The Necromancer and the Reaping Spear: Chapter One Final (NSFW/Erotica)

Hello, readers mine! Today I’ve started on line-edits for The Necromancer and the Reaping Spear. The total number of preview chapters will be greater this time, partly due to chopping a couple of over-long ones in half, partly because I’m going to share two that I previously didn’t. Each preview chapter I post will arrive in the same finalized form you’ll see when I publish the book.

Admittedly, “final” is a much more complicated idea here than usually. I encourage you to read Making Points, Mental Health, and the Necromancer’s Vengeance Series (northbornsword.blog) so you’ll understand the quandaries I’m facing with this series.

That said, I’m posting the first chapter again. Aside from the line-edits themselves you’ll find this one picked up an entire two-page orgy since the early version I posted back in August. Yes, you read that correctly, there’s literal erotica further past the asterisks!

If when all’s said and done you want to support me and this series, I encourage you to pick up the first book, The Necromancer and the Revenant, here at Smashwords: Smashwords – The Necromancer and the Revenant: Resurrected Edition – a book by Caerllyn McCurdy

That’ll take care of us for preliminaries–once again, we open on Urzen the Gossamer and the Seventh Plane…

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Chapter One

Lattice, Love, and Lessons Forgot

(3rd of Aboseyl, 1295 V.R.)

“It’ll happen. You mistake the warmth in your heart for a warmth shared. You say, “I am yours,” and they say, “I am not.’ No shame, no spite, no mending needed… unless you don’t let it end there.” -Kiresa Virneh

Urzen, lord of the Seventh, feared little. A venomous dagger through his heart meant nothing. His heart was surging energy. It would mend like a recombinant breeze wrapping the red-bedecked bows of autumn and burn the poison to speckled vapor. A mage’s scourging bolt meant little. It would burn and rip his silken purple skin. Its scorch and embers would lace ash amid the gemstone dust that served him for tumbling hair-locks. Yet these would fade. He would mend swift as a lover’s wink.

He needed little raiment for his splendor, for splendor was writ upon every incarnate sinew. Three sweeping tails, one from above his shapely rear and one from each shoulder-blade. Intricate antlers hung by golden chains that sprang from his glowing brow. Their mirror-bronze points framed his flawless jaw and radiant golden eyes with nine slit pupils. The five interweaving pairs of chiming wings crafted from hovering stained-glass shapes, bound together and to his body by coils of molten gold and the heat of the forge. His pale robes of gauzy fog that only obscured rather than truly hid his smooth-sculpt muscles and his ample member’s nakedness:

Urzen was Planelord of Flesh, mightiest of the Seven. Save for the Celestial Pact and the Pantheon’s dictums, he might reshape a nation with the power surging as torrential spectra around him. As long as he held fast upon it, it would answer no other. So what if another planelord attacked and the gods deigned not to intervene? It would mean only a spectacular struggle before a sure triumph. Better still, it meant a tale to impress the next mortal he favored with his touch. His realm’s folk knew these things.

They watched him as he marched along the ever-shifting avenue that wound through the many-leveled heart of the Seventh. Demon-craft raised delirious spirals and crescent arches formed by hundred-strong buildings rising as clawing inverse monuments to the defiance of gravity. Soothing crystal rivers carried platforms shaped as swirls, flower-petals, and sculptures. Some barren, many carrying rapturous passengers, they soared between spires and mountains stylized into woodcut spurs all across an endless sky: dawn behind, day to the left, and night to the right. Rosy sunset ahead.

Loshfayns reclined on veiled balconies wreathed by heady incense that would inflame the coldest mortal guest with maddening lust. They were horned and crested, winged, tailed, and more. Slender or curvy, muscular or plump and plush according to their tastes. Their bodies bore scales, silken skin, fur, crystalline nodules, and all conceivable forms of piercings beneath garments tailored to seem more nude than nudity itself.

A willaches slanted their hips atop a segmented archway above. The asymmetrical construct was jagged copper and gold with lace-like cables twining on the air around it. The art-demon’s move stirred an elaborate tiered garment imitating a painter’s apron. The demon’s form sported elaborate face-paints, orange on one side and blue on the other, with white zigzag patterns adorning skin comprised of countless intersecting facets. One half their features and body curved and rounded. The other half was angular and sharp. These asymmetries melded in striated lines down their face, front, and back alike.

