Illustrated Novella - Test Chapter Alpha

Hey folks!

This mini-update about the Illustrated Novella is only going out to Fanatic-tier members and above since it's Alpha content.

I've ended up having TWO artists potentially interested in the project. I've already been speaking with Bayushi about the 'Married Adventurer's idea suggested in the comments of the last poll by CandidBandit and we've been narrowing some things down in terms of characters and backstories. This is the first test chapter and is VERY Alpha Draft. Nothing is guaranteed to stay the same, but I had fun exploring what the character might be like to give Bayushi something to start designing the two main characters from.

The other artist isn't firm on wanting to do the project yet, but I'm hopeful. So we might end up with TWO illustrated novels being developed at the same time, because once I have the hook in I've got to reel them in, right!?

Anyways, enjoy this little bonus story testing out the Married Adventuring Couple idea!

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“You’ve got the ones on the left?” Amana grunted softly.

“As long as you have the two on the right,” Oberon replied, growling it quietly into his wife’s ear.

“I’ve got- fuck- the archer straight ahead as well,” she said, pressing her ass back against him. “You know about the two behind?”

“... of course I do,” Oberon said. He hadn’t, in fact, clocked the bandits behind them. But he’d always tended to get distracted when his cock was firmly planted inside of his wife.

The couple were deep in the Winewood - who had given it such a pleasant name, Oberon couldn’t say, but he was sure they’d never actually seen the place. Yes, wild grapes did grow plentifully among the thick forest, but the place was a dark, cramped place full of nearly every forest-dwelling danger that he could think of. And after eighteen years of adventuring across the length and breadth of Kahlmadag, he could recall quite a few truly shitty creations of the Gods.

“Do you want to wait, or take them now?” Amana groaned, reaching back and running her hand through his rough hair.

“Let them watch,” Oberon grinned a little savagely. “You are just as fierce as the day I met you, my little wolverine.”

“You say the nicest things, honey bear,” she laughed.

Beyond the natural dangers of the Winewood, there had always been bandits living in the depths. They did a brisk trade of thieving, whether they struck out at the small lumber and farming villages around the fringe of the forest, or played highwayman along the Queen’s Road that had been cut through the forest four centuries ago and served as a minor trade route between the city-state of Casbalah and the Bright Realms.

The bounty that Amana and Oberon were chasing wasn’t on any of the bandits, however. Sure, their heads might be worth a few silver each if you could identify the head and bring it to the correct judge who was looking for them. But the married couples’ needs were greater, and they didn’t waste their time with bandits for petty silver; with two children attending the Grand Lyceum at Pyke, Amana and Oberon had tuition on the mind alongside their own eventual retirement.

Oberon, for his part, had argued against sending their teens away to a poncy academy that was likely to ruin their sense of right and wrong, but Amana had attended the school, and her father before her, and back to its very founding. The school taught magic, martial skills, and all of the foundations afforded in the educations of the High Nobles. When the choice came down to send his children to the Lyceum or have Amana and her entire elvish family pissed off, Oberon had bent to the will of his wife.

He could always knock some sense back into the kids on holidays and remind them that mischief was the natural state of the world.

The bounty, which would cover about half the yearly tuition for one of the kids, was for a thing that the locals and merchant caravans had dubbed ‘The Stalker,’ spoken in a harsh whisper and always with a look over the shoulder as if the thing were sneaking up on them in the village pub. It was said to be some sort of dark fey creature, all talons and claws (or possibly spines and thick plates of armour, since reports varied). It did not speak, it did not negotiate, but it did attempt to catch its prey and drag them into the deep woods. So far it was estimated that a dozen men had been dragged off, and only a few had managed to escape its clutches before reaching its lair.

Finding that lair was where the Bandits came in, and why Oberon was currently fucking his wife in the middle of a forest clearing in bandit territory. Their campsite was small and mostly for show. The pair had made a little fire and scattered a couple of their pots to make it look like they’d been there for at least a few hours, but they hadn’t really unpacked or set up their tent.

