
Fifi smoothed the magic roiling off the silent serum
she was brewing with her left hand as the floating
cauldron of alchemal ingredients spun slowly in front
of her. The chaotic magic steadily grew calmer and
more regular as she pushed on it with impeccable timing.
Stilling the chaotic magic of a mixture was the most
fundamental skill for an alchemist, and it was one
Fifi excelled at. Fifi had dreamed of becoming a powerful
mage ever since she nicked a magic seed and awakened her
first core as a street urchin. She had taken to magic
like a fish to water, picking up dozens of cantraps
that helped her become one of the best thieves in
Landing, but by the time she saved up enough money
to go to the royal academy, she had spent too long
with just the single core awakened and no formal
meditation instruction. The lack of proper meditation
had crippled her path, merging all her unawakened cores
into a single massive core far too large to ever be
awakened. It meant she was stuck as a hedge witch for
the rest of her life. Instead of the high magic she had
dreamed of, Fifi had had to settle for becoming an
alchemist, since at least lower level alchemy didn't
require too much magical strength. She was still
restricted to lower level alchemal concoctions, but
she had found a way to elevate minor alchemy to
an incredible level.

The silent serum's chaotic magic had been smoothed
down to the point where Fifi could move on to the
next step, but she didn't do so. Instead she continued
ironing out the bumps and ripples in the magic, displaying
a degree of fine control only the greatest practitioners
could match. Fifi might not be all that strong magically,
but she made nearly perfect use of what strength she did
have. Eventually, the magic had been brought into such
perfect balance that only half a dozen people in the kingdom
of Seravore could have even detected it at all. Fifi smiled
to herself in satisfaction. The undetectable magical signature
was why her alchemy was so sought after. She could charge
10 times the normal price for all of her substances since they
allowed for the level of subtlety that her clientele desired.
She carefully lowered her glass inducer into the spinning cauldron
and began releasing a whisper of power into the brew, carefully
stabilizing the magic while keeping it in perfect balance.

When she finished, she withdrew her inducer and set it aside,
pulling back to stretch. Her style of brewing took longer than
typical alchemy, and the need to maintain perfect concentration
took its toll. She would bottle up the silent serum in little
flasks soon, but she needed a moment to collect herself first.
Just as she was closing her eyes to massage her core, she felt
a swell of magic behind her. She turned to watch the shadows
beneath her counter ripple before disgorging one of her best
customers.

"Kendrick! I told you to use the front door like a normal person!" she
admonished. The halfling's path was half activated with shadow and
agility seeds. His shadow powers allowed him to teleport between
shadows, and he used them as his primary means of transport. Fifi
wasn't powerful enough to create wards that would keep him out,
much to her frustration, though the fact that he always paid handsomely
for her products mollified her a little.

"You know that's not my style Fifi. I'm not gonna stop until I manage
to sneak up on you," there were very few people Kendrick couldn't sneak
up on, and Fifi's incredible magical senses made her one of them. It
was a challenge he had been trying to overcome ever since he started
buying from the half-elf alchemist, and so far he hadn't made any
discernible progress. It was a shame. Kendrick would have liked to
get an uninterrupted view of Fifi's incredible ass. Having grown up
in the big city surrounded by big folk, and in particular, big women,
Kendrick had developed a taste for mountain climbing. Since his head
was at just about hip height for big folk, he found himself face to
face with human and elvish butts on a daily basis, and when he had
gone through puberty he had become suddenly extremely aware of that
fact. Normally, Kendrick preferred humans since elves and half elves
were generally too skinny to produce the type of dump truck asses that
he found most arousing, but though Fifi was a half elf, when it came
to her body she was clearly all human. Really, the voluptuous alchemist
was more than human in that regard. Her ripe booty was the kind of
massive perfect ass Kendrick only normally expected to see on a
succubus, and her heavy breasts were every bit as impressive. Fifi
had always been curvy, but it was when she retired from thieving and
went to the royal university that she really filled out. At first, most
of that extra weight had accumulated in her breasts and ass, but of late
the voluptuous half elf had developed a hefty pot belly. Having awakened
cores made people more attractive, but Fifi's single core wasn't enough
to do much in that regard, so Kendrick knew the way her body put her
weight in all the right places was mostly down to good genetics. Women
on their paths tended towards a more lithe look than the fertility idol
one that Fifi embodied. Kendrick hadn't met any advanced practitioners
who could match Fifi's curves. He'd always thought it was a real shame
magic didn't leave women with more meat on their bones.

Fifi snorted, "not likely, you control your magic like a boy who
seeded his first core last week." In fact, Kendrick's control was
impeccable, just not on Fifi's level. It meant that Fifi could
pick up on the well hidden lust in his aura. She gave no sign of it,
having grown used to being able to read the emotions off of other
practitioner's auras even when they thought they were hiding them
well. Besides, she enjoyed knowing just how much her body effected
the men around her, even if they hid it.

"I'm wounded."

"What do you need Kendrick? Another custom ward key?" Fifi did a
brisk business in producing keys for wards that her clients had
taken the fingerprint of. She never asked questions about what
they were for. Most of her customers who bought ward keys were
of the criminal variety, so it was a little unusual for a registered
adventurer like Kendrick to want one, but he had come asking a
few months back for a contract he was working on. Based on the
necromancy in the ward signature, she had guessed it had something
to do with the litch that Prince Merv had fought a few weeks after
she gave him the key, but she couldn't be sure.

"No, this time it's something a bit different from usual. How
do you feel about some field work?"

"No."

"Fifi," he wheedled.

"No. I'm done with that. I'm an alchemist now. I make things, you
buy them and use them to go kill monsters or whatever. That's how
this works."

"It's for the Prince," he told her.

"No shit, still no."

"One of the royal dragon eggs was stolen. We've already caught the
people who took it and found the egg, but we need an alchemist to
get it back."

"Get Professor Hellic to do it then," she shot back.

"He's on sabbatical in the Far Astral. No one else in Landing is
as good as you. There are a few other people we could turn to, but
none of them can work as delicately as you. The Prince will pay you
100 gold."

It was more money than Fifi usually saw in a year. She would be able
to upgrade a bunch of her equipment, and even get the mana tank she
had been wanting for years. "No."

Kendrick noticed her hesitation, "200, and a blanket pardon for any
of your previous escapades that come to light."

The pardon would be a relief since Fifi had stolen from some pretty
powerful nobles before she went straightish. She glared down at
Kendrick. "Fine. I want half the money up front though."

"There's no time to lose, get whatever you need and I'll teleport
you there."

Fifi gathered up alchemy supplies into a large trunk, moving quickly
but making sure to pack anything securely. If she was an adventurer,
she would have had a dimensional bag of some sort to carry all her
gear, but she hadn't been expecting to move. She went upstairs to her
bedroom and took out her old leathers. Holding them up against herself
she snorted. There was no way she would be able to fit into them now.
Her new clothes didn't have all the convenient loops and buckles of
her old gear, so she strapped her old pair of knives to her belt, finding
she had to let out the little leather thigh straps significantly to get
them over her expanded flesh. It really had been a long time since she
had done anything like this. The rest of her usual kit, her lock picks,
the various useful alchemal substances she normally carried, her various
hidden blades, and some other miscellaneous gadgetry all got scooped
up in her hands and brought down to be added to the big chest.

"Ok, I'm ready,"

"Great, no time to waste," Kendrick hefted the chest easily, though it was
bigger than he was, balanced it on his head, then grabbed Fifi's leg. His
shadow rippled and enfolded them both. A second later, they were in a darkly
lit chamber. From the dank air, Fifi guessed they were somewhere under ground.
Bodies where scattered in a tangled mess on the ground, most of them human with
strange dark tattoos covering every inch of their exposed flesh. Fifi noticed
one gnome wearing half a skull over his face who had been nearly cut in half
by some huge blade. Beside the fallen gnome was a large black plinth which rose
out of the ground a few feet, to what would have been his height were he
still alive. A huge bowl made of what looked like bone was set atop the plinth
and Fifi could feel an evil magic within it.

A tall blond elf stood over the bowl, looking down into it with concern. He
was far more muscular than most elves, who tended to remain slender even when
they were quite strong. A bloody long sword dangled from his hand. His face
had the arresting handsomeness of a late path practitioner, though he was
famous enough that Fifi knew he was only mid path. It was the feel of his
aura that she noticed the most. It was very well controlled, and someone with
less sensitive magical senses might not have noticed the desperate concern
beneath the carefully schooled surface of his aura, but though his aura
was quite smooth by any reasonable standard Fifi was in a league of her own
when it came to noticing minor variations at magical boundaries. Beside
him stood a dwarf in heavy plate armor. It was always a bit hard to tell with
dwarfs, but based on the silkiness of the beard, Fifi guess it was a woman.
"This is Prince Merv and Rotha," Kendrick introduced her, gesturing to the
elvish prince of Seravore and the imposing dwarf. All of the people standing
around the chamber had the heightened attractiveness that came with a
half awakened path, though clearly the prince had started off quite handsome.
"Guys, this is my alchemist I was telling you about."

Fifi felt them probe her aura. The normally glassy surface of her impeccably schooled aura
buckled under their touch and revealed the structure of her path along with
her emotional state. Reading emotions off of an uncontrolled aura was easy,
but a practitioner with the right training kept their aura smooth enough that
it was hard to pick up on. Fifi was good enough at aura reading to do it anyway,
but the usual way of reading someone's emotions when they were masking them
was to apply aura pressure until their underlying structure was revealed.
Generally only a stronger practitioner could do it to a weaker practitioner
or normal person. For obvious reasons, doing so was considered quite rude, but
given the circumstances, Fifi could understand why they were doing so.
"She's only got one active core. Are you sure about this Kendrick?" The
dwarf, Rotha, asked.

"Alchemy is more about skill than power." A grey clad man spoke, rising
from the crouch in the corner of the room. Fifi could see the Wizards
Guild badge around his neck. She had been hoping to bear such an emblem
once herself, but they only accepted members after they had awakened
a second core with a magic seed. "Feel how smooth her aura is. The only
one I know with control that good is Chancellor Yards."

Fifi felt a surge of pride at being recognized by a wizard powerful enough
to be adventuring with the prince. It wasn't enough to make her forget
what Kendrick had said to get her there though, "remember what I said Kendrick,
half up front."

Kendrick turned to the prince, "I told her we'd pay 200 gold and you would
give her a blanket pardon for any crimes which come to light. Fifi's past is
nearly as interesting as mine."

The prince nodded, "fine." He reached into the pouch at his belt and drew out
a bags bulging with coins, "this is 100 gold. Now, please do be quick, I
can see the shell is starting to degrade."