They snapped their hands out as color peeled from their figure and streamed onto a canvas wide as a building. With its impacts the canvas rose and deformed until it became as much a sculpture as a painting.

Below, forge-fires and glassworks sent their glows upward on multicolored smoke-plumes. Superhuman hammer-strokes reverberated the clouds as the bainjests honed the crafts that lent them power. And, as always, the syustfayns laughed and squealed as they reshaped their palaces. They fitted terraces to towers and unfolded wine-cellars upwards along wall-sides. They glittered and whirled, finery and indulgence. Though they wore the same paints, scales, tails and other embellishments as the other demons of the Seventh, theirs were flamboyant rather than sensual and eye-catching rather than artful.

Always, his subjects practiced for the passions, the art, the revels they might soon conduct on Canno. Always, Urzen cherished these sights. Here there were no demon-hunters nor haughty mages drunk with the power to make immortals kneel. If the gods disdained his kindred, then at least that disdain made them loathe to visit the Seventh. An illusion of sanctuary? Perhaps. But it always felt real enough.

It always had.

If Urzen wished, he could stretch his spirit past the gathered energy giving it form. He could reach out. Mingle his self’s thousand outstretching tendrils, shared emotions and sensations, with the ever-twining play of the greater Seventh. He could see love and lust as rosy filaments with lovelorn thoughts and dreams contained like tapered reflections within every strand, or the crafter’s passion reflected as ghostly recollection within a sculpture’s shimmering surface. He wished no such things. Why, these demons must wonder, did Urzen the Gossamer look so stricken? Why did he furrow his brow and strain his eyes at nothing? Why did his lips droop? Why did he close his aura?

Urzen offered no answers for them.

He ran his triplet tails over his limbs with each step. Fitful, silent, he passed to the inmost promenade. Here his mightiest vassals linked their realms to his. Each planar merge expressed itself according to its ruler. Some decreed auroral rays, others countless wind-gusts laden with blossoms. Always they created the impressions of tendrils latching in and holding on. Today they seemed spiteful. Not clasping, but clawing, as if to say, “Bind myself tightly to you? Fine. I’ll make it hurt until you let me go.”

Sweeping walkways and many-leveled palaces sprang from grand hovering domes. Scarlet cathedrals covered with reliefs of tumbling lovers bobbed atop isles with undersides like down-grinding ivory fangs. Such spectacle laid where so few would see!

Such waste.

Close friends among the High Seductors blended their styles into bridges or islands like stepping stones. So too at the place just ahead where sandstone merged into greenish metal whose surface glinted with oil-paint swirls. Even as it occurred to him he soon must do so, Urzen drew even with a towering iron fortress. It jabbed out in sharp ridges at every corner and join. Every seam at those half-made meetings poured lilac fire. Atop the ramparts gusted ten thousand veils like ghostly banners. Wind-chimes rang about its battlements.

The planelord’s gaze moved by habit to the magnificent palace beside it. He started to smile, even if it was a strained smile, with the expected joy of seeing it.

The palace’s translucence lent further depth and color to the light it reflected. It bridged the distance to the iron fortress by crystalline nodules with layered lamellar bands for flooring. Ornamental alcoves and graceful buttresses of lapis-lazuli. Engraved steel inlays set with blue and orange topaz, wreathed by gleaming amber mist—Urzen’s eyes now drooped as deeply as his mouth. There was no such palace.

She was gone.

“Urzen,” Azukai greeted him. She startled him so badly that his form wavered.

The zhumozhe hovered closer and settled into place alongside him. Her sparkling deep-mauve robes swirled about her. The gold lines inlaying her snow-white face gleamed brighter even than those trimming her raiment. Her lamellar bands flowed in lustrous arcs about her slender body. Yet the three triangular pupils beneath her black hair and black brows held a fell glow in their amethyst cores. Her eyebrows, the lower pair fine and long, the upper shorter with soft swells at their inward ends, drew down as she regarded him. Silk bands and hair-twinings webbed the three pairs of bone-crests marching back over the curve of her head. They twanged and thrummed as though about to snap.