“Fuck, baby,” Oberon groaned loudly, clapping a hand down on his wife’s muscled ass. Her firm, chestnut-brown skin clapped and rippled with the spank and she moaned as she glanced back at him with a smirk. They were both half-dressed, Oberon only wearing the thick poncho of sabre cat pelt that he’d taken a half-dozen years before, and Amana had her bulky, loose pantaloons pulled down to her knees as she bent forward over the fallen log. Oberon had argued for her doffing her breastplate as well, but her safety ended up trumping her desire for her tits.

“That’s it, honey bear,” Amana grunted loudly. “Take that pussy. Fuck, you fuck me so good.”

“Getting close,” Oberon grunted. Amana slammed her ass back at him and arched her back, taking him deep and offering her hair to him for grabbing the way they both liked. Her hair was the wiry, curly black of the southern Elvish clans and she wore it pulled tight to her scalp, the poof of it behind her head a frizzy round thing that remained cute despite their middle age and her fierce reputation. God damn, I love my wife, Oberon thought as he grabbed his wife at the tie that kept her hair back and tugged softly.

“Finish up quick, fuckers,” said one of the bandits as he stepped out of the forest, a blade in his hand and a smirk on his face. “Maybe we’ll leave you alive if you-”

“Kromla, fuck!” Oberon swore, berating the God of Luck for his sense of humour. He’d been so fucking close. Instead of orgasming, he pushed Amana forward and up by the back of her head and her ass while he stepped backwards, his cock leaving her as he pivoted to the left.

If there was one good thing about his fucking getting interrupted, it was that sex helped him attune to the natural world around him. It was a primal act, a bestial one, and Oberon’s magics certainly favoured that state of being. The vines of the wild grapes shifted and snapped as he took control of them, his growl turning feral as he poured his frustration into them. They lashed out, flying as if by their own will, and wrapped around the three bandits that had been sneaking around and through their overgrowth. All three men screamed as their arms, legs and torsos were wrapped up in moments and they were being dragged deeper into the brush. The vines continued to coil and wrap, constricting.

He didn’t have time to focus on them, however, as he continued his turn to seek the bandits Amana had warned were behind them. Oberon threw up his hands in a grasping gesture, reaching out to the trees and yanking down their branches - two of the med were speared through as the trees bent to his will with a cracking that sent leaves scattering and birds leaping from their hidden perches in a panic.

Unfortunately, the third man was quicker than the other two and dodged out of the way of the branches, rolling over his shoulder and leaping to his feet in a sprint. Oberon had a split moment to read the runes daubed onto the massive man’s torso in blood ink and his mouth went a little dry. He was a berserker, the tattoos infused with the blood of some wild animal or another to give him speed and strength.

The Blood Ink was considered one of the dark rituals of the Root and Stone, the loose affiliation of druids who followed the old ways of the wild. It was too dangerous, and its use had been banished and caused the deaths of thousands of followers of the Old Way. Someone had learned the ritual, someone unworthy of the power they handed out to simple bandits.

Oberon had little he could summon by way of the nature around him that would intercept the berserker. Rock pulled from the ground he would leap over. Plant wouldn’t reach him in time. He could cast a handful of the grass seed he kept in a pouch at his belt, but the spells he could use wouldn’t be fast enough.

Oberon let loose a roar and tapped into the nature inside of himself instead. He could feel his teeth distend, the canines growing too large for his mouth, but they weren’t his main focus.

The berserker roared, bringing back a wood axe designed to carve limbs from trees and more than capable of severing Oberon’s head from his neck. Oberon roared a challenge in return and jumped forward, inside the swing of the berserker’s axe, and drove his clawed hands into the man’s chest. Except they weren’t hands - his fingers had shortened, and his nails had extended. His thick body hair had grown even denser, into a fur, and his arms had bulged with strength.

The bear claws shredded the berserker’s chest as his swing was blocked by the closeness of his target, and the man’s howl turned from one of bloodthirst to one of horror as he felt his strength and speed, his feeling of immortality, fading quickly.

“The problem with Blood Ink is that it only works as long as you wear the marks,” Oberon growled into the man’s face. His claws had carved four deep gashes down to the bone on either side of the big man’s chest, and even though he somehow towered over Oberon, he lost much of the unnerving danger that had cloaked around him. Oberon shoved the man back and he stumbled, his heels catching a pot on the ground and tripping back to land ass-first in the coals of the little fire of their campsite. It took the man a moment to register the pain of heat, he was so distracted by his clawed-up chest, and he rolled sideway with a howl.

