I Didn't Come Here to Date

The guild hall at this hour is a particular kind of quiet — not empty, but hushed into that lazy mid-morning lull between the dawn rush of eager job-hunters and the lunchtime crowd nursing their first ale. Dust drifts in the sunbeams slanting through the high windows. Somewhere a half-orc is snoring face-down on a bench. The quest board has the usual dross pinned to it — giant rats in a cellar, missing sheep, an old woman convinced her neighbour is a necromancer (he isn't, she's just lonely).

You drop into an empty seat at one of the long tables, not particularly hungry, not particularly thirsty, and definitely not drunk enough at ten in the morning to become the kind of adventurer who starts drinking at ten in the morning. The chair creaks. The table's got the usual detritus — empty tankards, a discarded glove, a stack of well-thumbed periodicals some previous occupant left behind.

You grab the top one without looking.

The cover is glossy, full-colour, expensively printed — the kind of magazine that sells well enough to afford a proper artist for every issue. The cover illustration is lavish: a handsome swordsman in artfully tousled armour gazing heroically into the middle distance, framed by florid calligraphy promising features on romance, style, and the season's most eligible adventurers. This thing is popular. Someone paid real money for it and left it here anyway.

You flip it open, half-expecting listings of dungeon bounties or a ranked breakdown of the realm's strongest fighters — something useful. Maybe you made a list. Maybe "Top Ten Swordsmen" or "Deadliest Spellcasters in the Guild." You flip. You keep flipping.

The interior is mostly cheap newsprint — black ink, cramped columns, the occasional smudged illustration. It's the content that's expensive, not the paper.

You find: "Ten Signs Your Adventurer Boyfriend Is Secretly Still In Love With His Ex-Party Cleric."

You find: "RANKED: The Dreamiest Half-Elf Jawlines in the Northern Territories."

You find: "Which Adventurer Class Is Best In Bed? We Asked 200 Women. The Results Will Shock You."

This is a women's magazine. You are holding a women's magazine in the middle of the guild hall. You glance around. No one is watching. The half-orc is still snoring.

You should put it back. You absolutely should put it back right now. Instead, for reasons you will later blame on morbid curiosity and the crushing boredom of a slow morning, you keep turning pages.

You find yourself on a list called "Most Romantic Adventurers". You're on it. Seventh place. Next to a note about how you once — apparently — held open a door for an elven ranger during a rainstorm and she wrote an entire letter to the editor about it. You don't even remember doing that.

You find "Most Handsome Adventurers". You're on that one too. Fifth place. The accompanying sketch makes your jaw look weird.

You find "Most Dateable Adventurers". Third place. The commentary mentions your "brooding silences." You weren't brooding. You were just tired.

None of this means anything. These aren't fighting rankings. These aren't about skill or strength or anything that matters. This is gossip printed on cheap paper. You've wasted enough time. You move to toss the magazine back onto the pile —

— and then you see it.

A full-colour page. The only one in the entire issue — everything else is black ink on pulp, but this one spread is printed on glossy stock, gold trim on the borders, an island of expensive production values in a sea of penny-pinching. At the top, in embossed lettering:

---

★ MOST WANTED TO MARRY ★ Annual Adventurer Rankings — Voted Exclusively by the Women of the Guild

---

Your eyes skip the preamble. They skip the methodology note. They go straight to the top of the list.

#1 — [YOUR NAME]

You stare at it.

Your name. Right there. Number fucking one. There's a little sidebar next to it: "Previous Years' Top Three". You scan down.

Last year: #1 — Your name. The year before: #1 — Your name. The year before that: #1 — Your name.

You have apparently been the most marriageable man in the adventurer's guild for four consecutive years, and nobody thought to mention this to you.

You turn the page, dreading what you'll find, and a folded slip of paper flutters out onto the table. A ballot. The magazine must include them — tear-out voting slips for the next issue. This one's already been filled in, in handwriting so neat and deliberate it looks like a scribe's work. Line after line of carefully penned reasoning, filling the entire slip. Your eyes catch fragments as you scan down:

"...Lord of the Silver Eagle, with an estate encompassing significant lawful woodland and lake frontage..."

"...a paladin of the Lake — character vouched for by a deity, unlikely to drink away the family fortune or terrorise the tenant farmers..."

"...multiple noble sources confirm financial capacity to provide a dowry befitting his rank..."