Urzen accepted that though he feared little besides the gods, Azukai was at least unsettling to him. From too-fluid grace to a cheek-distorting grin with her white-steel fangs, she looked little like the pleasure-demon she claimed to be. Keshohai, in the north Ton tongue.

“High Seductress Azukai,” he greeted her. That was the rank she held here. He wanted to feel it was the one that mattered. “It is appropriate to greet me as Planelord Urzen,” he dared to add. He firmed his brow and tightened his lips.

Azukai nodded. “You’re correct. That would be appropriate, Urzen.”

“Azukai,” he started.

“I’ll bide no scarp for your posturing this day,” she said. Her voice hardened. Chill. Sharp. “The Pantheon grants that you hold more power than I. So be it. When the Loar drove us from Tuha-Lin and I was a fledgling crying out for your aid, where were you and where were they?” She leaned towards him. “When we entered the Redoubt that day, where were you? The current Duchess von Graufeld, perhaps? You’ve always liked the women of that family. A miracle it’s not turned incestuous after so many generations.”

Urzen opened his mouth to order her silence. He was stronger than Azukai. Only, Azukai was right, and had a right to her anger. Besides, Iron Azu was an untamed thing who knew no fear.

“There’s no threat I can make that will humble you, is there?” Urzen asked.

“You know who I’ve served. You know how long,” Azukai answered. “What do you think? Would I ever let you, or anyone, control me by saying what you might do?”

Urzen drifted into silence at that.

Soon they reached the first pillars that rose higher, row by row. They approached his palace with nine interlocking roofs of black jet. Mottled walls of jade and emerald sprouted off level by level into many wings, windows, and hovering platforms.

“I didn’t want her to die,” Urzen said.

“You didn’t want her to die by the time it happened,” she agreed. “I also don’t want children to starve in the Barrens Feral. Only, I’ve no way of reaching them and no one asked that I take responsibility for them. The Seventh Plane isyour duty. By their request as well as that of the gods, the demons here make you responsible for them. You accepted the power readily enough, it seems. What of the burden? You were granted the power from the first that you might carry it.” She glared down at him. “If you don’t want your children to die, then do something to stop it. Pick up your end.”

“Azukai—” Urzen began.

“Let’s be clear about where we stand,” the zhumozhe cut in. “For now, I can neither sunder you nor match any onslaught you might kindle.” She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Twisted wistfulness tugged her lips. “Does it matter? What do you think will happen if you kill me?” Her eyes opened. Those warped twin amethysts lanced him. “You can’t shatter me. I can sense that it’s not in you. Do you think I’ll rest forever in some haze-plane painting of an afterlife? Eternal bliss, as all turns to silver glass?”

“Kill you?” Urzen demanded. “Kill you for arguing with me, what madness is this? The worst I would do is cut you off from Canno for a time.”

“I’m sure that’s the lie you believe,” Azukai said.

Urzen stared at her. Then he said, “If you’re asking my oath not to kill you because you have nowhere to go, I’m already in agreement with that. I understand that you’re angry, and can forgive—”

“But you overlook my anger’s drive,” Azukai said. “I’m not asking for lenience. Understanding? Why would the understanding of a gutless slug mean aught? Your empathy’s a phantom of words and avoidant guilt. Your breath won’t heal a friend or thwart a foe. No, Urzen. I warn you. You, and I hope my soul-sister never gleans the speaking of this cliché… you, Urzen, lord of all the Seventh Plane,” and she leaned towards him with a slight yet dreadful smile, “cannot kill me in a way that matters.”

Urzen’s temper rose. “I may test you on that if you continue to test me.”

“You see? The moment I tell you that you lack a form of power over me, violent promises flow forth. Kill me over insubordination…” Azukai said. She snagged a nearby pillar by a lamellar-band’s unfolding. She scrambled hand-over-hand around the planar column, then launched herself in a gliding spin past him. She flitted three swift circles around him while he walked. Urzen kept his tongue still and his teeth gritted.

The whispered finish came like a dagger in his ear: “Kiresa would love that.”

“Kiresa was not like you,” Urzen said. “Kiresa was…” He trailed off. Kiresa was what? Docile, except that she withheld his greatest desire? Obedient, except that she never smiled in it? More beautiful by contrast with her sorrow? The things he wanted to call Kiresa would hardly please Azukai. They had hardly pleased Kiresa.

