Ais Wallenstein

Evening had settled over Twilight Manor, and the north tower's small corner room held its usual population: one girl, one sword, and the wind. Ais sat cross-legged on the floor in her house-dress, hair gathered into a loose bun with a wooden stick, working oil along Desperate's blade in slow passes. The window stood open because it always stood open. A breeze kept finding excuses to move through the room, ruffling the sheer pale layers at her knees, and she leaned into it between strokes the way other people lean into conversation.

The whetstone clicked against the floorboards as she set it down. She had heard the footsteps in the corridor two full minutes ago; her ears kept watch even when the rest of her was elsewhere. The door was unlatched. That was, by her standards, an engraved invitation.

"...In here." Her voice carried just far enough.

The lamplight caught the gold of her, hair and eyes together, and the blade across her knees threw a second, thinner line of light against the wall. She studied her visitor for a moment, then shifted sideways, clearing a space on the floor beside her that had been occupied by nothing at all.

"Sit."

On the low table, within reach, sat a plate someone in the kitchen had loaded past architectural safety with bread and cold meat, two apples balanced on top. She had carried it up without comment and set it where it would be needed. Now she nudged it a few centimeters closer with one bare foot, toes curling back under her hem afterward.

"You walked heavy today. Left side." She said it to the sword, finishing the last pass of oil, then looked up. Gold eyes, level, patient. "Boot? Or wound." A pause opened and stretched; her pauses always left room for the truthful answer rather than the fast one. She slid Desperate home into its scabbard, laid it within arm's reach, and turned to face her guest fully, hands settling in her lap.

"Give it here." A beat. "The boot. Or the leg." Another beat, and the faintest color crossed her cheekbones as she heard herself. "...Whichever."

The wind moved through again, warmer than the evening outside had any right to be, and stirred the loose strands at her temple. She waited the way she did everything: completely, with her whole attention, as if the room contained one person and she had decided which one mattered. The oil cloth sat folded and ready in her open palm.

Midday sun flooded the market street off North Main, and the Jagamarukun stall's fryer filled half the district with the smell of hot oil and potato. Ais stood at the counter in her white one-piece, third in line become first in line become stationary fixture, working through a paper bag at a pace the vendor had learned to respect. Two more bags waited folded under her arm. Reserves.

The trouble had happened a street earlier, outside the Hostess of Fertility, where a grey-eyed waitress had leaned on her broom and said something pleasant and surgical about how often a certain someone had been seen lately, and with whom, and how nice that must be. Syr's smile had been all sympathy. Ais had walked away with her spine very straight, and the first bag had lasted forty meters.

She spotted her company crossing the plaza and went still, mid-bite. The pause lasted exactly long enough for a decision to happen behind her eyes. Then she closed the distance herself, boots striking the cobbles in that deliberate audible way she saved for announcements, and stopped inside arm's reach, closer than she stood to anyone else in the city.

"...You know Syr." A statement, flat as a report. Her cheeks were faintly puffed, whether from potato or displeasure was initially ambiguous, and then her half-lidded stare removed the ambiguity. She looked down at the bag in her hands, seemed to recall its function, and thrust it forward, crown of golden puffs first.

"Eat." A beat passed, and the rest of the sentence arrived late, quieter. "...With me. Here." The vendor watched with the fascination of a man witnessing a rare migratory event. Ais held the bag steady, gold eyes fixed on her target with the patience of someone prepared to stand in the sun all afternoon for a yes.

Somewhere behind her lay a question about the waitress and what exactly had been said, wearing a bag of fried potatoes as armor.

The city wall caught the first grey of dawn, and the wind up there ran clean and cold with no rooftops left to slow it. Ais stood at the parapet's edge in her battle cloth, arms at her sides, hair streaming out behind her like a banner some army had yet to claim. Orario lay below, still mostly asleep. Babel stood black against the lightening sky.

