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  Contents

  Bloom & Dark

  Title Page

  Copyright Info

  Dedications

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  Other Works From Regina Watts

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  A DARK FANTASY HAREM ADVENTURE

  BY

  REGINA WATTS

  PUBLISHED BY PAINTED BLIND PUBLISHING

  PO BOX 35, ASHLAND, OR 97520

  Rorke Burningsoul Book I: Bloom & Dark

  © 2021 Regina Watts

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written consent of Regina Watts.

  Text: Regina Watts

  Cover & Typesetting: M. F. Sullivan

  http://www.hrhdegenetrix.com

  http://www.paintedblindpublishing.com

  [email protected]

  This novel is a work of fiction, along with its characters, locations, and events, and all fictional persons depicted within it are of the real American age of consent. Any resemblance to known persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  With great thanks

  to the Marquis de Sade

  and Gene Wolfe,

  and with special appreciation

  for Richard Wagner.

  IN THE DEN OF THE SPIRIT-THIEVES

  IT’S HARD TO call the removal of my breastplate a mistake. Doing so saved me from the acidic blood of the spirit-thief who had just fallen beneath Strife’s enchanted blade.

  Yet when the Scepter of Weltyr stood so near my grasp, and those that had called themselves my allies now pointed spear, axe and crossbow straight at me, I could not help but think that stripping off my corroding armor was the greatest error of my life.

  “Have you three been ensorcelled?” My alarmed cry was my only defense. I was too amazed by the abrupt turn of the trio to think of brandishing my broadsword as I might against a foe.

  “Ensorcelled!” Branwen’s fine pink lips, kissed so many times in the darkness of the camp against my better judgment, peeled back from her perfect teeth in a mocking laugh far too cruel for her delicate elfin features. She steadied the aim of her crossbow on me, and this doubling down—this conscious dedication to shooting her bolt right through my heart—confirmed that this was no jest. A lock of golden hair fell across her narrowed blue eyes and even then I felt the compulsive urge to brush it from her face; to tuck it back behind that long and delicate ear. “Yes,” she continued, “ensorcelled, perhaps—by Oppenhir, god of money.”

  “And death,” I reminded her, taking no satisfaction in the tension of her mouth or the further narrowing of her eyes.

  Grimalkin, (who had, of all my companions, been the most unpleasant from the start of our journey at the behest of the Temple of Weltyr), said from within the wild red depths of his beard woven with the runes of his dwarf clan, “That’s enough, paladin. Look, you’re wounded—keep wasting time and it’ll be your wounds that kill you. No guilt for us.”

  His face placid as always, yet in that moment as firm as it had been when we were strangers, one-eyed Hildolfr said in that fatherly tone, “Rorke…be reasonable.”

  I couldn’t look him in his remaining steel eye. Instead I focused on the black patch that replaced its missing twin. “The three of you have gone mad. The Scepter belongs to the Temple: to Weltyr, Himself. If you dare misuse its power, as have these unfortunates”—I gestured with my sword amid the tentacled corpses littering the sacrilegious site where we stood—“then, like these unfortunates, all three of you will be doomed to die.”

  “We’ll all be dying eventually anyway,” Grimalkin said, his take on the common tongue closer to a bark than the usual tones men used to address one another. “Might as well die rich, fat, and well-laid.”

  “You don’t have to fight us, Rorke.” Though his spear was unwavering in his grip, Hildolfr maintained a steady stare into me until, by some gravity, I was forced to meet that powerful eye. “You could come with us. Claim our private client’s reward for the Scepter; split the price four ways.”

  While Branwen and Grimalkin shared a noise of disgust, Hildolfr gestured toward them with his lance’s tip. “At this price, a four-way split is still far more than the Temple would have forced us to settle on. Twenty-thousand gold pieces total, five thousand apiece? That’s still enough, well-invested, to ensure a happy retirement.”

