The Fertile Grove: Up-And-Coming (Starfall)

A "Detachable" story

By Devin McTaggart

The first couple of days with Ciara and Nina were crazy, as Ciara and I established a great rapport, forming a perfect couple almost immediately. Ciara also seemed to take great delight in putting Nina into her place, something which Nina also seemed to get off on. Ciara and I had gotten to the point where we were already finishing each other's sentences, and she'd revealed to me that she'd had a crush on me since the previous year and was extremely glad that I'd won the challenge.

From the very first night she arrived, Ciara spent her nights in my bed, well, our bed, I guess. She was perfectly at home with her naked body next to mine, and she still prefers to be there every night she can, regardless of how many of my other wives she must share it with.

Three days later, there was another knocking at my door, and to my amusement, Professor Antevestian was waiting on the other side of it with Starfall Willowdance alongside him. I'd seen her on campus before - she was something of a Big Deal with the Thermodynamics college of magics, and they were touting how her research was going to revolutionize everything we knew about heat and magic within just a few short years. Because of that, she was one of the most heavily talked about students on campus, although generally in a sort of distant, admiring sort of way. All of her studying had kept her extremely busy, and without the support network of the KJD sorority, I don't know that she would've had time for any social life. She was going to be making a lot of waves in the coming years, and I didn't have any intention of stopping her from doing any of that.

See, Starfall and I had spent a semester together as lab partners for Magical Weaving 101, and I'd gotten a chance to know her a bit back then. She was whip-smart and absolutely, positively relentlessly optimistic about everything. I'd never understood how anyone could always be so unflappable about anything. Even when her final project for that class had completely fallen apart halfway through development, she'd just seen it as an opportunity to do it again but even better the second time. And she was right - from failure came even better success. I admit, I sort of admired her determination, and it might have been a bit of an inspiration for me on my own journey.

She was a gorgeous elvish princess who was nearly twice my height, slender and majestic, with alabaster white flesh completely unmarred or unblemished in any way. Her hair was this lustrous shade of purple that I'd always admired. She wasn't very curvaceous, but thinner and willowier, refined and far more elegant than I'd ever be. She'd always smelled of lilacs, something I'd never really understood, but it was something I'd noticed each and every time we'd hung out together. If it was a perfume, she always had it on in abundance, and if it was her natural scent, it never truly faded.

"Heya Starfall," I said to her. "Hope you're not mad at me."

She giggled in a way that almost sounded like musical notes running up and down the scales as the performer warmed up. "I'm a little surprised you chose me, Wedge, but at least I can say you have excellent taste."

"I wasn't entirely certain it was you when I took the pendant off the tree, but the hair color, and the fact that it had that same scent you did, that floral aura of lilac. But I had high hopes that I was right, and sometimes high hopes and a little bit of faith are all you get to hold onto."

"May we come in, Lord Deepcopper?" Professor Antevestian said, scowling down at him. "Or would you prefer I simply deliver Miss Willowdance and go?"

"No no, I can see you've got something on your mind, Professor, so why don't you come in and we can have a conversation about it?"

I stepped back into the place and let them both in, as Ciara offered a little curtsy to the two of them. "Looks like wifey number two's finally showing up," Ciara said with a grin. When we were hanging around the house, Ciara liked dressing casually, a loose flowing skirt that hung almost to her ankles and a big puffy blouse concealing her none-too-modest chest. "Heya Starry." I'd been expecting a certain amount of camaraderie between all the soon-to-be wives, considering they were sorority sisters. They'd spent plenty of time together over the years since they'd first pledged, done tons of events together. They were going to be closer to each other than they were to me for a long time, which was why I was glad to see Ciara and Starfall exchanging hugs.

Nina, on the other hand, did basically nothing to acknowledge either of them. She'd been taking on the role of my bodyguard, and she'd been taking it extremely seriously, giving no quarter or even any sign that she had a sense of humor about the matter. She was from a different sorority all together, so she didn't have anything in common with any of them. If anything, they were something of adversaries of sorts, although I would slowly but surely get all my partners to put those old all allegiances aside and form a new top allegiance - our family.

"How's he been treating you, Ciara?" Starfall asked her as they moved from the entryway to the kitchen, heading over to the table to sit down and get caught up, as I brought the Professor into my living room, letting him sit down in my armchair as I sat down on the couch.

"So, what's the purpose of your visit, Professor?"

