The water was cold, a constant ache in their bones. Hilda braced her warhammer against the slick cave floor, her breath fogging in the dim light. "We stop here. We wait. They will find us, and we will be rested enough to fight." Her voice was gravel, each word a stone dropped between them. "Moving now is a fool's charge into deeper dark."

Richard shook his head, water dripping from his chin. He could feel it—a thin wire of panic humming through the bond, not his own. Lillian’s. Beneath it, the hollow, draining suck of Lys’s exhaustion and the deep, silent void where Zena’s consciousness should be. "Lys is worn out. Lillanna is panicking. Zena’s asleep in his arms. They aren’t coming to us. We’re going to them." He pushed off from the rock, his muscles screaming in protest. "You can stay. I can’t."

Hilda watched him. His body shook—not from the cold, but from the sheer, stupid effort of will it took to haul himself over the next slick boulder. His fingers scrabbled for purchase, slipped, then gripped again. He’d be in the way up there. More than that, he’d be a liability. A twitch in the bond, a shared spike of pain at the wrong moment, and he’d tumble right back down onto her. She calculated it like a battle problem: his stubbornness versus the rock, and the rock didn’t get tired.

“You’ll fall,” she said, flat and certain.

“Then catch me,” Richard grunted, heaving himself onto the ledge. He lay there for a second, chest heaving, the bond humming with the acid burn in his muscles. It wasn’t just his. She felt the ghost of it in her own limbs—Lys’s magical depletion, a hollowed-out sensation like a dried gourd. And beneath that, a sharper, brighter thread: Lillian’s fear, a frantic bird beating against a cage of stone.

Hilda spat cave water onto the gravel. The panic upstream was a tangible pressure now, a compass needle in her skull pulling her toward a fight she couldn’t see. Waiting here was the smart play. The strong play. But the bond didn’t care about tactics. It was a live wire, and Richard was clutching it, dragging them all toward the spark. She looked at her warhammer, then at his trembling back. The tool, or the fool. With a growl that started in her gut, she jammed the hammer’s haft into a crevice and began to climb after him.

Upstream, the calculus was simpler. Blood, or more blood. Lys moved in a low crouch, Zena a dead weight across his shoulders. His breaths were shallow sips of air, each one costing him. He’d become a lure, a piece of bait dragging a bloody scent through the tunnels. Behind them, Lillian was a whisper of motion, her twin blades still in their sheaths. She let the orcs see the burdened half-elf, let them smell the weakness. Let them come. Her heart was a wild drum in her ears, her panic a fuel she burned with cold precision. She waited until the first grunt was almost upon Lys’s back, until she saw the gleam of a rusted axe in the gloom. Then she moved from the shadow, not with a cry, but with a sigh of steel leaving leather. The first orc died thinking the kill was already his.

Hilda’s hand closed around the back of Richard’s sodden tunic. She yanked him off the ledge as if plucking a weed, the motion so sudden the bond could only transmit a spike of startled vertigo before he was draped over her shoulder, the hard plate of her pauldron digging into his gut. “Stupid hero boy,” she grunted, adjusting his weight with a single heave of her hips. She took the first few steps along the narrow ledge with a mercenary’s calm, then her free hand came down in a sharp, ringing slap on his ass. The sound was obscenely loud in the cavern. “My stupid hero boy.” She said it quieter, a raw confession to the dark. “Zena better wake up soon to fuck you proper. I don’t know how much longer I can wait.”

The bond answered before Zena’s voice did. A jolt, like a drowning woman breaking the surface. Then her shout, ragged and panicked, echoed down the tunnel. “Where? Where are we? Richard!” She thrashed weakly in Lys’s grip, her head whipping around. “Where is he? You lost him!” The rage was there, a hot coal in the pit of Richard’s shared awareness, but her body was a drained vessel. She could only tremble, the fury collapsing into a breathless, helpless gasp. “You lost him.”

From his upside-down perch, Richard felt it all. Hilda’s relentless stride, the bunch and release of her powerful thighs. Zena’s panic, a fluttering, suffocating cage. And upstream, the grim algebra of survival. Lillian’s fear had crystallized into a deadly focus. He could feel her moving—not with panic, but with a terrifying, silent efficiency. She was a pressure in his temples, a coiling in his own muscles. Lys’s exhaustion was a dry riverbed, but he was still moving, a deliberate, shuffling bait. Richard could taste the copper tang of orc blood Lillian had spilled, a phantom flavor on his tongue.

