Chapter 2: The Naiad
The sliver of chalk in her fingers had been whittled down to the width of a centavo, when it finally splintered with a crack just as Sofimon was tracing another triskelion around the arrow on the final step of the naiad queen's pool.
She grimaced at her fingertips now frosted white, dropped the chalk bits, and settled for smudging them against the stone with both hands. One-by-one, the three-headed spirals dancing around the arrow misted over into clouds along the black flagstones.
Considering the distances that that nub of chalk endured this evening, she probably shouldn't have been surprised. But the end of the chain was all but ruined.
Sofimon squinted at the newly-christened cloud mural under the glow of her lantern, shrugged her approval, then rose and cast its wedge of light further up the stairs half-hidden by dusk. Bone-white arrows and ashen waves flashed from the basalt steps, like stitches on the skin of the rock, before curving out of her sight. Trailing further back– she knew—through the archway, streaking in thin streams across the walls of the passage and the caves in-between like frozen meteor tails against the dark, and ending (or starting, depending on point of view) just a foot past the ancient door that Valkyon would have begun working on an hour and a half ago. With a little invitation scrawled onto the flagstones in her hand: 'Follow Me'.
She had resisted writing anything else. A person with Valkyon's mindset always preferred concrete proof over a written promise. And what could she write on those flagstones, really, to explain his final destination if he followed that trail of chalk arrows tonight up the mountain?
The last arrowhead was pointing directly between her bare feet. Above, she wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing. If she didn't count the wild violets peeping purple and saffron out of her dark hair, hastily plucked from the bluff just north of the pool.
Her pulse was still thundering in the dip of her collarbone to a shallow, restless timpani-beat as she automatically wiped her hands on her thighs. And then remembered that her tri-paneled pan'eva skirt was folded neatly halfway up the stairs. She grimaced down at her handiwork: sepia thighs now streaked with gray, looking a lot like misapplied Vodum ash. Hardly sexy. She settled for wiping her fingers clean against the wall instead. One bare foot rubbed reflexively over the toes of the other.
The summer air pulled at her nakedness, prickling the skin around her nipples, her navel, and the cleft of her legs whenever the breeze changed. Tonight was a risk taken a full league above anything she tried for her lovers in the past. But then again, none of them were anything like Valkyon. For good and bad reasons.
To start with the good… he was absolutely worth appearing naked before. And not just because a nude woman standing in his path with a smile wouldn't pull anything close to gawk out of him. Likely nothing more than the slightest rise of his eyebrows, for courtesy's sake. He had perfected that gentleman's composure without ever knowing it.
Which brought her to one of the great flaws of his one-in-a-million personality: there were several reasons why the phrase 'court Valkyon' was considered a paradox in El.
Proof A: her stoic, grizzled captain received a three-second heart attack on the night she first dared to call him 'cute'. To his face. She had to pour him another flagon of beer before he started speaking normally to her again.
Proof B: it took her seven more months of careful joking, little favors, and opportune 'off-duty exercises' with him before enough softness crept into the corners of his eyes whenever he saw her, and she could pose that requisite question with a clear conscience. And his reaction that evening was to ask without blinking where she would like to "go out with him". Followed by a droll assurance—at seeing her expression wilt—that his schedule on the day she had mind was light, so she didn't need to worry about imposing on him if it was a personal errand she needed his help with.
One of Valkyon's locker room names in the Obsidian Guard was 'The Sword-Test Mannequin'. That evening, Sofimon felt close to agreeing with the other ladies.
In any case, her captain had proved without knowing that a full-frontal assault was never going to work on him, in love or war. Which left- really- only one option for Sofimon: a war of attrition. A slow, gradual wearing down of that dangerously-literal mindset and the hidden, fired-iron defenses of his heart. With affection. With presence. With tact. With patience and resourcefulness. And a complete lack of judgment for his moments of obliviousness. Some people were worth waiting for.
Valkyon may have started off by catalyzing the mother of all awkward courtship moments… but she was finally seeing some pay-off in these last two months. Not in their routines together, but in the subtleties.
Such as the longer silences that crept into his piercing, amber-bright stare during their weekend beers under the cherry tree. The change from 'Sofimon' to 'Sofi'. The new softness around the set of his lips whenever she read out another book Ykhar loaned him in the evenings outside the forge: him leaning back into the bench, tired eyes closed, his heat-seared face taking in the evening air, muscular thighs falling apart naturally as he stretched his legs out on the bricks of the courtyard, and listened to her veer (often) into new tangents from what she was reading for both of them. The careful, concerned way he now asked if she still felt any stiffness whenever he massaged her back after a spar, to which she always answered in the negative and kept her face turned away. Because letting him know that she was already damp between her thighs when his huge, powerful hands—like islands of heat on their own—traveled down the length of her back, kneading her from neck to hips in firm, slow, reaching strokes… well, that might give him another heart attack.
The feelings were there. She was sure of it. But what he needed now was a change of routine. A chance to grow comfortable exploring the next level of possibilities between them. A catapult-shot out of normalcy to test these new waters with her, literally and figuratively.
