An Orc at College series Box Set, page 27
part #1 of Orc at College Series
Chapter Nineteen
Birth was painful and the material world didn’t make sense. It knew that it was alive. It knew that it could manipulate the placement of things in the universe with regards to space. That’s all time was really. The movement of objects over space. Only some objects were different from others.
Like the weeping elf woman before it. She hurt. Hurt so badly. That pain flooded its senses, making it hurt in way unrelated to its new semi-corporeal body. She wanted to save her mother. The living spell didn’t give a damn about that. It cared about the orc that had hurt the elf girl’s brother. Had transformed him into some kind of pervert and was clearly abusing him. Everyone knew what orcs would do to an elf one could corner. Her brother had always been delicate.
That hurt and hatred overrode everything. It was enough to for the living spell to pull free of the magical constraints that had been constructed to bind and direct it. Once those were shattered, it lost control. The elf girl—Soliana, she had a name—Soliana went backwards, moving through her timeline until she was almost where she had started from.
She’d wanted her mother set back. This was close enough. It needed to kill the orc. It sensed the anger of others directed upon him—Trorm. His name was Trorm Coldstrorm. A lot of people were mad at him.
The living spell followed that anger and—Trorm watched from the living spell’s perspective as it assaulted him and his teammates. Listened to its childish, alien thoughts and rage as it was wounded and repelled. It fled and hid and recovered and waited until it sensed anger directed against him again and watched as it attacked the Madden’s house.
Watched as it learned fear.
The pain he’d inflicted upon it earlier hadn’t been anywhere near enough to put its new life at risk. When it transformed Trisha into Trixiel and began to be devoured, that had been. It was afraid.
It fled. Hid. Its rage festered inside of it and like called to like. The living spell was drawn to the fury and came upon a gathering. People in dark robes. One of the figures, face obscured by a white oval mask with an impassive expression turned to meet the living spell. It raised a hand. Power struck it and the living spell screamed.
Things became foggy. Trorm felt as if his skull was splitting in two.
Trixiel was there, laughing as she taunted the figure in robes. Her purple lightning pulled the living spell to her and she devoured it.
The living spell cried out in terror. It did not want to die. It called out for the help of any who would listen.
Someone answered.
Xosione came to it through Trixiel, her servant who intended to betray her again. To leave her again. She told it how to hide inside of Trixiel and when to strike. Xosione did not simply release useful tools from her service. She subverted Trixiel’s ability to eat spells and the living spell waited within her until Trixiel’s plans became manifest.
She would use the dedication to Oana to gather power, hijacking it and the secrets of all those at the rally for her mistress and at once offer them as sacrifice and sever her connection. She would keep her power and be free of Xosione’s will.
The red-haired daughter, the servant of Thodos, had almost ruined everything. She was not flesh of Trixiel the traitor, but blood of a father who served Xosione faithfully still. For that connection the daughter was spared when she interfered. The living spell fed. Grew. And then the orc, the hated Trorm, was there and…
Trorm felt every blast and attack the spell titan had suffered as if he were it. By the time the scene had played out he had never been in so much pain.
He found himself pitying the hateful creature. It was a child who had only the most rudimentary grasp of how the world of flesh and blood, of time and space, functioned. It had no real concept of emotion except for what instinctually came about for its survival and what it had learned from Soliana.
It had known nothing but hate, fear, and pain. He put it out of its misery.
He couldn’t have said how he did. Trorm only knew that one moment he and the living spell were connected, almost one and the same, and then he was alone in pain and darkness.
And then he wasn’t.
A hand caressed him and where the hand passed over him the agony was replaced with pleasure. Exquisite pleasure. Trorm seized up with ecstasy his mind couldn’t fully process, it was like orgasm but different. It washed over him. Through him. Intimate and freeing and he was looking up into the eyes of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
He couldn’t have described her. Her features kept subtly shifting so that even her species was unidentifiable. She could have been orc, elf, dwarf, therianthrope, gnome, or human. She could have belonged to any ethnicity within those races.
“Hello, Trorm,” she said. Her voice made him painfully erect. “I don’t usually manifest to mortals who are not my followers.” She smiled and caressed his face. “But I’m making an exception for you. Mmm. I could just eat you up.” She ran her hands over his muscles. Was he naked? He felt naked. Trorm realized he had no real sense of himself beyond whatever this woman made him aware of.
His foggy mind slowly processed everything she had said and put it together with what he now knew. “Oana,” he gasped.
The most beautiful woman in existence smiled at him. “Goddess of ecstasy. Not the only domain in my portfolio of course, but it’s what everyone remembers me for so it might as well be.”
He was with a goddess. A literal divine intervention. “Am I dead?”
She laughed. He nearly came. She was bliss itself.
“No. But I’d like to offer to make you one of my priests,” she said. “Most of my clerics…I need someone capable of both violence and intelligence.”
“You’re not an orc goddess,” he said.
“No, I’m not a part of the Glorious Horde’s pantheon,” she said. “But is that really your objection? You’d deny me for not being a goddess exclusive to your race and nation?”
Trorm grunted. “Not for that.”