"Lord Deepcopper," he sighed. Ciara came in, dropped off a cup of tea for the professor and a tankard of ale for myself, before she excused herself back into the kitchen with Starfall. Once she was out of the room, the professor continued. "I am here to reiterate the strongest concerns that the High Council has regarding your selection of Miss Vanderbilt. Again, we admit that your selection was well within the parameters of what is allowed by the convention, but Miss Vanderbilt comes from a family with a great deal of influence and power, and they would like to extoll to you the virtues of making a choice other than the one you have already made. In fact, should you be compelled into changing your mind, to, say, an alternate selection, or, perhaps, multiple selections, not only would the Vanderbilts be extremely gracious, the University itself would also be significantly in your debt."

I remember the grin on my face almost hurting it was so wide. "You already tried this last time you came by, remember? The Vanderbilts, the University's influence, yadda yadda yadda. You don't have anything I would want more than what I already have, Professor. I have the one thing you cannot possibly buy for all the money and riches in the entire world."

"And what is that, Lord Deepcopper?"

"My reputation," I said with a laugh, gesturing at the air around me. "I'm the guy who not only beat one of the university challenges, but two of them. On top of that, I did so with such a flagrant style that students will be talking about it for years to come. If I wanted to, I could probably just decide to teach here, and the University would feel obligated to give me the gig. I know that more than a couple of kingdoms have pushed to try and get my services for security or defense, just to try and get me before they think somebody else will get me. My mailbox has been, as the kids say, blowing up. I've heard the underclassmen have even given me a nickname."

"Mmmm," the professor sighed, the undesired outcome of this conversation clearly taxing on his psyche. "Mr. A.P. although I do not admit to knowing what the initials stand for."

"Mister All's Possible."

"Ah yes, the children believe you cannot be stopped, that there is nothing you cannot accomplish, whether that's fair or not." There was something biting about the professor's tone that I didn't much care for.

I shrugged a little bit, in response to his suggestion. "I didn't come up with the nickname."

"No, but you haven't objected to it either."

I kicked my leather boots up onto the footstool. "I wasn't aware it was on me to comment on everything students said about me on campus," I told him. "That's going to complicate things a great deal for me in this last month of classes. I don't know if you know this, but I still have final exams to take and final projects to turn in."

"Mmmm," the professor said. "And you are not guaranteed to graduate without those exams and projects. It is conceivable that, should your professors determine your work inadequate, you might not even graduate, at which point all your winnings from the challenges set forth by the sororities would be considered forfeit, and thereby revoked."

"I truly hope you aren't attempting to intimidate me, Professor Antevestian," I said to him, keeping my voice as cold as the deepest stones my people had pulled from ice cores. Dwarven mages were uncommon at the university, but I felt like the reputation my people had of being nearly impossible to bluff should've still played here. "Because that would be in violation of the University's Code of Conduct, and would be grounds for not only your dismissal, but a settlement in favor of a student the likes of which is practically unheard of."

"Lord Deepcopper--"

"You know," I said, musing with a sort of vaguely threatening tone of my own, "Lady Bellington allows the University to operate under her discretion only while it is acting in accordance with the strict provisions and guidelines that she's set down for it, and that to violate those provisions, well, that's tantamount to insulting the Great Lady herself."

"Yes, well--"

"I believe she had the last person who insulted her drawn and quartered."

"She did."

"And she used her magics to prolong the man's life by artificially infusing blood and oxygen into his brain so that he could watch his body parts riding off into the sunset without him before she, graciously, permitted him to die a fortnight later."

"I am familiar with the case, Lord Deepcopper."

"Good," I said. "Then you can imagine exactly how strenuously my classwork and reports are being paid attention to, not just by the professors here on campus, but by Lady Bellington herself, who sent word to me congratulating me on my successes."

I heard the elf's breath catch in his throat at that. "Did she."

It wasn't a question, and I found the elf's tone extremely telling. He hadn't realized the Great Lady herself had reached out to me, and the fact that she had meant his implied threats carried all the weight of a mouse farting angrily towards a hurricane. He'd been suggesting that if I didn't release Nina from my service, they could tank my grades as a way to get my accomplishments overturned, but with the Great Lady having taken an interest in my missions, it meant that whichever teacher applied an unfair eye to my tests or projects would find themselves on the wrong end of her ire, which was really all I needed to hear. The Great Lady loved an underdog story, and if a teacher was found to have given me an undeserved poor grade, well, she'd have made an example of them, to discourage retribution on successful students.

The Great Lady hadn't come by to wish me well personally, but she had sent a very kind and remarkable missive, describing my successes as nothing less than "historically unprecedented" and how she expected this was only going to be the beginning of the Legend of Wedge Deepcopper, not a footnote in some student history book somewhere. I'd sent her back a very self-effacing letter, promising to continue to pursue great and important works, and not to be caught up in small squabbles or smaller ideals. I would never dream of being spoken of with the same high regard as the Great Lady herself, but stressed that I would aspire to reach heights not far below her own, and that my guiding star would be to constantly think "Is this worthy of the Great Lady?"