Fifi was surprised by how casually the prince handed over 100 gold, but she
schooled her features and nodded, "Ok, tell me what you know. Kendrick,
put my chest down next to the bowl. I assume the egg is inside and
trapped in some sort of locking brew?"

"Yeah, Marvin can explain it better," Kendrick walked over to put the chest
where Fifi had indicated. She followed and opened it to deposit the gold
inside and look at the bowl. A black egg the size of a grapefruit lay
at the bottom of a greenish liquid that glowed faintly. Fifi could feel
the angry magic coming off it. It was definitely a locking brew, but that
didn't seem to be the primary purpose. The whole concoction was thick with
necromancy. Someone with a less precise feel for magic might not have been
able to tell, but Fifi could feel it trying to worm its way inside the egg.
She shivered. Whatever it was trying to do couldn't be good.

The wizard came over, "we didn't spend much time waiting around to see what
they were doing, but it looked like they were doing some sort of modified
litch creation ceremony. My best guess is that the plan was to use the dragon
as a phylactery. Other than that I don't have much else to add. We need you
to break the brew lock and then we can get it back to the royal incubators."

Fifi nodded, "ok, I have everything I need here." She held out a hand and felt
the magic signature of the brew eating away at the egg. She carefully mapped
out the subtle variations in the magic that dictated the key. Brew locks were
like wards but more dynamic and therefor harder to break. Fortunately, Fifi
was an expert. She took out an iron tube from her trunk. It was closed at one
end, which made it almost like a very long thin cup. She oriented the bottom
towards the vile brew, though didn't allow the iron to touch the green liquid
yet. A quick <mage hand> spell brought ingredients floating up into the air to
enter the tube, which she swished around to mix, rapidly smoothing the magic
mixing in the tube before grabbing her inducer and sliding it into the tube
to stabilize the key. She muttered an etching cantrap and runes rapidly took
shape along the outside of the rod, taking on a soft white glow. She lowered
the rod slowly to towards the brew, but was suddenly stopped when the concoction
in her rod exploded in a puff of nasty purple smoke. She tossed it aside and
cast <puff> to disperse the smoke.

"What just happened?" Prince Merv asked. Fifi could feel the anxiety in his
voice.

"I didn't make the key quite right. I think I got a feel for it though. I
should be able to do it this time." She began mixing another key. This time
when she inscribed the runes and lowered it slowly, nothing happened until
the rod broke the surface. If she had gotten the key wrong she wouldn't
have been able to breach the surface tension. "Oooooohhhh kkkkaaaayyy,
easy does it now," she cast <mage hand> and reached down through the liquid
with the minor telekinesis spell to take hold of the egg. It was almost too
heavy for her to lift with her weak magic, but she managed to do so, and
more importantly she managed to do so without disturbing the magic of
the key and getting violently locked out. "Marvin right? Can you take this
from me?" she asked once the egg was out of the liquid looking at the wizard.

"I got it," he said. She felt a much stronger telekinetic force take hold
of the egg. A moment later a tiny portal opened and a gush of water washed
the last of the potion residue off the egg.

Fifi carefully withdrew the key from the brew and cast it aside. "How is
it?"

Prince Merv took hold of the egg. "It's damaged. The outer layer of the
shell, where the magic that keeps the dragon warm is has been eaten away.
It's already too cold."

"What temperature should it be at?" Fifi asked.

"About body temperature. Marvin can you do something?"

The grey clad wizard shook his head apologetically, "my fire spells are all
of the incinerate something variety."

Fifi snatched the grapefruit sized egg and stuffed it down the front of her
dress, adjusting her breasts to wrap around the bumpy black shell. Each of
her breasts was a bit bigger than her head, so her pliable flesh was able to
nearly completely cover the egg. "This work?"

Prince Merv looked down at the alchemist's considerable chest. Now that
the egg was out of the evil potion, he noticed just how generous her
figure was. The large egg stuffed between her breasts caused her breasts
to bulge out the top of her bodice like she was wearing a corset.
"Ummm, yeah, I guess that does."

Fifi smirked, "us hedge witches are all about the low magic solutions.
I guess it's a good thing I've gained all this weight after all. So,
umm, what happens now?"

"Now, you come with me to the palace and we get the court artificers to
build a new incubator for the egg."

"Right, umm, makes sense." Fifi's old instincts were telling he she should
be asking for more money, but it was about a royal dragon egg, and now that
she was actually holding it, asking for more gold to save it somehow felt
wrong. Despite the hardness of the shell and fierceness of the magic between
her breasts, there was something about the egg that felt delicate and in
need of protection. Already she could tell she would resent having to give
it back to the royal incubator.

Prince Merv lead her out of the room following a series of tunnels until
the emerged from the basement of a country estate. When they stepped out
onto the lawn of the property, Fifi was rooted to the spot by the sight
of a red dragon the size of a small barn. Its aura overwhelmed her magical
senses, and she staggered against the prince.

"I got you," he steadied her. "Rin, your aura's leaking again. It's ok,
Fifi here freed the egg for us, but it got damaged so now she's keeping
it warm until we can get it back to the incubator."

"Sorry about my aura. I was worried about the little guy. Thank you for
your help Fifi." The dragon had the same perfectly schooled upper class
accent that the prince did.

"Ummm, happy to help," Fifi said a bit faintly. This was not the day she
had been expecting.

"Come on," the prince gestured for her to follow him. He leader her over
to Rin.

Fifi stood awkwardly next to the huge dragon, "so, ummm- aaaahhhh"
she squeaked as Merv wrapped strong arms around her waist and
jumped 15 feet in the air with a flair of magic to land on Rin's
back.

The dragon's huge legs dug into the turf, sending clods of earth
flying as he launched into the sky. Fifi let out an undignified
squeak at the sudden movement. The ground fell away at a terrifying
speed, but the prince's strong arms around her made her pretty
sure she wasn't about to tumble off Rin's back. The dragon's mighty
wings sent them rocketing through the night. "We'll be there soon!"
Prince Merv yelled through the rushing wind.

"Ok!" Fifi yelled back.

*CRACK* the sound of stone splitting filled the air just as the palace
came into sight. Fifi felt motion between her breasts, "Ummmmm,
you highness! I think the egg is hatching,"

"Shit, Rin, can you get us down? Fifi, hold on tight,"

"Why- ahhhhhhhhhhhh," her knuckles were white around the spine
which came out of Rin's saddle right in front of where they were
sitting. Rin waited until the last minute to snap his wings
back open, coming in so hot that he had to vent a massive gout
of dragonfire below him to help brake hard enough to land.
Even with his wings spread and the force of his breath weapon
slowing their decent, Rin landed hard, his powerful legs
absorbing their momentum. As soon as they landed, Merv
jumped off, bringing Fifi with him.

"Aaaaahhhhhh, it's biting me! It hurts!" Fifi yowled. Looking
down at her cleavage she saw black veins begin to spread
beneath her skin. "W-what's happening?"

"I don't know! That isn't normal, it looks like necromancy!"
Merv held up a hand to feel the magic, hovering above Fifi's
bosom.

Fifi looked down in horror as her flesh began to rot around
the egg. A tiny black head pushed its way out of her decaying
flesh, and despite the horror of the experience, the moment
she met its little eyes it felt like her soul had been struck
like a gong. She knew in that moment that she would do anything
to protect the tiny creature nestled between her increasingly
decayed breasts.

As soon as she felt the blow to her soul, she felt a pressure
stir within her. Her second core began to flicker, "w-what's-
oh- no it can't be," Fifi's core was far too big to ever be
activated. When she had gone to the royal university one
of her professors had explained it to her. Because of the
damage caused by lack of proper meditation, all her unawakened
cores had merged into one giant core. Some practitioners with
merged cores managed to awaken them, but it was very difficult,
and even then the most someone had ever awakened was 3. Most
people had between 8 and 10 cores on their path, but based on the
size of her merged core, Fifi had been exceptional in that she
had 11. Each core is twice as big as the previous one in terms
of magical capacity, so that one extra core represented an
enormous extra volume to fill. There were only a few people
with 11 core paths who had fully awakened their paths, and
none of them had a merged core. Even if she had somehow
been able to somehow muster a seed event powerful enough to
awaken her entire remaining unmerged path at once, that wouldn't
be enough to awaken her second core now. When cores merged, their
capacity swelled to roughly 1.5 times the capacity of the two
unmerged cores, so Fifi's second core was impossibly huge.

Despite the impossibility of it, Fifi could undeniably feel
her second core sputtering to life like some vast engine.
Her single first core was literally less than a millionth
as powerful as her second core, so though she was no stranger
to magic, the sensation was quite alien to her. Whatever
was seeding her second core was clearly not the same pure
magic seed that filled her first core, though magic was a
large component of it. The magic sputtered for a while
and then caught. Black energy oozed from Fifi's eyes,
drinking in the light. Her body began to shift as it took
on the perfection of someone with a fully awakened path.
Her waist drew in, moving the extra fat in her gut up to
her breasts or down to her butt until her pants split and
her bodice burst. The rot spreading from where the egg
had hatched receded and disappeared, leaving pale blemish
free skin behind. Her face shifted to take on the otherworldly
beauty of a full path practitioner.

If Fifi's path had remained undamaged and she had managed to
complete it normally, she would have long since slimmed down
thanks to previous core awakenings by the time she awakened her
last core and her body was permanently locked into an immortal shape. Instead,
she went directly from a single core, which made her body barely
more than mortal and had allowed her to gain all the weight she
carried, to her final enhanced form. All that mass had to go
somewhere, so instead of the classic lithe figure of an advanced
practitioner, Fifi looked more like a lust demon's hotter older
sister. Her huge ass bulged with ripe perfection, her plush pale
flesh bulging out of the tatters of her pants. Each of her thick
juicy thighs was bigger around than her waist. The fat which had
once jiggled under her biceps when she raised her arms was gone,
sucked down into her breasts, which had swollen to twice
the size of her head, their pale perfection awe inspiring in
the moonlight. Her midnight black hair had grown thicker and
more lustrous until it seemed like a part of the night itself.

The changes below the skin were just as profound. To travel along
ones path was to transform from a mortal into a magical being.
On the first steps of the path that meant infusing magic into
a practitioners flesh to make it stronger, more resilient,
and quicker to heal, but about halfway down the path practitioners
began to experience profound physiological changes. Internal
organs shrank then disappeared, getting replaced by more efficient
magical processes. Practitioners no longer had to breath when
they began the final stretch of their path as their lungs disappeared.
In the final stages, their circulatory system disappeared and
finally even their skeleton dissolved into the ultra durable
flesh of their magical bodies. Fifi's insides went through all
those changes in rapid succession. In the final stage of the
physical transformation, there was no longer a meaningful
distinction between muscle and fat in terms of utility, so
despite the pillowy plushness of Fifi's figure, her body
surged with incredible strength as if it was muscle rather
than generous padding which gave her such an arresting profile.