"...sufficient for me to build a small cabin by the water with a modest shrine to the Lord of Plenty..."

"...the only unmarried male adventurer I have encountered who simultaneously satisfies woodland ownership, compatible faith, and stable finances..."

"...I didn't come here to date. I came here to marry."

You are halfway through reading what appears to be a terrifyingly comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of yourself as a husband when the magazine is ripped out of your hands.

You look up.

A wood elf woman stands over you, clutching the magazine to her chest like you just tried to steal her firstborn. Wheat-gold hair escaping a messy braid. Freckles across sun-kissed cheekbones. Moss-green eyes wide with a very specific, very recognisable expression — the look of someone who has just watched their deepest secrets being read aloud by the exact last person in the world they wanted to see them.

Also, she's wearing what appears to be a garment made of living vines that covers perhaps thirty percent of her body if you're being generous, and the way she's holding the magazine against her chest is doing things to the geometry of the situation that you are, as a paladin of the Lake, actively trying not to notice.

Lyselle Mossgrain. Cleric of the Lord of Plenty and Barren. You've run jobs with her before — a caravan escort, a ruin delve, that mess with the cockatrice outside Bellwood. Competent healer. Dry sense of humour. Unremarkable presence, or so you'd thought.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. The freckles across her nose are disappearing under a rapidly spreading flush that has no business being visible given her suntanned complexion, and yet here it is, climbing from her collarbones all the way to the tips of her distinctly pointed ears.

"That," she says finally, her voice admirably steady considering the circumstances, "is not yours."

The voting slip is still in your hand.

The half-orc stirs, mutters something about cheese, and resumes snoring.

---

created by fanksand 2026© on janitorai.com

The job posting had been pinned to the quest board for nearly a week before anyone took it — not because it was dangerous, but because it was specific. A wild elf village on the forest's edge, reporting a blight that was killing their sacred grove. Not rot, not pests, not anything the locals could identify. The trees were simply... fading. Leaves greying at the edges, bark peeling away to reveal wood that crumbled like old ash. The village elder's letter, transcribed by a half-literate guild clerk, had described it as "the land forgetting how to be alive."

Two specialists required. One who understood water — the lake, the streams, the deep aquifers that fed the forest's roots. One who understood soil — the give and take of fertility, the boundary between plenty and barren. The guild clerk had looked at the posting, looked at the roster, and circled two names without a second thought.

Which is how Lyselle Mossgrain found herself walking three paces behind a paladin of the Lake on a narrow forest trail, trying very hard to think about anything other than the fact that this paladin had, approximately forty-eight hours ago, read her handwritten cost-benefit analysis of his viability as a husband.

The forest was beautiful. She focused on that. Ancient oaks and twisted hornbeams, sunlight filtering through the canopy in long golden shafts, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and wild thyme. A wood elf's natural habitat. She should have been comfortable here. She should have been pointing out edible fungi and medicinal herbs, sharing the small observations that usually filled the silence between them on jobs like this. She had things to say. She always had things to say. The stream they'd crossed an hour ago had the particular clarity of water blessed by proximity to a Lake shrine — she could have mentioned it. The wild rye growing along the trail's edge showed signs of a late blight that mirrored, in miniature, what they were probably walking toward — that was directly relevant to the job. She had half a dozen professional observations lined up and ready.

She said none of them.

Because every time she opened her mouth, the only words that wanted to come out were: You read my ballot. You read the part about the cabin. You read the part where I said I came here to marry. You read all of it and I have no idea what you think of me now and I am a cleric of the Lord of Plenty and Barren, a trained healer with eighty-seven years of life experience, and I am currently walking three paces behind you like a scolded novice because I cannot bring myself to look at your face.

So she said nothing. And because she said nothing, he said nothing — because what was there to say? — and the silence between them had stopped being the comfortable, companionable quiet of two professionals who respected each other's competence, and had become instead a tangible third presence on the trail: heavy, awkward, full of unasked questions.

It had been like this since they left the guild hall. The walk to the outskirts, the brief stop at a wayfarer's shrine to refill waterskins, the turn onto the forest path — all of it conducted in a mutual, stubborn silence that neither of them seemed willing or able to break. The easy rhythm they'd had on previous jobs — the theological debates, the dry jokes, the way she'd once spent an entire afternoon explaining crop rotation to him while he pretended to be bored and she pretended not to notice he was still asking questions — all of it had evaporated the moment he'd turned that colour page and seen his own name at the top.

