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Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls.
From these emerald waters doth life begin anew.
Merrill blinked sleep from her eyes. It was the wrong day of the week for the elves to be reciting the Chant of Light in the courtyard.
Come to me, child, and I shall embrace you.
In my arms lies Eternity.
A song for the dead?
Oh. It was that day. The anniversary of the battle with the qunari. Dozens of the elves in the Alienage had left to join the Qun that day. Most died. The rest were gone, taken on ships to Seheron or Par Vollen, with the qunari.
Merrill rolled over and pressed her face into her pillow. She’d been dreading this day all week. It was silly - there was nothing magical about one year, especially when Isabela was so bad at keeping track of time. She used to say that she lost days and sometimes entire weekends.
But there was this horrible, awful feeling that all she had to do was love hard enough, and she would open the door and Isabela would be there. She rose, telling herself firmly that such a thing was a ridiculous fancy, that Isabela would certainly not be in the Alienage before the sun was up even if she had somehow returned to Kirkwall, and that there just wasn’t any way for her to even know what Merrill was doing, let alone thinking or feeling. But her traitor heart insisted on hoping as she opened the door.
No one was there.
She waited for the Chant to finish and for the elves to begin to leave for their work, then carried her own candle to the vhenadahl. “Dareth shiral, lethallan”: a prayer for a safe journey, wherever she was.
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There was a kossith in the bar.
Nobody gave him trouble after the first few nights. He appeared to live in one of the upstairs rooms and stood in the Hanged Man’s common room when he patiently waited for work.
After two weeks of this, and never once having seen him sit, Merrill asked, “Would you care to join us?”
“I do not partake of the drinks here, and the seats are for customers.”
Varric squinted at the kossith for a moment, then wagged a thick finger at him. “You’re the one who helped us out with those tal’vashoth on the Wounded Coast, aren’t you? Come on, sit down. I’ll buy you a drink and you can not drink it.”
“Then what would the point be?”
“I’d like to hear your story. Maybe I can pass it on to some Merchants Guild fellows looking for some skilled muscle.”
“Very well.” The kossith sat. “I have named myself Maraas. It means ‘nothing’ in my tongue, for that is what I am become.”
Maybe ‘friends’ was the wrong word. They were fellow travelers on a road of self-exile. She could say that she was lonely, and he wouldn’t ask her why she didn’t go back. He could wonder if he was correct to reject the Qun, and she’d let him work through his reasoning again.
He didn’t like magic and especially not blood mages (and she never told him she was one); she didn’t like that he sold his services to bad people as well as good ones. But they both knew what it was to choose to leave, to look back and wonder ‘what if,’ but to know that, for them both, there was no other way forward.
It was such a relief, to know that someone else could feel this way.
Maraas shrugged. “You could as well say to me that you... climb a mountain with someone because you care for them. I cannot see the connection. In Par Vollen, breeding is a duty, like any other, performed when you are called upon to do it.”
“But don’t you like it? It’s very pleasurable for us.”
“It was... not an unpleasant duty,” Maraas admitted. “But if one seeks only to sate that appetite, is it not better to undertake the task oneself? I would not have another person spoon food into my mouth, nor hold a cup to my lips.”
It had been a very long and lonely year. Isabela had always arranged their liaisons with others, and Merrill had always wanted the other woman nearby, if not directly involved. All talk of shedding old, stale tradition aside, she had still found that pleasures taken with her lethallan were what she wanted, more than anything else.
But it had been a year, and Isabela had not come back, and Merrill had not left Kirkwall to seek her out. There was, to be honest, no reason to think that Isabela was coming back.
Maybe it was time to move on.
“It’s not like having someone feed you, I don’t think,” Merrill said aloud. “Could I... could I show you, up in your room?”
Maraas frowned, a fearsome expression on a kossith. “Are we speaking of different things? You surely do not wish to perform the breeding act with me. We are too unmatched in size.”
“That is entirely a matter of opinion,” Merrill replied, rising. She would be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she was very interested in forming that opinion. She supposed she had Isabela to thank for that, too, between the friend fiction that sparked her interest and then supplying the men and toys to explore it. But of course, Isabela wouldn’t have gone near any of the qunari. “Do you wish to learn?”
Maraas shrugged his bare shoulders and got to his feet. “Only a fool turns away knowledge.”
Once she got him hard, first.
That was a little strange, actually. She couldn’t think of a single time where they’d been naked in a room and the man (or men) weren’t already hard. Then again, the qunari seemed to have some very different ideas about sex, and she wasn’t even his race. Human men seemed to generally like elves, but did kossith? More importantly, did Maraas?
Well, he wasn’t running away, so that was a plus. “Go ahead and lie down on your bed,” she told him, deciding that would be the best way to proceed.
He gave a bemused grunt but did as she instructed. “I thought that I understood ‘sleeping together’ to be a euphemism.”
“Oh, it is. There’s no real sleeping involved.” Following, she clambered up to straddle his waist. Creators, that was a lot of chest. She ran her palms over the gold-grey skin, rougher than any other lover she’d had thus far, marveling at the definition of his muscle. Even his stomach was a plank.
“What has this to do with the breeding act?” he asked curiously.
“Let’s call it something else, please, like...” It wasn’t really love-making, was it? “Like ‘intercourse.’” That sounded proper in her head, but ridiculously formal on the tongue. “Or just ‘sex.’” That was better. “After all, I don’t wish to breed with you. This part is called ‘foreplay’ and its purpose is to make both partners ready for sex.”
