Snakes and Ladders: Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I lower the girl onto the bed I had been sleeping in. I’m not as strong as I was. It’s not that I care but I’m not used to the differences yet. Huge differences. Two of my new huge differences pull my off balance and tumble me onto the bed too. I roll over panting. She’s heavier than I thought. I’m exhausted, and I just got up? I’m shaky I realize.

No I’m not that top heavy. I’m a D at a guess and a single D at that. It’s just I have a completely different center of gravity and a new leg. I’ve got to get up, to get to the service cart. It takes some doing and I see some juice. I’m not sure what it is but it’s familiar and refreshing, reddish. I can taste honey.

There’s a basket with these lily flower shaped croissants. There’s a weird orange colored strawberry in the center and the thing tastes a lot like a sweet very lightly glazed bit of puff pastry. It’s weird I’d normally just pop it in but I can’t do that now. Ha, nobody can say I’ve got a big mouth now.

I look over to the girl, woman elf. She’s stunning and she’s out like a light with this grayness under her eyes. She looks exhausted, she looks beautiful…that dark raven like hair, alabaster skin. Lips that just beg to be kissed…Her hairs slightly mussed and she wears nothing under that slip of hers. Just looking at her I feel…warm, and there’s more warmth in my groin and breasts, they feel heavier…more aware, and…Oh..oh…my. My nipples are getting hard…Oh my first time…I feel this warmth below, this achy tightening inside of myself like…like having a reverse boner? It’s…it has this kind of a focal point inside of me and I’m pretty sure I know what that is…It’s all so alien to me, the feelings are nearly overwhelming me….It would have if it didn’t feel so right to me…if the feelings from feeling sexual to just feeling the way I’m sitting, breathing the weight of my hair, the feel of my skin…The feeling of my brain…Yeah I know weird but I’m totally a woman now and I feel exorcised as well as transformed.

“Huh, I guess I still find girls attractive. But then look at you, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t think you’re beautiful.”

She doesn’t really respond only just rolls or shimmies into my warm spot with a slight sigh. It’s as arousing a sound as her moving that close that undressed. I have another drink and look through the dishes of food. There’s a lot that looks familiar if in different ways. The weird thing is the foods are covered by a soap bubble? I’m not going to touch those, there’s raw meats in some of those. I grab a wedge of weird crumbly looking green…cheese and nibble it. It’s really odd, like a really light asiago with a strong pistachio flavor…different, not my favorite but It’s cheese, I think it should tide me over for awhile.

I lie down beside her and watch her sleep. It’s not like that. She’s and elf, a real live elf and I’m still debating on which is crazier me being transformed into a girl or that I seen dragons?, I’m lying here next to and elf. I watch her breathe as there are little things I notice, that flawless skin its her pores they’re so tiny, even where you should really see pores easier they are hard to see. Her lashes are so long and lush and full, her lips are finely shaped a perfect little bow. It could make a girl be really self conscious, jealous… God she’s so perfect looking…Then there’s the little snore she makes popping the illusion of perfection. Her face scrunches as she tries to get comfortable again, and again.

I don’t know how I know but I know she doesn’t sleep well and she’s been getting less than normal. I roll her gently over to her side and lie down beside her and gently wrap my arms around her. Her hair smells like lupin flowers and blueberries. Her skin is so smooth to the touch like silk and her body has this lightest of soap scents with a similar scent but with vanilla undertones. My breasts touch her back and it feels so…good I feel so right I cry and fall asleep to happy tears holding this stranger in this strange place.

…I’m not sure how long I’ve been asleep and I’m awake before my eyes are open and I thought for a moment I must have been dreaming. Until my body catches up with my brain or the other way around and I feel myself. I know most people don’t but this is new to me so I still feel the rise and fall of my breasts. It’s not a dream when your hairs in your eyes and your arm’s asleep.

She’s awake and staring at me. Her eyes aren’t human, first they’re this deep navy blue with the littlest hints of grey and it makes her eyes a rich sapphire color. They’re this normal shape with just the slightest almond shape to them like she had an Asian grandparent or something. Her lashes are so thick and long and dark.