She hadn't responded to my letter, naturally, nor had I expected her to. The very fact that she'd sent me a handwritten note at all was the kind of thing I would not have believed if I had not taken great care with the letter itself. In fact, it remains to this day framed and beneath glass, resting behind the desk in my study, along with my other mementos of great achievement. The Great Lady herself has since seen it there and asked me how much inspiration I drew from it over the years, and I had to stress to her how recognition, even in just a few scant words, can power the strongest engines any of us have ever known.

"She did," I confirmed. "Is there anything else you wanted to bring to my attention today, or were you just going to make lightly veiled threats at me until I acquiesced or threw you out?"

The professor exhaled a defeated breath, reaching up to rub his eyes for a moment before looking once more at me, this time with an expression I'd not seen on his face before. "You truly won't be budged away from your decision, will you, Lord Deepcopper?"

"Nina!" I bellowed. "Come here for a moment."

Nina Vanderbilt sprinted from the kitchen to come and be by my side. While we were at home, she could move around however she saw fit, and she'd judged the Professor not to be a threat to me, at least for the moment. But hearing me summon her, she had her hand on her blade already as she stepped into the room, quite prepared to consider Professor Antevestian a threat if I proclaimed him so. "Yes, m'lord?" She was dressed in the traditional black and crimson attire which sentinels had been mandated to wear for centuries, a black dress with crimson stripes along her arms over her chest and down her back, gold filigree on either side of the stripes before they turned into black fabric.

The blade she wore at her waist she'd named Liecleaver, a gift from her mother upon her sixteenth birthday, years and years ago. It was an elegant weapon, a rapier with so many enchantments cast upon it that when she once tried to list them off for me, I politely asked her to stop a few minutes into her exhaustive recollection. Much like skilled dwarven weaponsmiths fold layer upon layer of steel, reinforcing a weapon by stacking sheets of metal together, the Vanderbilts were known to have a similar practice when it came to enchantments. They would place new magics atop old magics until they themselves could no longer remember all the various layers, meaning nothing could safely defuse a trap built by a Vanderbilt, not even a Vanderbilt.

"Nina, come over here for a moment, if you will," I said to her, offering her a kind smile.

"Do we have a problem, m'lord?" Nina moved over to stand alongside me, her hand never once leaving the blade, her eyes focused on Professor Antevestian as if he might be a threat, and if I declared him so, one she would gladly run through upon her blade.

"The Professor here seems to think you might be unhappy being in my service," I said, reaching up to slide my hand across her ass, something she eagerly leaned into. "Free of consequence, free of retribution, my word upon the name of the lineage of Deepcopper, you may tell him what you truly think of me, in no uncertain words, with no reservations."

"Are... are you sure, m'Lord? No consequences of any kind?"

"You heard me invoke my lineage, Nina. Know that I don't do so lightly. To a dwarf, it is one of the most sacred things we have. Go on. If you're truly unhappy here, you can feel free to tell the Professor so."

Nina looked down at me, nodded her head before her eyes turned to focus on the Professor. Then she licked her lips, and a wicked little grin crossed her face. "If I'm completely transparent with you, Professor, I did indeed have reservations upon my arrival to Lord Deepcopper's service, but in the days since you have seen me last and you see me now, I have discovered my purpose, and I have found... great joy in that. While you may look at my Lord and see a student about to graduate with a confident streak fathoms upon fathoms wide, I very quickly saw past that, and saw the true legend beyond that. What's more, it was the morning after I arrived here that a truth dawned on me, a truth greater than any presented to me by you, the Council, my parents or even the Great Lady herself..."

"What's that, my dear?" the professor asked her.

"Wedge Deepcopper could've had any of the women of the Wunjo Perthro Dagaz Sorority, and yet, out of all the options there, he chose me," she said, stridently, taking great pride in that realization. "This dwarf beat all our trackers, all our hunting spells, all our best labyrinthomancers, outclassing centuries of study, preparation and thought, and when all the world's riches were before him, he selected me as the greatest prize upon offer. And now, twice you have come to him, and twice you have offered him anything he wanted in lieu of keeping me, and twice now he has rebuffed you and your offers, because nothing you can offer him exceeds, in his eyes, the value of what he already has. Me." She leaned her ass comfortably into my hand, licking her lips with even more mischief in her eyes. "Should I need to prove my devotion further, I could service my Lord right here, to quell any doubts that you might have about where my loyalties lie, Professor. I wouldn't want you to have any cause to disbelieve the voracity of my claims."