The seed activating her second core had to be physical in nature,
something like a might seed. That wasn't the only thing
going on though, since she felt a greatly expanded mana
pool along with her new physical power. The magic from her
first core was a raindrop next to the ocean of her
her second core. She remembered her professors explaining that
people who did manage to activate merged cores tended to do
so with multi-seed events. An ordinary seed event seldom had
enough juice to get an oversized merged core activated. Something
like that must be happening now. Fifi turned inward, using the
meditation techniques she had learned in university to examine
her roiling core. At first it was too chaotic to make sense of,
but Fifi was an expert at handling chaotic magic, and she immediately
began using the same smoothing techniques she employed every day
as an alchemist to bring it under control. The powerful chaos of
the magic hardly seemed to notice her minute pushes, but over
time she was confident she could bring it under control. Before
she had made any real progress on taming the chaos, she
identified three major poles within her activating second core.
The largest was connected to the tiny dragon nestled between
her breasts. Another was a clot of magic that had crystallized
around a connection to her first core. Those two were pretty
easy to explain. Clearly the dragon's hatching was what had
begun to awaken her second core, so that first pole was a dragon
seed, and the pole of magic connected to her first core was
clearly a carryover seed. It was generally easiest to continue
down a path using seeds of the same type because previous seeds
carry over to subsequent cores and provide a point for the next
seed to form around. That seemed to be what had happened with
the second pole of magic. The third pole was a bit harder.
She couldn't tell where it had come from, but it had a dark
evil presence. The black energy streaming from her eyes was
coming from this third pole, and she sensed a terrible power
within it waiting for her to reach out and take hold.

The dragon seed was swelling larger and larger while the others
stayed the same. Her second core was so vast that as much magic
as was filling it, it still wanted more. It gulped from the bond
with the young hatchling greedily. The tiny black dragon moved
weakly between her breasts, struggling to escape its fleshy
prison. Fifi's heart melted at its struggles and she pulled it
out to let it rest on top of her bosom rather than getting crushed
between her heavy udders. Even after she freed it, it continued to
weaken. It was a creature of enormous magic, but her dragon seed
was taking too much too fast. Even the huge burst of magic from the
hatching was not going to be enough. Fifi knew what would happen then.
Her core would go dark once again, and the backlash would kill her. More
importantly, it would kill her hatchling, which, as of a minute ago, had
become the most important thing in Fifi's world. Panic filled her. She
had no idea what to do to stop it. Her overgrown core would be the death
of them both.

Fifi's greedy core sucked down an incredible amount of power from the
dying hatchling. It was shocking how much such a tiny body had to give.
The last of its magic disappeared into the maw of Fifi's soul, then the
tiny dragon's soul itself was drawn through their bond and gobbled up.
Fifi's core flared, nearly filling as the surge of power from consuming
the hatchling's soul filled her. She let out an anguished sob as she
felt the life leave its tiny body. She could feel death coming for it
and she reacted instinctively, "Nooooooooo!" The dark power within her
surged, shoving death back from the tiny body at her breast. "I won't
let you take him!" Fifi sobbed, overcome with the intensity of the moment.
Already, though, she could feel the power in her core waning. Even swallowing
a dragon soul had not been enough to activate it. Her power would inevitably
fade, hitting her with whiplash that would kill her, but first it would grow
weak enough that she would be unable to hold death at bay with what she now
understood to be her death seed. The little innocent dragon would slip past
the threshold of undeath on which she held it now and fully into the
kingdom of death. Fifi wailed with disconsolate rage. She had to save it.
Somehow she had to save it, no matter the cost. She turned inward, intending
to try to find some way to give her own life for the little dragon's, but
none of her new power offered an instinctive way to do so. She could only
cradle its lifeless body, sobbing as her power began to fade.

As her power faded, her continual efforts at schooling the roiling chaos in
her second core were met with increasing success. The pushes she was able
to exert on her core were so tiny that the should have had no effect, but
Fifi's timing and control were impeccable, honed after years of practicing
her unique form of alchemy. When she had smoothed out the magic enough,
Fifi became aware of a fourth pole. It was so faint, even she hadn't been
able to notice it at first, but now as her power faded and calmed it became
noticeable. It was tiny compared with the other three seeds, but its nature
excited her. It was the mirror opposite of the death seed she was using to
keep her dragon alive. With feverish desperation, she urged power into the
tiny seed, maintaining the perfect control of a master alchemist to avoid flooding
it and destroying it. Like the much larger dragon seed, this seed was from
the dragon's hatching, but it wasn't due to the great majesty of such a
magical beast, it was the seed of a simple life coming into being, any life.
A newborn foal could have produced a similar seed. Any number of village
healers or yeoman farmers had the same sort of good honest life seed. As
it was, it wouldn't be able to do much, but it was bathed in a sea of power,
and Fifi was just the woman to smooth that power and feed it into the tiny
life seed. She turned all her alchemal skill of magic shaping to the task,
feeding the life seed until it rivaled the death seed in size. Her body
responded to the new seed and to her desire for how to use it. She could
feel her huge breasts swell even further as they filled with life giving milk,
and her skin took on a glow of radiant health. She carefully lifted her
dragon's limp body off her bosom and slipped a nipple between its lips,
paying no heed to the way its sharp teeth pricked her skin. She let down
her milk and willed it to drink, using the death seed to animate it's
body. At first it felt like nothing happened. She continued to feed it a
drop at a time, smoothing out the magic of her second core until it was
glass smooth and filling her milk with pure life magic. She was starting
to give up hope when the little dragon twitched and sputtered. Fifi withdrew
the power of the death seed that was shielding it from the reaper and
it writhed in her hand.

Awe filled her and she felt a fifth seed take shape in her core. The power
of rebirth shone forth, reversing the flagging power in her core. The new
seed came with chaos, but it was chaos surrounded by the perfect smoothness
she had put her new core into, and she instinctively incorporated the new
magic like she was working a new ingredient into one of her concoctions.
Rebirth was an uncommon and mystical occurrence, so the seed event had
plenty of power. To Fifi's relief it seemed that it was enough to fully
fill her second core. Her smoothly rotating magic swelled, pushing yet
more power into her body, causing her beauty to find still greater heights.
Auras were a manifestation of magical cores, so Fifi's had taken on a
glassy hardness as she smoothed her core's magic. Now it swelled out,
crushing down on the world around her with incredible force. She
felt something snap under it's pressure, and an incredible sixth
seed blossomed, throwing her smoothing efforts off for a moment before
she took the new magical source in hand. With the two fresh seed events
pushing magic into her bloated core, she was no longer worried she would
fail to awaken it. Finally, the edges of her new power found the edge of
her core, forming a complete seal. Her vast mana engine had fully ignited,
and would remain alight for as long as she lived. She could feel the seal
on her core flash out over her body, locking everything about it in place
permanently. Once someone fully awakened their path, their body was set
in stone. They would always heal back to the state they were in at their
final awakening. As she felt the magic lock her body in place, Fifi
realized she had never withdrawn the life magic from her breasts, so
they would be swollen with healing milk for the rest of her life.
*Whoops, I didn't mean to do that. I hope I'm not leaking all the time.*

Fifi had been so wrapped up in the hatching and her own awakening that she
hadn't been paying any attention to what was going on around her. Now, she
looked over and saw Rin stretched out on the ground, unconscious. She realized
why when she saw Prince Merv. He was kneeling in front of her looking at her
with empty eyes. She could feel him through her aura, which, she suddenly
realized, was spilling out with crushing force. It was obvious what had happened.
Her aura had crushed Merv's will, breaking it so utterly that he was now an
extension of her. His will breaking had been the thing she had felt as her
aura expanded, triggering her final seed event. Will breaking was a terrifying,
and very illegal practice where a stronger practitioner overwhelmed a weaker
person with their aura so thoroughly that they snapped the will of their
victim, turning them into a puppet. Like all mind control magic, will
breaking was illegal, but it held a particular horror because it was permanent.

"Shit, shit, shit," Fifi muttered. Now that the terror of losing her dragon
was past she realized that she had just bonded with a royal dragon as a
commoner, and not even an pureblood elf commoner at that, and broken the will
Merv fucking Ha'zul. She wasn't sure which would make the royal cabal come
down harder on her, but either one was enough to get her a death sentence.
"Fuck, what do I do. I gotta get out of here." She started head away, leaving Merv and
Rin where they were, but as soon as she did so, she felt a thread between
herself and the prince stretch. She knew instinctively that if she got
too far away from him, the thread would snap and he would be left forever
will-less, without even her will to animate him. He would be as good as dead.
"Fuck, I gotta take him with me I guess. Merv, come with-" he had started moving
as soon as she realized she had to take him with her. "Well, I guess
we'll add kidnapping a prince to the list. Why not? It's not like they
can hang me twice." As soon as she said it, she realized that her
rebirth seed might mean they actually could.

She ran down the street impossibly fast, the power of her dragon seed
flowing into her body to empower it. Merv had dragon seeds of his own,
but she still had to hold back so he could keep up. Within moments,
she was pulling a sewer grate up and ushering Merv into it. She followed
a moment later, finding to her disgust that her swollen curves brushed
against the filthy walls of the access tunnel far more than she had
when she had been a younger and thinner woman skulking around the city.
She cast an empowered <cleanse> cantrap when she got to the bottom
of the ladder. Pouring extra power into a spell too low level to handle
it was a horribly inefficient way to use magic, but Fifi only knew cantraps
and she had plenty of magic to spare.

"Do you have anything on you they can use to track you?" Fifi asked
the prince.

"My blood is kept in the royal cabal. They'll track me with that."

"Great," Fifi had been hoping he had a toe ring he could ditch or something.
Of course it made sense that the royal cabal wouldn't rely on methods so
easy to circumvent. If she had the time, she could have made him a potion
to hide his trail, but she wasn't even confident that her alchemy would
be good enough to hide him from the cabalists. "Let's just get out of here."
A drop of filthy water splashed down on her exposed breast, "fuck, I somehow
don't remember this place being this gross. I wish I had some fucking clothes,"
she muttered, casting a quick <cleanse> and leading Merv deeper into the
tunnels.

An hour later she stopped beneath a clothing store and sent Merv up to buy her
something to cover her. The large blouse he had gotten her was quite lose at the waist,
and she was unable to lace it up to cover much more than the outer halves of
her breasts, but at least her nipples weren't hanging out anymore. The pants
he had gotten her were of the style favored by the eastern islanders, tight
around the calves and loose around the thighs and buttocks. On Fifi, they
were just tight all over. "How do I look?" she asked the prince. He wouldn't
be able to lie to her.