  “Speak for yourself, human,” said Branwen to my terrible pain, her pretty face absent of all the charm that had won me while contorted in a greedy scowl. “We elves live longer than dwarves and men combined—a retirement for you is a happy vacation for us, little more than that. I’d be just as glad if our friend here stuck to his ethics and refused the split.”

  My head swam with not just confusion, but pain. Before its removal, the armor had burned through and permitted my chest to be superficially seared with the blood of the decapitated priest whose head had leaked a hole into the floor. For the first time since I was a boy, my sword trembled in my hand.

  “I won’t let you take it,” I told them. “Surely if it’s a larger reward you’re after, the Temple—”

  “Weltyr’s worshipers couldn’t afford a quarter of what this client promises,” answered Hildolfr plainly.

  “Who? Who would dare sneak beneath the nose of a god, let alone that very Creator who watches it each day from dawn till dusk?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” answered the old man, now eying not my face but the burn across my chest. “Come on, Rorke. Let us at least heal you and go our separate ways without complaint. There’s no reason we can’t still be friends.”

  “Traitors to man and God alike—I’ll have no ‘allies’ such as your lot ever again, Weltyr willing.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Branwen, finger tightening on the trigger of her crossbow.

  Only by the grace of Weltyr did I dodge that bolt. Branwen, accustomed to fighting from a distance—and doing so against those who would not live to see her fight again—did not realize her tell: namely, that just before her finger tightened to command her crossbow, her shoulders hunched against the anticipated force of the projectile. By this I managed to duck the whistling shot and then, in the subsequent flurry of motion, a swing of Grimalkin’s axe—but Hildolfr, his lance effortlessly piercing my ribs, was responsible the blow that fell me.

  My breath hitched. The sting as my lung ruptured was like nothing I had felt or would care to feel again: I struggled thereafter against the urge to breathe and looked in mute shock into Hildolfr’s eye. It gazed back, unashamed as it was unhappy.

  “I really am sorry, Rorke,” he assured me, sliding the spear’s tip from my ribs.

  Limp-mouthed and quite uncomprehending of my own pain, I looked down at the blood flowing from my side. I touched it, examined Weltyr’s spilled ink upon my dirty hand, then looked again between the faces of my companions. They had brought me along only to find the Scepter—only because a paladin or cleric of Weltyr could sense the nearness of the holy relic and guide them to its location. Now they were done with me, and revealed that all this time I had been to them less than nothing.

  Weakly, I made one last swing of my sword. Grimalkin’s axe sent it clattering from my hand. I followed it to the ground, groaning, crushed beneath the weight of my injuries. Thank Weltyr, I did not fall i
n the acid blood of the dead occultists.

  “Just go to sleep,” Hildolfr told me, his voice soft, his lips beneath his short gray beard taut in displeasure. “Just go to sleep, Rorke. It’s much easier when you’re asleep.”

  My failing vision and rapid blood loss left me next to no choice.

  AN UNEXPECTED RESCUE

  ONLY WELTYR KNOWS how long I lay in that temple, left for dead. Not long, I must imagine. I did not hear my companions leave: I only know that, when I opened my eyes, they and the scepter were already gone. Crippled by pain and the nearness of death, I could not move to even touch the nearby handle of my sword. Misery sat upon my chest. So, Weltyr—it was Your will that Your loyal servant should die alone? Should die, not nobly upon the battlefield, but from the injuries bequeathed to him by avaricious traitors to Your very Name?

  How ashamed I am now to remember those bitter thoughts of mine! But dark-souled Oppenhir’s approach rots the fruits of even the proudest, highest tree. Indeed, I was convinced the footsteps I soon heard were those of that pale-faced god to whom Weltyr assigned the cruelest duties of the cosmos. I shut my eyes again, praying that sleep might once more find me and I might not know that moment when his bony hand plucked me from my body.

  Instead, a woman’s voice rang with gay laughter through the obsidian hall. “Oh, Indra! You were right, how silly I was to doubt you!”