“Evening.” her voice has a strange accent to her English. Like a Indian/Hindu person who speaks really perfect UK English that has lived in the like France and the United States for years.

“Hi, It’s evening?”

“I believe so, around the twentieth pearl.”

“Uhm…okay? So that’d be what in earth time?”

“I have no idea.”

“How many hours in a day?”

“What is an hour?”

“Uhm…”

Okay Wren you’re a bright girl, how to figure out how people measure time if they don’t do it like we do? It’s kind of silly to just assume the universe works according to earth values…

“Okay, how many pearls does it take for the world to turn?”

“Thirty six.”

“And how are the pearls broken down time wise like in smaller units?”

“The pearl has four quarters and each quarter has fifteen leaves.”

“Oh..okay..So your pearls are equal to my hours and a leaf is equal to a minute to me.” I’m half talking to myself. Getting lost in the thoughts and implications.

“You have a thirty six hour day?”

“Yes if what you said of your ways is true.”

“My world has only twenty four pearls in it’s day.”

“Oh, you will have some adjusting to do.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“My name is Shaya.”

“Hi I’m Wren.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, how?”

“You were dying, there was so much in you that deserved the best chance to live that I could give you. You saved my life and that of Bhlaze from Shai-tan and Mohad, you were taken from your home when our fight came to Ea through the leyline storm. To keep you alive I had to make us bonded.”

“Bonded?”

“Yes….” She holds out her right palm and there’s a metallic silvery scar on her palm. Then she moves aside my robe and strokes a matching one on my breast. The finger touching my breast is sending feelings I thought I’d never have making my shiver, my nipple to tighten and my breath to get shaky as tears come to my eyes. I know there is more than this?

“I don’t understand…”

“I gave you part of my soul, a piece of me. To keep you alive until mother healed you.”

“…………..……” A piece…of her…soul…even as I hear it I know it’s true…I can feel something inside me that’s different…and she…No one, never…I never knew something like this was even possible….I start crying all over again and she wipes my tears away…

“Shaya?”

“Yes.”

“How…how am I like this?”

“Ah You mean Erendae and not The Bear.”

“Yeah…Erendae?

“Ah That is the way your name would be said amongst us formally. You have the name of a bird, but are a human, a person, a child of light thus E for Ea or of the Earth and dae for the day because you are a child of light. It translates to Sweet-Morning-Forest-Singer.”

“Uhm, that’s…”

“Very complicated?”

“Welcome to Sylvania.”

“Sylvania?”

“The name of our nation, our mother world.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. How I know these things of you? I had dreamed and lived part of your life, this is how I know your words. I know something’s of you just as you will come to know of me.”

“I think it’s started already. You have trouble sleeping Shaya, I felt that. This Bond thing didn’t help did it?”

She lowers her eyes and shakes a little, her voice is smaller, quieter. “No, I do not sleep well.” she bites her lower lip and I see a deep well of something, I feel a deep dark well inside of her there’s an age of pain there.

“We should eat, I am beyond fasted and you are still recovering and need to eat as well.”

I know when someone is avoiding the issue. I still get up and move over to the trolley as Shaya takes two elegant chairs and puts them on either side of the trolley then sits.

The food is very different and held in those strange bubbles. Shaya pops them with no difficulty or restraint. I try one and it pops and the food these however many hours later smells fresh as when they just brought it out. Some of the raw stuff is cooked by Shaya on these gorgeous metal plates that sit on another metal disc that’s in ceramic and somehow the contact between the two makes heat.

I’m more than impressed with the magic and I’m not trying to sound like I’m blasé about it but I’m still in shock and in this place after everything that’s happened. The bubbles are neat but I guess it’s just scope? Or am I accepting this more through my bond with Shaya?

Part of me wants to ask her what’s wrong, to make things better. To kiss her…I look at her and sort of swallow it all down and she’s deep in thought. Later, I want to help her but later…we need to know each other more…I can tell feel, she’s really reserved. It’s the strongest gut feeling I’ve ever had.