"You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen," Fifi could hear the
sincerity in his voice.

She smiled, "thanks! I guess this situation isn't all bad." She led Merv
through the sewers towards the port, emerging a few blocks from
the harbor front among the roughest dives of the waterfront.

Once they were above ground, she headed for a particularly seedy looking
joint named The Broken Mizzen. Conversation hushed when they walked in.
Every eye was on Fifi as she strutted up to the bar. It wasn't just because
she looked like she gave succubi self esteem problems. Her kind of
beauty only came with power, way more power than typically walked into
a bar like the Mizzen. The fact that she didn't have the lithe figure of
a typical late-path practitioner muddied the waters somewhat, since she
she could be a mid-path or even early-path practitioner with lust or
beauty seeds, but even if she was she had more power than any of the
unawakened people in the bar. The customers who had taken a few steps
on their own paths could sense her politely withdrawn aura, but when
they poked at it with their aura senses they could feel its absolutely
unyielding nature, and none of them were able to get a gauge on her
full strength, which could only mean she was stronger than them.
"Hey Miter, what's the next ship leaving port? I want to be on it."

"Ummmm, ma'am, I think you might have more luck with the Port Authority.
Beggin' your pardon ma'am, but a lady like you might not like the kind
of ships that take on passengers around here."

Fifi gave a musical laugh, "you don't remember me Miter? I was in here
just a few nights ago."

The bartender's eyes widened in shock, "Fifi? You awakened more cores?"

"Yeah, you could say that."

"Are, you, ummm, you working again then?"

"Nah, I just did one last job. Now about that ship?"

He nodded, "umm, yeah, ummm, there's a Balish crew that just got in
a bit of a scrap at the dog. I think they're looking to cast off before
sharky comes after them. The snaggletooth pier."

"Thanks Miter, I won't forget it." She slid him a silver piece and
headed out of the bar.

=======================================================================

"Sails! Red sails!" Chambers called from up in the crows nest.

"Bloody barnacles," Vinny swore, running over to begin climbing up
the mast so he could get a look. Red sails meant eastern islanders.
It didn't 100% mean pirates, but the odds were pretty good, especially
given the way the other ship had their weather and was tacking right
for them. He handed the telescope back to the lookout and swung down
the begin climbing back down, "pile on more canvas boys, let's see
if they can catch the old girl."

Below him, sailors swarmed into motion. Vinny wished he had a wind
herder or two on board, but he was going to have to make do with what
he had. This trip had been one bit of bad luck after another. First they
got caught in a storm, then they had barely got their rigging repaired
in Landing before half his boys got into a scrap they couldn't finish
in one of the dives and they had to high tail it back to sea before
they had taken on half the goods he had meant to. The one spot of luck
so far was when a couple of adventurer types caught them right when
they were shoving off and paid handsomely to come along. The man
didn't talk much, but from his accent when he did, Vinny guessed he
was some sort of noble, though he couldn't have been more than a viscount
since he didn't have the slim build of an elf though Vinny never did
see his ears under the hat he always wore. Human nobility was rare
in Seravore. Most of Vinny's attention had been on the half-elf woman though.
She did all the talking and considering the way she looked, it was
a struggle to focus on anything else when she was in the room. She
spoke like she came from the streets of Landing, though clearly she
had risen beyond that. No one looked the way she looked without some
serious power, even if it was a little peculiar to meet a high level
practitioner who was as full figured as she was. Still, even if she was
a mid-path courtesan, she came from a world above his own.

The crew was swarming over the deck by the time Vinny dropped
off the main mast, working to raise more sails. He bellowed
orders to organize the chaos, but stopped when the female adventurer
climbed out from below decks. He could feel his body responding
at the sight of her supernatural beauty, but he did his best to
ignore it. She turned to regard him with her large amber eyes,
"What's going on?"

"Sails on the horizon. Probably pirates," he explained.

She turned to look in the direction he was pointing. The red sails
had just become visible from the deck level. The woman lept up to
dangle from below the crows nest with one arm in a single bound,
"they are certainly dressed like it," she called down to him.

"You can see them from here?" Even after Vinny asked the question he
realized it was dumb. She was clearly far along her path. Even if she
was pure magic, which she clearly wasn't from the jump she had just
made, her body and senses were enhanced.

She dropped back down to the deck, slowing herself with a puff of
wind as she landed, "yeah, there's a bunch of them. All armed."

Vinny swore. Even with all the extra sail out, the pirate ship
was visibly gaining on them. The pirates had to have some wind
herders. A lot of eastern islanders went down that path.

"I'll talk with them if they catch us. I won't let them do anything
to your ship," she assured him.

Her absolute confidence in the face of the prospect of dealing with an
entire pirate ship on her own quelled the panic Vinny had been
suppressing. Something about her made him confident that the pirates
would be dealt with. Part of him almost wanted to reduce sail to get
it over with faster.

The pirates gained on them steadily until they were a few hundred
yards away. The deck of the eastern islander ship was swarming with
rough characters bristling with weapons, and Vinny knew he and his
crew would have been toast if it were not for their passengers, or
rather passenger. The man was still below decks, apparently the voluptuous
half elf standing on the deck of his ship was confident she could handle
the pirates herself. It seemed that the pirates had come to a similar
conclusion, because they had stopped drawing closer and several of them
were peering at her through a telescope and speaking vigorously to
one another. To his relief, the pirate ship began to tack away, apparently
not wanting to tangle with the obvious high level practitioner standing
on the deck of their target ship.

"Oh no you don't," his passenger said, then took three rapid steps towards
the railing and launched herself into the air. The deck boards cracked
under the pressure of her powerful legs. Once in the air, translucent
dragon wings took shape on her back and began pumping through the air,
sending her rapidly towards the fleeing pirates. Gusts of wind tried
to blow her off course, but she plowed through them as if they weren't
there and landed lightly in the middle of the deck of the pirate ship.

Fifi looked at the hard men surrounding her with weapons drawn. She could
feel the fear in their auras. "I'm just here to talk."

Her aura was fully withdrawn, so they
couldn't feel her strength directly, but her beauty, the way she
had arrived, and her apparent unconcern at being surrounded made
it clear that attacking her would be a very bad idea. Eventually,
a tall man with the umber skin of an eastern islander stepped forward.
His aura was withdrawn, but Fifi's already excellent magical senses
had been greatly enhanced with her path completion and she could tell
he had a handful of cores awakened with speed seeds. He was likely
quite deadly with the sword at his hip. "My ears are open."

"My companion and I have just returned from adventuring, and we would
like to take it easy for a while. We'd like to spend a while away from
the mainland, and the eastern isles seem like just the place. You seem
like you know you way around the archipelago, so we'd like to take
passage with you to your next major port of call. We'd pay you of course."

He looked at her considering, "you're already passengers on a ship. Why
not stay on it."

"We left in rather a hurry, so we weren't actually planning to end up
where they are headed. There are some people on the continent with
some respectful disagreements about the proper proprietorship of several
items we now have in our possession, and we'd rather avoid any difficult
conversations with them. Switching ships midway through seems like just
the thing."

"Your enemies, will they come after us?" Anyone this woman was running
from seemed like someone to stay far away from.

"Oh I don't doubt it, but the sea is a big place. Considering your options,
I would say taking us as passengers is worth the risk. If you take us,
you'll be payed, and if you don't, well, I turn this into a ghost ship."
She suddenly unleashed her aura, crushing down on their spirits with
overwhelming, domineering force. The six seeds in her second core made
the feel of her aura complex and varied, especially as death mixed with
life and rebirth to create a confusing blend. Her final seed lent her aura
a tyrannical feeling that went over and above the fact that she possessed
so much more strength than all of them. The pirates eyes widened
with fear, and they found themselves unable to draw breath, even those
of them who had taken a few steps along their path. A moment later,
Fifi withdrew her aura again and they were left gasping to recover
while she gave them a winsome smile.

"V-very w-well."

"Great! Glad we could come to an arrangement! Oh this is gonna be fun,
I've never been on a pirate ship before!" Fifi jumped up and down
excitedly, clapping her hands and grinning even wider.
"I'll just go get my friend." She leapt off the ship and once more
summoned her translucent wings to fly back to the ship.

Touching down in front of Vinny she dismissed her wings, "so, slight
change of plans. We're going to hop over to the pirate ship, and you're
going to go on your merry way. James, can you give Vinny here the
rest of the money?"

Prince Merv was already on deck, having emerged at Fifi's silent
command after she struck the deal with the pirates. He reached into
his bag and handed over the 50 silver pieces they had agreed to pay
on arrival, then pulled out two gold pieces, "we would appreciate your
discretion." He said, handing the money to the merchant captain.
Each was worth 100 silver pieces, so the extra money tripled what they
had agreed to pay. "And thank you again for taking us on at such short
notice."

Fifi and Merv leapt over the rail together, wings sprouting from
both of their backs.

Once they were ensconced in their cabin on the pirate ship, the captain
had insisted on giving up his own quarters for his guests, Fifi
reached into her cleavage to withdraw her little hatchling. He
stirred to wakefulness as she withdrew him and began unlacing
her top so she could let it suckle at her breast. He was so
tiny he fit in the palm of her hand, clearly smaller than he should
have been given the size of the egg he had hatched from. His life
force still felt terrifyingly fragile to the senses that had so
recently awakened in Fifi. She let out her milk in drips and drops,
despite the fact that each of her huge udders held gallons of the
stuff and before long its little stomach was bulging. The rich
life magic in her milk gave the little runt a much needed boost
of energy as he began to digest it. She set it on top of the shelf
of her breasts where it curled up to sleep once again. "I still
haven't named you little guy." She said, petting it it's smooth
scales, "how does Shadow sound?"

Shadow let out a soft huff, snuggling deeper into Fifi's abundant
flesh.

Looking over at the empty shell that used to be a prince of Seravore,
Fifi felt a flood of guilt. "Somehow, I'm going to figure out how to
make you better," she promised.

======================================================================

The little island of Aruck was so tiny it didn't even have a fresh
water spring. All the water on the island was summoned by the
practitioners among the small village that supported itself by
fishing and trading with the pirates who used it as a home base.
There were thousands of islands like Aruck in the eastern islands,
and hundreds of pirate towns that existed outside the control of the
three island kingdoms that vied for control over the archipelago.
It was far enough out of the way, that when the pirate ship they
had jumped onto stopped there, Fifi had decided it was the place
to stop. At first she had been expecting to have to move on from
the first port of call quickly, but it had turned out that the
second mate dabbled in alchemy and had the supplies Fifi needed
to make an anti-tracking potion for Merv. It was stronger alchemy
than she had done before, but she knew the theory well and was
fairly confident it would work. If it didn't she would find
out soon enough.