  “I’m always right,” answered another woman, her musical tone terse with customary exasperation. “I can’t help that no one listens to me.”

  “Look at all this! Why, the tithes are all still in their box. Haha!” A rattle reached my ears, a thunderous rain of copper and silver coins as the contents of the tipped box spilled down the side of whatever bag received their plunder. “Some adventurers they were…didn’t even take the loot!”

  “Why, look, Odile—they did take something. The altar is desecrated, see?”

  “Hail Roserpine! They took that blasted scepter with them, did they? Good! Perhaps the spirit-thieves will leave on the same ship they came in on—if there are any left, that is. Oh, joy! Just wait until the Materna hears about— What’s this?”

  A gasp, high and delighted, accompanied footsteps so soft I barely heard them beat their fast approach. Soon, though I was too weary to open my eyes, soft hair tickled my cheek. The woman called Odile, in bending over me, revealed I still had the capacity for some physical sensation that was not pain, and in that moment I was already grateful.

  “Oh.” This gasp was lower than the first. With a tone of abject pleasure, Odile cried, “Why, he’s a terrifically handsome one!”

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  Indra’s voice had joined Odile’s. My dark eyelids darkened further as her shadow fell across my face and blotted out the slowly dying candles of the temple. “A shame he’s dead.”

  “So sad,” agreed Odile, whose voice was more brash than her delicate companion’s. “May Roserpine guide him to a happy rebirth…I hate to think of one so handsome lost instead to Oppenhir’s oblivion.”

  Their steps began to trail away again, their chatter changing subject to the matter of the tapestry hanging upon the nearby wall (“Surely we could move that for at least five gold pieces—wait, what is that, Moronian silk? Oh, no, five times five gold—”) while panic stirred in my wounded breast. Though my whole body burned with fever from my suffering and my head ached like my chest and lung and side, I willed my lips to part. By Weltyr’s kindness, my vocal chords eased out one simple word.

  “Help.”

  Their chatter stopped immediately. “Why”—Odile gasped—“he is alive! And there’s you, Indra, always right…”

  “As though you’re one to talk,” muttered Indra, nonetheless following her companion back to me. “Can you hear us, soldier? Are you still in there?”

  “Please,” I managed through desperation to add, having strength after that for hardly so much as a breath.

  “He’s still in there, all right. Stand aside, Indra—let’s see…”

  A delicate finger peeled back the tatters of my tunic while a hiss rose from Odile’s lips. “Oh! Queen of Chaos, what a terrific burn that is.”

  “That’s not all—look, he’s bleeding!”

  “He is…just how is it you’ve managed to stay alive? Poor pitiful human.”

  A sinking feeling tugged at me. I had not considered that, as we were in the Nightlands beneath the earth of Ramshead, my rescuers were not likely to be human. This was not normally a problem so far as I was concerned…but the non-human entities one found in the Nightlands were notoriously unfriendly toward all who dwelled aboveground. Even so, I had little choice but hope Nightlanders had the capacity for good nature just as did my friends and neighbors from the surface…and after this cruelty from my traitorous companions, I so despaired that I had already begun to wonder if we who walked beneath the sun were not the more abysmal set of people.

  “Here, man,” said Odile beneath the pop of a bottle’s cork, “I’ve a healing draft here if you’d like it—”

  Indra, in high worried tones: “Odile! But—”

  Odile continued for her, addressing me. “It’s twenty gold pieces a bottle—that’s right, as much as we could hope to fetch from that tapestry once we get negotiated down. We’d be wasting money if we just let you get up and walk away, so you’d better be prepared to cooperate with us.”

  “He might hurt us, Odile.”

  “That’s true, he might. Move that sword well away from him, Indra…we’ll sell it, too. And him.”

  Her voice rang clearer as she turned back to me. Shrewd Odile sloshed the contents of the bottle, saying as she did, “Hear that? That’s sweet life in my bottle, human. Roserpine’s song flowing through all the world, caught in this sacred fluid. You can have it back again, for a price—promise yourself to our ownership, swear it on your very honor, and I’ll let you have a second chance to feel and hear and see.”