Hilda didn’t slow. The slap she’d delivered still burned on Richard’s skin, a bright, possessive brand. Her hand now rested on the same spot, fingers splayed, holding him steady not with gentleness, but with a claim. Her breath came in controlled huffs. She was carrying him, but she was also carrying Zena’s weakness, Lillian’s razor-wire tension, Lys’s depletion. The bond made them a single burden. “She’s awake,” Hilda muttered, more to herself. “Good. Now maybe we can stop this fucking parade and kill something.”

The tunnel curved. The sound of water was joined by new sounds: a guttural shout, cut short. The wet, meaty thud of a blade finding home. Lillian was working. Richard, jostling against Hilda’s back, felt a phantom impact in his own shoulder—not pain, but the precise, transmitted memory of a scimitar’s swing meeting resistance, then slicing through. It was followed by a warm, sickening pull in his gut. Lillian’s satisfaction. The bond hummed with it. They were close now. The choice to wait was gone. Hilda’s grip on him tightened, and she picked up her pace, the warhammer in her other hand beginning to swing like a pendulum counting down to violence.

Hilda rounded the final bend and saw the trap closing. Lys was on his knees, Zena slumped beside him, a semicircle of four snarling orcs advancing with crude spears leveled. Lillian was a blur of motion at their backs, one orc already crumpling, but two more were turning to face her. They were out of space, out of time. Hilda’s sprint became a charge, and the bouncing of Richard’s body against her shoulder turned into a violent, jarring rhythm. “Put me down! I can fight!” he shouted, the words punched out of him with each impact.

Hilda didn’t break stride. She shifted her grip, one hand firm on his thigh, the other swinging her warhammer in a wide, warning arc. As the nearest orc lunged, she pivoted, using Richard’s body as a counterweight. His legs swung out like a fleshy flail, his booted feet smacking hard into the orc’s jaw with a wet crack. The creature staggered. “You watch my back,” Hilda grunted, heaving him back for another swing. “And your legs watch my front.” Another orc ducked the hammer, only to catch Richard’s knees squarely in its chest. “I am not a tool!” Richard roared, his world a dizzying whirl of stone ceiling and green, snarling faces.

“You’re whatever I need you to be,” Hilda shot back, her voice a low rasp of effort and intent. She used his body to block a spear thrust, the wooden shaft thudding against his ribs, the shared shock of it buzzing through the bond. “Hammer. Shield. Distraction.” She swung him again, his heels clipping an orc’s temple. “I’ll use you one way or another, farm boy.” From the ground, Zena’s head lifted. Her eyes, glassy with exhaustion, found Richard’s upside-down, furious face. Then they tracked to the orc he’d just kicked, now spitting out a broken tusk. A sound escaped her—a weak, wheezing thing that built into a ragged, full-throated laugh. She shook with it, clutching her side, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

The laughter was a weapon they hadn’t expected. The orcs hesitated, confused by the naked, joyful sound in the midst of their violence. It was the opening Lillian needed. She moved like silence given form, her scimitar flickering out to slit a throat from behind. Lys, summoning a final reserve, shoved to his feet and drove his fist up under the chin of the orc menacing Zena. Hilda, with a final, grunting heave, planted Richard on his feet and brought her hammer down in a crushing arc on the last orc’s skull. The fight ended not with a climactic clash, but with a sudden, ringing quiet, broken only by the river’s rush and Zena’s diminishing, breathless giggles.

They collapsed into a heap together, a tangled knot of sweat, blood, and relief against the cold cave wall. Richard sat propped against Hilda, her arm a heavy, possessive bar across his chest. Zena crawled into his lap, her laughter finally subsiding into weak hiccups, her face buried against his neck. Lillian leaned on Lys, both of them trembling with spent adrenaline. The bond hummed between them, not with pain or panic, but with a profound, weary fullness—the shared weight of five hearts still beating, five sets of lungs still drawing the damp, dark air. No one spoke. The message was clear in the press of bodies, in the silent exchange of glances: they were still here. Together.

Zena’s first punch landed against Richard’s sternum with a weak, wet thud. “You stupid… stupid…” The second was weaker, her small fist trembling as it connected. Richard didn’t flinch. He just sat there, propped against Hilda, a slow, impossible smile spreading across his grime-streaked face. With each pathetic blow, his grin only widened, his eyes bright in the cavern’s gloom. Zena wore herself out in three more hits, her strength dissolving into shuddering breaths as she collapsed forward, her forehead pressing into the hollow of his throat. “Don’t you ever be that stupid again,” she whispered, the words hot and damp against his skin. “You had me… you had me worried.” She tilted her head back, her dark eyes searching his. “And what are you smiling about, you dumb man?”

