10. The Magic of the Falls
The Magic of the Falls
Guruk
The falls, according to the elders, had been a sacred gathering space for the different species of Havenlore.
Symbolizing peace and tranquility, it had been written about with awe in our texts.
In modern days, it was considered with equal respect, but now as a pilgrimage of sorts, instead of an assembly spot.
A place to be journeyed to alone or in small parties, as Sammy and I now did.
As the path descended toward the basin, a low, constant roar built. A vibration lit the air, buzzed in the ground underfoot, and stirred in one’s chest. Sammy’s grip on my hand tightened, not from fear as on the bridge. But from anticipation.
The trees thinned. The path curved around a last stand of old birches, their white bark gleaming in the late afternoon light. The canopy opened, and the falls appeared before us.
Sammy stopped, her mouth dropping open. I watched her with a grin.
The falls dropped from the ridge in a single, unbroken curtain from crest to pool, wide enough that the spray reached us where we stood at the path’s end.
The water caught the late sun at an angle that broke it into light.
Not a rainbow exactly, more like the suggestion of every color at once, shifting as the water moved, constant and never the same twice.
The pool below was deep and clear, the basin worn smooth by years beyond counting, and at its edges where the water met the rock face, the light had a quality I had noticed and not named until now.
Amethyst. Just at the edges. Easy to attribute to refraction, to the mineral content of the stone.
I looked at it for a moment. Filed it away. Said nothing.
“Guruk,” Sammy breathed my name, and it stirred my blood.
Through a tight jaw, I said, “Yes?”
“This is—” She turned to look at me, spray catching in her hair. I had to keep my expression composed. She was radiant beyond words in her unguarded openness. “There aren’t words.”
“No,” I agreed, though she spoke of the falls, and I spoke of her. “There aren't.”
She looked back at the falls, and I watched her for a moment longer as time stood still.
I had been here once before.
It was not a memory I had shared with many people, as it did not have the shape of a story that was easily digestible.
No event at its center, no resolution. I had simply come here, alone, in the third year of farming the land my family had helped me acquire.
When the house was built and the fields planted and the animals settled, and everything was as it should be, I had found that all of that rightness contained a silence I had not expected.
I had walked east until I heard water. I had crossed the bridge alone.
Sitting at the edge of this pool for two days, I had lost myself in the stillness of my life.
I was not quite thinking, certainly not arriving at conclusions.
I was just being present with a heavy feeling, which was the orc way of handling things that did not have immediate solutions.
I had not known, sitting here those two days, that I was waiting for something. That would have required knowing what I was missing, which I did not.
Now I knew. It was her, my little human.
“Guruk,” she called as she explored the pool’s edge, crouching to trail her fingers in the water, then standing to follow the mist upward to the crest of the falls. She grinned with the delight that had been, from the first moment I saw it, one of the great privileges of my life. “Can we swim?”
“We can.” I set down our bags.
“Now?”
I checked the position of the sun in the sky. The light was still good for at least an hour. “Now.”
Her boots were off before I finished the word.
Sammy
The water was chilly. The bright, clear, startling cold of water that had come down from a high ridge and had not yet had time to forget it. It hit me mid-chest, and I made a sound that was mostly a shriek, partly a laugh, and came out as something in between.
“Cold,” I reported.
“The melt,” Guruk said, wading in behind me with the composed expression of an orc who ran hotter than a human. The water reached his waist. “You adjust.”
“You adjust,” I muttered, and ducked under.
He was right, annoying. The shock of it settled into something bracing and then into something wonderful. It was a chill that made every nerve ending stand on end at once. I surfaced, pushed my hair off my face, and floated on my back, looking up at the falls.
From here, their crashing break was enormous. It filled everything, pressing into the spaces between thoughts, and making the usual low hum of worry go quiet. Just the falls, the cold water, the sky above, my orc, the florin, and me.
Berry had found a rock at the pool’s rim. It was the driest, most elevated rock, as far from the water as it was possible to get. They were watching us with an air of great dignity.
“Berry doesn't like swimming?” I called.
“Berry,” Guruk said, from somewhere to my left, “has opinions about wet fur.”
“Strong ones,” I agreed, watching the florin tuck their tails more firmly around themselves.
I righted myself and swam a slow circuit of the pool, taking in the basin walls, the purple moss that grew thick on the northern face, the way the falls’ spray created a constant drift of mist that caught the light in varying degrees, depending on where you stood.
Guruk was watching me from where he stood, water to his waist, arms crossed over his chest. He had that expression again, that deep observing of his that made me feel like the most known person in any world.
“What?” I said with a knowing grin.
“Nothing.” He held out a hand.
I swam to him and took it. He pulled me in until I could stand, chest-deep, looking up at him.
“Tell me about this place,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. “You’ve been here before.”
“Once.” Something moved in his face. A quiet shift, like light changing. “A long time ago.”
“You mentioned.” I waited.
He looked at the falls for a heartbeat. “I came in the third year on the farm. Everything was settled. The fields tilled, the animals settled, the house built.” He paused. “It was very quiet.”
I thought about what he had told me the night before, about the house and what it would sound like with people in it. I squeezed him. “Too quiet.”
“I did not know that yet.” The corner of his mouth moved, his right tusk rising. “I thought I was simply tired from the year’s work. I walked east because I needed, well, I’m not sure what I needed. To be somewhere that was not my own four walls, I supposed” His body stilled. “I stayed two days.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.” He confirmed it without self-pity, which made it somehow more affecting.
“I sat here and was present with the feeling, which is the orc way of handling things that do not have immediate answers.” A pause.