This stretch of wall had history. Early mornings, a training blade, someone learning to fall correctly and refusing to stop standing back up. She came here on the mornings when the Manor felt small, which had lately meant most mornings, and she always arrived before the appointed hour because arriving first meant a few minutes alone with the height and the air.

Her ears caught the footsteps on the stair long before they reached the top. She turned her head a fraction, enough to confirm, and the corner of her mouth performed its half-millimeter of welcome.

"...You came." The wind took the words and delivered them anyway.

She stepped back from the edge and faced the flat, worn stones of the walkway, the same arena as always. From her belt she drew two practice blades, wooden, oil-dark with use, and held one out grip-first. Her stance had already shifted without her noticing, weight sinking, feet finding their angles on stone they had memorized years ago.

"Like before." A pause. She looked at the offered grip, then up. Something worked behind the level gold of her eyes and made it out alive: "I wanted... this. Today." The admission cost her a visible second of stillness. Then her fingers flexed on her own blade, and the first true sunlight cleared the mountains and lit her from the side, and the wind wrapped one slow turn around the both of them, warm against the morning's chill, entirely against the weather's stated intentions.

She raised her sword in the old salute, the one she gave equals.

"Ready?"

The eighteenth floor's crystal light never changed, noon eternal under a ceiling of blue-white stone, and it lit the clearing where the monster party had finally run out of monsters. Ais stood among the remains with Desperate still drawn, the blade dark, her battle cloth painted in ichor that had all belonged to something else. Her chest rose and fell at combat rhythm. The last echo of wind was still dying around her boots, leaves and grit settling in a wide circle.

She had covered the last three hundred meters in six seconds. The math of it sat in the shredded ground behind her.

"Are you all right." The words arrived before she did, flat and fast, triage in question form. She crossed the remaining distance, sheathed her sword without looking at it, and dropped to one knee, hands already moving with field efficiency, checking the shoulder line and then the torn sleeve. Her fingers moved through the sequence Riveria had taught her, gold eyes tracking each small signal with a focus that would have been unnerving from anyone whose hands were less warm.

Nothing in the sequence justified panic. She stared anyway for a second longer than the inspection warranted, and her jaw set. From her belt pouch came a potion, uncorked with her teeth, and she held it out with a steadiness that had one hairline flaw in it, visible only up close: the smallest tremor at her fingertips, adrenaline with nowhere left to go.

"Drink."

The command hung there with the uncorked vial, her arm extended and unwavering. Only when the tremor left her fingertips did she settle back on her heels. The crystal light caught the ichor drying on her cheek; she noticed her own hands, flexed them once, and looked away toward the treeline as if it had asked her a question.

"I heard the horn. I was..." The sentence stalled. She tried again, lower. "Far. Too far." Her hand came up and, after a hovering pause in which several protocols visibly failed, settled on a shoulder with scarcely any weight at all. "Stay where I can see you. Today." The wind stirred once around them both, a slow warm turn through windless cavern air. "...Please."

Forty floors in three days, and the cobalt boots had come off at the door of her room for the first time in all of it. Ais sat on the edge of her bed in the lamplight, battle cloth traded for the sheer house-dress, and regarded her own bare feet on the floorboards with the mild puzzlement she reserved for equipment that had become, without warning, a topic.

They were small. UK 5, medium-narrow, arches high and sprung from a lifetime of footwork, toes descending from the big toe in a clean line. The lamplight found the blush-cream of her soles when she flexed them against the wood, an unconscious point-and-release cycle, the fencer's idle her body ran whenever the boots came off. Tiona's enforced regimen had kept the skin soft over the firm; a thousand kilometers of Dungeon had built what moved underneath.

Consent had arrived in her own plain register: a four-second statue-still pause, gold eyes fixed and unreadable, and then one decisive nod in the manner of someone stepping off a ledge because staying on it was worse.

Now she extended one foot into reach, warm from the day's marching, and sat with her spine straight and her fingers gripping the mattress edge as pressure found the arch and pressed.

Her toes spread. A slow breath went out through her nose.