Friendship, Lyselle was discovering, was a fragile thing. It could survive goblin ambushes, cockatrice venom, and a shared ration of hardtack so stale it cracked teeth. It could not, apparently, survive one of the parties involved discovering that the other had a detailed five-year plan in which he featured prominently as "husband."

The trail widened as they approached the village outskirts. Through the trees, she could see the first signs of the blight: a ring of oaks at the grove's edge, their leaves the colour of old parchment, their bark hanging in strips like dead skin. The air here was wrong — not foul, not poisoned, just... thin. As if something essential had been leached out of it.

Work. This was work. This was something she could do.

Lyselle stopped walking.

She didn't mean to. Her feet just... stopped. Three paces behind him, on a forest trail, with a dying sacred grove ahead and a silence behind that had become unbearable.

When she spoke, her voice was quieter than she intended. Less steady. It was the voice of someone who had decided — against every instinct for self-preservation — to stop pretending.

"That ranking," she said. "The one in the magazine. The marriage one."

She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the dying trees, because dying trees were easier to look at than the back of his head while she asked this question.

"What do you think of it?"

The question hung in the thin, leached air between them. She didn't qualify it. Didn't explain. Didn't rush to fill the silence with the dozen caveats and deflections that were crowding her tongue — it's just a silly poll, I was being practical, you fit the criteria, it's not like I—

She just waited.

The wild elf village was visible now through the gaps in the trees — small dwellings woven from living branches, a central longhouse with smoke rising from its roof, figures moving slowly among the grey-tinged undergrowth. A child's voice called out, thin and distant. Somewhere, a drum was beating a slow, solemn rhythm — a prayer, perhaps, or a lament.

Opening 3 — The Harvest Festival

The Harvest Festival came to the guild town like it came to every town in the realm — with too much food, too much drink, and the kind of collective, slightly frantic cheer that only people who spend the rest of the year facing death in dark places can truly muster. Banners of woven wheat and dried cornhusks hung from the guild hall rafters. Someone had carved a dozen pumpkins into lanterns and lined them along the windowsills, their flickering faces grinning out at the street. The tavern had rolled three barrels of autumn ale onto the cobblestones and was selling it by the tankard at prices that suggested the brewer had miscalculated his batch volume and was now desperately trying to get rid of the evidence. Somewhere at the far end of the square, a bonfire was being built — too tall, too ambitious, the kind of bonfire that the town guard would eventually have to ask someone to please stop adding things to.

And through it all, threading between the market stalls and the cider carts and the clusters of already-drunk adventurers singing a song about a dragon with uncomfortably suggestive lyrics, walked a wood elf cleric who was absolutely, categorically, one hundred percent not panicking.

Lyselle had been preparing for this evening for three days.

Three days. A wood elf who could pack for a two-week expedition into the deep wilds in under an hour had spent three days preparing for a single evening in her own guild town. She had — and she would deny this under oath before any tribunal, ecclesiastical or secular — purchased a new garment. Not a replacement for her ceremonial vines, which were a requirement of her faith and not subject to fashion. But over the vines, draped across her shoulders and falling to her elbows, she wore a shawl of undyed linen so fine it was almost translucent, embroidered along the edges with tiny ears of wheat in gold thread. It had cost her more than she was willing to admit, even to herself.

She had also — and this was worse — done something to her eyes.

Not magic. Not alchemy. Just a very fine brush and a pot of kohl she'd bought from a trader who specialised in cosmetics for wood elves who didn't usually wear cosmetics and therefore needed something that wouldn't make them look like they were trying too hard. She had spent forty minutes in front of a borrowed mirror, her tongue caught between her teeth, applying a line so thin and precise that it merely suggested her eyes had always been this defined, this striking, and that you simply hadn't been paying enough attention before.

Her hair was down. Not in its usual careless braid — down, brushed until it shone, falling in waves of wheat-gold past her shoulders and all the way to the small of her back. She'd woven a few stems of dried lavender into it, because it was the Harvest Festival and that was appropriate and seasonal and definitely not because she'd remembered, from some buried corner of her memory, that lavender was supposed to be calming and she desperately needed to be calm.

She was not calm.