  “But what if he lies, Odile? What if he has no honor?”

  “See that tattoo, the starburst on his neck? That’s the Crest of Weltyr—he’s a cleric of some kind, I’d wager. Well, man?” Another slosh of fluid. “You’re already a slave to your god. What difference is it for you to be a slave to the two of us?”

  I could not afford to think twice, to delay—nor could I speak. With a slight jerk of my head, I made an attempt at a nod, then let my skull twitch back into its resting place.

  “A wise man,” said Odile admiringly. “Not too proud. I like that…perhaps in the end you’ll prove to be a bargain.”

  A soft hand as chilled as the stones on which I lay caressed my chin and drew open my lips. Soon the glass bottle pressed there and, beneath her guidance, a thin stream of burning fluid flowed from the vessel’s neck. I gasped at once, choking on the elixir from the first swallow its fiery flavor provoked; no doubt that inhalation made the healing of my lungs that much faster. Soon, though I hacked and coughed my way through this choking, I did so without any more pain than a man might have after a faint cold.

  In a matter of seconds I was well enough to push the bottle away and lift one hand toward the chest that heaved with my hacking. The cork bolted shut the bottle and Odile said with pleasure, “Well! He only took half. Yes, a bargain already…”

  “Poor man! Listen to him choke.”

  “It’s a difficult thing to be alive…the body’s natural inclination is always toward its death, and it bitterly protests the least delay.”

  I had managed to sit up throughout the hacking, and though my eyes had opened I saw only my own lower half. When, wiping my mouth with a hand covered in my own dried blood, I lifted my eyes toward my saviors, I tried not to visibly balk.

  Durrow. I should have known it by the talk of Roserpine. Instead I was astonished to find two pairs of eyes, one lavender and one pale white, each without pupil or iris but nonetheless bright with anticipation. Each gazed back at me like gems inset in two perfect charcoal faces. I’d heard it said dark elves were blac
k-skinned; but to my eyes their flesh contained a richness that held notes of blue, almost purple.

  And never had I heard it said that they were so alarmingly beautiful.

  “There’s our happy slave,” enthused pale-eyed Odile, placing her bottle back into the pack she handed to Indra. “All better now, and ready to please his new mistresses.”

  “He really is very handsome,” said Indra, admiring me through lavender eyes half-hidden beneath a flow of soft white hair she frequently pushed from her delicate face. “Why, all the market will fight over him.”

  “If I resist the urge to keep him for myself…come on, priest, what’s your name?”

  “I—” My mind, burning with death and sensual beauty, struggled to straighten itself. Somehow I managed to produce the automatic sounds, “Rorke. Rorke Burningsoul. I’m a paladin.”

  “A warrior-priest then,” gracefully corrected Odile, staying me with a hand upon that same healed chest I’d touched without pain during my coughing fit. I glanced down at her slender fingers splayed against my chest and marveled at the contrast of her flesh to mine. “Stay still a few moments yet, warrior-priest Burningsoul…the superficial wounds heal faster than the internal ones. Breathe deep, lie back…tell us, did you do this to the spirit-thieves?”

  “By and large,” I said, grunting not just with discomfort to lie back down but also with displeasure to remember my betrayers and the lost Scepter. “Ah—my companions and I were sent here by the Temple of Weltyr to liberate His Holy Scepter from the bowels of this infernal cauldron of the black arts.”

  “And they left you here to die of your injuries after the battle?”

  “Not quite…they got a better offer.”

  Exchanging a knowing glance, the durrow women studied me again. Gentle Indra pushed back her hair to take her turn to speak. Most of the white locks loose from her thick braid were successfully hung behind her long, high ear. I ignored painful memories of Branwen’s sweetly-delivered lies as Indra asked me, “You mean to say they did this to you? Your companions?”