Rather than answer me, I felt her tighten up, muscles cinching inside and out, all of her grasping down on me. “Val—” she whispered, and then cried out, undulating beneath me like the waves in the river.
“Yes,” I growled, shoving myself forward, making her wrap me as my own sensations crested. “Yes!” I grunted as I thrust, feeling the first hot spurt of my cum flow into her. “Yes—yes—yes!” I practically bayed my triumph as each burst sprayed out, feeling her body sway as it accepted them, until I reached the end and my balls were empty.
I fell over her then, pinning her to the table, nestling my face against her glorious breasts, breathing hard. “I can’t believe children also come out of that same place,” I murmured, mostly to myself, and felt her laugh beneath me, as she ran a gentle hand through my hair.
“If I’d known you could make me feel like that, I never would’ve left.”
“Don’t say that, Shay.” But I felt the same. If I’d known even of a fraction of this pleasure with her, I would’ve hunted her down mercilessly, leaving all thoughts of magic behind.
“I mean it, Val. With the exception of Frenel—I wish I’d stayed here with you.”
“I would’ve never been able to give you a child.” I pushed up, and pulled back. Whatever magic had possessed me passed, and my root was just a root again, heavy, but it slid out of her easily, and as I stood I could see where I’d been, her soft soaked petals now dripping with my green.
When she’d left my cum was still milky—still human.
Not that I wasn’t human anymore, but I was human plus something else besides, carrying my magic around like she’d carried Frenel, perhaps, nestled inside of myself, making it grow.
But before she’d left...there’d been...a chance.
That I could’ve had all of this with her.
She smiled up at me, not knowing a thing about my thoughts. “Maybe we could’ve just stolen one from town?” she teased, and I swallowed.
I’d never felt the cost of my magic before that very moment. Up until now it’d been a coin I’d willingly spent, knowing no better—but if I had known that there could be a path to something like this, here, now, with Shayla and her beautiful child—would I have truly given up my life, to be a man who could only make a single flower bloom?
“Magic is my mistress,” I said, forcing myself to sound flippant, despite how I felt.
“Hmm,” she said, as the corners of her lips pulled up. “A mistress implies that you have a wife.” Before I could respond to that, however, she rose up on her elbows and her eyes went wide.
“Val—” she said quietly, pushing herself up to her hands next. “Val—look!” she commanded and I did, turning to follow her gaze around the barn and—
Plant after plant was in bloom. From simple grasses all the way up through orchids I’d stolen from the riverbank months ago, their thick green stalks bobbing with skads of silky, pendulous flowers.
“How?” I asked aloud.
“You!” she exclaimed, and when I kept staring at her, mute, she went on. “Well, it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Frenel!” She laughed.
“Me?” I was still bewildered. But the flowerswerethere, and Iwasthe only mage around. “I didn’t even know that I was doing anything!”
She made a joyously affronted noise. “Pretend that you thought that I was as pretty as a flower! Or that you bloomed all these to give them to me!” She laughed even harder and started shoving her skirt down.
I caught it with my hand to stop her. “Oh, they were absolutely for you,” I told her.
Her eyes tracked up from my hand over the rest of my body, and it didn’t matter that I’d already set seed in her once—I knew I could swell in but a moment, to do it again.
The rosy tip of her tongue darted out, licking across her lips—then Frenel cried out, hungry. I stepped out of her way and she hopped off the table.
“Give me a bit to settle him,” she said, holding onto the top of her dress without pulling it up, casting a look over her shoulder at me that set me aflame. “And then you may make things bloom again.”
I setmyself back into my pants and laced them loosely. This time, I finally felt free to watch her pace with the child. Feeding Frenel and standing with the wild fields behind her, just outside the barn door, she looked incredibly fecund, like she was one with the world all around her. I felt like my magic had turned me into some sort of forgotten tributary, and I longed to rejoin her larger flow.
“Maybe there’s a way for me to give it all back,” I said. Before her arrival I would have done any amount of crazy things to secure my magic—anything Xelrim could’ve told me to. Stand in the river for three days naked, set my hand in the fire, whatever it would’ve taken I’d have done.
But now I would’ve traded all of it in in a heartbeat to live the rest of a normal life out with her.
Shayla looked up and over at me, rolling her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do.”