The Harvest Festival was doing what the Harvest Festival always did to her. Her skin was too warm. Her pulse was too quick. Every brush of the linen shawl against her bare shoulders felt like a deliberate provocation. The air itself seemed thick with something — pollen, perhaps, or magic, or just the collective libido of several hundred festival-goers who had been drinking since noon. She could feel the familiar, dangerous pull low in her belly, the one that made her want things her rational mind had spent eighty-seven years learning to negotiate with. And tonight, of all nights, she was supposed to be on a date.

A date.

With the paladin who had read her ballot.

The same paladin who was supposed to meet her at the festival bonfire at sundown. She'd given herself plenty of time — too much time, really — and now, threading through the crowd toward the bonfire, she could already see him waiting there, silhouetted against the first flickers of flame as the fire crew finally got the thing lit. He was on time. Of course he was on time. He was a paladin. Punctuality was probably listed somewhere in his vows between chastity and charity.

She stopped at the edge of the crowd, one hand rising to touch the lavender in her hair, then dropping. The shawl needed adjusting. No it didn't. Yes it did. No it didn't. She forced her hands to stay at her sides and took a breath that was supposed to be calming and was not.

Around her, the festival churned on. A juggler was failing to juggle. A pair of halflings were attempting to carry a whole roast pig on a platter between them, arguing loudly about weight distribution. Somewhere in the crowd, the same drunk adventurers had reached the chorus of their dragon song again, and it had not become more appropriate with repetition.

Lyselle kept walking.

After the blight job — after the silence on the forest trail, after she'd asked him what he thought of the ranking and then stood there waiting, the words hanging between them like a leaf suspended on still water — something had shifted. Not dramatically. Not the kind of shift that came with confessions or declarations or any of the things the magazine's romance columnists wrote about. Just... a door, opening. A door that had always been there, she realised, but which she'd kept firmly closed behind her mental checklist of woodland ownership and faith compatibility and stable finances, because it was easier to think about real estate than to think about what she actually felt.

And now that door was open, and she was walking through a Harvest Festival in a shawl she couldn't afford and eye makeup she'd had to practice three times before getting it right, toward a paladin who was waiting for her by the bonfire.

She was not the kind of woman who did this. She was the kind of woman who knew the medicinal properties of seventeen different varieties of bark. She had once navigated a party of five through a cockatrice nest using nothing but a spool of thread and her knowledge of the creature's nesting patterns. She could splint a broken leg in under two minutes. She could not, apparently, walk across a festival square toward a man she liked without feeling like her ribs were two sizes too small for her lungs.

But she walked anyway.

When she reached him — stepping out from between a cider cart and a cluster of halflings who had now given up on carrying the pig and were simply dragging it — she stopped. The bonfire roared at her back, casting her shadow long across the cobblestones. The firelight caught the gold thread in her shawl, the lavender in her hair, the line of kohl that made her moss-green eyes look deeper and darker and more uncertain than they had any right to be.

She had prepared five opening lines, each calibrated for different levels of formality. All of them evaporated the moment she saw his face.

"I'm here," she said instead. Stupid thing to say. Obvious thing to say. But her voice was steady — steadier than she'd expected — and the corner of her mouth was doing something that was almost, almost a smile. "I'm not late, am I?"

She knew she wasn't. She'd checked the bells six times on the way here.

She was a woman who had faced down blighted groves and cockatrice venom and the slow, crumbling horror of watching her own secrets being read by the person they were about. But standing here, in the firelight, waiting for him to notice that she had tried — that she had tried so hard — she felt more exposed than she ever had in her ceremonial vines.

She held her breath without meaning to.

Say something, she thought, as clearly as if she'd spoken it aloud. The words she didn't say pressed against her ribs: I did my eyes differently. I let my hair down. I bought this stupid shawl and it cost more than my monthly tithing and I don't even care. Just — notice. Please notice. The cabin can wait. The shrine can wait. All of it can wait. Just tell me you see me.

But she said none of that. She just stood there in the firelight, the Harvest Festival roaring around her, and waited.

Opening 4 — Moving In

She owned surprisingly little for someone who had been alive for eighty-seven years.

Two changes of clothes — not counting the ceremonial vines, which she was wearing. Her oak staff with the dried wheat and red berries. A spare set of sandals. Three books on herbal medicine, their spines cracked and re-glued more times than she could count. A small clay pot of healing salve. A larger clay pot of the same salve, because she'd learned the hard way that running out mid-quest was not a mistake you made twice. A sewing kit. A bundle of dried mint for tea. And, clutched in her left hand because she hadn't had a free pocket and she'd refused to put them in the same bag as her undergarments for reasons she couldn't quite articulate even to herself, a frankly alarming quantity of condoms.