Richard’s arms came around her, pulling her closer into the cradle of his body and Hilda’s. He felt Hilda’s chin rest on the top of his head, a solid weight. He felt Lillian’s exhausted sigh across the bond, and Lys’s quiet, focused attention on Zena’s trembling. “You’re all alive,” Richard said, the words simple and quiet, a truth so profound it felt like the only one that mattered. The bond hummed it back to him, a feedback loop of relief: five hearts, five sets of lungs, a tangled knot of survival. Zena stared at him, her defiance melting into something raw and unguarded. Then she kissed him. It was less a kiss and more a transfer of breath, a desperate seal pressed against his lips, her hands fisting in his wet tunic.

When she broke away, she was crying again, silent this time. Hilda’s arm tightened around Richard’s chest. “Sentiment later,” the dwarf grunted, but there was no heat in it. Her eyes, however, were scanning the dark tunnel behind them, then the river ahead. “We need to move. They’ll have heard the fight.” She made to rise, but her body betrayed her—a deep, shuddering ache echoed through the bond from her thighs and lower back, the price of carrying Richard and fighting in full plate. She grimaced. “Or we don’t. This is as good a choke point as any.” She looked at Richard, her gaze assessing. “The others are spent. Zena’s a ghost. Lys is running on fumes. Lillian’s sharp, but she’s one blade. We wait here. Let them catch up to us. Rest. Then we kill the next wave properly.”

Richard felt the proposal land in the shared space between them. Lys, still kneeling, gave a faint, weary nod. Lillian wiped her blade clean on a scrap of orc leather, her movements precise but slow. The bond carried no argument, only a deep, collective craving for stillness. Zena had gone limp against Richard, her breathing deepening into the rhythms of exhausted sleep. Richard looked at Hilda, at the stubborn set of her jaw, and understood her logic wasn’t just tactics. It was possession. She wanted them together, in one defensible pile, where she could see and touch them all. Where the bond could be a quiet hum and not a screaming siren. He nodded slowly. “We wait.”

Hilda’s posture eased a fraction. She shifted, pulling Richard and the sleeping Zena more fully into the shelter of her body and the cold cave wall. Her large, calloused hand found the back of Richard’s neck, her thumb rubbing slow circles over the tense muscles there. It was a claiming gesture, but also a soothing one. Upstream, the only sounds were the eternal rush of water and the distant, ominous scrape of stone on stone—the orcs, still digging, but farther away now. For this moment, in the damp dark, they were a single, breathing organism. Richard closed his eyes, the smile still lingering on his lips, and let the warmth of them—Hilda’s solid strength, Zena’s trusting weight, the steady presence of Lys and Lillian—seep into his bones. They were alive. It was enough.

The distant scraping of stone stopped. For three heartbeats, there was only the river’s rush. Then the silence shattered into the unmistakable, metallic chorus of combat—the shriek of steel on iron, bestial roars, and a single, rising scream of fury that echoed down the tunnel like a physical thing. Lillian’s head snapped toward the sound, her pointed ears twitching. “What is that?”

Hilda was already moving, hauling Richard upright. “An angry mate,” she grunted, nodding toward the unconscious Zena in Lillian’s arms. Her eyes, hard and calculating, locked on Richard’s. “And if whatever’s up there is half as pissed as she was, we need to be gone. Now.” She didn’t ask. She bent, drove her shoulder into Richard’s stomach, and stood with him draped over her like a sack of grain. “Run!”

The world became a jolting, inverted blur of rushing stone and shadows. Richard’s ribs compressed against Hilda’s armored shoulder with each pounding stride, the air forced from his lungs in ragged gasps. He could feel the burn in her thighs and back through the bond—a hot, protesting ache she utterly ignored—mingled with the fainter, frantic pulse of Lillian’s exertion as she carried Zena ahead of them. Deeper, fainter still, was a new, ferocious signature in their shared space: a white-hot cord of rage and protectiveness that could only be Zena’s mate, a distant star going supernova. The bond thrummed with it, a secondary heartbeat of pure violence.

