One of the world’s great beauties bolted awake and upright in her chamber.
She was a picture of distress. The normally calm eyes flashed with fear, proud features twisted into a battle-ready snarl. Her chest heaved, her pulse pounded—but there was no threat present.
She looked all around her and saw what she ought, by all rights, expect to see: multiple attractive men and women of various ethnicities lay in the silk sheets, bodies draped over each other nude, soaked in a thin sheen of sweat. The musky scent that filled the room gave testimony to the evening’s activities between Asha and these individuals.
But none of them woke with her.
Her mouth suddenly filled with a taste of bile. She swallowed, raised a hand to cover her red-painted lips, and with an effort, she temporarily curbed her urge to vomit.
It wasn’t the evening’s activities that had raised her gorge, or the cocktail of alcohol and drugs she had taken prior to their start.
No, High Priestess Asha had experienced a terrible vision while she slept, the most ominous of her life. The Goddess of Love occasionally shared her will with Asha, and rarely, Astara had placed Asha into dreams where she could psychically punish heretics for their evildoings.
In the past week, she had done so twice, though only once had been successful. That had been a strange and unwelcome shock, being driven from a dream the Goddess had invited her into.
That was part of why she had arranged tonight’s indulgent activities. Losing herself in the pleasures of the flesh brought her closer to her Goddess. Asha thought she might perhaps have done something to lose a little of Astara’s favor. That was the only explanation for what had happened.
It was hard to say what Asha might have done wrong, exactly, but the Goddess could be just as slippery and capricious as the High Priestess herself.
Asha drew back the curtain around the massive, plush bed she used for these sexual rituals. She stepped over the bodies of the others carefully, trying not to wake anyone. She set foot on the cold tile of the chamber, found the small, ornate vase she kept by the bedside, and quickly, quietly, efficiently vomited into it.
There. That cleared some of the fog from her brain.
Now the tall, nude woman crossed the room, shivering with every step but not bothering to cover herself. She didn’t have time for such frivolities. She needed to act immediately, carefully, before anything escaped her memory. She parted another curtain and found the windowsill and the dream journal she kept there. She could see the view of the capital, but she had no time to enjoy it this evening.
After Astara-induced dreams, Asha tried to faithfully record any wisdom the Goddess imparted as well as any occurrences of note in the dreams. Tonight, that was especially urgent.
These dreams were not prophetic. The power to see into the future was not one that anyone was known to possess. However, the Goddess did sometimes try to tell Asha things, she was certain. They could not be transmitted as clear messages—the domain of controlling dreams belonged more fully to a different god—but the symbolic meanings of priestesses’ dreams had been an area of study for temple scholars for generations.
She began to scribble down as quickly as she could the contents of this latest dream. Its events had been far less opaque than the usual, giving rise to the High Priestess’s current state of agitation. Astara’s narrative here felt like an actual premonition, a straightforward prophecy of doom. It could not be that, but that was how it felt.
“The armies of the dead march on Enh,” Asha wrote rapidly, in messy handwriting. “They follow a foul, resentful creature, bastard-born.”
The dream had not revealed the man’s name or face, but someone had alluded to a title of some sort. The Bastard of… Bastard of someplace.
Damn it! She was already losing important details. Curse that wine. Curse those leaves I consumed, too…
Her own mental habits were almost as much an obstacle as her remaining state of slight intoxication. She kept sliding back and forth inadvertently between trying to remember the rapidly fading details of the dream and devising solutions to the problem. Asha was as much a political figure as she was a religious one, and she was very action-oriented.
A moment like this was a test of her patience and mental discipline.
Perhaps I could beseech the King’s Council to order that all noble bastards be put to death, she thought. Too much of an overreach? Hmm. And it does go against the Goddess’s general principles. She wishes the product of any dalliance to be born and treated well. All love between men and women is equal. It might not even work. I don’t know if the Bastard of… whatever cursed place… even resides in the Kingdom. Just that he marches at the head of an invading army in this disastrous vision.
Since the vision was not an actual premonition, it wasn’t likely that the threat was anywhere near fully formed yet. More probably, some unlucky thirteen-year-old boy had just awakened one of those vile necromancer classes. She knew from temple records that it happened every half-century or so, and the Divine Trust typically caught it before word could spread.
This boy would have to be purged like the rest, but how to find the child? And what if he was already older? What if the warning was more urgent?
A detail surfaced in her mind.
Something about a desert…
Before she could fully grasp it, Asha’s other reason for the ritual orgy poked her head out from behind the bed curtain.
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“Mistress—I mean, High Priestess, what troubles you?” the girl asked, stepping down from the bed. She flushed slightly at the self-correction. Sometimes, her mistakes had led to correction by her mistress. For the girl’s own good, of course.
Sienna had a sheet bunched up in her hands, partially covering the redhead’s nakedness. Asha was tempted to pull it away and gaze upon the young beauty’s alabaster body in the candle light—women lying with other women being officially forbidden, Asha could only excuse her activities with Sienna via these rituals—but, of course, the High Priestess had more urgent matters to contemplate.
“Sweetling, I had a vision from the Goddess, and I must write it out and decide what to do next before I play with you further,” Asha replied bluntly. She gestured at the ground in front of here. “Kneel here, and I will enjoy you when I’m done.”