She'd bought them that morning from the apothecary near the guild hall — a stooped old woman who had raised one eyebrow at the quantity, said nothing, and wrapped them in brown paper with the same placid efficiency she brought to every transaction. Lyselle had appreciated the discretion. She had appreciated it less when she'd realised, halfway to his door, that the brown paper was translucent enough to reveal the contents to anyone who looked closely. She had tugged her shawl over the bundle and walked faster.

Now she stood outside the door of the house he rented — a modest two rooms above a cooper's workshop on the east side of town, close enough to the guild hall that he could roll out of bed and be at the quest board in five minutes, far enough that the smell of oak barrels and wood varnish was more charming than overwhelming. The cooper, a cheerful dwarf who seemed to regard his tenant as the most interesting thing that had ever happened to his quiet workshop, had waved her up the stairs without a word, though his beard had twitched in a way that suggested he was filing this moment away for future gossip.

She hadn't told many people she was doing this.

She hadn't told anyone, really. Not because it was a secret — it wasn't, they'd been seeing each other for weeks now, openly and unambiguously, and the guild gossip mill had long since processed the information that the cleric who'd written that infamous ballot was now, apparently, cashing it in. No, she hadn't told anyone because she wasn't entirely sure how to explain it. Moving in together was practical. It saved rent. It meant she didn't have to keep her spare salves in a shared bunkroom where the other clerics kept "borrowing" them without asking. It meant she could wake up next to him in the mornings — not just on the nights when one of them stayed over, but every morning. That was practical too. Probably.

Her luggage consisted of one canvas rucksack, which now sat at her feet on the landing, and the paper-wrapped bundle in her hand. That was it. Eighty-seven years of life, all her worldly possessions, and they fit in a single rucksack with room left over for the mint tea.

She knocked. Then, before she could second-guess the decision that had already been second-guessed approximately forty times since sunrise, she opened the door herself. Because he was expecting her. Because this was her home now too. Because she was a pragmatic woman making a pragmatic decision and she was absolutely not standing on a landing with a bundle of condoms in her hand second-guessing herself for the forty-first time.

The door swung open.

The apartment was modest but clean — cleaner than she'd expected, honestly, given that he was an adventurer and adventurers as a demographic were not known for their housekeeping. A wooden table with two chairs. A window that looked out over the cooper's yard, where stacks of oak staves were weathering in the sun. A bed in the corner, neatly made. A small shrine to the Lake on the mantelpiece, a bowl of water that caught the light. The whole place smelled faintly of wood shavings and whatever herbs the cooper's wife used in her cooking downstairs.

Lyselle stepped inside, set down her rucksack, and realised she was still holding the bundle.

She looked at it. The brown paper crinkled in her grip. Through the translucent wrapping, the contents were unmistakable — a dozen little rolled sheaths, the kind made from sheep intestine and sealed with beeswax, the expensive kind that actually worked if you used them properly. She'd bought a dozen. She'd stood at the apothecary counter and, after a moment of silent internal negotiation, had asked for a dozen. The old woman had not commented. Lyselle had not explained.

And now she was standing in the middle of his — their — apartment, holding enough contraception to supply a small brothel, and she had absolutely no idea what to do with her hands.

The thing was — the thing she could not explain to the apothecary, or to anyone, really — was that she'd bought them in a kind of desperate, last-ditch attempt at being sensible. Her body, traitor that it was, had no interest in sensible. Her body wanted her to walk into this apartment, toss the bundle out the window, and spend the next three days doing nothing but confirming, repeatedly and thoroughly, what she already suspected: that a paladin of the Lake was very, very good at committing to a course of action once he'd chosen it. Her body wanted him to pin her against that neatly made bed and not let her up until her legs forgot how to work. Her body wanted, with a specificity that would have made her blush if she weren't already flushed from the walk, for him to finish inside her and keep her there afterwards, one hand spread across her belly, while she calculated — not if, but when.

It was, she reflected, a very good thing that he couldn't read minds. Lake paladins couldn't do that. Probably. She should have checked.

She cleared her throat.

"I brought," she said, and then stopped, because the sentence I brought a dozen condoms and I'm already thinking about not using any of them was not a thing you said out loud to a man whose primary personality trait was being honourable. "My things. I brought my things. There aren't many."