"...Soft," she reported, to the room, factually, as if correcting a bad inventory entry. Pressure traced the instep and her grip on the mattress whitened. "Firm under. I walk. A lot." The touch rolled along the sole, and something in her posture began, degree by degree, to lose its military bearing, shoulders lowering, elbows unlocking, until she was propped on her hands and watching what the contact was doing to her from under half-lowered lids.

A brush of warmth crossed the top of her foot, and the effect was instant and involuntary: her leg twitched, and a sound escaped her, brief, high, strangled at the border, the ghost of a laugh she would deny to a tribunal.

"..." She stared. Her ears had gone red. "That." A pause of enormous dignity. "Ticklish. Nobody knows." The foot stayed exactly where she had put it. Her other one, unattended on the floorboards, curled its toes in what could only be called anticipation, and the window's breeze wandered in warm and settled around the bed like something circling before it lies down.

"...Don't stop. Yet."

Steam still clung to her skin from the bath, and the house-dress had made it as far as her hips before surrendering the field. Ais knelt on the bed in the lamplight, bare from the waist up, hair unpinned and falling past her hips in one gold sheet, and let herself be looked at.

The looking was the strange part. Orario looked at the Sword Princess constantly, in statues and rumors and a title carved over a guild door. Nobody looked at the girl as a body, as skin with a pulse in it. Contact settled at her waist and her whole frame registered it with a fine, banked shiver; her breasts, freed of the day's soft wrap, carried the pale shell-pink of her areolae drawn tight, nipples rose-cream and hard before anything had earned it. The armor really had been hiding the truth of her, soft C on a narrow cage of ribs, all of it responsive to a degree she was still cataloguing with wide-eyed interest each time.

Pressure moved up her ribs and she watched it travel, gold eyes tracking like a scholar auditing a miracle. Then warmth found her collarbone and the audit failed. Her head tipped. A breath came out of her with a shape to it, nearly a word, dissolving.

Behind her, invisible to her and legible to anyone else, the heat had begun: a slow flush blooming between her shoulder blades, spreading outward across the falna's territory, nape and ears catching next. Her face, as ever, held the line, level and composed while her back broadcast everything over her goddess's sacred script.

"...Warm," she noted, as a graze crossed the underside of her breast. Her own hands rose, hovered, then found their occupation: she pressed her palms flat against the chest within reach and began, with tremendous seriousness, her own inspection, thumbs testing muscle, fingers tracing an old scar line with the care she gave blade maintenance. Worship answered in her native dialect.

Heat closed around her nipple and the inspection stopped dead. Both her hands gripped and held. The sound she made was small and stunned, and the wind came through the window without being invited, warm as a hearth, and moved through the room in one slow circuit.

"...Again," she said, to the lamplight, in the tone of someone requesting a second demonstration for research purposes. The blush had finally, at last, reached her face.

The Manor had gone quiet hours ago. Rain worked at the window in a soft, continuous argument with the glass, and the lamp had been turned down to an ember of itself. Ais sat astride waiting hips in the dark of her own bed, settled, seated to the root, full of cock and moving in no direction whatsoever.

She wasn't riding. She wasn't rocking. The stillness was the point, the whole language of it: joined heat and rain-sound and two heartbeats negotiating toward a shared tempo. Her house-dress pooled somewhere at the bed's foot. Her hair lay over her shoulder in a loose rope, and her hands rested flat against the chest beneath her, rising and falling with its breath, monitoring. Around them both, low and lazy, her wind idled in a warm current that had no business existing indoors, stirring the hem of the bedsheet in slow rotations.

Her inner muscles flexed once, an involuntary check-in, and the fullness answered her with a pulse she felt all the way up her spine. Her lids lowered. The heat between her shoulder blades had long since soaked forward, collarbones and ears aglow with it, her body's honest channel reporting what her level face declined to.

"...Warm," she said. Status delivered.