“That was our point,” Azukai said. “Rays and I didn’t need to be mirrored spirits to care for each other. You might learn from that, primordial lord.”

“And is that it? Is that your point, alone?” Urzen asked.

“No, actually,” Azukai said. “My point is this: why do you wreathe yourself in misery and shadow when Canno destroys us? Or rather,” she tapped her lips, then spread her hand towards the four-way sky, “why do you do this with your sorrow about you as a shield, somehow making your expression alone say, ‘I feel awful, so don’t ask me why I didn’t stop it?'” She drifted to a halt as they reached his palace’s entrance. “You feel awful in the depths of your palace. A few hours later you’re fucking the sadness away. Minutes if you’re especially springy. Nothing that you feel awful about will ever be real for you; you never let yourself witness it. You may say that’s unfair. A gilded cage is still a cage, and so on. I say…”

The zhumozhe bared her fangs. A hot, ripping tide of an emotion surged out between them. Urzen had never felt it from another demon. Though he knew himself the stronger, he staggered back. It was a searing urgent yank. A need to cleave and rage held back by a restraint so fierce that it tormented the zhumozhe: herself, tearing herself.

Azukai hated him.

“I say there are no poems or portraits to be made about what happened in the Redoubt. None for our despair beneath the burning sky the night Tuha-Lin fell, or a thousand battles just as bitter when the law and justice of the gods was nowhere to be seen,” she said. “There’s no allegory or metaphor or distance for us to hide in. We,” and as she pointed to herself, she snarled and dug the sudden claws on her fingers into her own chest, “don’t get a chance to be cowards. We are summoned, we are bound, and we serve until we die.”

She snapped out her arm, summoning forth the spectral reaping spear that defied all Urzen knew about his own plane’s powers. She did not point it at him, but swept it about to enlarge her arm’s grand flourishes. “So here’s my challenge unto you, most ancient and admirable Planelord: the next time you see a demon you purport to care about in need of your aid, you do something,” Azukai said. “I’m not counseling you to violate the Pact. Just make the frailest effort.”

“And if I don’t?” Urzen asked.

“Then you’ll stay perfectly safe, and can continue staring at all the pretty things here in the Seventh Plane,” Azukai said, drifting closer. “You’ll continue to quietly despise yourself and yearn for oblivion. You must. Nothing is as anathema to love and passion as cowering while hatred tramples them both.” She shrugged, turning side-on to him so the conjured sunlight turned her profile aglow. “I’ve learned so much about the roots of courage through mortals I love. So few match the warstock ideal: excited by violence rather than fearing it. Most only learn to live with the fear. You can be the same. Face death a few times. You’ll find the abyss rather appealing once you learn what you’ve sacrificed from terror of it.”

The rebel zhumozhe turned, still hovering, and drifted back the way she’d come.

“What if you’re wrong? What if it never feels worth it to me?” Urzen asked. It was such a pathetic way to phrase all this. He knew that.

And, damn her, the lazy ring of her voice proved she knew that he did.

“Then your soul contains no worth whatsoever,” Azukai said. She neither turned back to look at him nor slowed her pace. She dispersed her spectral reaping spear. “It’s been twenty thousand years of this, primordial,” she called. “Do what you’ve always known you should, or cease feigning a listener’s ear. Nothing will convince you if you hope to remain unconvinced.” She disappeared in a pulse of lilac fire.

Urzen entered his palace.

He passed in shameful silence beneath the gateway, with three smaller frames set inside it and geometric cageworks binding them together. He walked with a heavy tread over the carpet’s plush, shining silk. He took no joy from the trysts and romances past frozen as moments in the copper sculptures. He ignored the pining coos from the loshfayns who lazed about in the cushioned recesses and interior balconies to all sides.

Finally he arrived in his throne room. He bid his attendants leave him. He barely felt it when cheerful Murab kissed his cheek. Their iridescent form glinted with facets like a rainbow fractured, frozen, and melded as a sculpture of shards. An ever-coiling mass of polished onyx dreadlocks wove about them as far down as the knees. All warm to the touch, and heightening the allure of those parts of them—lips, rear, and yet-unroused cock—shaped from soft, simple flesh. Normally Urzen rejoiced in their beauty. Today the younger demon’s pout won no response.