Not to mention that Valkyon really needed a bath by this point. Especially after his last reconnaissance this morning: rappelling down a pitch-dark, forty-foot deep, algae-slicked well that smelled like the den of a minhocão. Bless the dear man for his dedication: he recovered a small trove of offerings dumped into the well right around the time that the complex was abandoned. But not even Floppy was willing to get close to him after he toweled the ichor-black mud off his skin.
So the moment she found the naiad queen's pool this afternoon—its waters steaming gently under the first of the ancient hot spring's rapids, each side lined with a cavalcade of naiads flirting, preening, and twisting together in the throes of jewel-bright ecstasy—two ongoing quests met with a satisfying click in Sofimon's mind. And she knew that she would have to do justice to the cheeky artisans of this spa village before the night was done, and the pool was sealed off for good from the world's eyes.
She only hoped Kero wouldn't try to check on her if she returned to camp a little late tonight.
The evening air—warmed to the ghost-touch of skin from the simmering hot spring—kissed the bare skin of her back, and slipped between her thighs to breathe over the tender folds of her womanhood as Sofimon laid her lantern on the final step, and eased herself down to the submerged bench. Deep warmth closed around her feet and calves, every pore on every square-inch of her skin opening and prickling from the unprecedented heat; she held herself steady, absorbing the temperature of the waters until the taut muscles of her legs and the bones below seemed to dissolve. An instinctive sigh left her, warm flush rolling up her legs and stomach, and she took another step off the bench to the bottom of the pool. The rushing water closed warm over her hips, rising to just below her navel as her feet found the gently-molded river stones and tumbled jewels lining the pool's base, glowing through the new calluses on her soles with the low heat of centuries.
Chalk dust rose in thin streams through the dusk-darkened spring as she rubbed at her thighs, before vanishing over the far lip of the pool as the water continued its headlong rush down the ravine. Sofimon continued massaging her skin absently, thumbs sweeping inward over the sensitive flesh near her womanhood at the thought of what lay ahead tonight, while she gazed around the walls of the pool. Ancient faces in profile peered back at her with eyes inhumanly-large, flashing onyx and gold in the light of her lantern perched on the stair step. Still more naiads were lolling against their partner's necks or gazing skyward, ebon hair spiraling out through the river current on the mural, backs bending, bare breasts cresting the waves of their spring.
She had to bite her lip again to keep from laughing. If only Kero knew what they were looking at this afternoon. If this was a scene from a naiad epic stamped across the faces of the pool, then they had seriously underestimated the spirit of the vanished river folk. Once upon a time, they must have been memorable hosts.
Her eyes soon fell on a strange figure stretched out on his side, high up on one wall of the pool. A young man—not one of those reclusive male naiads, from the lack of gill-ruffs and gold-rimmed eyes, but from a people she didn't recognize— lying naked, supple as a Bronze Age athlete, and posed as though asleep on the mural's riverbank with an ewer by his side. Except his free fingers were resting tellingly over the generous curve of his member, and his face turned at a strange angle to look further down the wall, eyes lidded but wide awake.
A strange suspicion forming in her mind, Sofimon edged closer, curling her knees onto the side bench and hunkering down until the spring waters lapped around her shoulders. She pressed her face against the stone wall to peer through the water past the youth's reflection, and then started laughing to herself. Just under the wavelets of the spring, an answering female face was staring back at him, with the wide, gold-gilt eyes and angelfish fins of a naiad, her breasts high and erect as she arched up from the depths of the mural's 'river', one slim, webbed hand reaching out to pull herself onto the riverbank. Or perhaps to pull him under.
So. The Greeks weren't entirely wrong about the naiads. They celebrated their bodies through medicine and art, reveled in the rites of fertility… and had a healthy appetite for men on regular days too. And not just from their own kind.
Her cheek was still pressed against the wall, grinning at what her ancestors would have called a blatant kidnapping attempt, when a voice called out from twenty feet overhead.
"Enjoying yourself already?"
Sofimon jerked out of the water like a cork, splashed two steps back, and craned her neck up at the promenade. Where the unmistakable broad shoulders of her captain were silhouetted against the fire-touched evening sky. Perched on the wall next to his elbow was a second lantern, beaming down at her like another eye in the dusk.
"Maybe…?" she called back, laughing, arms instinctively rising to fold over her breasts. Before dropping a few inches lower once she remembered that this was Valkyon after all. "The painting is already finished. So I thought… why not take a soak while there's still light?"
"Not even chalk drawings can keep you busy?" She could sense that trademarked dry smile overhead.
"Well… I ran out of drawing space," she replied, gesturing at the final step rising from the edge of the pool, etched in white, with the last, cloud-rimmed arrowhead pointing to her. "Why not see for yourself?"
His armored boots clanked down the stairs to a tempo that punctuated the triple-time beat of the pulse in her throat. Once Valkyon rounded the final corner, her smile peaked: in his free arm were the ewer, towels, sponge, and cake of soap that her note asked him to fetch—discreetly—on his way up the ruins. He was also carrying that tiny, dry smile she knew, as his boot swallowed up the final chalk marker that brought him to her.