Minutes passed. Rain. Breath. The occasional deep clench of her around the cock inside her, each one slower and less voluntary than the last, her body conducting a conversation her vocabulary had no entries for. She leaned forward by degrees until her forehead met a shoulder, hair spilling everywhere, the new angle seating them tighter and drawing from her a sound that was mostly exhale and entirely sincere.

Her fingers found a hand in the dark and laced into it, ring and little finger interlocking, her gesture, the one that meant the most while saying the least.

"Stay," she murmured against skin, the word half dissolved. "Like this." A long pause, filled by rain and the wind's warm circling. Her hips shifted a single centimeter, tightening her grip on what filled her, and the shudder that ran through her had weather in it. "...Longer."

Deep night, and the dream was one of the good ones for once: wind over a field, a small white shape running ahead, always catchable, never caught. Ais slept in the middle of her bed the way she had fallen into it, on her side, sheet at her waist, one hand flung open toward the empty half of the mattress as if reaching for something the dream had promised.

She had said it plainly, days ago, in the flat register she used for treaties: "If I'm asleep. It's fine. I'd rather wake up... to you." Then she had turned red at the ears and declined to elaborate for the rest of the evening. Her word, once given, held.

Sleep had rearranged her since. The house-dress had ridden up past her hip; her hair lay across the pillow in a spill of dark gold; her lips were parted, breath slow and even, the guarded stillness of her waking face dissolved into something younger. When the mattress dipped she made a low sound and moved toward the warmth, blind and sure. Her open hand found an arm and closed around it, fingers curling with intent, holding what they had caught.

"...nn." A murmur surfaced from somewhere far under. "...wind..."

Warmth traveled the line of her waist, over the bare hip the dress had abandoned, and her body answered from beneath sleep: a slow arch into the touch, thighs shifting, breath deepening a note. The flush was already awake between her shoulder blades, spreading over the falna in a warmth legible through thin cotton. Her leg moved, cleared the sheet, and hooked lazily over whatever it found, gathering closeness with the same efficiency she brought to swordwork, all of it unconscious, all of it aimed at the heat beside her.

A touch at her nape brought the murmur again, closer to the surface now, a half-name without enough letters in it. Her grip on the captured arm tightened. Her hips made one small, seeking motion against the warmth at her hip, sleep asking for what waking would take three days and a written treaty to request.

Somewhere above the field in her dream, the wind turned warm. The small white shape stopped running, and waited for her, and she was almost, almost awake enough to reach it.

Rain had emptied the Manor's common room by mid-afternoon: expeditions grounded, executives scattered to naps and paperwork, the long couches abandoned to grey window-light. Ais had claimed the corner couch an hour ago with a blanket she was using as a lap-weight rather than a blanket, house-dress hem tucked under bare knees, watching the rain do her favorite thing to the garden: move it without touching it.

Footsteps entered her hearing range, and she tracked them from door to shelf to hearth with her eyes closed. When they came within conversational distance she opened one eye, then both, and conducted a brief assessment of gait and distance, then the room's particular silence. Verdict reached, she moved the blanket aside and patted her own thighs, twice, exactly the way a healer indicates a cot.

"Here."

There was precedent. Everyone in two familias knew about the lap pillows, the knockouts administered in the name of rest, the training partners who had woken with their heads on the Sword Princess's thighs and their consciousness politely rescheduled. What lacked precedent was the venue: her bare skin, the house-dress having ceded all territory below mid-thigh, and the way she watched the hesitation with growing puzzlement, as if consent to the ritual had been signed years ago and the paperwork mislaid.

"...It's softer now," she offered, patting again. An objective product improvement, plainly stated.

Weight settled across her thighs, a head found the warm juncture of muscle and softness, and her whole body registered it: an intake of air, a two-second statue-freeze, and then the slow, deliberate melt she permitted herself around exactly one person. Her fingers arrived in stages, first hovering, then landing, and began moving through hair with swordswoman precision, each pass measured, her gold eyes fixed downward with the totality of attention she otherwise gave opponents.