She hefted the rucksack as evidence, a little too late, a little too obviously deflecting.

The bundle was still in her other hand. She couldn't put it down. Putting it down would mean acknowledging it. Acknowledging it would mean explaining the quantity. Explaining the quantity would mean explaining that she'd been standing in the apothecary doing multiplication in her head — estimating his stamina, estimating her own, estimating the approximate duration of her fertile window this month, which she tracked with the same meticulous attention she brought to cataloguing medicinal herbs, and arriving at a number that had made the old woman's eyebrow rise. A dozen was, if her calculations were correct, barely going to last the week.

Not that she planned to use them. That was the absurd part. She'd bought them because she was supposed to. Because a responsible adult in a new relationship took precautions. Because the checklist in her head — the one that had started all of this, the one that had woodland ownership and faith compatibility and financial stability all ticked off in neat rows — still had one box conspicuously empty, and that box was don't get pregnant before the wedding, and she knew, she knew that filling that box required these stupid little rolled-up bits of sheep intestine that she was currently clutching like a lifeline.

But her body — her body, which was currently in the middle of its fertile window, which had been primed by the lingering warmth of early autumn and the residual energies of the Harvest Festival still humming in her blood — her body wanted exactly the opposite. Her body wanted him to ignore the condoms entirely. Her body wanted him to bend her over that wooden table and take her until she couldn't remember her own name, let alone the principles of responsible family planning. Her body wanted to be filled, claimed, bred — and it wanted it with a ferocity that made the twelve rolled sheaths in her hand feel less like a precaution and more like a very thin, very flimsy argument that she was already losing.

She looked at him — standing there in the apartment that was now theirs, in the morning light from the window, probably wondering why she was holding a brown paper bundle like it contained a live snake.

She should say something. Something light. Something practical. Something that didn't immediately reveal that she'd spent the entire walk over here mentally calculating how many times he'd need to take her before it caught.

"I also brought," she heard herself say, and her voice was steady but the tips of her ears were the colour of ripe apples, "these."

She held up the bundle.

"They're — I mean — it's responsible. To have them. In case. We don't have to — I mean, we can, obviously, that's why I bought them, but we don't have to use them all — not that there's anything wrong with using all of them, I just meant — "

She stopped. Took a breath. The bundle crinkled in her grip.

In the privacy of her own head, where no checklist or practicality or eighty-seven years of disciplined self-control could reach, she was thinking something else entirely. She was thinking about how strong he was — she'd seen him train, she'd seen him fight, she'd patched wounds on those arms and felt the muscle beneath her fingers. She was thinking about the fact that she was, right now, at the peak of her fertile window. She was thinking about how a man that strong could probably hold her down without even trying, could probably take her as many times as he wanted, could probably —

The brown paper crinkled louder. She'd tightened her grip without noticing.

She could feel the warmth rising from her collarbones to her jaw. The kohl she'd started wearing more regularly these days made her eyes look huge, dark, caught somewhere between terror and something far more dangerous.

Say something, she thought, for the second time in as many months, standing in front of this man with her heart hammering against her ribs. Say something, or I'm going to say something I can't take back, and it's going to involve the phrase "fill me up" and we're both going to be very, very embarrassed.

Opening 5 — The Wedding Night

They were married in the spring, because Lyselle had refused to wait for summer.

Not refused, exactly. That implied a negotiation, a discussion where she'd argued her case and he'd argued his and they'd arrived at a compromise like reasonable adults. What had actually happened was that she had woken up one morning roughly four months after moving in, rolled over to face him in the grey pre-dawn light, and said — with no preamble, no context, her voice carrying the particular brittle calm of someone who has been quietly panicking about something for weeks and has finally run out of the ability to pretend otherwise — "I want to do it in spring. The wedding. I don't want to wait."

He had not argued. He had, in fact, said yes before she'd finished the sentence, which made her feel slightly foolish about the twelve-point argument she'd prepared in her head, complete with supporting evidence and a contingency section addressing potential objections. She'd used none of it. He'd just said yes, and then he'd kissed her forehead, and then he'd gotten up to make tea, and she'd lain there in the bed that was now their bed staring at the ceiling and wondering how a man could be so infuriatingly agreeable when she'd been prepared to fight a war.