“Y-yes, High Priestess,” the girl replied. She dutifully walked over and knelt, covering herself more fully with the sheet.
Normally, that would have annoyed Asha, but she needed to avoid the distraction.
“That’s it!” the High Priestess exclaimed.
The girl remained silent as Asha wrote more rapidly into her journal.
“The origin of the problem is in the Salt Waste.”
She continued writing, as much as she could recollect, until it was only irrelevant details.
“The moon was full.”
Probably a useless detail, since the dream was unlikely to actually predict the future.
But she took everything down that she could.
When she finally stopped scribbling with her quill, Asha noticed that the girl in front of her was shivering.
That wouldn’t do.
The High Priestess rose from her seat in the windowsill and sat down alongside Sienna, wrapping an arm around the girl’s shoulder and pressing her bosom into Sienna’s side. Asha loved the contrast between her own dusky skin tone and Sienna’s pale flesh, her own height and curves and Sienna’s shorter, more slender frame.
“Thank you, High Priestess,” Sienna said sincerely.
“For future reference, I am ‘mistress’ until you leave the room, Sienna.” Asha whispered the words into the girl’s ear, eliciting a quiver that amused her. She reached over and tweaked one of the girl’s erect nipples, eliciting a little whimper of mingled pain-pleasure.
“I thought it was only in bed,” Sienna said. “I thought you were only allowed to… in bed.”
“The High Priestess of Astara can do whatever she wants in this chamber, girl,” Asha said curtly. “None can punish me. None can refuse me, whether they wish to or not. Remember that.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“And my power protects you outside of the room, as well. If any man tries to lay a hand on you, that will be the last time they have hands.” She had preserved Sienna from the touch of any male. The High Priestess had more than enough power to accomplish such a simple task. Even the others in the bed with them could only watch during that part of the evening’s session. Sienna was purely Asha’s to enjoy.
“What threat did you dream of, mistress?”
Asha smiled. The girl was intelligent enough to be curious. That was a rare quality in an initiate. They were not selected for intelligence or curiosity but willingness to obey.
“A terrible necromancer,” Asha said. “I believe he will arise from among the beastfolk. You and I will play soon, but I think the best solution has just come to me. Go to my desk over there, and take dictation.”
Sienna bowed her head and obeyed. She let the sheet drop as she moved, showing her nakedness in its full glory to her mistress. Now that Asha no longer needed to focus as urgently, the sight was welcome.
She’s beginning to understand my preferences better, the High Priestess thought, pleased.
As Sienna bent over the desk, Asha spoke the words of her letter in a formal tone.
“To my beloved sister, the Paladin Samara, of the Party of Heroes, I hope you are well. Unfortunately, I bring most ill tidings of a threat that demands your immediate attention…”
Asha laid out everything she knew.
Knowing her sister and the Party of Heroes, they might not act on only her word. They had a great deal of independence, which was a major reason why Samara had joined them. Even if they did decide to act, they were at the other end of the continent right now, clearing dungeons and saving people in the farthest reaches of Abadd, near the Dwarven Lands the last Asha had heard. The Hero and his party did not merely belong to the country of Niet. They belonged to the world.
To return, they would need to be instilled with a sense of urgency.
“Why are you not communicating with the King’s Council first about this, mistress?” Sienna asked quietly.
Asha tried not to let her face slide into a suspicious expression as the redhead looked at her with an earnest expression. There was always the possibility that one of the King’s Councillors had slipped a spy into the Great Temple. The political authorities and religious authorities were always trying to interfere with one another in this country, playing games of influence, espionage, and counterespionage.
Not Sienna, though. She is… pure. She is mine alone.
The High Priestess reminded herself of the nights of pleasure she and Sienna had enjoyed in each other’s arms and forced her lips into a smile.
“Because, sweetling, the King’s Council would do exactly the wrong thing. They would send an army into the desert… and I expect that a different sort of army would come marching back. You’re basically just feeding him resources at that point. There are records that tell us how necromancers are beaten historically. The way to defeat such a monster isn’t to drown him in bodies; it’s to send a small, elite force before he establishes himself. Given the arrogance of the Grand Duke, the Council would undoubtedly defy my advice—”
She stopped in midsentence. Something she’d said had jostled something loose in her memory.
That word kept coming up in the dream, didn’t it? There’s no way it could be a coincidence. Could it? No, Astara communicates by such signs. ‘Defiant.’ It means…
“M-mistress?” Sienna asked, her voice quivering slightly as if fearful that she had displeased Asha in some way.
“Thank you for your impertinent curiosity, little one,” Asha said, her face breaking out into a mixed smile. The information was good and bad. Good in that it might be enough to persuade the Party of Heroes. Bad in that “Defiant” was a very ominous modifier. She stepped closer to Sienna and squeezed one of the girl’s breasts from behind. Asha found that made for excellent stress relief.
The girl let out a surprised gasp before she recovered herself.
“Um, m-mistress?”
“You will revise the letter. Get another piece of parchment. You just reminded me of something the dream told me that will bring home the urgency of their task… Each time the text refers to the enemy, it should use the title: ‘Defiant Necromancer.’”
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