When Fifi had arrived, she had been expecting a challenge from a
local pirate, but the man who ran Aruck, Andrew Snipes, had been
extremely respectful of her, putting her and Merv up in The Wanton
Widow, the large inn he ran in the center of town, at a rate she
was quite sure was well below what he usually charged for his best
rooms.

Now, she could feel his aura approaching as she sat on the weathered
porch overlooking the crystal blue tropical bay eating her breakfast.
It wasn't as consumed by fear as it had been when he had first seen her
and gotten a taste of her domineering aura. After a week of the strange
practitioner living peacefully in their midst, the people of Aruck had
grown used to her, which had allowed the overwhelming fear with which
the islanders had first regarded her to be partially replaced by lust,
at least among the male contingent of the islanders, which was pretty
much all of them except the bar maids employed at The Wanton Widow.

"Mistress Mazz, I believe I've been able to find some of the books you
were interested in. I'm afraid I still haven't been able to locate
the alchemal equipment you asked about, but I have The Vicious
asking around while they do a supply run." The Vicious was one of
the three pirate ships Andrew personally owned, and it had been
finishing up refit when Fifi arrived. Rather than send it right
back out to the high seas, he had decided to use it and its
crew to help resupply Aruck. Normally, he used some of his smaller
boats for the task, but he wanted The Vicious to have a shaking
out cruise after the extensive storm damage it had recently suffered
and its crew was better equipped to go looking for the things his
new guest wanted.

Fifi took the stack of three books that Andrew offered, "I'm
impressed, you found these so fast. I expected you to have a bit
more trouble, given the subject matter." All three books were
bound in black leather. The largest announced its title, The Deminomicon,
in bold gold lettering. The other two weren't quite so ostentatious,
but they were each registries of demonic genealogy.

"You will find that I'm a man able to put his hands on a great many
things, Mistress Mazz," Andrew smiled, giving a respectful bow. Fifi
had met men like Andrew before, but they had never treated her like
this. Always before they had been vicious and domineering. She'd had
to move her clandestine alchemy lab on more than one occasion when someone
like Andrew took too great an interest in her. By contrast, the pirate
lord in front of her was servile and obsequious. She'd never even
threatened him, but her overwhelming beauty and adamantine aura was
enough to make him perfectly aware of how much power she held, and
apparently that was enough. Fifi found that she liked this version of
a crime lord much better.

"How much do I owe you?" She asked, getting out her coin purse. She
was confident he wouldn't attempt to take advantage of her.

"Please, there is no need for that. I hope you will accept it as
a token of friendship." They both knew it was more like a token
of tribute.

"How about I fill up your cisterns by way of thanks,"

"We would all appreciate that. You are too kind Ms. Mazz," he bowed
and withdrew. He was quite proud of himself for maintaining eye
contact with the voluptuous half elf who had taken up residence
in his inn. He didn't know much of anything about Fifi Mazz, but
despite her obvious power she had arrived on his island with
very little by way of material possessions, though plenty of coin.
When she had asked about clothing, he had directed some of his
serving girls to modify a few of their dresses for her. Only the
heavy set Wendy had anything with a chance of fitting the newcomer, and even
the dresses which fully laced over her not-inconsiderable bosom
had only managed to cover Fifi when the half elf used a heavily
empowered minor mending spell to stretch the fabric of the dress's
bodice thinner. Even with the modifications, Fifi's new dresses
were unable to lace up over her bosom, leaving creamy cleavage
on full display through the laces. It made conversations with
the sexy practitioner an exercise in will power.

Fifi smirked as she watched him walk away. She wasn't a stranger
to men lusting after her body. Especially in her younger days,
half the men she met had been trying to get in her pants. The
desperate struggle to avoid ogling her she had sensed in the
pirate lord's aura was something new though. It might have
been worrying if she didn't have the power to put any man who
got too handsy in his place. With the knowledge that she was more
than equipped to defend herself, she found the effect her new
body had on people thrilling.

Setting the two books of genealogy aside, Fifi opened the
deminomicon and began to read. In some ways, Fifi was already
an incredibly talented witch. Her control and precision were
second to none. She was formally trained at one of the best
magical universities in the world, and due to the power limitations
which had plagued her until so recently, she had spent all of
her time there laser focused on refining her skill and efficiency
with minor magics, artifice, and above all alchemy. Her focus
on low powered magic and her natural talent for the art had made
her the best at what she did, but when it came to the world of
heavy duty magic she felt like a novice again. She had a solid
grasp of the fundamentals, but she didn't know any specific
spells or rituals that could make use of her new power. What
she needed was knowledge.

Pure magic seeds were the most versatile of the common seeds,
and when wielded with skill, the most powerful, but unlike
other seeds they were basically useless without knowledge of
how to use them. Seeds like Fifi's life and death seeds took
time to master, but came with an instinctive ability to use
them right out of the gate. There were three paths to learning
to wield a pure magic seed. The first was to muddle through
learning specific spells and rituals on your own, scrounging
for magic knowledge. This was the path of the hedge wizard
or witch. Only the most talented mages made it far this way.
The second was formal instruction at a magical university.
Most true mages came to their power through formal education.
Fifi had followed both paths, first as a hedge witch thief,
then when she managed to save enough for tuition at the
royal university of Seravore. Going back to university to
learn to wield her new power was off the table as soon as
she stole a royal dragon and kidnapped a prince, and she
would never access the kind of spells that would utilize her
full power scrounging for scraps as a hedge. That would have
been ok with her, if it were not for the fact that she had
no idea how to heal Merv's broken will.

The third path was seldom taken outside of the badlands. The
path of the warlock was a dangerous one that saw many
practitioners turned into thralls of demons, their souls
twisted and warped by the powerful beings that taught them.
A demonic tutor was the only option available to Fifi if
she was going to undo the damage she had done to Merv and
bring him home. The books her host had just provided her would
help her find one.

====================================================================

Shadow bumped his head against Merv's leg affectionately. In the
month since they had arrived on Aruck, the black dragon had grown
to the size of a house cat. His life force was much stronger than
it had been, but to Fifi's eyes he still looked worrying weak.
He still had yet to produce a breath weapon of any sort or attempt
to fly, and while he often displayed the excitement at the world one
would expect from a puppy he tired easily and spent most of his time
sleeping. If it were not for the life bolstering effects of the milk
Fifi was still nursing him with, she worried that the little dragon
would have hardly grown at all.

Merv's dull eyes were even more worrying than Shadow's frailty.
His head was still full of knowledge. He had helped her to understand
the demonic magic she was studying, and had done a good job of explaining
her new seeds, having identified her sixth seed as a dominion seed and
shared lots of details about her dragon seed, but it was like
she was using him as a recording spirit. He never did anything of his
own volition. If she didn't will him to eat, he would have starved to
death. Through the bond between them which had been established when
she broke his will, she could feel the man he had been lurking beneath
the surface, but she had no idea how to draw him out.

Hopefully that would change soon. Today was the day she summoned
a teacher. There were several sorts of demons which made good teachers.
Bonelords were the demon of choice for necromancers, and would make
a good option for Fifi because of her death seed. Blood tyrants were
masters of battle magic, though usually a bit too strong for early
career mages to learn from, not that Fifi would have an issue with
that. Infernal craftsmen were good choices for aspiring artificers
and alchemists. In many ways any of those choices would have been
better choices for maximizing Fifi's personal power, but this wasn't
about maximizing her power, it was about learning how to fix Merv.
She was going to summon a succubus. Succubi where masters of mind
control magic and the breaking of wills was a specialty of theirs.
If any demon could teach her how to fix Merv, it would be one of them.

Fifi had spent the last few weeks summoning imps who worked in the
infernal library to gain insight into who she should summon and
attempt to bond. The vast library took up nearly all of the 6th
hell. Demon librarians of all the major intelligent species worked
in the library, and due to the way they were sought after as demon
tutors their influence had been steadily expanding over the several
thousand years. Now that Fifi had squeezed the information she wanted
out of several imps, she had just the demon she wanted to summon
in mind. Due to the demon's present circumstances it would take
far more power to summon her than a typical ritual, but Fifi had
plenty of power to spare.

Cora sat sullenly fuming in her cell, bound in cold iron chains
that glowed with angry red runes. In a few hours, the soldier
demons would come to take her to be executed. They would do it
as painfully as possible so it would take her centuries, or
even millennium to reconstitute herself, but they wouldn't fully
destroy her. They would leave a chunk, probably one of her eyes,
for the rest of her to rebuild itself around, then they would put
it in a coffin in the catacombs and the novices would go through
every year shaving off any flesh which managed to heal. It was as
close to death as a being like her was able to come. Despite all her power,
despite all her knowledge, there was nothing she could do to stop
it. Vash had played the necromancy acquisitions committee like
a fiddle, blaming the whole "Bone Carving and its Use" debacle
on her even though it had been his nephew who had screwed everything
up. Now she was no longer chair of the reanimation acquisition
committee, and thanks to Vash's scheming, she was going to be
torn to shreds. Suddenly, Cora's thoughts were interrupted
by a summoning call. Her true name was repeated three times,
and powerful magic drilled up from the material plane, pushing
past the restrictions of her shackles and opening a summoning
path down to the material plane. It beckoned to her invitingly.

Of course, Cora knew it was a trap. The practitioner trying to
summon her had clearly done enough research to know she was in
desperate straights. She was being called by name rather than
a wide net for any demon matching the right parameters being
cast out. Still, what choice did she have. Cora accepted the
summons.

Fifi had been starting to worry the demon she had been researching
wouldn't answer her call when a puff of incongruously pleasant
smelling smoke filled the center of her summoning circle and
a red skinned woman stepped out. She was completely naked
and black rams horns curled back from her head. Aside from the
horns and skin, she looked entirely human. She was quite generously
proportioned, with breasts the size of cantaloupes, a tight waist
and a ripe bum. Before the woman who had summoned her, however,
she seemed flat.

"Things aren't going all that well for you in the infernal
library, are they Cora? Can I call you Cora? Coranvashin is
a bit of a mouthful." Fifi said. The demon just curled her
lip, "I'm hoping I could help you with that."

"How so?" Cora asked.

"Well, I need a demon tutor, and you need out of hell. I figure
we can help one another out."

"You stupid mortal, becoming your tutor won't get me out of hell."
Typically warlocks communed with their demonic tutors while they
meditated or performed calling rituals.

"It will if I bind you as my familiar," Fifi said.