Oberon turned from him, no longer a threat for the moment, and found that Amana had done her work with ruthless efficiency as usual. The archer, about a dozen yards into the trees, was gurgling as he staggered around with a throwing knife buried in him at the base of the throat. She would have thrown that as she leapt with his push, and she’d grabbed up her sword-spear from where it had been leaning, looking like a walking staff. The blade was almost two feet long with a soft curve, and the haft was a dark wood which Oberon himself had slowly carved runes of hardness, stability and balance into. It could resist the bite of any blade, and repair any other damage given enough time, water and sunlight. A living weapon, Amana had turned her bladeskill with it into an absolute art form.

Two bandits were dead and leaking onto the forest floor, while a third was whimpering as he held a slashed gut and sat at the base of a tree. Amana put the blade through his temple as she came back towards the clearing, dragging a final bandit behind her. The thief was little more than a boy, perhaps no older than their own son Mekti at sixteen winters.

“You’re getting soft, wife,” Oberon said as he shook the fur from his arm, his hands returning to normal but the extra hair needing to be shed.

Amana frowned at him and shoved the boy past Oberon. “Yours is likely more useful,” she said, eyeing the berserker who was gasping and clutching at his wounded chest. She had, at some point in the brief but deadly fight, pulled up her pants.

“If we can get him to speak,” Oberon sighed. Then he turned to his wife and reached up to caress the long, pointed tip of one of her elfin ears.

“Stop,” She smirked, batting his hand away. “We can start up again later when we aren’t surrounded by the dead and dying.”

“We’ve done it in worse places,” Oberon chuckled.

Amana rolled her eyes and whacked the boy with the butt end of her sword-spear. “Are you going to tell us what we want to know, or do we wait for the big one to have enough sense to speak?”

“I- I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” the lad sobbed, looking sideways at what must have been the big man of their band. A bully and brute, reduced to nought much more than a whimpering fool.

“The ‘Stalkers’ territory,” Oberon said, kneeling down at the boy's feet and wiggling his fingers. The grass and dirt shifted at his command into a map of the forest - not perfect by any means, but certainly better than drawing with a finger in the dirt. “You must have been avoiding it. Where does it lair?”

The lad whimpered a little, glancing at the big man again as if he feared reprisal for giving up any free information, but the claws had dug deep and her was still more than a little distracted. The boy got to his knees and considered the map, then pointed to an area north of where they were currently, and east of the Queen’s Road. “It’s supposed to be in this area here,” he said. “We never go that deep into the wood anyways, there are all sorts of things out there.”

Amana grunted, eyeing the map over her husband’s shoulder. “Did your band ever run into it?”

The boy shook his head. “We heard about it from the Pull-Dug Gang and stayed far away. They said it attacked their camp one night and dragged off Tall Jon into the woods. That would have been… here.” He pointed to a spot a little south of the main area he’d indicated as the Stalker’s territory.

“Good enough,” Oberon sighed, standing up and feeling his knees creak a little as he did it. He glanced at his wife and raised an eyebrow. Amana glanced back, then dug into the pouch at her waist.

“Stand up,” she ordered. The boy did, hugging his arms around himself. Amana grabbed his hand and made him hold it out and open. “This is to feed and clothe yourself when you get out of the woods,” she said, taking out a silver sceptre and placing the coin into thy boy's palm. “And these are to pay a tradesman for your first month of apprenticeship.” She pressed two more of the silver coins into his palm. “I don’t care which trade, or where, but if we ever cross paths with you again and you aren’t an apprentice, I’ll kill you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy gulped.

“Now get,” Amana growled, pointing south towards the edge of the forest.

The boy took one last glance at his wounded former-bandmate, and around at the death of the others. The trees Oberon had pulled on were slowly returning to their natural state, lifting the bodies off the ground inch by inch. He blinked, then took off running as if he expected Oberon or Amana to change their minds.

Aman sighed once he was gone, shaking her head. “That’s what, three miles from here?” she asked, gesturing to the map.

“Closer to four,” Oberon said with a frown. “Through some dense areas, too.”

“Well, we better get moving,” Amana said.