We finish eating and I look at her. “So what now?” I ask.

She looks at me. “Despite the hour, we are an active people. Many of us live for the night. Would you like to come over to my rooms and pick out something to wear we can go out and I can show you around.”

“I’d like that. I think I’ve slept enough. I’d like to get out and see the sights and stuff.”

Shaya leads me through the adjoining door to her rooms. They’re huge to begin with, and have these thirty foot high vaulted ceilings with these carved wooden pillars and rook supports carved as if they were rich dark trees and the ceiling is a mosaic of red maple leaves and this ivy of red roses? Real plants of some kind that go up from the base of the posts into the ceiling. Her bed is a huge four poster deal and has deep brown sheets of some near bronze silk. The room has halls coming off of it and is…it isn’t a room, it’s a palace in it’s own right. There’s a room of mannequins that look like her but instead of clothes it’s armor and weapons, hundreds of weapons like I’ve never see but mostly fantasy blades and knives and stuff like that. There’s several bows and I think I see guns too?

I pass by another room that’s a glass topped open air gazebo with folding huge doors and that blue grey sand. On top of that sand is the dragon. Silvery reptilian plating that looks like mother of pearl with metal in it and this snake fine skin in between this pale blue with pale white grey tiger stripes. He’s a classical dragon like from Dragonlance or D&D he’s so beautiful he takes my breath away. He’s coiled up sleeping on heated sands and just at a guess he’s a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet long. This huge eye cracks open and stares at me, just one eye like a massive cat.

~Good Eve Erendae, Shaya are we going out this night?~

Shaya smiles at him stepping into his enclosure to run her hands up and down the huge muzzle and leans forward to kiss him. “Perhaps later dear heart, if Wren is not afraid of heights.”

“I’m not.” I reply, okay I know that flying like this will be totally different than anything else flight wise than anything I’ve been on before but I’m not going to pass up the chance up to fly on dragon back.

Shaya smiles at me. “Perhaps, now what do we say to getting some clothes and exploring?”

“It sounds good to me, but uhm I’m new to this, new, uhm real me so I might need some help.”

She leads us to her summer wardrobe. Shaya has a room, a very large room per season and a few others as well. “Are all of these just for your clothes? This is kind of a bit much isn’t it?” Shaya nods. “Yes it is but this is a collection of things I’ve bought and been given and gifted over the last seven hundred years.”

“Seven…Hundred…Years…, How old are you?”

“It is considered rude, to ask a person such things.”

“Yeah, I’m a bit rude back home too.”

Shaya laughs and it’s a beautiful sound full of music. “Okay, okay Wren, I’m eight hundred and twenty three years old.”

“Is that old for an elf?”

“Yes, unless they are of my bloodlines.”

“That sounds complicated and stuff.”

“Family often is.”

“Yeah…” I can’t help but remember mine and feel kind of sad about things that had happened.

Shaya picks me out this golden silk camisole and a green cotton hooded tunic and pants with matching leather sandals. It’s simple for the things I see here, but it’s the most elegant thing I’ve ever worn. The cuts are simple yet definitely female as is the incredibly elegant silk and lace panties that send a incredible thrill through my body. I almost start crying all over again.

Watching Shaya change or rather undress was enough to stun me out of crying. Her body for all she’s is over eight hundred years old and everything but Shaya has the most amazing body I’ve ever seen. She’s tall at an even six feet tall and slender but with this great muscle tone under her alabaster flawless skin. Her breasts are a bit small on her frame but very, very nice a 26B if I’m to guess. Her beautiful sex is bare not shaved but just no hair growing there or under her arms either. She’s breathtaking…I watch her almost stripper dance shimmy into her sexy black panties and the fall of that hair of hers like me she goes braless and then pulls this sleeveless black tunic of silk with a black velvet trim and hood that has a blue sheen to it and matches the sheen of her hair and makes those eyes of hers look amazing…Shaya pulls it like a hoody over her head.