"I'm a greater dem-" Cora was cut off as the curvy half elf's
aura smashed into her, pummeling down on her will with bruising
force. Cora was a master of aura duels and she fought back
skillfully, but the witch who had summoned her was incredibly
strong. She moved her aura clumsily, but strangely there were
no gaps in it through which Cora could penetrate. It had the
same implacable feel as the aura of a succubus queen, though
none of the skill. If she had time to prepare, Cora might have
held out better, but she was caught off guard and left quivering
as her core was gripped tight in the witch's aura.

"What you are, is out of options," Fifi walked over to the gasping
demon, maintaining a tight grip on her with her aura, and showed
her a contract. It was quite short. It read simply, "I Coranvashin
Rumar swear to serve faithfully as Fifi Mazz's familiar and
slave so as long as Fifi Mazz is alive, only to be released by
Fifi's final death or Fifi herself releasing me." It was a horrible
contract. Cora would normally never take it, but she was sure to be
destroyed if she went back to hell, and there was no way she could
overcome her summoner. Grudgingly, Cora shoved a sharp nail into the
ball of her thumb and pressed it to the bottom of the contract.
The paper burned starting from the point where her blood had touched it,
and Cora felt the magic of the contract settle into place on her.
She could feel the new familiar bond settle into place. Cora had
served as a familiar a few times. She had thought she was past that
when she began working for the powerful necromancy acquisitions
committee, but now she found herself on the wrong end of the most
unequal familiar contract she had ever experienced.

"Good, now follow me, don't try any tricks, keep quiet until we
get to my room, and no feeding on any mortals. Got it?"

"Yes," Cora said sullenly.

"That's 'yes, Mistress Mazz'." Everything Fifi read about keeping
a demon familiar in the demenomicon had stressed the importance
of keeping a tight leash on the demon in question, especially in
the early days of a relationship.

"Sorry, Mistress Mazz." Cora said, this time demurely rather than
sullenly.

"Good, so long as you remember your place, I'll try to make sure
you enjoy your time as my familiar. I won't hesitate to punish
you if you step out of line." Fifi tightened her grip on the
familiar bond, not enough to hurt Cora, but enough to let her
know just how easily she could. "Now, I'd rather not be walking
around with an obvious demon familiar. Can you disguise yourself
as a mortal?"

"Yes, Mistress Mazz." Cora manifested the runes required for a
disguise spell and light shimmered over her, making her horns
disappear and her skin shift from red to the same pale shade
as her mistress. A brown dress suited to a lady's maid took
shape over her body.

"Excellent, now follow me," Fifi had summoned Cora in a sea cave
on the far side of the island from the village, not wanting the
pirates to catch wind of her consorting with demons. They probably
wouldn't do anything about it, but she still preferred to be
discrete. Now she lead Cora up the steep cliff path
to the top of the bluff the cave was set in.

"Yes, Mistress," Cora said demurely, trailing after Fifi. Anger at the way she had
been so easily dominated by the mortal mage boiled within her,
but despite that it was impossible not to appreciate the sight
of her new owner's shapely legs flashing through the slit in
her dress as she climbed up the cliff side, the wind blowing her
dark hair. Fifi's bulging ass swayed hypnotically from side to
side with every step, and despite her frustration at her new situation,
Cora found that the sight of her owner's body was rapidly bringing
heat between her legs. *With the way she looks and the strength of
her aura, she's already a better succubus than me, what does she want
me to teach her for?* Cora wondered. At the very least her new
mistress would not be like most students of a demon tutor, that
was for sure.

Fifi lead Cora back to The Wanton Widow. She could feel Cora's
emotions though her aura despite the demon having the best aura
control Fifi had ever encountered, save for her own, and she
smirked when she felt Cora's initial anger give ground to lust.
The new arrival drew some surprised looks, but no one was going
to question Fifi, and the pirates populating the tap room turned
back to their cups after the two beautiful women swept through
and went up stairs. Once she was back in her room, Fifi called
Merv over, and he arrived a moment later.

"Can you feel what's been done to him?" Fifi asked Cora.

"You broke his will. I'm impressed mistress, that takes some
doing," given the power of Fifi's aura Cora wasn't actually all
that surprised she had managed it, even with her strange lack
of skill.

"Yes. How do I fix him?"

"Why would you do that? Broken willed servants are so delicious,"
Cora trailed her fingers over Merv's chest, "especially one as
yummy as this one. How'd you find an elf so muscular? He got a
might seed or something? Rather than fixin- aaaaahhhhhhhhh"
excruciating pain shot through Cora as Fifi dug into her with
the familiar bond.

"Remember who you are addressing," Fifi said severely to the
demon, releasing her grip.

Cora had fallen to the floor, and now she levered herself slowly
to her feet. "S-sorry Mistress. F-forgive me, I forgot myself."
Cora's nipples stiffened. The power of Fifi's aura crushing down
on her was bringing out her submissive tendencies.

"Yes, you did. Now, answer my question."

"There are two ways to fix a broken will. First, you can kill the will
breaker, but I'm guessing you're not interested in that option. The
second option is much harder. It's almost never done since only the
will breaker can do it, and it takes a long time to repair a broken
will in that way. You must closely monitor the victim with mind
reading magic, watching for tiny flickers for desire, then command
the victim to seek out their desires, however faint. This will slowly
build the will back like a muscle. It is hard in the beginning, when
the victim has very few desires. The usual approach is to focus on basic
bodily functions at that stage. The middle stage is the easiest since
the victim has more developed desires and can still be healed by fulfilling
relatively simple desires. The final stage is most difficult because it
requires realizing relatively complex desires."

"That seems like a bit of a pain. So is there a mind reading spell I should
use?"

Cora nodded, "there are several options, but I believe the best option in
your case is to read his mind via aura manipulation. Your aura is very
powerful, and if you learn to wield it right you'll be able to read his
mind much less invasively than mind magic could accomplish. The less
invasive you are with your mind reading, the less you will perturb his
desires and the faster progress you will make."

"You can do that? Read minds with aura manipulation?" Fifi asked.

"It is an advanced technique, which required impeccable control, but I sense
you have excellent control. I must confess, I find that quite confusing
considering what I sense to be your relative lack of skill with aura
manipulation techniques. Your fundamental skills appear to be superior
to those of most succubi I know, and my kind are masters of aura play."
Cora hoped she hadn't stepped out of line by pointing out her Mistress's
deficiencies, but she didn't see how she could teach without doing so.

"My control's really that good?"

"Yes, Mistress, I don't lie when I say you feel like a succubus queen."
*and look better than one,* she thought.

Fifi felt a buzz of pride, "Well, that's good. As for why I'm so unskilled
at advanced aura manipulation. I've only had my path fully awakened for
a bit more than a month, and well, feel for yourself where I was before
then," she withdrew her aura enough that Cora could probe her path, "go
on, probe my path."

Cora reached out with her aura and felt Fifi's path. "You have only
two cores?" She gasped in shock, "your second core is monstrous.
I've never seen anything like it. Is that six seeds I feel? What
happened to you? It's magic is so smooth. I've only felt cores smooth
like that from a group of assassins who specialize in aura control.
I can't feel your seeds."

Fifi smirked at the naked awe on her new familiar's face. "It is
pretty impressive, isn't it. Here, can you sense my seeds now?"
She shifted them forward so Cora could sense them despite the glassy
shell which protected them.

"Are those two greater seeds? Y-you are- mistress- god you're so strong,"
the arousal was obvious in Cora's voice now. When she realized that
the second greater seed was a seed of rebirth, she realized that the
chances of being freed from the contract she had just signed was near
non-existent. Full path practitioners were biologically immortal, but
still vulnerable to death by violent means, but a seed of rebirth
in a high tier core meant that very few beings could kill them in
a way that made them stay dead. A rebirth seed in a lower tier
core provided strong healing magic that was more effective the
more injured the recipient was. If it occupied a seed midway through
the path, it allowed the wielder to resurrect albeit with a long
recharge time. The resurrection grew more effective towards the end
of a user's path. It made rebirth seeds extremely coveted, though
they were very rare and there was no reliable way to trigger rebirth
seed events. With Fifi's overgrown second core bearing a seed of
rebirth, Cora doubted that anyone but death himself could put her down.

"I guess I am, aren't I?" Fifi preened under the demon's obvious shock
and arousal. "But I'm also very ignorant for all my power. That's why
I summoned you."

"Oh, thank you Mistress, thank you for binding me. I'm sorry I was
ungrateful before. I didn't realize how unworthy of you I am," Cora
sank to her knees and began kissing Fifi's feet. The sheer power of
her mistress was incredibly arousing for the succubus at her feet,
and now that she realized it was impossible, the schemes she
had been making to escape withered. Despite her ignorance of
higher magic, the woman in front of her was at least as powerful as
duke of hell. Lady's maid to a duchess of hell was leagues above
chair of the infernal library's acquisitions department subcommittee
on reanimation. Cora realized she had a unique opportunity to
make herself indispensable to someone who could become extremely
powerful. She eagerly imagined the place she would occupy in
Fifi's domain once her mistress claimed a land worthy of her.

Fifi bit her lip, allowing her new familiar to kiss her toes.
She had been feeling Cora's scheming through the familiar
bond from the moment she forced the demon to sign the contract.
She couldn't see the details, but she had known Cora was plotting
against her. As soon as Cora was exposed to her seeds, she felt
that all melt away to be replaced with the lust directed towards
her that had already been mixed in with the scheming and a new
sensation of greed. Again, she didn't know the details, but she
could tell Cora could imagine a future where Fifi dominated everyone
around her and used Cora as one of her chief instruments. *I'm
not going to become some sort of dark queen, but if it makes Cora
horny for me instead of makes her constantly trying to escape,
I suppose I can live with that," she thought.

"Alright, enough of that," Fifi chuckled, pulling her foot back.
"You've got a job to do. Tell me what I need to do to learn these
aura mind reading techniques."

"Sorry, Mistress Mazz, I got overwhelmed by your majesty." Cora
remained kneeling at Fifi feet, "Aura manipulation has four
foundational skills: expansion, retraction, suppression, and
communion. You appear to have all four mastered, or at least
the first three, I haven't felt your communion."

"It's not so great. The first three I can practice on my own,
but I haven't done much communion since I graduated from school
years ago. I'm not terrible, but not as good as with the other
three."

Cora nodded, "I see. That is unfortunate, since aura mind
reading is mostly based on communion. It requires first
dominating someone's aura through aura combat, then using
communion to establish a one way link. In the case of your
will-broken slave here, you won't need to work to dominate
his aura, so it will just be the communion part you need
to learn."

"Ok, teach me how."

"Aura mind reading is an advanced technique. There are
several skills beyond the basics that one typically
learns first. We should at least go over the basics
of aura combat, and then go over some techniques for
soul healing before we get into aura mind reading."

