Douglas Niles - Circle at center

Noticing new, soft sensations in his skin, he saw that the calluses that had hardened his fingertips and palms since his earliest days as a warrior were gone.

They gasped in unison. Engulfed by heat, he pressed as she strained against him. Her legs clamped his waist and for a moment he tried to tease her, to pull away. But inevitably he sank downward again and she shivered, moaned, clenched him with renewed desperation. Then for a long time they rose and fell in mutual rhythm, slowly at first, then faster, ultimately crying aloud in shared release.

It was with a sense of fulfillment that Natac drew long, ragged breaths, allowed Miradel to wriggle to the side. A languid contentment washed through him, though, surprisingly, he felt no inclination to sleep. Instead, he relished the tenderness and a momentary satiation, watching as she lifted her head to shake out the cascade of hair.

Her smile was coy, and the fire, barely banked, still smoldered in her eyes. “Once more, my warrior… you must take me again. It is the law of the goddess and the spell: three times before the Lighten Hour.”

Natac had no desire to argue, and when a round breast poked out from the curtain of black hair he was once more awed by her allure. By Teztcatlipoca, he wanted her again-now!

She looked at him, and he saw an almost desperate hunger in those dark eyes. He reached, moaning in protest when she slipped farther away from him, but it was only to roll onto her belly. He was still erect as he watched her rise to her knees, that glossy black hair a gleaming shroud over her back, fanning outward across the pallet.

He pounced on her like a jaguar taking a deer. Again she took him, crying out her own delight as ecstasy overwhelmed him. They mated like wild animals, she squirming and bucking, he clenching, thrusting, entering her so deeply that he felt he must be reaching all the way to her heart. The intensity of their lovemaking expanded to gather in his entire consciousness, building toward utter, complete release. Miradel matched his passion, lifting herself wildly, crying out with inarticulate expressions of need, of joy.

Finally he seized her hips, squeezed her against him, and once again his world focused into a shuddering convulsion. For long moments they remained clenched, muscles locked as they strained together, covered with sweat, shivering with tremors of remembered passion.

And only then did he sleep, drained and sated by his welcome into the afterlife.

It was Karkald’s job to see that the watchlights kept burning. Ten times each cycle he inspected the wicks of coolfyre, measured the flamestone, ensuring that the six beacons of his station blazed through the sunless Underworld in proud, bright testament of the Seer Dwarves realm.

And now he was ready, even eager to start on that routine… but first he would savor one more look. He struck a spark to the wick of a lamp and held the soft flame above the bed. The sight of Darann’s soft curls, so light in color they seemed almost golden as they framed her sleep-gentled face, moved him almost to tears. He leaned over, touched her lips with a blunt finger, and then slowly kissed the soft down on the cheek so close beside her ear, glad that she would sleep.

As to himself, he was vibrant, eager to move, ready to work out the boisterous delight singing within him. Still holding the lamp, he clumped through the living chamber of their den, down the long, curving entry tunnel leading to the portico. Near the entrance, he stopped to strap on the tools stored neatly on a wall rack, murmuring softly as he dropped each of the eight items into its strap, belt loop, or sheath.

“Hammer, chisel, hatchet, file. Knife, pick, rope, spear.”

Content and whole, he blew out the wick on the lamp and strode onto the portico, coming into the cool wash of illumination from the nearest of the watch-station beacons. That great lantern was posted a hundred feet over his head, while to the right and left he could see the swaths of light from the nearest of the additional lamps. He trusted that the three beacons on the other side of the island were burning as well, but he wouldn’t take that for granted until he walked over there and saw for himself.

Looking across the inky waters of the Undersea, Karkald clearly saw the corona of light that marked Axial, the great center of dwarven culture. Some fifty miles away across the deep, eternally still waters, there were the smithies and forges, the alchemists and scholars, who had gathered all the knowledge of the last tens of thousands of intervals. There, too, were the inns and taverns, the schools and arenas of the greatest city in all the First Circle. In Axial, gold was jangling through countless transactions, while Seer Dwarf drums pulsed a steady cadence of vitality.

And Karkald couldn’t help but chuckle as he realized that he didn’t miss the place at all.

Indeed, there was no place in the Underworld that he would rather be than here-and it had been so since Darann had come to stay with him. The watch station was a pillar of rock that rose from the black, unplumbed depths of the sea. Above, far out of Karkald’s sight, the stony column merged with the cavernous ceiling of the Underworld to form the lightless, solid sky of the First Circle. Far below the portico, extending like a rickety spur from the base of the pillar, a lone wharf jutted into the sea, nearly invisible in the thick shadows beneath the glare of the great lanterns. Two hundred steeply pitched stone stairs connected that dock to the portico and the den.

With an easy cadence of footsteps, Karkald marched steadily up the steep trail to the first beacon. At the lamp he climbed up the ladder from the trail, peering into the top of the great fyre-lens. He checked the level of powdered flamestone in the steel hopper, making sure that the automatic feeder would keep the beacon burning. As always, the coolfyre within the great globe of glass was fascinating, though too bright to look at directly. Yet he placed his hands against that lens, inevitably wondering that the surface was barely warm to his touch.

From the platform above the beacon he also looked out to sea, seeking any sign of movement on the still waters that lay within the broad cone of illumination. Not surprisingly, he saw nothing but darkness. Yet he never forgot that, far beyond the reach of his light, the Underworld teemed with savage Delvers, blind and utterly wicked killers who sought to capture, torture, and slay their seeing cousins.

The Blind Ones were the reason for this watch station, the threat that made life for the Seer Dwarves an ever-perilous undertaking in the First Circle. Cruel and ingenious, always eager to take prisoners for their vicious rites, the Delvers had waged merciless warfare against Seer Dwarves for thousands of cycles. It was only a dozen generations ago, after the Seers were trapped in a small corner of the First Circle and threatened with utter annihilation, that a Seer alchemist had made the discovery that changed the Underworld. He had mixed flamestone, water, and gold to make a fuel that burned for a long time, cast a pure white light, and didn’t generate the searing heat that was the liability of most brilliant fires. With the development of coolfyre, Karkald’s ancestors had been able to hold the Delvers at bay and, eventually, to prosper.

Even so, the threat remained, requiring constant vigilance on the part of the Seers. Karkald remembered a dwarven corpse that had floated up the dock three or four intervals ago. Half the hapless Seer’s skin had been flayed away, and both eyes had been gouged out by Delver torture. Yet when Karkald pulled the body onto the shore, water ran out of the lungs. Even after all that punishment, the victim had lived long enough to suffer death by drowning!