I wasn’t too excited to be journeying to the land of permanent ice and snow, admittedly. It was dark in the north for months in winter, and, conversely, it was sunny the entire day and night in summer; what was more, I’d be going there to hang out with some toothless crone who likely smelled as bad as or worse than Drok. Still, I understood that this was a quest I simply had to embark on. My intuition as a deity told me this unequivocally, as did the goddess Xayon, who now inhabited the body of my enjarta from Yeng, Rami. Oh, and she happened to be as flexible, agile, and fierce in the sack as she was in battle.
I missed that lithe, tawny body and those beguiling phoenix eyes, that silky cascade of jet black hair, that hot, eager mouth that was so good at sucking and licking… But she’d left Brakith the day after I’d taken it back from Rodrick. She left on a quest of her own to recover some items that had been lost, or stolen, during the period in which she’d been dormant. Nearly dead was a more accurate way to put it. I’d only just managed to resurrect the goddess’ soul before it would have disappeared forever.
And regarding that near death, it had been prevented in part thanks to my resident necromancer, whose pale skin, jaw-droppingly beautiful face, and voluptuous curves could only be those of a goddess—even if she was only a former goddess now, courtesy of yours truly. And, it would seem that she had also had something to do with the deaths and exiles of many of the Old Gods. It was something to do with a massive betrayal and an alliance with the cocksucking conqueror, the Lord of Light.
Isu, the sultry but surly former-goddess-now-necromancer, had remained tight-lipped about whatever this mystery was. But Xayon’s animosity toward Isu, once she’d been resurrected into Rami’s body, had been blatantly apparent. And I’d already had good reason not to trust Isu completely before: Elyse had warned me that the former goddess wanted her divinity back, and she sure was (understandably) pissed at me for stealing it—and, bizarrely, I’d spied Isu practicing sucking an exact wooden replica of my own cock in the woods, in what seemed to be a kind of preparation to deceive me at an opportune moment.
Knowing that she’d been involved in some sort of massive betrayal gave me even more of a cause to distance myself from Isu, but I hadn’t let on to her that I mistrusted her or even that I suspected her of any possible treachery or scheming behind my back. But of course, I kept a close and watchful eye on her.
“You want me tell about dream I have?” Drok shouted from below, snapping me out of my reflections.
“Yes,” I yelled back, “but wait there, I’ll come down!”
There was no need to wake the entire castle with a prolonged conversation shouted across this distance, and besides, if I headed down to Drok’s chambers, I could position myself where the wind would carry his reek away from my nose rather than into it.
“Okay!” he bellowed cheerfully.
I tiptoed through my own huge chamber, now not wanting to wake Elyse since I had things to do before I could enjoy a morning romp. I quietly opened the heavy oak door, then closed it behind me. The guards posted outside tipped their steel helmets to me.
“Morning m’lord,” they said. “Sleep well, m’lord?”
“Well enough,” I answered.
I headed down a few flights of stairs and reached the floor on which Drok’s chamber was located. Even if I hadn’t known what room he was in, the smell would have made his location pretty obvious. I walked over to his door, breathed in deeply, and held my breath as I opened the door.
The stink hit me like a thousand fists, and, still holding my breath, I hurried through the room and out to the balcony where the barbarian was waiting for me. I quickly checked the breeze, still holding my breath, and positioned myself upwind of him. Only then did I finally breathe out.
“All right, Drok,” I said. “What did you dream this time?”
Drok’s dreams, which he said were sent to him by the Wise Woman as messages, had been growing more vivid and more frequent in recent weeks. As tempting as it was to simply blow them off, there were things in the dreams that made me think they were not merely incoherent ramblings conjured up by Drok’s mind. They did seem, strangely, to be messages directed to me.
“I dream,” he said gravely, “of giant blood monster.”
“The Demogorgon?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, Demogorgon.”
It wasn’t the first time Drok had dreamed of the Blood God’s powerful minion. This was worrying.
“What happened in this dream?” I asked.
“Demogorgon rise out of Sea of Ice,” Drok said. The Sea of Ice was a permanently frozen ocean farther north even than the wastes in which the northern barbarians dwelled. “Demogorgon come out of Sea of Ice and start to eat the world.”
“Did you see any of my armies there?” I asked. “Were my undead troops near the Sea of Ice to fight the Demogorgon?”
Drok shook his head, his expression dark and grim. “Some undead soldiers, yes. Zombies and skeletons. Many, many. Thousands, tens of thousands. But cannot stop Demogorgon. Too late. Blood God too strong.”
“How did you know it was too late?”
“Drok see many broken clocks in dream lying on ice. Clocks look old, broken long time.”
I nodded, chewing on this information in my mind.