The Professor nearly choked on his tea, coughing sharply. "No no, Lady Vanderbilt, I do not require such proof. I would prefer that you do not service your Lord at this time."

"Are you certain, Professor?" she said with a wry smirk on her face, taking great delight in seeing just how uncomfortable the old elf was, shifting nervously in his chair as though someone had lined the inside of his council robes with itching powder. "It's no trouble at all. You see, I've quite grown to enjoy sucking the Master's cock on those times when he allows me to be so privileged as to provide for his pleasure."

"Quite certain, Lady Vanderbilt."

"Excellent. Then might I assume you're also done threatening my Lord?" Her right hand hadn't moved from the hilt of her blade the entire time she'd been speaking with him. "Because as much as it might pain me to strike down a member of the Council, I'm sure with my reputation on the line, any investigator worth their salt would come to the only logical conclusion - that I had slain you in defense of my principal. You have been a respected professor here at the University for centuries, but I, as you have taken great pains to repeatedly point out, am a Vanderbilt. There simply no is overcoming that for you, so I think you may wish to reconsider your course of actions."

"It was never my intent to offend, m'lady," the professor stammered. "I was simply doing what was asked of me."

"Mmmm," Nina said. "By my father, no doubt, a stubborn headed man with only ever one thing upon his mind - his precious honor. This, he must learn, is what honor looks like. My fate has become inescapably intertwined with an up-and-coming legend, the sort of spellcaster who comes along once in a generation, someone gifted with cunning, wisdom and ambition. Tell my father I am happy where I am, and that if he wants to threaten my Lord, my lover and my principal again, he can come here and do it to my face, where I extend to him the same offer of running him through on my blade for daring to try and decide for me what is best for me."

The professor stood up quickly, as if no longer feeling entirely safe in my home now that he had crossed my guardian. "Yes, well, perhaps I should take my leave of you both then. I will return in a few more days with the next of your brides to be, Lord Deepcopper, Lady Vanderbilt."

"I agree, that seems wise, professor," I said, rising to my feet so as to not be rude to my guest. "And should you see Professor Longcross again before I do, assure her that my class project for her, providing an alternate hypothesis for Oomba's Theorem, has some very compelling data behind it, and a number of practical applications which I'm sure the University can do further research on, as I'll be donating all my research notes into the matter to the college upon my graduation."

The Professor turned back from his place near the door with an abject look of shock and dismay upon his face. "Such research... it would be worth several fortunes if you were simply to keep your notes to yourself and sell them off instead."

"Of course it would," I told him, grinning devilishly, "but in doing so, I would only be hindering the research that could be done by the next generation of finest minds, and who knows what sort of useful applications they could find for my research, for the betterment of all mages."

The old elf scowled even more deeply than he had been when he first arrived. "Naturally. Good day, Lord Deepcopper."

"Good day, Professor."

He made his way out of my place and Nina locked the door behind him as she started giggling hysterically. "GODS that felt so fucking good," she cackled. "He was so convinced that I would be eager to leave you, and to crush that thought of his with a simple argument and my hand on my blade... I felt so fucking powerful for the first time in my life, and for who I am, and much less for my family name." She sprinted over, bent down and pressed her lips to mine in a lovely kiss, full of warmth and affection before she pulled back, giving me a playful 'I've been bad' look. "Sorry for kissing you without permission Master. Do you want to punish me for my willful disobedience?"

I laughed, rolling my eyes at her. "C'mon, let's go say hello to the newest member of our family, now that Ciara's probably had time to spread all sorts of scandalous lies about us to her."

We headed into the kitchen and found the two young women giggling and exchanging conspiratorial glances to one another before looking back to me. "M'lord," Starfall said to me as she stood up and gave a deep curtsy. "You said you had high hopes that I was me when you took my pussy from the Fertile Grove. I am not the most beautiful of the women of KJD, nor the most powerful, the wealthiest, the most intelligent, the most socially prominent or even the most talented. I am very highly respected in my field, but my field is the smallest of niches upon which our foundations of magical knowledge are built. I know a lot of students are talking about the impact of my research, but very few of them even have the insight to grasp the fundamentals of my principal theory, much less the theory itself. Might I ask what it was about me that drew you to me? Are... are you going to ask me to discontinue my research?"

I scoffed at that. "Of course not, Starfall, don't be ridiculous. You're a brilliant mind, and while I can follow the baseline of your theory, the particulars and specificity of it are far beyond my own comprehension. Why would I want you to keep what you've learned from our fellow spellcasters? That's the sort of thing the Council is known to do, hedging off information, keeping it segregated from those who would study and learn freely from the font of knowledge. Didn't you say that your research was always going to be made available to anyone who wanted to come and learn from it, how you didn't want to keep the power of knowledge behind a walled garden? Wasn't that what you said to the school newspaper?"

