The Walls Come Tumbling Down
Nymhriel paced nervously in her cottage, wringing her hands. Each time a patient came for treatment or supplies, she jumped a mile and her heart nearly stopped in terror, thinking it was someone coming to ask about Willem's disappearance. Or the vile man's reappearance. Or someone coming to prey on her in her isolation.
She didn't want to admit to herself that she was afraid of being alone, unprotected, for the first time in her life. Such an admission was overshadowed by the realization that she owed her rescue from such humiliation to Gundshau, an orc, and one who owed her little.
She had treated him so basely in his helplessness, she thought with shame. If he knew how she had touched him when he could do nothing about it... How could she look him in the eyes and claim to be above acts of depravity or wickedness?
Sitting at her table, she traced her fingers along the whorls of the wooden surface, lost in thought. Nymhriel had been alone for four years now, the war long since over, the fallen men rotted in their graves. Too many women such as she were left behind to mourn in the lonely hours, days, weeks... years. She missed the company Angwedhon provided. The feelings of being loved and protected. The comforts of the marriage bed...
The sun had set by the time Nymhriel shook herself from her thoughts. The orc had been gone for hours; perhaps he found his folk and rejoined them. She should be grateful, if that were the case. Yet she was not. An empty feeling in the pit of her stomach refused to go away even after she sought to fill it with a light meal. Her pacing increased in agitation, and she frequently peeked out the window, hoping to see his loping form approaching.
Her thoughts kept returning to him, lying bound in her bed. Gundshau's body, so different from her late husband's, yet so intriguing in its sameness. Had there been an inch of his flesh she did not touch? Her hands fairly itched to do so again.
What was wrong with her? Had she gone mad? Nymhriel shook her head vigorously, trying to drive Gundshau out of her mind. There had been times, as she dozed in the hard wooden chair in the kitchen while he slept fitfully in her bed, that her dreams had taken her to very disquieting places with the orc. Once, she'd allowed a dream to drift onward into waking, only to smother it soon after, flushing with shameful arousal.
She slowly went to her room and changed into a light sleeping shift. He wasn't coming back. She was alone again. Lying in the bed so long occupied by Gundshau, she breathed in his lingering scent. She'd kept him clean, had gotten quite used to him. Now the smell of him was as familiar as Angwedhon's had been at one time.
Lying awake, her thoughts drifted to Gundshau and her eyes closed. Turning her head on the pillow, she inhaled slowly. The orc was no longer there to tempt her with his presence. She could let down the walls protecting her mind from the betrayal of her body. She could think of him freely now, doing things to her only Angwedhon ever had the right to do. The images did not repel her as she thought they would, or should. It was confusing, but she let the fantasy continue, adding the movement of her own hands over her secret places, imagining they belonged to the orc.
She did not hear his return, so wrapped was she in delirious self-pleasure. The door to her room slowly opened, the dark form of Gundshau entering curiously. He beheld her, lying on the bed, whispering his name as she rubbed vigorously between her legs with one hand, and roughly massaged a breast with the other. Aroused by this vision, he hastily stripped, and climbed into the bed atop her.
Nymhriel's eyes flared open, and she screamed.