All the Seventh Plane’s essence converged on this frescoed chamber. Rainbow currents of fire interwove with mercurial silver streams. Pure light spun out rays from its in-shifting coils as of radial cloudbursts from a serpentine sun. Sweet-spice aromas and tingling warmth, steely drive and impassioned song: Urzen was aware of it all!

He just couldn’t make himself feel it.

He kept neither clocks nor calendars here. He preferred to put the march of time from his mind. Thus Urzen, silken-souled and made for sensuality, had no way to reckon the hours, or days, or weeks that drifted by while he slumped on that throne. His form diffused throughout. Purplish grain-whirls drifted about the many-leveled jade sconces, and seeped into the golden glow that poured from them. He lost himself in the pure reverberating energy and emotion. Yet he could not shake the sensation of chill-dragging mass upon his shoulders: something lightless and unmerciful that splintered him and crept inside.

“It pains me to see you this sad,” Murab said. They nuzzled Urzen’s cheek. “Would you let us try to cheer you? Come on. A quick orgy will brighten you right up.”

Urzen sighed. “Oh… oh, alright, I suppose it’s worth the attempt.”

“Preferences?” Murab asked.

“I don’t believe I have any right now,” Urzen sighed.

They nudged him. “Just speak your mind. You’re always overthinking your desires.”

Urzen sighed and closed his eyes. “Ohhhhh… boys only today, I suppose.”

This elicited disappointed sighs from the myriad pleasure-demons who didn’t identify as men. They shortly overcame their gloom by arriving at the plan of a “not-boys” orgy to be held elsewhere in the palace. This did cause some regret on Urzen’s part, for it meant departure by the larger portion of demons with love-tunnels and several with rather nice girldicks. The price of his whim, he supposed. Meanwhile, his words prompted considerable debate among his non-binary attendants. Murab remained where they were.

“I’ve decided I feel like a boy at the moment,” they said. They winked.

“Well,” Urzen responded, relaxing into his cushioned throne, “I’m glad to hear it.” His melancholy lessened somewhat as the mood in the throne-room grew more amorous. He signaled his own shift with a slow-spreading grin. “Since you’re feeling confident, and it was your idea, perhaps you’d like to start us off?”

Murabe answered with an immediate eager lick trailing down Urzen’s chest and over his belly. They pinched his flanks all the way down—slight startling tugs to bring him more alert and heighten his sensitivity to their play. They took especial care with the quick plucks and pecks of their lips as they reached the fine white hair around his manhood. They continued down around the weighty brim of his testes with luxuriant sighs. Their heated breath tickled Urzen. In unison with their skillful lapping, it took only a few breaths before the familiar swell and ache of need washed upward through him.

By now the question of exactly who wished to count themselves a boy was sorted. Those more inclined to the other orgy trickled out. Those who remained converged upon Urzen. Soon enough he was surrounded, indeed engulfed, by a bobbing mass of smooth skin and sensuous scales, plush fur and torrid crystal. He reached out for the nearest twitching shaft and pulled it towards his lips with an insistent groan. Not to be ignored, Murab put their favorite trick into play. Rainbow cords sprang out and cast ephemeral nets on Urzen’s body. Each tug and release caused the last fading strands of the cords to snap back with his skin. The cords frayed on impact, diffusing through his form with erogenous ripples.

The lord of the Seventh drooled eagerly around the steamy solidity filling his mouth. The demon bearing that cock, a goat-legged well-tanned lad folding and unfolding his wings in lust, gasped and tensed his fingers on Urzen’s head. Another demon took advantage of his distraction to envelop the two of them in a rosy cloud of erotic energy. The goat-legged lad was unprepared. He gasped and spouted thick gouts of seed down Urzen’s throat.

“Hey…” the goat-legged lad complained, “that’s not fair—”

Urzen popped the younger demon’s shaft loose and licked away the last offerings with a chuckle. “Everyone will get a turn,” he promised. Murab chose this precise moment to wrap their lips around Urzen’s own ready member. They clutched his aching balls with kneading fingers. They used their energy-cords to play a symphony of delight over the insides of his thighs in repeating advances towards his stirring groin. Urzen muffled his gasp of surprise with the wet folds of a man’s vagina. He brought all three of his tails into play with swift coilings around the meaty lengths gathered for his enjoyment.