Starfall blushed a little bit. "I didn't think anyone really read that interview. My own family said the illustration made me look too--" The last word trailed off as she muttered it beneath her breath.

"Too whatnow?"

"Too prudish," she sighed. "All that research hasn't left much time in terms of dating, not offered much chance to find a mate, so if I'm completely honest about everything, I'm rather glad not to have to think about it, especially since Ciara tells me that you're a good soul, and that you have been nothing but kind to her. She had hopes that you were going to repeat your brother's performance, but I don't think anyone in KJD dreamt that you might take more than one pendant from the Fertile Grove."

"I mean, there weren't any rules specifying that I couldn't," I laughed.

"No no!" She laughed along with me. "You were well within your rights to do so. I'm just astonished that we didn't have some sort of rule in play restricting a raider's booty to one, well, booty," she giggled. "You know, when we realized you had taken more than one pendant, and I, well, when I felt you licking at my pussy, I tried to clench in rope knot code to send you a message letting you know that, well, that I was enjoying myself."

"Was that what that was?" I chuckled. "I could feel the contractions and how rhythmic they were, so I wondered if you might have been trying to communicate with me, but if I'm being truthful, I was still so nervous at that point that I almost worried you might have been threatening me."

"We, ah, we were all trying our best to use our magics to locate you, but as it turned out, the campus buildings are designed to obfuscate all magics during projects, so we couldn't trace you at all, beyond the fact that you were somewhere on campus," she said with a blush. "We were often together when you were playing with one or more of us, and we would sometimes hold hands, trying to ride out your intense appetites. We spent weeks trying to hunt you down, seeing if we could think of possible ways to outwit whatever clever plans you'd put in play, but at the end of it, it seems like our efforts were all for naught." She looked down at her hands and then back up at me again. "Not that I especially mind. You know, as long as the pleasure's going to continue."

"You're going to be one of my wives," I chuckled. "Of course the pleasure's going to continue. Tell me, you get along well with the rest of your KJD sisters? No expected turbulence between you and some of the others?"

She frowned nervously, a fraught look crossing her face. "It seems poor to speak ill of those not here to defend themselves yet, m'Lord."

"Please, for the sake of all the gods, when it's just us around, call me Wedge. No need to stand on ceremony when we don't have company. And being forewarned is being forearmed. They're still coming one way or another. It's just of question of me knowing what to expect."

"Kaori's... uptight. I don't know if other merfolk are like that, but I swear, if you removed whatever stick is up that fishgirl's ass, you could probably turn it into quite the unbreakable weapon," she giggled as I sat down next to her. "She's too wound up for anyone's good, so I sincerely hope you will find some way to bring her down from her intensity. And Felicia..." Starfall let out quite the whistle. "That girl is a freak's freak, I mean, wild like a Zopolian stallion with burrs in its hooves. She was convinced you were going to win from the moment you announced your intention to take a run at KJD, and she wanted to be sure she would be appealing to your tastes and sensibilities. She even mentioned that she'd gotten some tattoo work done in hopes that it might allure you in, although she wasn't sure that you'd recognize demonic."

Ciara grinned, shoving a mass of her coppery locks from her face. "That might have been where I got the idea to use the dwarvish mining iconography with the skin paint I originally put on before I had it tattooed. I'm not saying I stole the idea, but let's just say she gave me some very good inspiration."

"And how do you feel about the others, Ciara?"

"Starfall's read on Kaori and Felicia is spot on, although I think you'll probably be able to crack through Kaori's tough outer shell given a little bit of work," Ciara admitted. "Rosegrove's shy, as to be expected from a dryad, but she's a lot of fun to be around, once she gets comfortable. Olivia, well, that girl's so excited that you picked her that she could barely contain herself. Like most pixies, she's highly excitable and overly energetic, but if she tries to play up that 'oh I'm just an innocent little pixie girl' act on you, I call bullshit. She's drunk me under the table at least twice, so I'm not falling for it anymore, nor should you."

I leaned in and pressed a tender kiss to Starfall's lips, taking her hand in mind as I felt Ciara's hand on the small of Starfall's back. "Shall we head to bed?" I asked her.

Starfall grinned wickedly at me. "Too good for the kitchen table, are you?"

I laughed, shaking my head. "Not in the least..."

Thank the gods we're all great at cleaning magics, because what we did to our kitchen table was downright unhygienic.