She sighed. “You lack faith in the divine.”
Trorm nodded. “I’d make a terrible cleric.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Oana said. “I think you’d do fairly well once you learned to trust in me.” She smiled. “There will be a place for you in my clergy when you realize how good you’ll have it. My temples are open to you, my followers your allies.” She leaned down and kissed the side of his neck. Pleasure unlike anything Trorm had ever felt exploded his mind into tiny fragmented pieces.
Slowly it, and he, reformed. “Wow.”
Oana giggled. “You have my blessing, Trorm Coldstorm. And power. You saved my followers and this dedication in my name. I filtered the chaos magic so that you didn’t simply explode and now…” she grinned. “Now you’ll see. I kept most of it for myself. It was meant for me after all, and it wasn’t like you could have handled much more than I’ve given you. Not without a stronger connection to me.” She grinned. “I’ll be giving your prayers to me special priority, sweet Trorm.” She winked and was suddenly holding Trorm’s sunglasses. She slid them onto his face, sending a shiver through his body.
Trorm fell.
He hit the pavement hard. His football pads only did so much to cushion the impact.
With a groan he rolled over, opened his eyes, and winced. The sky overhead was bright with sunlight. It was also blue.
Hands helped him to sit up and he realized that they belonged to Nymal. Abigail and Lilian were helping Trixiel—no, Trisha, upright. Only she wasn’t Trisha as Trorm knew her. She wasn’t Trixiel either. She wasn’t a teenager anymore, but she hadn’t been restored to her original age. Instead she looked to be somewhere in her mid-to-late twenties. The scar on her belly was faded and the symbol of Xosione was overlaying it.
All around them, the parking lot had been restored, the effects of the chaos magic undone. The pavement was pavement again. The light posts and cars were back. Trorm felt himself mildly disappointed until a rumbling sound drew his attention and he found the draco-truck looming over them, all three heads cocked inquisitively, as if waiting to see if he’d be okay. When he grunted at it, the engine let out a rumble and the mouths opened. The monstrous construct resembled nothing in that moment so much as a warg ecstatic to see its master returned.
“Definitely keeping you,” he told it, which earned an eye-roll from Nymal.
“Looks like we needn’t have worried about drawing from the stadium she said,” gesturing around them all. “Destroying that thing undid almost all of the temporal effects I can see.” She gave the draco-truck a pointed look.
Trorm jerked his chin at Trisha. Or Trixiel. Honestly, he had no idea who she was at the moment. “Not her. Is she alright?”
“I’ve healed her,” Lilian said, looking up from her mother for the first time. “Nothing seems to be wrong, physically—what the hells happened to you?” Her hand shot up to point to Trorm’s neck.
Trorm’s hand flew up to slap over the place where Oana had kissed him. “Nothing.”
Abigail and Nymal turned their attention to him.
“Show me,” Lilian demanded.
Trorm was too tired to argue. Besides which, it wasn’t like he could go around concealing his neck forever. He let his hand fall away.
“Oh, that just—come on!” Lilian said, slumping down. “Really?”
“I don’t see anything,” Nymal said, leaning in close to examine Trorm’s neck.
That was a relief. Trorm had half been afraid he’d ended up with a kiss shaped tattoo on his neck.
“What is it?” Abigail asked.
“He’s been blessed by Oana,” Lilian said sourly. “The freaking goddess of hedonism. She marked him and he’s living in our house.” She turned her gaze toward the heavens. “Thodos, did I do something to offend you?”
“Who’s offended who now?” said Trisha-who-might-be-Trixiel, her eyes fluttering open.
Lilian held up a hand to forestall Abigail, who looked like she’d been intending to pull their mother into an embrace. “What’s your name?”
“Trisha Madden,” Trisha said, brow furrowed. “Wha—”
Lilian pointed at Abigail. “What’s her name?”
Trisha blinked. “Abigail. Lilian, what’s going on?”
Trisha Madden
Gender: Female
Emotion: CONFUSED. CONCERNED.
Interest Level: 4
“It’s her,” Trorm said. He’d learned to trust his sunglasses.
Lilian pulled her mother into an embrace and began weeping. “Thank Thodos. You’re all right. You’re all right.”
Police cruisers arrived then and officers, both local and campus poured out. Black SUVs and a pair of helicopters followed. Men in suits got out of the unmarked cars with unimpressive looking guns, wands, and swords that Trorm knew were anything but. The group was promptly arrested.
Trorm fell asleep in the interrogation room and awoke an unknown amount of time later when a police officer was uncuffing him from the table at the direction of a woman in a skirt suit that was far too sexy to be professional.
The woman was in her early thirties and stunning with an hourglass figure and her blonde hair done up in an elegant, slightly messy style. She glared at the officer over glasses that made her both stern and sexy at the same time. Her skirt was high enough that Trorm could see the tops of her thigh high stockings and she didn’t seem to be wearing a blouse underneath her suit jacket. She wore a necklace from which dangled the holy symbol for Oana.
“You, my dear Mr. Coldstorm, are going to the hospital,” she said, moving around to his side and helping him to his feet.