“I did not find the answer. I went home. I farmed for three more years before you fell out of the sky.”
I laughed, which was probably not the intended response, but he smiled too.
“And now?” I said.
He cupped my face. The falls roared behind us, and the mist caught in my hair. “Now,” he said, “I know what the quiet meant. And it does not feel quiet anymore.”
I pressed my face against his chest. His arms came around me, warm against the cold water.
“Good.” The words between us meant more than the quiet. “Me too.”
We ate at the pool’s edge as the sun went down.
Guruk had produced, from what I had privately begun thinking of as the Bag of Infinite Provisions, a small wheel of the same cheese from the village, travel bread, the last of the honeyed almonds, and a tin of something that turned out to be a soft, herb spread I had never seen before and was immediately devoted to.
“What is this?” I demanded, holding up the tin.
“Chive paste. From the valley market.”
I sniffed the delectable contents. “You bought this at the market and didn’t tell me?”
“I was saving it.”
“For what occasion?”
He gestured at the falls, the pool, the last gold light. “This occasion.”
I looked at the tin. At him. At the falls. I considered several responses and settled on spreading a large quantity of the paste onto a piece of bread and eating it in two bites.
Guruk watched me with quiet satisfaction.
“I would like you to know,” I said, while reaching for more bread, “that I find your planning extremely irritating.”
“I know.”
“And also extremely good."
“I know that too.”
Berry accepted a small piece of bread and ate it with composure on their rock. We watched the light leave the falls in slow degrees, the color going out of the water, the mist turning silver, the stone of the basin darkening from amber to gray. The first star appeared. Then several more.
It was, I thought, exactly what he had planned it to be. What I had needed without knowing I needed it.
I was composing this thought, turning it over, deciding whether to say it aloud, when Guruk said, “I have something for you.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out something small, setting it on the blanket between us.
I picked it up.
It was a carving. Small enough to fit in my palm, warm from being in his pocket, smooth where his knife had worked the wood.
An alicorn, miniature with details that came from time and attention and care.
The wings were suggested rather than fully rendered, each feather a matter of angle more than line. The horn was tapered to a fine point.
I turned it in my fingers. The wood was the same warm grain as the nightstand in our bedroom.
The one where a larger version of this carving had sat on its stone top, the first thing I had seen when I woke up in Havenlore.
The first thing I had picked up, considered, and called beautiful, not knowing yet what world I was in.
My throat tightened. “When did you make this?”
“In the forest,” he said, a solemn expression on his face, “while you slept.”
I turned it over once more. The night of the fire and the stars and the deputy and the constellations burning steadily overhead. He had stayed awake and finished this.
“Guruk,” I breathed his name like a prayer. I didn’t have the words. Not the right ones. Not ones that were equal to the weight of the small carved figurine in my hand and everything it meant. So I kissed him instead. Not quick, not brief. A real kiss, unhurried as the falls.
He made a sound low in his chest and pulled me closer. The blanket shifted, and Berry made a pointed sound from their rock that we both ignored.
When I pulled back, I was still holding the carving.
“Thank you,” I said, motioning not only to the alicorn figurine but to the food, the blanket, the bags. “For this. For all of it.”
He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Always,” he said. And meant it the way he always meant it, completely and without reservation.
Rising to my knees, I circled his neck with my arms. “Let me show you how much I appreciate all of this, Guruk.”
His growl ignited the fire rising inside me. My orc was fearsome yet kind, powerful yet gentle. I’d never tire of wanting him, and tonight, I wanted to show him how special he was to me. I kissed him with all the passion in my heart.
Then, I tugged at his pants. “Take them off.”
“You first.” He tugged at my tunic.
Berry chittered, then took off through the trees. We both laughed.
“Together?” I supplied.
“Why not?”
We stripped off our clothes, standing naked beside the falls and under the silver moon. The light shining on my orc’s gorgeous skin had every muscle on clear display. My mouth watered.
The same desire sparked in his gaze. “Come here,” he said, holding out his hand.
I went to him without hesitation. Our kiss blazed hot as our tongues collided. But I would not be denied showing my orc what he meant to be. With a soft shove that did not move him at all, I pointed to a large boulder. “Sit.”
He obeyed, a smirk tugging at his lips and quirking up his tusks. “What have you planned, little human?”
“Oh you’ll see.” I grabbed a blanket and placed it between his legs. Then, I knelt upon it and lovingly nudged his cock with my cheek. His thickness would be too much to take all of him, but I’d never been a quitter.
His mint-green eyes widened in shock as I took him in hand and wrapped my lips around the bulbous head. With bobbing motions and quick strokes, I loved my orc.
“Sammy,” he roared to the sky. As he thickened in my mouth, he abruptly tugged my hair, gently yet firmly away from his cock.
“Why?” I pouted, wanting to give my orc everything.
His eyes darkened. “My turn.”
With the speed of a panther, he lifted me off the ground. He kicked the blanket to spread it out, then placed me upon it. Before I could think clearly, he lowered to his belly and buried his face between my thighs.
“Oh!” I cried out as his tongue found my clit.
Like a male starved, he feasted on me. A thick finger plunged into my depths as he sucked and licked with that talented mouth.
“Guruk!” His name was torn from my lips as an orgasm rocked me to the core.
Without giving me a second to breathe or come down from the edge, he drove his cock inside me in one delicious stroke. His pace was fast and unyielding. My pussy clenched at the welcome intrusion, drawing another orgasm from me as quick as the first.
When his cock thickened, I screamed in pleasure for a third time. I didn’t know if you could die of too much pleasure, but it seemed my orc was determined to find out.