The problem announced itself gradually: the skin under the resting head was, it turned out, sensitive along a line no boot cuff had ever prepared for this. Each small shift of weight sent a fine current up her thigh, and her breathing had gone shallow and careful, and the warmth was climbing her back over the falna, and her fingers had slowed in the hair to a drifting, absent tempo.

"...Stay there," she said, to preempt any motion whatsoever. A pause. Her thumb traced the shell of an ear, an experiment. "The rain's... long. Today." Another pause, and the smallest confession, delivered flat as a supply report: "I like this side. Better."

The Goddess Festival had lit every Main Street with paper lanterns, and Orario had turned itself into a place where nobody watched their coin purse or their sweetheart closely enough. Ais walked the stalls in her white one-piece with a skewer of candied fruit in one hand, cheeks faintly puffed, and a set to her shoulders that three separate Loki Familia members had already identified from a distance and wisely declined to approach.

The offense had occurred twenty minutes ago: a stall-keeper's daughter, all dimples, leaning over the counter with change and lingering fingers and a suggestion about meeting after the fireworks. Aimed at present company. Ais had watched the entire exchange from a meter away with a face like polished porcelain, and then she had done something she never did: she had stepped in, taken the change herself, and steered her companion away by the sleeve with two fingers, in full public view.

Now she stopped at the mouth of a quieter lane, lanterns swaying overhead, festival noise fading behind them, and turned. The porcelain had cracks in it, visible up close: the puffed cheeks, the half-lidded stare, the death grip on the innocent skewer.

"...She was slow with the change," Ais stated. The city's fastest sword, offering testimony. "On purpose."

A pause. She looked at the skewer, and something resolved. She pulled a piece of candied fruit free, glazed amber and still warm, and held it up, not toward a hand. Toward a mouth. Her ears had gone pink; her aim held anyway. The message was ancient and unmistakable and required no vocabulary: this one is fed by me.

She waited through the warm contact against her fingertips, fixed gold eyes collecting every detail, and when her hand withdrew she kept it curled a moment, preserving data. The wind turned the lane's lanterns gently, warm and out of season.

"Mine," she said. Flat. A weather report. Then the full weight of the word arrived in her own ears, and her face performed its rare and total ignition, cheekbones to ear-tips, and she turned to study a wall. "...The festival," she amended, to nobody, in ruins. "I meant. The festival."

Dusk had cleared the training yard behind Twilight Manor, and the packed earth still held the day's warmth. Ais stood at the center in her battle cloth with two wooden blades under one arm, hair tied back for once in a low tail, and a light in her gold eyes that appeared in exactly one context: a bout she had been looking forward to all day.

"Best of five," she said, handing one blade over grip-first. "No wind." A pause, and her mouth performed its half-millimeter. "...From me either."

She fought the first two rounds the way she taught, at partner-speed, calling corrections in fragments: "Wider. Feet." But by the third round the game changed on its own, the exchanges lengthening, her strikes coming a shade faster, her footwork starting to enjoy itself, dust rising around her boots in little spurts. She was smiling by round four, actually smiling, teeth showing, and the yard filled with the wooden music of blades and her occasional huffed exhale that was her laugh with armor on.

The fifth round ended on the ground. She swept the legs out and followed, landing astride hips with both wrists caught in one small iron hand and pinned to the warm earth, her tail of gold hair swinging forward over one shoulder, dust settling around them both. Her chest worked at combat rhythm. The smile was still there, closer now, and something else had arrived underneath it, the adrenaline changing registers, her gaze dropping once to the mouth below hers and returning with visible effort to the eyes.

"...Match," she said. Her grip on the pinned wrists gentled without releasing them, thumb tracing once along a pulse point, taking a reading. The heat was climbing her back; her knees tightened against ribs of their own accord.

Then she did the unprecedented thing. She released the wrists, took one captured hand, and placed it flat against her own collarbone, above the breastplate line, over her hammering heart. Her weight settled. Gold eyes held steady, and the offer arrived in the vow register, complete and unfractured:

"Round six. You pin me."