Trorm’s legs didn’t seem to want to support him. He tried to say something and all that came out was a string of gibberish.
“Definitely a hospital,” she said with a decisive nod and a glare at the officer who’d uncuffed him. He’d been checking out her ass and his face went red at her glare and he seemed to shrink in on himself. She returned her attention to Trorm. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Mr. Coldstorm. My name is Cherry Tempest. I’m part of the church of Oana’s legal team and I’ve been directed by the goddess herself to be your legal champion.”
Trorm blinked at her stupidly. She was a lawyer? She looked like she’d been heading off to make a porno. “That’s…good.”
It was good, wasn’t it? Did he need a champion? He staggered and she caught him. Maybe just this once.
Chapter Twenty
The next week went by in a blur.
Trom was in and out of sleep for the first two days or so while he was hooked up to dozens of monitors, put on an IV drip, and plied with more healing potions than he could keep track of. He was fairly sure that he could have left by the third day, but both the hospital and his new legal counsel advised against it.
Cherry Tempest was not at all what Trorm thought was a typical lawyer in Aflana, but she was effective and for all that she dressed like she was going to an exceptionally provocative photoshoot, she was good at her job. It was a lot like having a sexy attack warg. She was all soft words and caresses around Trorm, only to whirl upon some unfortunate victim and savage them to tears. Trorm watched this happen several times.
Once with a nurse who muttered something about orcs he didn’t quite make out, twice with a pair of detectives who wanted to question him, three times with other legal representatives, and most brutally of all with a reporter who tried to sneak into his room. That woman left weeping after Ms. Tempest—please call me Cherry, Mr. Coldstorm—finished with her. There was something decidedly attractive about watching Cherry work that had nothing to do with her appearance or the fact that she was a cleric of Oana, though those things certainly added to the effect.
Apparently, there’d been a lot of pressure to find a villain to pin the entire debacle on and a few people had decided that he’d make a good scapegoat before she’d gotten hold of them. Now all the fault fell upon Soliana. Everyone in power was very happy about this as Soliana had not reverted to her proper age with the death of the living spell.
As a toddler who would remain so for years to come yet, she could hardly defend herself against their accusations. Legally, according to Cherry, it was a bit of a mess since the court was trying to decide whether she qualified as a minor and whether or not it was ethical to punish her at this point. Trorm honestly didn’t give a damn what they decided about Soliana so long as they left him the frozen hells alone.
After the three days of recovery, which Trorm hated, he was allowed visitors apart from his counselor, each of whom was cleared by Cherry and her legal team.
First came the Maddens. Cherry hadn’t wanted to let Trisha visit him but Trorm had overruled her. Abigail had hugged him, and Trisha hadn’t been able to stop apologizing. She had no memory of what she’d done while she’d been Trixiel. Lilian had been more subdued, thanking him stiffly for helping.
It was during this visit that Trorm learned that the university had been shut down. After two major incidents the board had decided that the school needed upgraded security and that until they could provide extra protection for their students, classes were canceled. There was to be no football for the Stallions that season. Not with the school shut down and the stadium’s defenses so easily manipulated.
When Trorm had worried aloud what that meant for him staying in Aflana, Trisha had grabbed his hand. “You’re living with us for as long as you want. Okay? Football scholarship or no.”
“You did nothing to violate your agreement with the school,” Cherry informed him. “You’re still a student and will stay a part of the football team. You’re not going anywhere unless you choose to.”
Nymal visited next. They didn’t say much. She crawled into the hospital bed and simply cuddled into him. They read together for a while.
When she did speak it was to tell him, “Soliana’s mother died.”
Trorm held her while she cried.
The team visited next and the hospital room was decorated with memorabilia and balloons and he was plied with trays of party food. According to them, everyone on TV was calling him a hero. They certainly seemed to think so.
Coach had not cut them all from the team like he’d threatened to do. Practice was cancelled while the school was down, but they were all to resume as soon as the school was up and running. They were getting a new stadium with upgraded protections. A lot of new wards were going up around the school. There were rumors that the new security wards would summon elementals to attack anyone who acted with hostile intent on campus. Trorm didn’t think he believed that.
The Maddens, Nymal, and various teammates rotated through his hospital room, keeping him company when they could. Trorm was grateful for them. But as they days wore on he grew more and more worried.
Winnie hadn’t come to visit him and when he asked after her, nobody could tell him anything. He wasn’t a family member and the hospital staff refused to tell him anything. It was Cherry who brought him the information he was after.
“She’s awake,” she said. “Still recovering. That spell was nasty and they’re keeping her under observation.”
“I need to see her,” Trorm said.
“You’re a good friend, aren’t you,” she said, trailing her fingers over his chest. They were alone in the hospital room and night was coming on.
“I try,” Trorm said.
“Think you’re recovered enough to try something else?” Cherry asked, smirking and glancing pointedly at his groin.
“You are stunning,” Trorm said. “Winnie is my girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Cherry said, withdrawing her hand. “I apologize.”
Trorm shrugged. “No need. She’s…I think you and she will get along.”
Unbidden came the image of himself, Winnie, and Cherry naked in bed together in a tangle of limbs and flesh.