Fifi nodded, "ok, so teach me the other stuff first,
but I want to get to mind reading as fast as possible.
In the mean time, teach me one of the mind reading
spells I can use until my aura technique gets better."

==============================================================

Fifi and Cora knelt facing once another on the sandy beach
next to where Fifi had summoned Cora on the far side of the
island. She hoped that the distance would help prevent any
accidental aura flair ups from bothering the townspeople.
They might all be pirates, but Cora still wanted to be a
good neighbor. The last thing she wanted was to have another
will-broken patient to rehabilitate.

"This exercise helps practice the basic skills required for
aura combat. I'm going to push against your aura, and you
push back. Feel the rhythm and try to match me. To start
we'll just push and pull, but we'll move onto aura wrestling
once you get into the groove of it. Ready?" Cora asked.

Fifi nodded, "yes."

"Ok, I'm going to push, and now you-" Cora was cut off as
Fifi's aura crushed down on her with enough force that she
couldn't talk. As quickly as it had come, the pressure was
withdrawn.

"Sorry, I didn't realize how hard I was pushing."

"No, I'm sorry I'm not strong enough to train you at your full
strength. You'll have to set your limit lower."

Fifi looked confused for a moment, then remembered that higher
level practitioners could intentionally limit their power to
a lower level. She'd never learned much about the practice because
too much power was never a problem until recently. "I don't know
how."

"Ah, that makes sense. Forgive me, I should have realized. Establishing
a limit is more than just holding back with your power. It involves placing
a seal on your own power. Cores contain the energy you use to activate
your powers or cast spells, and seeds are like valves that allow the power
out, adding a different flavor to the power of the seed as it escapes.
Establishing a limit is like necking down the valves. It will weaken your
powers by restricting the flow of magic out of your cores. The limit will
get broken if you get injured or choose to drop it, but once properly
established you should no longer need to concentrate on it, allowing you
to focus on your training. Training is the primary purpose of limiting your
power, though it does help a little with stealth."

"Ok, so how do I do it?" Fifi asked. Much of what Cora had just told her
matched up with her existing knowledge.

"Turn inward, focusing on your cores. Normally you focus on all the cores
you want to limit simultaneously, but your first core is so small it
doesn't matter, just focus on your second core. The challenge for you
will be acting on all six of your seeds at once. Feel them out, watch
them one by one until you can feel the magic flowing out of them. It
might help to visualize them as actual valves, or you might find some
other way of looking at them."

"Ok, I can feel the magic flowing out of them." Fifi reported.

"Already?" Cora asked in surprise.

"Is that bad? Do you think I should spend more time on it?"

"No, no, I'm just surprised you got a feel for it so quickly, it takes
most people much longer. I guess it's because you've spent so long
honing your magical control. Ok, now start squeezing off the flow,
forcing it down to a trickle. It's ok it it takes a-"

"I've restricted it to 10 times the level my first core emits. Is
that good?"

"Umm, yeah, yeah, perfect," Cora said, once more surprised by how
quickly her mistress had picked up a trick it took most practitioners
weeks or months to learn. "Now, the part many people find the hardest
is holding the magic steady enough that it takes shape and holds itself
in place. If you can't do this part, you'll be able to limit yourself
but only by maintaining concentration."

"Oh, I already stopped focusing on it. The limit seems to be holding
though. I held it steady, but just how I normally would. Did I do an
ok job? Will it fall apart in a few minutes?" Fifi exposed her core
and shifted her seeds forward so Cora could examine them. The seals
on her seeds were the best Cora had ever seen.

"N-no, that's great. How, um, how did you get them so smooth."

Fifi grinned, "smooth magic is kinda my thing. Can we do the aura
exercise now?"

"Yeah, yeah, we should. Ok I'll push, and now you push..." they
soon fell into a rhythm with Cora taking the lead. Fifi started
off a strange mixture of perfectly controlled and clumsy. Cora
could tell that Fifi's aura was moving exactly where the voluptuous
half elf wanted it to go, she just didn't know quite where to put
it. That rapidly changed as Fifi got the hang of things, and after
twenty minutes of practice, Cora couldn't have told the difference
between Fifi and any of her sister succubi in terms of the push
pull drill.

"Ok, I wasn't planning on doing this today, but you're clearly
ready for some more advanced aura combat. See if you can form
the edge of your aura into a spike," Cora demonstrated with
her own aura. Due to the inherently fuzzy nature of auras,
the tip of her spike was rather blunt, but it would allow
her to apply a lot more pressure to a single spot than simple
aura extension. "This is pretty tricky. Most practitioners
can't do it, so it's ok..." Cora trailed off, feeling the
spike Fifi had formed with her aura. The glassy smoothness
of Fifi's aura was evident in the spike as well, right down
to the wicked tip, which was far sharper than Cora's.

"Is this good?" Fifi smirked, at the expression on Cora's
face.

"Umm, yeah, that's good." Cora had only ever encountered anything
like it from the assassins of the Creeping Death guild, who
awakened sloth seeds in a special way to get smooth magic cores
like the one Fifi had. "Now, we spar. We'll each try to puncture
one another's aura. If one of us punctures the aura of our opponent,
we'll reset and go again. Ready?"

Fifi nodded, confident after how easily she had breezed through
all of Cora's earlier lessons. When their aura's met, she realized
she should not have been so confident. She had limited herself to
a level far below Cora's strength, and her familiar pressed in
on her from all sides. She thrust out with her aura spike, but
Cora's aura gave way before it, avoiding the sharp tip while
she thrust into Fifi with her own spike. Despite her greater
available strength, Cora had trouble getting through the glassy
wall of Fifi's aura, but eventually she did manage it. "Good,
again," Cora said. Fifi set her jaw and centered her spike,
determined to do better the second time.

Cora was shaken when they finished the sparring session. She had
still won most of the bouts, but that Fifi had won any at all
give her inexperience and limited power was shocking. Even
after Cora had told her to blunt the tip of her spike so she
could learn good technique, Fifi had managed to pierce her
aura once. The glassy surface of Fifi's smooth aura was much
harder to pierce than it would normally have been, but the
power differential between them had made up for that. The
overpowered half-elf had just taken to aura combat as
instinctively as any succubus Cora had ever met.

==================================================================

Water sheeted off Fifi as she emerged from the sea. When Cora
had advised her to force herself to break her habit of breathing
by going under water, Fifi had fallen in love with diving in
the crystal blue waters around the island. She now swam through
the reefs and explored under water caves for a few hours each
morning. She could feel the attention of all the men on the
water front as she emerged, which wasn't surprising considering
that her bathing suit consisted of a couple of shells magically
adhered to her nipples, mermaid style, and a tiny pair of red bikini bottom.

Shadow had been waiting for her on the shore, curled up in
a ball to drowse. He stirred to action when she emerged from
the water, falling in beside her like a faithful hound. He
was now the size of a medium sized dog, still small for
his age, but starting to look healthy. Fifi felt his happiness
to see her through their bond.

*I wish she was walking me like that, only on a leash,* Fifi
picked up the thought from a young pirate sitting at a table
outside the Wanton Widow reading one of the news papers brought in with
the last supply run. He wasn't looking at her, but she could
tell from his aura that every fiber of his being was focused
on her. He wasn't the only one. Though no one was staring at
her, she had the full attention of everyone in eyesight.

Sensing emotions was an important step along the way to reading
minds, so Cora had taught her how to do it early. She had
discovered the mix of fear and lust directed towards her she
had been expecting among the pirates, and, not wanting them
to be afraid of her, had pushed on their auras using minute
and impeccably timed pressure to dampen their fear emotions.
It was quite similar to how she smoothed magic when doing
alchemy. It was only afterwards that Cora told her emotional
control through raw aura manipulation, without the aid of
a seed that allowed it, was considered one of the most difficult
aura skills to master.

With the pirates fear suppressed, they had become much more
willing to approach her, and after being peppered with cat-calls
Fifi had decided that a little fear might be good for them
after all. She had been about to let the fear come back, when
she realized there were different sorts of lust directed at
her. Some men saw her plush body and wanted to hold her down
and fuck her within an inch of her life. Others wanted her
to do the same to them. With minute pushes on their auras,
she transformed lust of the first sort into the second sort.
Now, the pirates were every bit as respectful as they had
been when they were terrified of her, but because they yearned
desperately for her to dominate them rather than out of raw
fear. Fifi much preferred them like this. The fantasies they
came up with were quite entertaining.

Fifi could have dried herself with a spell, but she chose
not to, preferring the feel of the sea breeze on her alabaster
skin. Before her final awakening, she would have used alchemal
sunscreen to protect herself from the intense sunlight that
washed Aruck every day, not having had the mana to maintain
a sun shield for very long. Now, she didn't even need to bother.
Her body was frozen at the moment she completed her path. Her
skin would never sunburn or even tan again.

She approached the young pirate whose thoughts she had picked
up. His internal monologue went entirely non-verbal when
he realized she was paying attention to him, and Fifi smirked
at the way her unreasonably perky udders dominated his mind.
"Hey Gareth, could you be a dear and fetch James for me?" She
plucked his name out of his mind. She noted his shock that
she knew his name absently, but she didn't get to savor what
it did to his schoolboy crush on her because Cora had launched
an aura sneak attack on her halfway through the sentence.

Fifi kept herself limited down to an infinitesimal fraction
of her power, as she had on their first day of practice, though
she now also added some roughness to her seed limiters so her
aura wasn't as smooth. Despite the severe handicap, she dealt
with her familiar's aura attack deftly, forming hundreds of
spikes to deal with the dozens that Cora launched at her.
Cora had the edge in power and experience, but Fifi made up
for it with speed and control. Being able to form more than
five or ten aura spikes was considered quite impressive for
mortal practitioners. The dozens and dozens Cora was able to
produce were due to the succubus' innate talent for aura
play and her centuries of experience. It wasn't enough. Each
of Cora's more powerful spikes were surrounded by four or
more of Fifi's spikes, which worked in concert to hammer
at the sides of Cora's attacks in quick succession until they
collapsed. Fifi's limiters made it impossible for her to form
the razor sharp aura spikes she normally produced, so she had
to rely on rapid fire strikes to wear down Cora's aura and
collapse her weapons.

"Y-yes, Mistress Mazz, I-I'll go look for him," Gareth stammered.

Fifi had Cora well in hand now, so she was able to focus most of
her attention on the flustered pirate. "Thank you, that would
be lovely," she purred. He got up and ran off to look for Prince
Merv.