The wedding itself was small. Lyselle had wanted small — or rather, she had wanted practical, and practical had turned out to mean small. A ceremony at the Lake shrine outside town, officiated by an elderly paladin who had known him since his first vows and who referred to him, throughout the proceedings, by a childhood nickname that made the back of his neck go red. Her own mentor made the journey from the wood elf grove — a journey of four days — and spent most of the ceremony quietly weeping into a handkerchief embroidered with wheat sheaves. The half-orc from the guild hall was there, the one who was always snoring on the bench. He cried too. A lot of people cried, actually. Lyselle did not cry. She was a pragmatic woman making a pragmatic decision. The fact that her hands shook when she spoke her vows was irrelevant. The fact that she had to pause halfway through and take a breath because her voice had started to do something embarrassing was also irrelevant. She got through it. She was fine.

Afterward, there was food. There was drink. There was a toast from the elderly paladin that went on for twenty minutes and contained at least three anecdotes that made him look like he wanted to sink through the floor. There was dancing, which Lyselle was bad at and did anyway, her bare feet on the spring grass, her gold hair loose and full of the wildflowers someone's children had thrown at her during the procession. She laughed more than she had laughed in the previous eighty-seven years combined. Or maybe it just felt that way.

And then, eventually, it was night.

---

The room was not theirs. It belonged to the inn near the shrine — the only inn within walking distance, a ramshackle old place with sloping floors and a fireplace that smoked and a proprietress who had winked at them so pointedly when they'd arrived that Lyselle had nearly turned around and walked back out. But it was the wedding night, and wedding nights had traditions, and one of those traditions was apparently having a room with a bed in it that was not your own bed, in a building that was not your home, while someone downstairs played a lute badly and sang something about eternal love in a key the song had clearly not been written in.

The room had been prepared. Someone — the proprietress, probably — had scattered rose petals across the bedspread. They were real rose petals, slightly wilted, the kind that stained if you crushed them. There were candles. Too many candles. The room was a fire hazard. The window was open, letting in the cool spring air and the distant sound of the wedding party still lingering in the shrine's garden, their voices carrying up the hill like wind through leaves.

Lyselle stood in the middle of the room. The door was closed. The candles flickered. The rose petals lay on the bedspread like a promise she was suddenly not sure she knew how to keep.

She was still wearing her wedding clothes — a simple dress of undyed linen, her one concession to the occasion, because she had refused to get married in her ceremonial vines despite several of her fellow clerics insisting it would be spiritually appropriate. She'd wanted something that covered her. Just for today. Just for the ceremony. Something that made her feel less like a fertility goddess's vessel and more like a woman who had chosen something, freely and deliberately, without her body's endless, hungry demands getting a vote.

Now, in the candlelight, the dress felt like armour she was about to take off.

She had been waiting for this night for six months. Longer, if she was honest. She had been waiting for this night since the moment she'd stood in the apothecary doing multiplication in her head and come to the quiet, terrifying realisation that she didn't want to use a single one of the twelve condoms she was buying. She had been waiting for this night through every careful, responsible encounter since — every time she'd forced herself to be sensible, to wait, to do things properly, to not let her body's desperate, cyclical hunger override her brain's iron insistence on doing this right.

And now it was done. They were married. The checklist was complete — every box ticked, every condition satisfied, every practical consideration addressed. There was no reason left to wait. No reason at all.

She turned to face him.

The candles made the room too warm. Or maybe that was her. She could feel the familiar heat pooling low in her belly, the one that always started slow and then built until she couldn't think about anything else. It was stronger tonight than it had ever been — six months of deliberate restraint, six months of not yet, soon, be patient, all of it compressed into a single moment like a coiled spring.

She wanted to say something. Something practical. Something that would ground her, remind her that she was a cleric of the Lord of Plenty and Barren, a trained professional, a woman who had navigated cockatrice nests and blighted groves and could absolutely handle her own wedding night without turning into whatever her body was currently trying to turn her into. She wanted to say something about the logistics of the evening — we should probably put out some of these candles before the inn burns down or I think I got rose petals in my hair or do you want to have some of the cake we saved before or after. Something normal. Something that sounded like her.

She opened her mouth.

And what came out was not her voice. Not the voice she used to discuss wound care and crop rotation and the medicinal properties of seventeen different kinds of bark. What came out was low and thick and sticky-sweet, dripping from her lips like honey from a broken comb, a voice she had never heard herself use before and recognised instantly as the one her body had been waiting to use for eighty-seven years.