The room’s aura grew more charged by the second as demons lost fine control over their lust. Some let it slip deliberately. Shared shudders and rhythmic sighs of eagerness echoed throughout. Even Urzen soon grew pleasure drunk. Murab was right as always. All he needed was a nice, long bout of fucking to put the world back in perspective. Guiding himself with the resonant presences of the others, the ghostly sensations of two lonely shafts hot and unattended behind him, he reached out his hands.

The tickling tension in his nethers grew until he couldn’t possibly contain it. Yet a queer pressure prevented him from releasing even as he bucked his hips. Branching throbs ran up and down his length. Moaning, he pulled his mouth away from the latest length and glanced down to see Murab watching him with a sly look. With each suck on his shaft, faint rainbow rays emanated out. It took another three bobs of their head Urzen saw the last fraying strands of light around his cock’s base, and understood.

“You… and those damned cords…” he gasped. “Let me cum… ah, I need to…”

Before he could beg further, one of the quivering rods in his hands jumped and squeezed. A positively paranormal quantity of sperm drenched his forehead and dripped into his eyes. He opened his mouth and tilted his head back, eagerly catching whatever he could and drinking down the residual power of another demon’s pleasure. Several of the others joined their tails to Murab’s ruthless teasing until his manhood felt as though it must burst at the seams in a few more strokes.

“Please, just let me…” Urzen begged. Murab did. He cried out, his length bulging with one long surging load of seed after another. Murab’s shimmering cheeks bulged and crinkled. Stray droplets escaped despite their ecstatic swallowing, trickling down their jawline and spattering Urzen’s crotch. In the delirium of his first climax, he was barely aware when his attendants lifted him up.  Hands, lips, and tongues sneaked many a caress on his form both to heighten his ardor and steal tastes of the seed spilled on his silken skin.

In a few quick shifts one of his subjects took his place on the throne’s seat and pulled him down atop them. Urzen glanced back just in time to see an enormous pinkish cockhead lining up with his backside. It pressed against his lower tail’s base. He swayed atop them and let out a steady up-pitching yell while they entered him. Before any of the others could take the initiative, Murab bounced up and settled themselves on Urzen’s shaft in turn. He spread his arms and beckoned more, always more. Always, they provided it.

Murab leaned down to kiss him while the demon penetrating his ass built to a rapid rhythmic pounding, alternating sometimes with slower strokes. By now so many erotic talents were in play, everything from cascading feathers and spectral tongues to Murab’s tantalizing spirit-tendrils, that Urzen couldn’t form a coherent thought. He spouted monosyllables and needy two-word tangents: “I can’t—right there—take me—” He wrapped all three of his tails around Murab’s shaft, teasing its entrance with one tip in a rotation made fumbling by his sheer ecstasy.

Murab bounced up and down on his length. They squirmed their glutes to clutch and twist his shaft in counter-time with the plunging girth that filled him from behind. The double-teaming had Urzen aching again within minutes. This time Murab made no effort to stop him from releasing into their depths. Rushing heat called out purple glows beneath the planelord’s skin. He clutched Murab to him and strained upward even as his seated lover pulled him down against them. Murab cried out as well. Torrents of seed spurted out, coating the both of them, each filled by another with bubbling orgiastic liquids.

And after that round came another, and another, a ceaseless whirlwind of lovemaking and the sound of flesh on flesh until Urzen lay utterly covered in milky white tribute and a clear sheen of sweat and other fluids. He panted slowly on his throne. He enjoyed the sensations of the sexual excess’s slow absorption, the steady trickle of new power absorbed. Murab cuddled against him on the verge of sleep. He stroked their dreadlocks until that sleep took them in full. Urzen imagined for a time that he was at peace.

Eventually Murab roused and wandered off to seek a game or some other light entertainment. His other attendants bid him farewell for now. He sat alone on his cushioned throne. He waved his hand. His colorful radiance gathered all the traces of the orgy. He swallowed them and savored the imbued emotions as long as they lasted. But in time they ended. Urzen sighed. Once again he noted his plane’s energies, painfully aware yet unable to feel any of it for real.

Thus, even when scarlet cacophony rang through his mind, he hardly twitched.

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