Inner Fire (Sexy Non-Erotic Free Fantasy) Read online

Inner Fire

  A Sexy Non-Erotic Fantasy

  *FREE* Ebook

  Copyright Kaye Skellington 2013

  Dust coated Areesal from platinum blonde head to dainty toed foot. When she took a seat at one of the chairs in a bar in the elven capital, road grime puffed up to form a cloud around her. It was hardly the way to get positive attention in a city based on high intellect and oh so proud of its sophisticated culture. After all that Aree had been through and had yet to endure, though, she cared nothing for any of this. Hunched over her part of the bar, she glowered and ran over the last week's events.

  There had been a book. She'd found it off a massive stone creature she'd felled while out exploring an exotic and foreign land. The land was green and lush but for dark pockets of terrible magickally ensconced forests and swamps. In one of these pockets, she'd heard tell of a creature made of huge boulders and glowing with a terrible green energy. And it was there she found the book.

  Once the creature had succumbed to her spells and tumbled to the ground, Aree had poured over the stones that had made up the magickal being's body. There were a few runes and inscriptions, but nothing she could comprehend easily to explain why the creature existed.

  Aree's curiosity was insatiable. It'd gotten her into plenty of trouble when she was a student at her people's academy of magick. And it was likely why she had taken to the darker arts instead of studying something more noble and refined. Her parents had desired her to be a mage of great reknown, but focusing on the arcane had been only one facet of what interested Aree about magick. She wanted to know why things were as they were, and not why things glowed blue and smelled of flowers, no. She wanted to know why the shadows could move under a warlock's fingertips, why skeletons crumbled to dust under an adept of the darkness's touch. And it was power that she wanted from such knowledge.

  So it was that she had herself become one of the dreaded warlocks. How a people like her own, long ears and refined angular faces, could harbor such a class within the city walls was beyond the ken of most people. Elves were known for leading lives of richesse and culture. Their magicks worked to make life more convenient and luxurious, from their floating planters to their robotic seeming sentries that marched around the city's cobbled streets and kept it safe. The planters never needed watering, the greenery within always healthy and alive. The sentries had a core of arcane magick within but no other moving parts, yet they had metallic bodies gilded with gold and decorated with large gems and appeared capable of crushing an invader to smithereens in seconds.

  Aree appreciated all of this finery, but it interested her not one bit. She wanted to know about other things, darker things. How did a warlock control a succubus? Where did demons come from and why were they obedient? And how could she make an infernal creature of myth into her very own slave and servant of war? These questions led her to the darker parts of the city's magickal academy, and into elven notoriety.

  Aree didn't care really how she was perceived by her own people. She enjoyed her new skills and talents and became one of the best at what she could do. When she heard of strange creatures in far off lands that needed dealing with, she was almost always one of the first to strike out and pursue the beings. She liked to know why they did the things they did, and if there was any way she might control them for her own means. If she couldn’t control them and make them hers, then she wanted to destroy them, take them apart, and see what made them tick. Were they infested with some old wizard's left over spells or were they the result of some decrepit old witch's curse of a thousand years ago?

  The creature she had fought most recently had been a mystery - at first. Aree had given up finding anything actually on it to explain its condition, so she'd begun to look around the cave it had been seemingly protecting. There were several sets of bones present, as well as pieces of armor and torn cloth. Clearly she hadn't been the first to get into the cave, but she would be the only one to leave alive, that much was clear. She'd gathered up the belongings she'd found, in case something had value, like some other adventurer's satchel or whatever. There might be coins at least to compensate her for her troubles. For as adventures went, it had been very dull and fruitless, excluding the fight to make the creature succumb to her powerful will and perish.

  Aree had moved to a safer part of the land, away from the shadowy trees and dark swampy undergrowth and into the more vibrant and alive areas. There was a secret waterfall that she was pretty sure she alone knew of, and it was to there she went. Making sure she was alone, she summoned her imp, a smallish creature of about a foot and a half in height, if that, and set him to guard her things. Of course, she knew that telling him to guard them was also, in his devilish yellow eyes, an invitation for him to investigate what she put him in charge of. But it was no matter, she didn't intend to be very far away.

  She had pulled her heavy robes free, leaving the stiff war brocade against the shore of the river that the waterfall fed into. She could feel in that moment how hard the battle against the stone creature had been, for she reeked of sweat and dark magick. The water had been turbulent but welcoming, and so long as she clung to the rocks with what was left of her strength, she could let her naked body be pulled and tugged this way and that by the currents. The water washed her itself, she didn't have to do any of the work. It tugged at the long blonde length of her hair when she freed it from its pins, and it washed over her aching shoulders and massaged down her slender legs. Muscles she hadn't realized hurt were now soothed. Being a caster of magick wasn't all spell-flinging and finger wiggling. She'd had to endure the onslaught of the stone creature's very physical attacks, and the brocade armor most spellweavers wore was thick but not that thick. She'd been thrown around quite a bit.

  Luckily, Aree had been trained by the best. She had no problem calling upon the void that demons called home and drawing forth a demon of her own to defend her. The demon was a symbol of the void himself, a dark blue in colour that seemed to swirl, making him look amorphous at best. But somehow, he held the stone creature at bay while Aree cast her spells from a safer distance, uninterrupted. It was how most fights went for her. She tried to engage whatever awful creature she wanted to fight on her own at first, but in the end gave in and called forth some demonic servant or other to fight with her. It was either that or risk perishing. And she hadn't learned half of what she hoped to learn before her near immortal life was over.

  Once the water had cleaned her, Aree had dragged herself sopping and dripping wet out of the river to sprawl on the bank. She had listened with only one ear as her scrawny imp rummaged through the belongings she had found in the cave. When he began to get quiet, though, that's when she started to pay more attention. And when she sat up slowly and turned to look at him, careless of how he would react seeing her naked before him, her emerald green eyes had narrowed suspiciously.

  Imps were evil little beings, capable of casting a handful of potent fire spells and giving their masters a protective shield of fire that burned anything that tried to harm them. But they were loud and obnoxious and terribly rude, with squeaky high pitched voices that bordered on glass-breaking octaves if they found something particularly funny. Aree's imp, however, had gone incredibly quiet. Looking at him, she could see why immediately.

  He was blinking at her, his two yellow eyes practically glowing as he feigned innocence. There was an almost unnatural tuft of hair atop his speckled head, and the stance of his whole little bony body suggested he was hiding something. It also helped that the book he was hiding behind him was half his size and was in no way obscured from sight by his pose. He, however, thought it was well hidden and continued to give Aree a 'what?' sort
of look. Even the set of his thin lipless mouth, looking as if he wasn't trying to hide a big covetous smile, looked off on his face.

  "Give it," the elven warlock said, putting her hand out.

  "Give what, mistress?" the imp quipped with a shaky voice.

  "The book," Aree said, snapping her fingers and putting them out again. "Give it now."

  The huge deer-like ears of the imp drooped very noticeably as he hung his head and hopped forward, holding the book out for her to take from his clawed grasp.

  "Mistress shouldn't keep such powerful things in stupid bags," the imp said with a near snarl of disdain in his voice. That, Aree knew, was unusual, that he would dare to talk even slightly down to her or chastise her for