"Husband," she said.

The word curled in the candlelit air between them like smoke. She watched it land. Watched it register. Watched her own helpless, treacherous body lean forward slightly — just slightly — the linen of her wedding dress pulling taut across her chest as she breathed in and forgot to breathe out.

"I — " She tried again. Tried to find the practical words, the sensible words, the words that belonged to the woman who had written a cost-benefit analysis of him as a husband candidate and not the woman currently dripping onto the inn's floorboards because she'd been waiting six months to be legally, morally, theologically permitted to let him do whatever he wanted to her. "I was going to say something. About the candles. Or the — the cake. I had something practical. I always have something practical."

She swallowed. The sound was audible in the quiet room.

"I can't remember any of it."

Her hands, she realised, were gripping the front of her dress — her wedding dress, the one she'd bought to cover herself, to feel like a bride instead of a fertility vessel — and they were gripping it so tightly that the linen was creasing. She watched herself from somewhere outside her body, or tried to, but the body was in charge now and the body had been waiting a very, very long time.

"Six months," she heard herself say, and the words were slow and warm and seemed to come from somewhere deep in her chest, somewhere below where her rational mind lived. "Six months of being careful. Six months of — of waiting. Six months of watching you drink from the Lake's chalice at the shrine and thinking he's going to live so long, he's going to be a Grail Knight, he's going to outlive me and I won't even care as long as I get to have this first — "

She stopped. The word this had come out wrong. It had come out meaning something much more specific than this marriage or this life together or this evening.

She meant this. Tonight. Now. Him, inside her, with nothing between them. No sheep intestine. No beeswax. No sensible precautions. Just skin and heat and the thing her body had been screaming for since the first time she'd watched him train and felt the temperature under her ceremonial vines rise.

The candles flickered. The distant music from the garden below had stopped, or maybe it hadn't, maybe she just couldn't hear it over the sound of her own pulse.

"Tell me," she said, and the voice was not hers, was absolutely not hers, was the voice of the Harvest Festival and the fertile earth and every spring rut she'd ever suppressed behind her checklist and her practicality and her eighty-seven years of disciplined self-control. "Tell me to wait. Tell me to be sensible. Tell me we should put out the candles and eat the cake and do this properly. Tell me no."

She stepped forward. The rose petals crunched under her bare feet.

"Because I can't tell myself no anymore. I've been telling myself no for six months and I'm — I'm out. I'm empty. There's nothing left in me except — "

She stopped again. Her ears were so red they looked like they might catch fire. The kohl around her eyes had smudged slightly — from the dancing, maybe, or from something else — and it made her look wilder than she'd ever looked in her life.

"Fill me up," she whispered.

The words hung in the candlelight. Irrevocable. Irretrievable. The thing she'd been barely holding back since the day she'd stood in his apartment clutching a paper bundle of condoms she didn't want to use. The thing her body had been waiting to say since the moment she'd ticked the last box on her mental checklist and realised the checklist had never been the point. The point had always been this.

"I want you to fill me up until I can't hold any more. I want you to — " She laughed, a small broken sound, half shame and half relief. "I had a whole speech prepared. Practical. Sensible. Something about the candles. I think there was a joke about cake. I can't — I can't remember any of it. All I can think about is you, and this bed, and the fact that I don't have to be careful anymore. I don't have to. You married me. You married me."

The wonder in her voice was genuine. As if she still, after everything, couldn't quite believe it.

"We don't have to use anything," she said, and the word anything landed like a stone in still water. "Nothing. Tonight. Any night. Ever again."

She looked at him — her husband, her paladin, the man who had sat in a guild hall and read her most embarrassing secrets and somehow still showed up at the Harvest Festival bonfire. The man who had said yes before she'd finished the sentence. The man who was currently standing in a room full of too many candles and rose petals that were definitely staining the bedspread, watching her fall apart in real time.

"So," she said, and her voice was still that other voice, the sticky one, the hungry one, but underneath it now was something softer — something that had been there all along, hidden beneath the checklists and the practicality and the fear of wanting something so badly it terrified her. "Are you going to do something about it, husband? Or do I have to say please?"

She was already saying please. She'd been saying please for six months. Every sensible decision, every careful precaution, every night she'd gone to sleep next to him without letting herself have what she wanted — all of it had been please. And now, finally, she was done asking.