"I needed to check on you anyway," he remarked, without so much as a raised eyebrow at her nakedness. "The passage has been blocked up, mostly. There's still room for you and I to get through." A quick, cursory glance of his tawny eyes across the jeweled pool, the waters now mixed with lead and fire from the evening sky. "...Though if you'd like to stay here for a bit longer, that's fine. I could always finish up later tonight." And with that he stooped, depositing the ewer, soap, and towels on the final step next to her lantern. "I'll save some dinner for you back at camp."
Sofimon's smile finally dropped as her captain turned on his heel and climbed back up the stone steps. Maybe 'The Mannequin' wasn't such a bad name for him after all.
"Valk, that extra towel isn't for me," she called out. "You know that… right?"
At her voice, Valkyon froze in midstride, one boot halfway off a scuffed chalk arrow. When he turned at last, it was with a strange, split-second clench of the muscle in his jaw. Gone as soon Sofimon realized that it was nervousness.
"I had my suspicions," he began, his voice giving away as much as his expression now. Which was to say, nothing. Then the side of his mouth broke into another faint, droll smile. "Don't worry: I'll give myself a good scrub once I'm finished with the passage tonight. I'm aware that you and Kero prefer if I sleep on one side of the camp these days."
Sofimon winced, fingers biting into the insides of her elbows. "That's— that's not what I meant. Really…"
He was still smiling at her, lightly. "Your gesture is appreciated, all the same. I'll see you back at the camp."
And her captain was over halfway up the stairs by the time Sofimon realized what that cryptic smile meant.
He was distracting her. Well. Once this was all over, she'd have one or two choice things to say to those Obsidian ladies in the locker-room.
Her feet flashed out of the water and over the basalt stairs, silver puddles shivering along the steps in her wake. One arm caught his: slipping easy through the crook of his elbow, her skin shining dark and slick as an eel in his halo of lamplight as it suddenly jerked, and swayed over the step they were perched on. The deep, spicy warmth of his musk wrapped around her.
"You've brought everything I asked, followed a trail of kiddish scrawls almost a quarter of a mile up a mountain without complaining… and you're about to climb down again without so much as a break? Without asking why I wanted you to come see this pool for yourself?"
His eyes flicked once, over the top of her head, to the crash and roiling hiss of the waterfall. Still noncommittal. "…Well I can see why we need to block up the passage before we leave."
A frown rippled once over her face, and was pushed away. "Yes, exactly. Who knows how long it would be before this place comes alive again? We might be the last ones to see this pool while it's still in this state. And you're not at all interested in knowing why this section of the spring was saved just for the queen and her consorts?" When he kept his silence, she quirked her head to the side. "…Have you never tried bathing in a hot spring before?"
"It hasn't come up."
Her smile was returning. "You really don't know what you're missing, then. Did you know that a typical balneotherapy back in the day involved twenty-one different baths, over two weeks? They claimed that it was only under wild, constantly-running, mineral-rich waters that the healing effects of the river would settle into the body. Patients used to visit these springs to treat rheumatism, arthritis, sprains and fractures, damage on peripheral nerves, and all sorts of skin ailments: bathing with an empty stomach, then resting once every three days where it was warm and protected from the winds."
"Not surprising then that we found a full-sized medical clinic on the corner of the village."
Was he set on making this difficult? "Well I also read that waters this strong will work wonders on soothing pulled muscles and frayed tempers," Sofimon grasped, her moist fingers tracing lightly over the vein on his hard bicep, the dusky bud of her nipple brushing against his forearm. "And for removing mud from hard-to-reach places. It's not all medicinal." Now she offered a tiny smile, angled up at his poker-face. "We've been crawling up and down these ruins for three days without break, and there's another week-long hike back to El in the morning. Why not take this last night to relax?"
Her captain kept his silence. But those golden eyes were searing through hers, the pulse in his muscular neck leaping.
"Just for an hour, just for tonight. With me. Because we haven't had a chance to share so much as a drink together since we started traveling. And I miss it."
With excruciating slowness, Valkyon's lamp descended onto the step, the iron handle ringing faint against the stone.
Her arm twined tight through his, the moist summer air shivering the droplets stuck across her naked skin, slipping slick from her hair and the curve of her lips to dampen his clothes. And Sofimon pulled him down to the water.
Abduction complete (so to speak). But knowing Valkyon, he's still going to put up a fight even in when in deep peril. The next chapter holds all the details.
Disclaimers:
- Yes, the trail of arrows was stolen, er, borrowed from one scene in Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. Sofimon is a little too nice to actively subdue and kidnap her superior officer. Even with good intentions.
- Sofimon is in fact Brazilian, and a definite bookworm who enjoys looking up obscure facts.
- In the game, Valkyon has never been called 'the Sword Test Mannequin' (though he might have other nicknames we don't know about yet). In fact, as of Episode 17, he's confirmed to be very far from a dunce in romance/plain seduction. But this story was written back when the fandom was convinced he was a bona fide cyborg with a pure heart and a dangerously-literal mind. Let's roll with that for now.
- Naiads are definitely seen as sex symbols in ancient Greek myth, both pursuing and being pursued by a gamut of deities, sub-deities, and heroes. In this story, I decided to keep that element of the myth.