“If you will move, I can easily ready myself,” Maraas offered, making a grasping gesture toward his member.
“It’s not about what’s easy or efficient, it’s about what feels good, about making each other feel good. It is much faster to self-pleasure, but it’s... not the same. Just relax and don’t worry about being efficient,” Merrill advised. “And tell me what feels good.”
“This is a part of this... cult of self-indulgence rampant in these lands.” Maraas sounded suspicious as Merrill reversed herself to trail fingernails up along the insides of thighs that might as well have been tree trunks, watching his cock twitch in response. He may have abandoned the Qun, but he was still wary of a culture he couldn’t help but see as decadent.
“It’s a symptom, not a cause. People are selfish, or they’re not. Selfish people -- Look, it’s the difference between a glass of wine and a bottle, all right?” This wasn’t supposed to be so hard and she was really done talking about selfish, self-indulgent people who only thought about themselves and not the messes they left behind them. “Do you want me to leave?”
Maraas pondered the question in silence for the space of a breath. “No. I understand the difference between a glass and a bottle.”
“Good.” Merrill leaned forward to lick a long stripe down the top of his cock.
Maraas rumbled with quiet surprise. She kept to her work, sealing her lips here and there along his shaft, feeling him quickly harden under sweeps of her tongue. When the head of his cock finally emerged, dark as bronze and, she thought, almost as hard, she opened as wide as she could and tried to take him into her mouth.
It couldn’t happen. She whined, tipping her open mouth side to side, trying to find an angle that would miraculously make it work and let her take him down her throat until she choked on him. She wanted her lips stretched tight, her jaw distended to take all of that huge, thick member into herself - but it simply wouldn’t fit.
She’d just have to find someplace it would.
She wrapped both hands around Maraas’s length to slowly stroke him while she looked back over her shoulder. “I need for you to hold still, or you might hurt me.” He nodded, and she moved forward until he was under her.
The thought crossed her mind that she should turn around, to watch his face, but that didn’t feel quite right. What felt right was working on getting that massive cock into her.
@
Even the tip was broad. She held him up with one hand as she sank down. Not far - probably not even half an inch before it felt impossibly stuck. But it wasn’t impossible, it would just take time. She waited, then pressed a little further, then a little further. Then she sat up and came down in one motion, a tiny, shallow thrust, stretching her and helping slick him up. Then a little further, and a little further...
Merrill bit her lip and moaned as she felt the great flared head finally make its way inside. The mattress under her shifted as Maraas half sat up. “Are you hurt?”
Chest heaving, she shook her head. “No. No, that’s a, a happy sound. It... there’s a burn, as the muscles stretch, but it’s good. And...” She rocked back and forth, working him in deeper by degrees, reveling in the sensation of being opened and filled. “I’m not empty. I’ve been empty and ah this is better... oh. Um. You, how are, are you?”
“Impatient.”
Merrill managed a genuine laugh. “Well, that’s uhn good in a way.”
“It is maddening. You are as tight around me as a fist, but... soft, and warm, and I wish to move but you have forbidden it.”
“Almost ready. Just... just...” She had him far enough in that she could really slide up and down him now, each thrust opening another fraction of an inch of her channel. She heard him growl behind her, something in his own tongue, and then - that was it. Almost a handspan of him did not fit, but there was nowhere else to put him. Kneeling on the bed, she rotated her hips in a small circle, just to feel how thick he was, how far she was stretched and how tight and close their joining was.
She turned around carefully, back arching slightly forward as she felt the rotation deep inside. Maraas was watching, eyes dark. She lay down on his broad chest, looked up and nodded. “You can roll us over. Is that how you do it?”
One massive arm held her to his chest as the other flipped them over, still joined. “No. For breeding, it is best to take the female from behind, they say.”
“That has its points, too,” Merrill said. It was very nice, being pinned under the kossith’s considerable bulk like this, but it still wasn’t the position she wanted. “Now you get up onto your knees.”
“Pashaara. Why is this so complex?”
“Don’t fall out! Hold onto my hips, there... and let me...” She got a leg onto either shoulder as Maraas looked down at where he disappeared into her with some fascination. “That will help you go as deep as you can go.”
“I may move freely now?”
“Please do.”
“You will tell me if I cause you pain.” And with that, Maraas began to pound into her with a vengeance.
Merrill howled, fingers clawing at the mattress. When he unselfconsciously grabbed her ankles and spread her legs apart wider, she tossed her head until she was dizzy. This, this was what she’d wanted, skewered and split apart and filled up again, with that relentless bronze shaft hitting all her softest innermost places over and over and over until...
”Keep going!” she screamed at him, just before she shattered. Shrieking, thrashing, only his iron grip on her ankles kept her from accidentally flinging herself off the bed.
She was still twitching weakly with aftershocks, whole body shaking from Maraas’s vigorous attentions, when the kossith tipped his head back and roared as he reached his climax.
And she came again, to her immense surprise. Not as strongly as the first time, but Creators, something about that sight and sound just... uhn.
The kossith put out one hand against the wall to steady himself, breathing deeply. “That was... yes, I think I have learned something.” He shifted back, pulling himself out from her; she squeezed as hard as she could, as if that could keep him in her.
But you couldn’t keep people who wanted to go.
“Well, that’s... that’s good. Point of the exercise and all. I should get dressed.”
“You seem unhappy. Did I offend?”
“Oh. Oh Maraas, no.” Merrill stopped to lay a hand on his arm. “You were brilliant. I’m just... empty in more ways than one.”