Chapter Four
Varis
When the sun set that evening, the glow of the lighthouse flared to life in a way it hadn’t in seasons. The shine of it filled with magic that made his heart thump in his chest. Beautiful…
Varis watched the dark waters and dove for his evening meal. And while eating, he watched the glow of the lighthouse, the subtle hope that welled in his chest, growing faster by the minute. Something needed to happen, like he wanted to crawl from his own skin.
Instead of focusing on it, he traversed the ships that night.
A belly full of fish and mind set on anything.
As if he’d not searched every ship twice over in the time he’d been there, he always reasoned with himself that new things could have floated up or drifted by.
In fact, as he slipped below the deck of one ship, one of the oldest ones, a clink of glass caught his attention.
Bobbing bottles of wine congregated at the side. “Joy!”
He swam the flooded depths and shouldered the netting bag he carried, carefully depositing the bottles neck down so they stuck out of his sack but kept separate.
As he swam through the busted hull of one ship toward the bow of another, a lacemaker beast swam by, dark eyes full of insurmountable stupidity, raw hunger, rage, and the occasional horny rampage where, among other rough-scaled lacemaker leviathan beasts, they engaged in the world’s most intriguing coital rituals…
And to that day, Varis had no idea which were the males or females.
Nor if anyone was consenting. Or even if it was really mating…
The last few times he’d seen it, tiny lacemaker beasts followed a few months later, so, perhaps?
Though, many of the other lacemaker beasts ate smaller ones, so their children didn’t last all that long.
Varis likened them to the leaf-wrapped parcels of fried minced vegetables they sold on the street in his home country.
His belly ached for a taste of something besides fish, but it was fish or risk being sent back home, or worse, tried for crimes against a nation.
The lead-lined box that nestled securely in the hold of his ship held millions of gold worth of the rare silks meant for the skin of kings only. Varis’s only consolation was that the seal on the casket hadn’t been broken. That was his only bargaining chip.
As he returned to his ship, he stowed away his findings, pushing the few bottles to the side so that come someday soon, he could imbibe and lounge.
Not that he did much more than lounge, repair his clothing, swim, and sleep, anyway.
But the plus side had been the Monsmount sun.
What little of it there was, had given him the most oddly beautiful tan, blossoming over his once noble-pale flesh.
As he lay on the bobbing deck, staring up at the starlit sky, a great shadow darkened the horizon, and he glanced over to pay heed to a cruising wyvern.
Unlike those of Rammolia and those reared by the Wyverncrest family, this beast was a sparkling white, and the rider upon it had a golden hue to him that Varis couldn’t quite get a good look at from his angle.
Still, Varis hid from the flier by tucking his body under the lip of a bench. Broad shoulders, stocky form, and so much gold. Just the sight of it made Varis long to fly as well, body aching to taste a sky that called him in his dreams.
The beast circled his ship a few times; the banking rider’s face was obfuscated by whipping golden hair. But atop his head stood golden tines like that of a rather impractical crown, and something made Varis’s heart stutter, cock twitching for no reason whatsoever.
Seriously, prick? The first male we see in almost a year, and you get all rodded up?
Varis adjusted his hips and tucked his cock between his thighs.
At least if he got hard that way, it’d not tent up the bit of cloth he wore to cover himself.
Uncomfortable? Yes. But if he rocked his hips and got hard, it made for an interesting sensation…
He bid the thought away and shook his head.
The circling rider stared pointedly at where he’d been only a moment before, and Varis swore under his breath when his strong jaw and chiseled features came into view. Holy fuck, if this man is not a lover of flowers, I will die.
He fought every urge to wave the interloper down.
Varis waited for the flier to leave and found himself growing tired, unusually so. The softly lapping waves drew him into uneasy sleep.
He yawned and tucked himself in, using some discarded netting as a pillow.
***
In the nightscape of a dream, he woke in a silken bed; his lithe form spread among pillows and intricate embroidery on textiles as fine as the ones he guarded—a sinful thing to imagine.
Like royalty, he shifted hips draped in a swath of deepest purple set against his skin like charoite, silken and sensual.
In his dream, hot kisses decorated his body like jewelry, each brand leaving a glowing phosphorescence in its wake, like the creatures of the deep sea that skirted the darkest depths, or the algae that made halos around one’s feet when they walked on the sodden beaches and splashed in their waters.
The kisses turned filthy, a hand sliding under his silk, a mouth grazing branding lips over his maleness.
He rose to full hardness, tenting the material, precum darkening the thin, flowing fabric. “Gods…”
“You will cry to no gods.” Lips parted, hot breath dancing, fingers traveling up his thighs, over his hips.
Varis flexed his hips and whimpered, the touch lasting forever, lips not kissing further. He ached for a cock inside him, sweat making the silk stick to his skin, body shaking.
“Your name.” The hungry growl from the vision came into full view—a beacon of gold and wonder.
“Aah!” Varis cried out. “A—Varis!”
“Avarice… Greed and Avarice.” The snarl of wonder encompassed him in unending pleasure, and with the unholy screech of a seabird perched upon a mast, Varis woke.
“Fuck…” Varis flailed himself awake with a breathless gasp as his cock still throbbed, ample pulses of spend sticking his cloth to his lap and softening cock. “How the…”
He’d not had a wet dream since he was a springling, and there he was humping air and spending himself raw over a dream where he didn’t even get a finger inside him. “Fuuuuuuuck.”
Varis sat up and tugged at his clothes before glaring at the seabird above as it stared at him with boggled eyes pointing in two different directions.
“Fuck you! Shit-spreading sky rat!” Varis sneered as the thing followed its namesake, shat a white mess over a mast, and fluttered off with its excrement dripping onto the stained deck below. “And now for a swim…”
Varis slid from his hiding spot and strode to the edge of the ship before diving in. He shook his hips a little extra to wash the filth from his rags. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to pollute the bay, but he still hated it.
When he climbed from the ship and shook his head, water glistened as it flew about. The aforementioned sky rat screeched at him, its off-center eyes trying to focus.
Varis glanced around, locating the rusted pulley of a rope nearby. He lobbed it at the feathered gremlin. “Fuck off! Godsdamned sky peasant offal-mongers.”
Golden men consumed his mind for the day as he foraged the ships and found a mostly legible book. With daylight still abundant, he lay back beneath the shade of a fallen sail and read until he dozed once more.