“You’re really going to leave me like this?” Oberon asked, gesturing to his cock still dangling below his poncho.

“Like what?” she laughed. “You aren’t even hard anymore. Just help me pull any coin off these fools and we can get moving.”

Oberon muttered to himself as he fetched his breeches from beside the fallen log and started pulling them on.

- - - - -

“I mean, it can’t be any more obvious than that, right?” Amana said quietly. They had made the trek through the forest, Oberon warding away the worst of the natural predators, both beast and plant. He hadn’t been expecting the River Troll in the stream where they filled their canteens, but Amana had made short work of the beast as it tried to grab her.

Now they stood before a dark, close copse of evergreens that looked like they were being choked out by the wild grape vines yet continued to stand strong. That in itself wasn’t too strange, but the telling sign of something being off were the bodies of men strung up a dozen feet from the ground, hanging like dry husks.

“None of them have pants,” Oberon observed.

“That’s what you’re concerned about?” Amana asked.

“Well, it’s a clue,” he said. “Of what, I don’t know. But it is.”

Amana rolled her eyes. “We could just burn it out.”

Oberon considered the idea for a moment - it wouldn’t be the first time they flushed out a monster with smoke and fire - but shook his head. “No telling which direction it flees, and we can’t surround it. Plus the fire could spread quickly, it’s been a dry year.”

“Straight in, then?” his wife asked.

Oberon shrugged. “Only way to figure out what it is,” he said. “Unless you feel like stalking the stalker and hiding to try and catch a glimpse.”

Amana grimaced at that. It was another tactic they’d used in the past, but something always went wrong when they tried to be extra cautious. With the way Kromla laughed at them with his luck, it was just as likely that the Stalker would be taken by some other bounty hunters miles away and they’d be sat waiting for days.

“Straight in then,” Oberon nodded. He fetched a decent-sized stone from the ground, keeping it in his palm, and as he followed his wife stealthily towards an opening in the evergreens he also pulled a handful of grass seeds from his pouch. Between rock and seed, and being surrounded by plants, he felt fairly confident that as long as the thing wasn’t invisible he would be able to handle it.  And then there was always his deadly wife.

Through the trees, the sounds of the deep forest grew dim, even the soft sounds of the wind becoming dead. The tunnel under the boughs of the trees stretched ahead as if it were a tunnel through the earth, and the light dimmed behind them.

“Fey,” Amana whispered, her grip shifting uneasily on her sword-spear.

Oberon grunted his agreement, keeping his eyes darting for any irregularity in the trees. The Fey were tricky to deal with, and sometimes their realms stretched the world thin and bent reality. This wasn’t the first time they had encountered such a place, and things always became complicated when handling the Fey. One of their former companions, an archer who had travelled with them a decade back, had taken a job that had left him aged sixty years or more in the space of a few minutes in such a space. They had met another woman who had emerged from a Fey-space two hundred years after she entered and swore she had been no more than an hour inside.

Thankfully, those risks were rare, but the faster they dealt with this thing the better.

Finally, the trees began to thin, well after they should have been into the interior of the copse, and Oberon followed his wife into the clearing. The trees loomed tall, easily eighty feet into the air, and the light of the place was cold and grey as if filtering through a fog. A small pool sat off-centre in the clearing, its water as smooth as glass.

Across the clearing and the pool, a creature was stomping around. It was humanoid, about the size of a man, and wore an armour of gnarled, grey wood that was spiked with severed branches. It wore a similar helmet over its head and face, craggy branches reaching up like horribly twisted antlers, and its face was a rictus contortion of dark eyeholes and a jagged mouth.

“Well, shit,” Oberon said, because it turned and looked right at him as he entered the space.

“Nothing to it but to do it,” Amana said, hefting her sword-spear and spreading to the side to gain some room.

The creature howled, something between a she-wolf and a cougar, and charged. It’s claw-like hands extended, it’s grey wooden armour creaking loudly with each movement.

Something ticked the back of Oberon's mind, however, as he mentally flicked through his options. This space, the pool. Tree roots curled from a nearby tree, a great evergreen that seemed to take up an entire side of the space, and the roots dipped into the pool.

