Gen stared at Vyxia.
“A what now?”
“Seamaid,” Vyxia said.
“The thing that pounced on you. The thing you apparently just met and walked away from.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard enough that his teeth rattled.
“Now give me every detail you remember, human. Every single one. Do not leave anything out.”
Gen waited for the shaking to stop before he answered.
“Okay, okay. It was tall. Like, 7 feet tall? Skin was tealish, kind of a muddy blue going into dark aquamarine. Hair like really old seaweed, dark green, hanging down over its face. And teeth. Sharp teeth, more than Groova or the pale one have. The kind of teeth you see in a nightmare and then spend the rest of the day trying not to think about.”
Vyxia released his shoulders and took a long, slow breath.
“Alright. That checks out. It’s a freshwater sea maid, which means it likely did not want to drown you.”
“Oh good,” Gen said.
“That’s a relief.”
“It would have just bitten off your jugular and drained your blood instead.”
“What!” Gen’s hand flew to his neck.
“How is that better?”
“Faster,” Vyxia said simply.
“Less screaming.” She crossed her arms and studied him, thinking.
“But it stopped. It had you on the ground and it did not finish the job, and sea maids do not leave live prey. So something about you gave it pause. Think. Was it a female?”
Gen went back through the memory against his will.
The creature had been inches from his face, close enough that he had catalogued details he would rather have not catalogued.
Small but perky breasts.
Definitely female build.
“Yeah. Probably. It had, uh.” He gestured vaguely at his own chest.
Vyxia sighed, long and heavy.
“And did it do anything strange? Anything at all?”
“Strange like attacking me, because it did that. It pounced on me, bit my stick clean in half.” Gen held up the sad little splintered remains of the stick, which he had apparently been holding this whole time. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
“This stick was brand new, by the way. I had just picked it. It was going to be a good stick.”
“The stick is not important, human.”
“Yes it fucking was and you take that back!”
“Did it do anything else?”
Gen hesitated.
“It drooled on me. Sniffed me all over, like it was appraising something. And it tried to lick my cheek right before Groova showed up and scared it off.”
Vyxia’s heart dropped straight through her chest and out the bottom of her feet.
Her face cycled through a rapid series of expressions, all of them unreadable, and then she turned around so fast her white hair whipped through the air, and the sound that came out of her was a laugh, a full body, hand over the mouth, shoulders heaving laugh that she was failing completely to suppress.
Gen’s face went red.
“What is so funny? I almost got my throat ripped out by a fish monster and you’re laughing at me?”
“It’s nothing,” Vyxia choked out.
“It’s absolutely nothing, human, I swear on my mother’s hoard, it is nothing at all.”
“Then why are you laughing like that!”
Vyxia turned back around, and the smirk stretched across her face was so wide it was practically glowing.
“It seems the sea maid found herself a new mate.”
Gen’s brain short circuited.
Static filled his ears, and he was fairly sure his soul briefly left his body and floated up to look down at the scene from above before deciding it was not worth coming back for.
“What? How? I did not do anything! I stood there holding a stick, she bit the stick, and then she tried to lick my face! That’s not mating behavior, that’s just weird fish behavior!”
Vyxia was still grinning.
“Sea maids are mythical creatures, human. Ocean sea maids are already a thing of legend, and freshwater sea maids are even rarer than that. If she is what I think she is, she is probably one of the very last of her kind alive in this world. So when she comes across the only sentient male she has seen in centuries, maybe longer…” She spread her hands wide.
“Well. To her knowledge, you are the only option in the entire forest.”
“The only option for what?”
“The only option to fuck.”
“WHAT?!”
Behind him, Groova had been standing beside the aspen dryad, her head swiveling back and forth between them as she tried to follow the conversation.
And before Gen could blink she was in front of him, one massive arm wrapped around his shoulders and pulling him tight against her side like she was claiming him in front of witnesses.
“No!” Groova declared, loud and fierce.
“Only Groova can fuck Gen!”
Gen opened his mouth to argue, glanced at the aspen dryad, who was standing a few feet away with her usual completely blank expression and the 500 pound fish propped under her arm like it weighed nothing, and very deliberately closed his mouth again.
He had questions.
Plenty of questions.
The main one being whether the pale one counted in that equation, given what had happened in the cabin the night before, not to mention the night before that.
But he looked at Groova’s face, at the absolute unshakeable conviction burning in her red eyes, and he decided that was a conversation for a time when he was not standing in lake mud with a dragon princess cackling at him and a freshwater monster probably circling somewhere beneath the water’s surface.
He sighed in defeat.
“Alright. Let’s just hope I do not run into her again, okay? She lives in the water, I will stay on the land. Easy. Simple. Problem solved forever.”
Vyxia’s laugh came roaring back, louder than before.
“Too bad!”
“What do you mean, too bad?”
“Too bad she already has your scent.” Vyxia was wiping actual tears from the corners of her eyes now.
“You are oozing magic passively, human. Constantly, whether you want to or not. You are practically a walking beacon for anything with even a sliver of sensitivity to it. That little encounter probably did more work than that helius plant you are so proud of could ever dream of doing. You are soaked in your own magic and she got one good breath of you. She WILL find you again.”
Gen stared at her.
Then he looked at the water, calm and dark and utterly unknowable.
Then he looked back at her.
“Great,” he said flatly.
“That’s just great.”
Groova tightened her arm around him, pulling his head against her chest.
“Groova will protect Gen from the fish woman. Groova will bite her if she comes back. Groova bites hard.”
“That’s very reassuring, Groova.”