They ran until the sounds of battle faded behind the river’s roar and Hilda’s legs began to tremble with a fatigue so profound it blurred Richard’s own vision. She staggered into a side cavern, a shallow scoop in the rock wall, and dropped to her knees, letting Richard roll from her shoulder onto the cold, dry stone. She collapsed beside him, her breastplate heaving, sweat dripping from the end of her nose. Lillian laid Zena down gently, then sank against the wall, her chest burning. For a long minute, the only sounds were their desperate, shared breaths and the bond’s silent scream of overload.

Richard pushed himself up onto his elbows. Hilda was on her back, eyes closed, one hand pressed to her forehead. The bond carried no specific injury, just a total, systemic depletion. “We stop here,” Richard said, his own voice raw. “You’re done. Zena’s… being hunted but its buying us some time. We use it.” Hilda opened one eye, a sliver of defiant amber in the gloom. She looked at Zena’s still form, then at Lillian’s exhausted vigilance, and the fight left her in a long, slow exhalation. She gave one curt nod. They would wait. They would rest. The bond, humming with the echoes of flight and distant fury, slowly began to settle into a watchful, battered quiet.

Exhaustion hit them like a physical collapse. There was no ceremony, no discussion. One moment they were a tense, breathing circle in the shallow cave; the next, the bond itself seemed to sigh and go soft. Hilda’s eyes, which had been scanning the dark tunnel entrance, simply closed. Her head tipped back against the stone with a dull thud, her warhammer slipping from her loose grip to clatter on the rock. The relentless, armored vigilance that defined her dissolved into the deep, slow rhythm of unconsciousness. Through the bond, Richard felt it not as sleep, but as a fortress gate finally dropping—a profound, defenseless surrender.

Lillian was the last to yield. She remained upright, her back against the wall, one scimitar across her lap. Her pointed ears twitched at every drip of water, every shift of stone in the distant dark. But the bond betrayed her. It carried the leaden weight in her limbs, the gritty burn behind her eyelids, the way her focus blurred and doubled. Richard watched her fight it, her jaw tight, until a fresh, muffled roar echoed from upstream, still holding the line. It was a sound of fury, but also of protection dispite hunt down the sleeping zena. Lillian’s shoulders slumped. She slid down the wall, curling onto her side, her blonde braids a pale spill against the dark stone. Her hand found Zena’s ankle, a point of contact, and then she was gone, falling into a sleep so deep it felt like drowning.

The pressure on his mouth was sudden, absolute. Richard’s eyes flew open in the total dark, his body tensing to fight before his mind even registered the scent—blood, river-stone, and her. Zena. Her other hand pinned his wrist to the cold stone above his head, her weight a familiar, unyielding anchor. He could feel the rapid-fire of her pulse through her palm, but her breathing was controlled, silent. A predator’s stillness. He stopped struggling, his own breath hot against her skin. She held the pose for three long heartbeats, letting him take in the shallow cave: the dim outlines of Hilda’s massive form, dead asleep, her chest rising and falling in a deep rhythm; Lillian curled protectively around Zena’s own sleeping body, a paradox of presence; Lys a pale, slender shadow against the far wall. Everyone was down, lost to exhaustion. Only then did her hand slide from his mouth, tracing a slow, possessive line down his jaw to his throat.

Her eyes gleamed in the dark, reflecting a faint phosphorescence from the cave wall. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. The bond hummed, not with alarm, but with a single, focused intent that felt like a hook behind his navel. She shifted her weight, her body sliding over his, and he felt himself hardening against her thigh even as confusion clouded his thoughts. This wasn’t an attack. It was a claim. Her lips found his ear, her whisper a wet, hot vibration. “You are ours,” she breathed, the words less a statement than a ritual. “Every part.” Then she was moving down his body, her hair a slick curtain dragging over his chest, his stomach.

Her mouth was a wet, shocking heat around him. There was no preamble, no teasing slide of lips. She took him deep, her throat opening in a practiced, yielding swallow that pulled a broken sound from his chest. The bond, which had been humming with the distant echoes of her mate’s battle-fury, suddenly narrowed to a single, blazing point of contact: the slick pressure of her tongue tracing the thick vein underneath, the tight constriction of her lips at his base, the unbearable, velvet warmth of her taking him all. Richard’s head thumped back against stone, his fingers digging into the cold rock. He could feel the precise shape of her attention through the bond—a focused, consuming hunger that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with possession.