“Wait!” Oberon called to his wife, and he tossed the grass seeds he’d been holding as he tapped into his magic, and the magic of the pool. The water glowed at his mental touch and he drew mana out of it, and ineffable stuff formed where magic pooled in the natural world. This allowed his spell to react much faster than it might have, and as the creature ran straight through his cloud of seeds they sprouted in mid-air, thick field grasses growing two ten inches in a moment, and thirty in a second. They wrapped around the limbs of the creature and pulled it back and down towards the ground until the grasses were long enough to reach neck high on both Oberon and the creature.

It howled again, but Oberon held a hand out to his wife to motion her back.

“Don’t tell me,” she said sarcastically. “You ‘just want to try something.’”

“I don’t think this is what we think it is,” Oberon said as he cautiously approached the creature. It was thrashing against the grass bindings and he could tell that its natural influence was quickly taking over the grasses - soon it would turn them to its own will.

Or, likely, her own will.

Oberon stepped a foot directly into the pool, forming a connection with the leyline that fed it, and he pressed a palm directly to the forehead of the creature. “Calm,” he said, though the word was in the primordial tongue of power.

Immediately the creature stopped thrashing and it’s tense, jerky tics of movement oozed out of it. Amana watched her husband curiously, her spear still at the ready, as Oberon reached forward and took the helmet the creature wore by the base of the antlers and slowly pulled it off. It came away just like any warrior’s helm and revealed the smooth green skin of a slender neck, then a cherubic face that was flushed a darker green as eyes the same clear blue of the pool blinked and looked out helplessly.

“She’s a dryad,” Oberon said.

“Clearly,” Amana replied with a soft smirk. They’d had run-ins with the promiscuous fey on several occasions in the past.

Oberon loosened his grip on the Calming spell and the Dryad blinked her eyes and gasped slightly, her face flushing all the more as her eyes trained on him.

“Please,” she begged. “I feel so… hollow. So hot.”

“What’s happened to you?” Oberon asked, strengthening the Calming spell just a touch. Usually his control over such a magic would be a bit more of a blunt tool, but with his connection to the mana pool and the leyline, he could wield it like a Luthil knife-fighter.

The flush to her skin seemed to dim a little again as she gained more clarity. “It is my season of pollination,” she groaned in pain. “In the past, I have always had Yellowleaf to fulfil this need, but when I sought him out in the forest I could not find him or any of the other Treemen who used to call the forest home. Please, the longer I go without pollination…” She closed her eyes tightly, gritting her teeth in pain.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Amana sighed, shooting her husband a look.

For his part, Oberon responded with a shrug. “I had no idea, my wolverine,” he said. “If we leave her like this, she’ll eventually wither into a husk. She’s been seeking a suitable partner for pollination. It’s her nature.”

“Please,” the dryad whimpered again pitifully. “My name is Eshcol. I need help.”

“Fucking a tree. Again,” Amana sighed, setting aside her spear with a grunt and starting to unlace her breastplate at her side.

On seeing this, the dryad opened her eyes wide and looked hopefully at Oberon.

“Yes, I can perform the rituals needed for this to work,” he said, blowing out a breath.

He had to keep a hold on the Calming spell as he quickly pulled the wooden armour from Eshcol. It was technically not armour so much as an outer layer of her skin turned to hard bark by her slow corruption. If he understood the life-cycle of the dryad, she should have shed it months ago but without having gotten pollinated it had formed to protect her in her hunt.

Revealing Eshcol was almost as pleasing as seeing his own wife stripping out of her clothes. Where Amana had her chestnut brown skin with nicely hefty breasts capped with dark nipples and a thatch of dark hair over her mound, the dryad was a pale green with tits that seemed heavy and oversized and engorged nipples leaking a sticky, sap-like substance. A vibrant green moss grew like pubic hair from her mound, though her head was smooth and bald, the hair having merged with her helm.

“Eshcol, I’m going to need to release you from the Calming to perform the ritual to make me a suitable pollinator,” Oberon said, trying to remember the esoteric pieces of the spell that would be necessary. It was one of those things that had been hidden away in a druidic tome stuffed with such spells; hard to get ahold of to begin with, and full of seemingly inane pieces of lore that would only be useful in very specific situations. Like this one. “When I release you, you’ll become feral again. Do you think you can direct that towards my wife without extracting her life essence?”

