prior to her unlocking, a sword’s blade to the neck would’ve meant a quick end to her career, and the same for a blunt impact hitting just right, thrown by a competent fighter.

Now, having received her class, she had been granted an invisible defense. ‘Hitpoints’. She could take previously career ending blows and walk away not much worse for wear. Most of the time. It wasn’t a perfect defense. Empowered by a skill,...

2.05 - Liz

Natalie hadn’t put too much thought into the training weapon she’d grabbed back at the courtyard, but for the first day of spars, she needed to be smarter.

Tenet’s armory—the smaller one situated inside the training facility—hosted everything a person could need: a swathe of fighting utensils so varied Natalie couldn’t help but gawk. She shook the reaction off—she was from the backwaters, but she didn’t have to showcase it—and focused. Instructor Robin had said she wanted to be expeditious about things. In, then out, ...

3.29 ❤ Post Date II

Zoey looked down at her cock, where a thick metal ring was wrapped around her shaft’s base.

Rosalie’s ‘request’. What she was cashing Zoey’s open-ended promise for. The cock ring was finally seeing its day.

“It gets bigger with every prevented orgasm,” Rosalie said. “I … I want to see what the limit is.”

Whatever spell had washed over Rosalie and made her take charge had passed—she blushed and stuttered over the explanation. She even provided her usual justification.

“Out of curiosity, of cours...

2.04 - Sparring Class

Under Tess’s tutelage, Natalie made surprisingly good progress. Certainly more than she had by herself, bashing her head against a wall back at Tinford. While Titus—her, Jordan, and Sofia’s primary mentor—knew his way around weapons, he was as poor at spellcasting as Natalie. That might’ve been one of the reasons she’d been hopeless at it. With proper training, she hoped she could crawl out of mediocrity. Or maybe to mediocrity, by Tenet standards.

At 9:20, a bell rang through the training facility, announcing that...

3.28 ❤ Post Date I

The trip back to their room was frantic.

Zoey barely lasted a second through the entry before she had Rosalie pinned against the wall. She kicked the door shut with her foot, her mouth on Rosalie’s before it finished slamming closed.

The kiss was nothing like their chaste, heart-fluttering one back at the parlor. It was hungry and needy. She pried Rosalie’s mouth open and explored, drinking her taste. There had always been something holding Zoey back from doing this, from taking Rosalie’s lips directly, but the dam had been...

2.03 - Mace

“Hm,” Tess said. “You keep gravitating to gestures.”

“I know.” Natalie had to stop herself from snapping at the other girl. Tess was actually patient and overall pleasant, not pushy or condescending, but Natalie’s continued incompetence made it hard to keep her temper in check. “I’m trying not to.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Natalie was taken aback by the question. “Because … it’s bad?”

“Why is it bad?”

Great. She was being prodded to figure something out. Tess’s tone made that clear...

3.27 The Date V

“This is ridiculous,” Rosalie huffed.

Zoey considered Rosalie’s canvas. A lurid display of blues, greens, and spots of reds and oranges—the flowers scattering the park—splayed out on the white sheet, brought to life by Rosalie’s fingers. Zoey made a show of inspecting the piece, turning head side to side and humming in deep consideration, like a critic appraising a fine painting for merit, deciding whether it deserved to be hung at a gallery.

“Well,” Zoey said, nodding firmly. “I think a toddler might have done ...

2.02 - Fumble

“Okay, everyone, settle down. My name is Tess, and I’ll be your instructor this morning.” Her words were loud and clear, cutting through the two pockets of chatting students. “Just to make sure everyone is in the right place, this is an introductory session, where we’ll be doing a quick overview of the fundamentals of spellcasting before moving to self-guided practice, where I’ll walk around and help where I can. Good?” Tess surveyed the concrete pad with a slow gaze, making sure nobody had ended up in her lesson by accident. �...

Dalliances 2.01 - Facility

Finally, the first real day begun.

Tenet’s training facility was an enormous, sprawling structure, the largest of any Natalie had seen so far. Which made sense. Tenet was, at its core, a combat academy. So this structure—the training facility—was the cornerstone of Tenet: where students learned how to maximize their abilities and survive in the brutal kinds of life-and-death combat that pervaded dungeoneering.

The grounds sprawled much past the facility, too. Natalie and Jordan passed students in a variety of routi...

Ascent 3.26

Rosalie was as awkward about feeding the ducks as Zoey had hoped she would be. Rosalie didn’t say it outright, but her furrowed brow as she tossed breadcrumbs into the water and watched the animals quack and swarm showed how she felt: mostly perplexed. It was a very Rosalie reaction.

Zoey was just glad she was humoring her, seeing how much of a ‘waste of time’ she must view all this. Though, her shoulders definitely seemed to have loosened from their usual ram-rod straightness. And there was a hint of a smile mixed in with her va...

Dalliances 1.28 - Closing Introspection

Sammy’s tour lasted a half-hour more. She seemed frustrated about having to cut it off, but she ‘really did have something she was supposed to be doing’ and couldn’t entertain Natalie all night. Her assigned duty for today’s freshmen hadn’t been tours, as she’d said earlier—and one-on-one tours weren’t really a thing anyway—but had made an exception for Natalie, taking interest.

Which was great news. Natalie suspected tomorrow night, during the first party of the year—sorry, ‘school pride event’—she’d be g...

Ascent 3.25

It was odd, visiting a park hanging thousands of feet into the air.

Despite being wrapped around a gigantic, dead tree trunk, the park was more or less the same as the ones Zoey knew back home. Lush green grass, simple pathways crisscrossing here and there, sparse trees, and even a decently sized pond.

The logistics behind all that—how they’d built a park in the sky—hurt Zoey’s head, but so did the logistics behind the entire city. How had the designers and constructors managed to create Treyhull? How did they bring suppl...

Dalliances 1.27 - Tour

“Okay,” Sammy said. “So. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about the guilds, and it’s my job to clear things up. What do you think of them?”

Sammy had guided Natalie out of the large entry hall, where freshmen candidates had been swarming the various tables ready to be greeted by guild officials. It seemed Natalie had skipped the line through an odd, if fortunate, series of events. And she was getting a full tour, rather than the casual, canned discussions she’d been hearing back at the hall.

“What do I think of them?...