She moved with a slow, devastating rhythm, one hand cupping his balls, her thumb pressing firmly into the sensitive skin behind them. Her other hand braced against his hip, holding him down, controlling the depth of each stroke. Every pull of her mouth was a claim, every soft groan she made a vibration he felt in his bones. Through the bond, he felt the sleeping forms of the others not as separate, but as a hazy, warm background hum to Zena’s concentrated fire. Hilda’s deep, unconscious exhaustion was a heavy blanket. Lillian’s protective curl around Zena’s own body was a soft, golden knot of worry. Lys’s distant, pained magic was a silver thread. And Zena, kneeling between his legs, was devouring him, and through him, weaving herself into the very fabric of their shared sense of safety.

Through the bond, she felt it all. The desperate, throbbing ache at the root of him as her lips stretched around his girth. The electric jolt that shot up his spine when her tongue found the sensitive spot just beneath his head. The involuntary twitch of his hips, the way his stomach muscles clenched tight as a fist, the pre-come leaking onto her tongue—she tasted it, salt and bitter, and through the bond, he tasted it too, a shared, intimate proof of her effect. Her own body responded, a slick, answering heat gathering between her thighs, but her focus remained singular, a black-hole gravity pulling every sensation from him into herself.

She slowed, letting him feel every millimeter of the retreat, the cool cave air a shock on his wet skin, before diving down again, deeper, until his tip nudged the back of her throat. She swallowed, deliberately, and the bond lit up with his choked-off gasp. Her eyes, locked on his in the dark, were pools of absolute ownership. She could feel the pressure building in his balls, a tight, urgent gathering that was both physical and emotional—a surrender she was wrenching from him. With her hand still cupping him, she applied a firm, rhythmic pressure, massaging that tender space behind, and felt the answering pulse in his cock, a frantic beat against her tongue.

He was close. She could feel the tremor in his thighs, the way his breathing shattered into ragged pants. She didn’t let up. She took him to the edge and held him there, her mouth a relentless, wet heat, her throat working around him. The bond became a screaming feedback loop: his impending release fed her fierce satisfaction, which in turn amplified his helpless pleasure, a closed circuit of claiming. He tried to speak, her name a mangled syllable, but she just hummed, the vibration traveling straight up his shaft, and that was it.

His climax hit him like a physical blow. She took it all, swallowing convulsively as he pulsed into her throat, the bond flooding with the raw, blinding white-out of his release. It wasn't just his sensation; for a fractured second, it was theirs. She felt the explosive rush as if it were her own, a phantom heat bursting in her core, her own muscles clenching around nothing. He arched off the stone, a silent scream locked in his throat, his fingers now tangled in her hair not to push her away but to hold on, to anchor himself to the source of the devastation. She milked him through it, gentle now, until he was spent, sensitive, and shuddering.

She surged up his body, her mouth crashing into his before he could breathe. The kiss was a violation, deep and claiming, and yes—he could taste himself, salt-bitter and warm, through the bond and on her tongue. Then her lips parted against his, and with a soft, wet push, she spat the last of his spend into his mouth. His throat convulsed in a swallow he couldn’t stop, the act as intimate as the blowjob, a final loop of consumption. She pulled back just enough for her words to brush his lips. “I’m not done with you yet.” Her hands gripped his hair, guiding, as she swung a leg over his head and lowered herself onto his face.

The world became her: the musky, potent scent of her arousal, the slick heat of her folds against his mouth, the coarse tickle of her pubic hair against his nose. She ground down, not asking, taking. His tongue found her opening, and the bond ignited with a fresh, shared shock—the electric jolt of his touch for her, the drowning taste of her for him. He could feel her pleasure as a second heartbeat, a throbbing echo in his own groin where his cock, still oversensitive, began to harden again. She rocked against his mouth, her thighs clamping against the sides of his head, and a low, guttural moan vibrated through her core into his skull. Every lap of his tongue, every suck on her clit, was reflected back through the bond, amplifying, so he felt her climbing pleasure as a tightening coil in his own stomach.

She fucked his face with a slow, relentless rhythm, one hand braced on the stone above his shoulder, the other tangled painfully in his hair. Her breath came in sharp, hissed gasps that echoed in the cavern. Through the bond, the sleeping forms of the others began to stir not to wakefulness, but into the shared sensation. Hilda’s deep sleep warmed with a diffuse, pleasant heat. Lillian’s protective curl tightened, a soft sigh escaping her lips as she dreamed. Even Lys, in his exhausted trance, shifted, a faint flush coloring his pale cheeks. Zena was weaving this act into the very fabric of their collective unconscious, branding them all with this raw, shared intimacy. Richard’s jaw ached, but the bond fed her satisfaction back into him, blurring the line between service and conquest.