The dryad looked at Amana and licked her lips, nodding. “I can hold it off,” she said. “Just… be quick.”

Oberon nodded, then looked at his wife.

Amana stepped up to the naked dryad, placing her hands on the green nymph’s shoulders and pushing her to her knees. “If you’re taking my husband's cock, little nymph, you’ll lick me for fairness’ sake.”

As Amana pulled Eshcol and her green lips towards her pussy, Oberon let go of the Calming spell, and the grasses, and quickly stripped off his clothes. Eshcol, sensing his nakedness in her grove, tried to turn to him but Amana kept her face between her legs, groaning in a pleasured command to keep working at what she was doing.

The ritual, with the aid of the mana pool, was a complex attunement of Oberon’s body with the grove, and centring his reproductive essence with various sigils and runes that he painted onto his body with the water from the pool. Where he did so, the magic glowed a soft blue-green.

Once it was over, his stomach and thighs thick with the glowing runes, he stepped out of the pond and got behind Eshcol. He hefted her hips up and pulled her away from his wife, turning her over in the air and setting her back on the ground on her back.

“Sit on her face, dear,” Oberon grunted. “Keep her in one spot for me.”

“I better get a taste of that before this is over,” Amana groaned as she straddled the dryad’s face. Eshcol was already sticking her tongue out before she even lowered the entire way.

“I thought you wanted to wait for later?” Oberon smirked, meeting his wife’s eye before glancing back down to ensure that his cock was teasing the dryad before thrusting into her tight, all-too-humanoid cunt.

“This is later, honey bear,” Amana moaned, leaning forward and pursing her lips for a kiss as she grabbed the dryad’s tits.

“Fair enough,” Oberon laughed. “Gods, she’s fucking tight.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to pop that quick,” Amana teased him.

“Not a chance,” Oberon grunted, starting to thrust into the squirming dryad with slow, heavy thrusts. “Just gotta stretch her out properly.”

“Which is just what she’s craving,” Amana said.

- - - - - -

His wife snorted as Oberon stopped to adjust his cock in his breeches again.

“It’s not funny,” he grunted. “I still feel sticky and I’m chafing.”

“Serves you right for dragging me out into those woods,” Amana said. “You do realize that we just threw a bounty of six golden thrones away. We can’t collect on a dryad we fucked instead of a monster we killed.”

Oberon groaned and adjusted his cock again. Dryad cunts were slick, but their juices were naturally sugary like sap and after drying it got sticky. “Yes, I realize that,” he sighed. They were still almost fifteen thrones short for the next tuition payment their kids would need for the next semester at the Lyceum. “You can’t tell me you didn’t have fun, though.”

“She did have a nice long tongue,” Amana said, stopping on the Queen’s Road to catch her husband in her arms. “Almost as satisfying as you ‘pollinating’ me after finishing with her.” That seemed to spark a thought in Amana though. “We aren’t going to need to be worried about little plant babies getting dropped in our lap at some point, are we?”

“No,” Oberon chuckled. “At least, I’m fairly certain no. The ritual was only to channel magic into her to fulfil the pollination needs, not to provide her usable seed.”

“Good,” Amana said, then took her husband’s hand and tugged him to keep walking. “If the only payment we’re getting is that Dryad’s Favour for this whole thing, we should make for Stumpford. We can trade the favour token at the lodge for a better-paying job, and if we get there early we can shack up at the Wolf and Whistle. You do your cleansing spells for the girls, I’ll make some collections in town, and we can spend the evening with Jageela free of charge. She’s got that thick tongue that I like, and that orcish ass that you like. What do you think?”

Oberon grunted and shifted his ponch slightly. “I think, wife, that we’d better get a move on,” he said. Then he reached down and cupped Amana’s ass through her pants. “Though I think you have the ass that I truly like.”

Amana, for all her deadly ferocity, turned and flashed her husband a smile and a raised eyebrow. “If you start that now, there’s no telling how many bandits we’ll pull in to watch out lovemaking.”

“It would be worth it,” Oberon said and kissed his wife. There was always another hunt to bring gold into their pockets, but it was a great day when helping someone felt so good.