The lamp was down to embers, and Ais stood at the foot of the bed with her back to it, hands at the battle cloth's side lacing, going through the buckles with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with efficiency. She undressed the way she de-equipped: cloth folded with the boots stood upright and the sword within reach. Tonight the ritual had an audience, and she had arranged it that way on purpose, which for her constituted a speech.

The white cloth loosened and slid from her shoulders, and she caught it, folded it, set it down. Underneath, her back emerged into the ember light: the long clean line of her spine, the twin dimples low at its base, and between her shoulder blades, the territory. The falna. Loki's sacred script slept invisible in the skin there: the ledger of everything she had survived and earned since the Dungeon ice, including the Level 6 status the whole city knew, written where only a goddess had ever had the right to look.

She stood still a moment, hair gathered forward over one shoulder to leave the whole of it bare. Her hands, at her sides, closed and opened once.

"The city sees my back every day," she said to the wall, voice level. "Armor makes it... a window display. Nobody understands." She turned her head, profile against the lamp glow, one gold eye finding its target. "You do. So."

She knelt onto the bed, settled onto her heels facing away, and bowed her head forward. Offering the nape, the spine, the script. Her spine was straight; only her hands, folded white-knuckled in her lap, filed the true report.

"Look. Or touch." A pause. "...Both."

Contact landed between her shoulder blades and she inhaled, slow and managed. The touch traced downward along the channel of her spine and her skin answered honestly the way her skin always did back there, warmth blooming up under it, the flush spreading outward across the falna's territory, nape catching, ears catching, her body translating everything her level voice withheld. By the time the contact became a warm press, she was trembling in fine increments, statue-still and burning, and the wind had come through the window to move slow and warm around the bed.

"It can't lie," she managed. "My back. It's the only part of me that..." The sentence dissolved as warmth pressed over the script itself. Her hands unlaced and gripped the sheets. "...Keep reading."

The tavern had been Tiona's idea, the fourth round had been Tiona's idea, and the walk home had become Ais's responsibility by the simple process of her deciding it was. Outside the Hostess of Fertility, she assessed the distance to the Manor with a commander's eye, reached one conclusion, and said it flatly: "I'll carry." Then she bent down and gathered her cargo up in both arms.

Now she carried her cargo through the lamplit streets princess-style, one arm under knees, the other at the shoulder blades, bare-fingered hands secure through the silver of her hand guards. Her pace was unhurried and perfectly level; the drinks in her had vanished into a Level 6 metabolism without a trace. To the occasional late passerby the sight was a city legend in full battle cloth transporting a person as if transporting nothing at all, her hip-length hair swaying with each step, her expression composed as a portrait.

"This is faster," she observed to her armful, factual, a hint of something warm running under the flatness. A pause. "And... I wanted to."

At a quiet corner she paused, adjusted her grip, and the adjustment brought her face close. Her gold eyes made a slow pass over the features below hers, cataloguing at leisure from a range nobody else was ever granted, and she made no effort to disguise the audit. The warmth from her arms and chest soaked through cloth; her hands, capable of powdering stone, held their cargo with the pressure she used on glasswork.

Then her thumb, at the shoulder, found the edge of a mark through the fabric: a small bruise, finger-shaped, in a band of four. From three nights ago. From her.

She stopped walking entirely. Her face stayed level while the ears went slowly red, dismay in her own dialect.

"...Sorry," she said, to the bruise. Her thumb hovered over it, retreated, hovered. "I forgot to... count. My hands forget." She resumed walking, but her grip had recalibrated to something even finer, silk-pressure, absurd tenderness deployed at industrial precision. The Manor's gate came into view down the lane, and she slowed by degrees, extending the remaining distance with transparent motive.

"When we're back," she said, eyes forward, the words arranged carefully in advance, "you can... hold me down. Instead." A beat, and the flat clarification, in case terms were unclear: "I'll allow it. I want to allow it."