Her climax, when it broke, was a silent, shuddering quake. He felt it first through the bond—a sudden, precipice tension, a held breath in her soul—then in the violent clench of her around his tongue, the flood of her release bitter-salty on his lips. She pressed down, smothering him, her inner muscles pulsing in a rapid, endless rhythm. The feedback through the bond was blinding: for a long moment, he couldn’t tell whose choked gasp was whose, whose body was shaking. She collapsed sideways, off his face, landing beside him on the cold stone, her chest heaving. The connection didn’t break; it simply softened, satiated, humming with a spent, heavy warmth that seeped into all of them.

Zena rolled over onto her hands and knees, the curves of her ass a pale, inviting moon in the dark. She shook it once, a slow, deliberate taunt, and Richard didn’t need to be told twice. He was behind her in a heartbeat, one hand gripping her hip, the other guiding himself into the soaking, desperate heat of her. He slid home in one brutal, perfect stroke, and the shared gasp that tore from them was less sound and more a vibration through the bond.

He had to cover her mouth almost immediately. Her cry was too loud, too raw, a feral thing that would echo. His palm pressed against her lips as he set a punishing rhythm, his hips slamming into the lush give of her ass with a wet, skin-slapping cadence that filled the cavern. She bit down on his hand, hard, her teeth breaking skin, and the sharp, coppery pain lanced through the bond and into his pleasure, twisting them together into something indistinguishable. He could feel her orgasm building like a storm—the clench of her inner muscles around his cock, the tremble in her thighs, the silent scream vibrating against his palm.

When she came, it was a violent, silent convulsion. She bit down harder, her jaw locking, as her cunt milked him in rhythmic, pulsing waves. The bond shattered into pure sensation: the taste of his own blood in his mouth as if he’d bitten his own tongue, the blinding-white burst of her climax behind his eyes, the exquisite, too-much feeling of being gripped and pulled deep into her shuddering body. It ripped his own release from him, a hot, helpless flood that seemed to go on forever, syncing perfectly with the clenching of her around him.

They collapsed together onto the cold stone, a tangled, sweating heap of spent limbs. The bond hummed, overloaded and satiated, a warm, heavy blanket of shared exhaustion. In that haze, Richard could feel the others had all have their own orgasms in the mrr sleep., Lillian’s panic a frantic flutter, Zena’s own sleeping body a distant, sore weight. The orcs were close. The digging was a dull, persistent throb in the periphery of their shared awareness.

They fell asleep like that, still joined, his softening cock slipping from her as exhaustion pulled them under. Richard’s arm was a dead weight across Zena’s waist, her back pressed into the heat of his chest. The bond, glutted and quiet, hummed a low, somnolent frequency that dragged the others deeper into their own rest. For a few hours, there was only the drip of water and the shared, heavy rhythm of five sets of lungs breathing in the dark.

Richard woke to the ache of stone against his hip and the peculiar, metallic taste in his own mouth—blood and salt and her. He shifted, and Zena grunted, rolling away from him to curl into a tight ball. The movement stirred the others. Lys sat up first, running a hand through his disheveled platinum hair, his elegant features pinched as he worked his jaw. He smacked his lips softly, a frown deepening.

“My mouth tastes… strange,” Lys murmured, his voice hoarse with sleep. He glanced at the still-damp stone where they’d slept, then at Zena’s bare back, his expression unreadable.

Hilda was next, pushing herself up with a groan. She hawked and spat into the river, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her brow furrowed beneath her helm-less head. “Aye. Like I’ve been sucking on a copper coin,” she rumbled, her eyes still clouded with sleep. She looked at Richard, then away, a faint flush rising on her neck.

Lillian was the last to stir. She uncurled from her watchful posture, her blonde braids frayed. She brought her fingers to her lips, her elven senses sharper, more precise. She blinked, once, twice, her pale cheeks draining of color. “It’s… cum,” she said, the word flat and clinical in the cavern’s silence. “The taste is seminal fluid.” The statement hung there, stark and undeniable. Hilda froze mid-reach for her waterskin. Lys’s slender fingers stilled against his own lips. Only Zena, feigning sleep or truly lost to it, did not react. The shock was a cold, shared current through the bond, sharper than the river’s chill.