I really wanted to just walk over and touch her then. Take a breast into my mouth…Shaya stares at me for a moment, Then pulls on these loose pants that are of the same velvet but are tricked out with rose shapes of lace like jeans that have those worn or fake worn holes in them. The sheen of the velvet draws your eye to those legs that are further shown off by her skins contrast to the lace. Then she belts on this belt of this blue gold? Designed to look like blossoms linked together by what looks like three silver ropes like the rope in that kind of necklace. It sits just off her hip with an almost holster like sheath holding a foot long straight bladed dagger of this lustrous chrome and mother of pearl hilt.

She smiles at me after she’s done belting up and offers me her arm, almost chivalrous like.

“Shall we?”

“Yes, Let’s.” I try to put on an almost English/UK accent but it just goes over her head.

We walk out through several long halls and I’ve going to get so lost in this place. We pass by other elves who kind of sort of glance at us but don’t look at us. I nearly wave when Shaya says. “Don’t.”

“Why, did I do anything wrong?”

“No, if anything you have the palace buzzing with gossip.”

“Gossip?”

“Yes, it is a fine art here. But no one will talk to you unless you speak to them first. With guests we have a tradition of them being here but not being here until they give an indication of they are actually here rather than having arrived.”

“So I’m not here officially until I make it official?”

“Exactly, it’s very important. Especially here in the palace.”

“Palace?, okay I knew this was a huge place for a reason. Lemme guess you’re an Elfin princess?”

“Yes, Crown princess at one time.”

I stop…And stare at her. “Crown Princess…”

“Yes.”

“But, you said one time?”

“Ah, yes…I’m a Dragon Rider, A knight and part of the military, we do not allow any kind of political rankings in our military. One must rise or fall on one’s own merits.”

“So you’re still in service then?”

“Yes but I’m on medical leave, as well as on diplomatic service detail.”

“Oh, so what’s that entail. I get the medical leave but the diplomatic thing?”

“I’m being made responsible for you.”

“Oh, uhm…sorry?”

“There is naught to be sorry for Wren. I’m getting ordered to show you our home and ways and such. I’m being paid to…”Hang out?” with you…I would have requested the duty even if we were not bonded.”

“You would have?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I do not know, I’m drawn to you.”

“Drawn to me?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, I’d have said that it was impossible but…” She looks at me and stares then continues to walk. There’s this look to her, a flush. “I find myself attracted to you Wren and I find that hard. I need to know if what I feel is real or a side effect from our bond.”

“Oh…”

She likes me too.

I can’t help but feel really, really excited by that. It’s not just that she looks like that or anything other than It’s her, It’s Shaya…Oh…I can feel it, she is really confused by this. It’s all a part of those murky private depths of hers.

“I’m interested in you too Shaya.”

She gives me this sideways glance that’s so incredibly shy and vulnerable at the same time. It makes me ache to be there for her. I want to ease that hurt, I feel in her…this loneliness that’s there…

We step into the outside and my breath doesn’t just catch but stops.

I see the scene unfold as we step out onto this terrace that’s almost Spanish in design. It’s hundreds of feet wide and stretches a mile or more in either direction. The palace is huge at least ten stories tall and stretches the length of the terrace. It’s so complex and stunning like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Just off the balcony/terrace there’s this river canyon. Like if the grand canyon was filled to nearly being full with the Danube. It’s full of boats and sailing boats like the most beautiful floating sculptures I’ve ever seen. And then there’s the moons…I can see seven of them all looking breathtaking but around the biggest, hugest moon that I’ve ever seen. The most beautiful...Hugest moon I’ve ever seen. You know when you see the moon on open seas or plains. Bigger two or three times that size it looks so much like earth…. I’m tearing up and crying as I see a few dragons bank over the waters and there are even more graceful ships floating past in the air…

I feel Shaya’s hands on my shoulders and her behind me letting me lean on her. Her head rests lightly on my shoulder from behind me.

“Welcome to Sylvania Wren.”