Fifi sat down at one of the tables next to the one that Gareth
had been sitting at, with Shadow curling up at her feet. As
she sat down, she punched through Cora's aura to her core
and surrounded it. Normally, while it was relatively easy to
puncture the edge of an opponent's aura and force a partial
collapse, the going got tougher the closer to an opponent's
core one got. In combat aura duels were important, but not
the whole story. Achieving aura dominance over someone made
it harder for them to use their abilities, causing them to
manifest slower and less powerfully, but it wasn't definitive.
If an aura combatant could get a grip on their opponent's core
however, they could completely cut them off from their magic.
Fifi and Cora had discovered that Fifi's dominion seed made it
much easier for her to pierce deep into her opponent's aura.
There was a slight increase in difficulty, but it was nowhere
near what it should have been. It meant that once Fifi achieved
penetration, she could exploit it mercilessly, rolling up the
entirety of Cora's aura and taking the demon's singular core
in her grip. Few magical creatures had the multi-core paths of
mortals, instead having a single large core. In some ways that
made Fifi more like a magical creature than a mortal practitioner,
considering how insignificant her first core was next to her second
core.

One of the bar maids came out to hand Fifi a tall glass of lemonade.
The girl was brimming with worshipful admiration for the sexy
practitioner she was serving. It was a stark contrast with the
contempt she had secretly harbored for Fifi at the way the midnight
haired witch flaunted her body. The handful of other women on the island
had shared similar sentiments until Fifi reshaped their emotions
in the same way she'd turned all the male residents into lustful
submissives. She may have gone a little overboard, but she didn't
feel guilty about it. When she had first sensed their contempt, she had
been pretty pissed and immediately put them in their place with
some well timed aura manipulation. She just wished she had been able
to do the same to deal with women jealous of her looks when she was
younger. It was just so much more pleasant to have them like this.
"Thanks Viv," Fifi accepted the glass.

*She's so sexy and amazing, I wish I was like that,* Vivian thought.

Fifi took a sip to hide her smirk at the thought from the other woman.
She hadn't let up on Cora once she took hold of her core, and she could
sense that the way she was forcing the power of her dominion seed down
on Cora was quickly pushing the succubus towards the edge of orgasm.
Cora had been hiding in an ally across the street using an invisibility
spell, and she had remained in place when Fifi punctured her aura.
The subby demon had been unable to resist hiking up her skirt and
plunging her fingers into her snatch when she felt Fifi press down
on her core. She knew Fifi didn't mind, because with Fifi gripping
her core like she was, Cora couldn't do anything without Fifi allowing
it. That would have been true even if Cora weren't already Fifi's
magical slave. The effortlessness with which her mistress had dominated
her despite being limited had Cora sopping, and the domineering pressure
of Fifi's aura soon pushed her over the edge. She was glad she had
thought to cast <silence> on herself in preparation for the attack,
because otherwise her moans would have been quite embarrassing.

Gareth brought Prince Merv out to her. He stood dully while Fifi
finished her drink, heedless of the world around him. Fifi had
been spending a few hours a day sitting with him and trying to
pick up any minute desires he might feel ever since she learned
how to read minds through auras, but so far she hadn't been able
to pick anything up. She had decided she would start bringing
him around with her so she could monitor him in the background
at all times. Spreading her focus across a wide array of things
was the key to Fifi's special brand of alchemy, and had turned out
to make her an incredibly talented aura manipulator. Spreading her
focus and multitasking weren't quite the same thing, but Fifi
was still much better at multitasking than most, so she was hopeful
she would be able to monitor Merv while doing other things even
when that wasn't normally advisable.

*Come on, time for spell practice,* Fifi pushed the thought into
Cora's mind. She could have used the familiar bond, but wanted a
chance to practice her aura telepathy.

Merv and Cora trailed after her as she walked across the island,
following a densely wooded footpath until they came out on the white
sand beach opposite the village. Fifi spent most of her time here,
working with Cora to build up her magical skills. At first, they
had focused exclusively on aura manipulation, but since it turned
out that Fifi's native talent for the art had made her master everything
she needed to know to start healing Merv's will incredibly fast,
they had soon started mixing some normal magic into their practice.
Fifi had been very excited to learn the battle magic she had never
been able to try while at the academy, so she had been focusing on
learning force magic, a sub-discipline of evocation that focused
on speed and precision.

Frustratingly, none of the spells Fifi had learned could make anywhere
near full use of the power at her disposal. Normally, a practitioner
with magic seeds steadily built up a knowledge base of more and more
powerful spells as they walked their path. Spells able to handle the
power of a late path mage built on the simpler spells they had learned
early on their path. Fifi had never gone through that process, so she
had to painstakingly learn at least some of the lower level spells she
would have picked up along the way before she could handle holding the
more complex spell schema in her mind to cast with her full power.

To start off her spell practice, she went through all the spells
she already knew, forming their schema in her mind and imbuing them
with magic without actually casting them. After doing that ten
times for each spell, she ran through and cast them all to completion,
summoning force shields, manifesting a <mage hand>, and conjuring
a <lessor force whip>.

She saved <force ball> for last, knowing Shadow would want to play
with the manifestations she made. Every practitioner had a unique
color for their force effects, and hers had a rare multi-colored
hew that reflected the different seeds in her core. The black of
her death seed dominated, but flecks of green from her life and
rebirth seeds and gold from her dragon seed were set in the dark
field. It made her <force balls> look like big fist sized opals.

She sent the balls gliding around the beach. As soon as she conjured
one, Shadow shot to his feet, the normally lazy dragon suddenly
laser focused on chasing the balls down. He wasn't fast enough to
keep up with the balls when she moved them as fast as she could,
so she kept them deliberately slow. Whenever Shadow caught one,
he slashed it apart with his claws, bursting the relatively weak
force construct. Fifi started lifting the balls higher and higher
into the air to force Shadow to jump after them. He still had yet
to go on a proper flight, but his wing-assisted jumps now spanned
eighty feet at a time when he was determined to catch a ball.
Eventually, Shadow grew tired and wandered over to pant in the
shade of a tree. Fifi took this as the signal to transition from
practicing spells she already knew to the one she was focused
on learning. She began to form the spell schema for <force darts>,
with Cora watching and correcting her whenever she made a mistake.

Fifi was making slower progress than usual because of the need to
monitor Merv while she practiced, but she was glad she had brought him
along because she felt a tiny flash of annoyance from him when she completed
the spell and sent five darts of force rocketing through the air to
chase down the illusory targets that Cora had conjured for her.
Forgetting all about the spell, Fifi carefully bolstered the tiny scrap
of Merv's will with her own, supporting it without snuffing it out
by drowning it in force. Cora had warned her that she would probably
quash Merv's desires the first few times she felt one, but her impeccable
control stood her in good stead and after a few minutes she had helped
his annoyance build to the point that he was able to speak.

"You shouldn't be working on combat magic."

"Oh, umm, why?" Fifi asked. She could feel the motive force of Merv's
own will recede, but now she was curious about what he meant, so she
pushed him to answer with her own will. He was once again her puppet.

"You have several combat capable seeds. The dragon seed, as I've
told you, acts as a combination of the might seed, the magic seed,
and a unique seed giving you access to draconian abilities like
scale armor, conjured wings, a breath weapon, and manifested claws.
Dragon seed practitioners generally learn some combat magic to
round out our ranged attacking options, but you already have
seeds well suited for ranged combat. The necrotic energy of your
death seed is versatile and flexible, and will allow you to make
use of your talent for magical control. Your life seed might take
a little more practice, but will allow you to be an excellent
ranged controller by manipulating plants. The adventuring tutors
I had growing up would tell you to focus your magical study on
utility spells. Things like teleportation, earth shifting, and
spells for stealth are a better use of your time than learning
combat magic."

"Huh," Fifi nodded, "that's a really good point. This must have
been quite frustrating for you to watch if that was what finally
got your will moving on its own. I still want to finish learning
this force darts spell, but then I'll start working towards
a teleport."

===================================================================

Fifi's mage hands pulled the cords at her back tight, cinching
the black leather armor Andrew Snipes had custom ordered for
her. Having a pirate lord eager to curry favor with her was
quite convenient. Turning back and forth in front of the illusion
mirror she had conjured, Fifi liked what she saw. The armor
covered her from head to toe, but it clung to her figure so
tightly that it still left nothing to the imagination.

She gave a little jump, and was happy to see that the stiff
leather at her chest mostly prevented her heavy breasts from
jiggling about. When she had started taking Merv's advice and
training to use the physicality of her dragon seed, she had
soon found that her fertility-goddess curves were not well
suited for swinging a sword. She was hoping that the tight
leather would keep her tits from flopping about too much
while she got her ass handed to her when sparring with Merv,
though she was pretty sure her figure would always be an
impediment when it came to that sort of thing. She was planning
on putting some enchantments on the armor which would make
it do its job even better, but even just as mundane leather
it was already doing a good job.

Fifi was about to head to the beach she practiced on every
day when she felt a flash of desire from Merv. She carefully
bolstered it, gently breathing life into his fragile will
with her own. When his will grew strong enough for her to
make out the details of his desire, she giggled. Apparently,
the prince was a fan of her new armor. She helped his will
build to the point where he was taking action. He took a
few steps towards her and pressed up against her, reaching
dow to grab her ass, his strong hands sinking into her pliable
flesh. Fifi smiled and pulled him close to herself. He
leaned down to kiss her on the neck, and she leaned back
into it until she felt his will gutter out. Heat had
gathered between her legs, and for the moment, she
no longer cared that had just reverted to her puppet.
She spun around and kissed him fiercely, running her
hands over his well defined body. His lips wouldn't
move on their own, so she moved them for him, but
the wrongness of it grew harder and harder to ignore.
She broke off with a shuddering breath. "Sorry. Sorry,
I shouldn't have," she muttered, pushing him away.
How frustrating.

She looked over to where Cora was sitting in the corner
watching them. She could feel Cora's frustration that she
had stopped through their bond. The succubus had been able
to feed of the second hand sexual energy, even if it was
just the barest morsel, and now she was frustrated at
being denied more. Cora could sense the annoyance that Fifi
felt, and knew better than to urge her mistress to have
her way with the prince as she wished her to. Instead, the
two women broke their gaze without saying anything.

"Come on everyone," Fifi said, sweeping out of the room.
Shadow crept out from under the bed, where he had been
curled up, and Merv gathered two wooden practice swords
before following Fifi mindlessly.

As they walked through town, Fifi refrained from the usual
aura games she played to push people's emotions around.
Aura play wasn't illegal or nearly as invasive as most mind
control magic. Everyone had aura interactions all the time,
though usually at a subconscious level, so what she normally
did was really just being way better at it than anyone else.
She was continually puppeteering Merv due to his broken will,
which she didn't normally have much of a problem with, but
after having just fought back the urge to have sex with the
mindfucked prince she was a bit put off from mental manipulation
of any kind for the moment. Someone else might have reevaluated
their whole approach over an incident like this, but Fifi had
always had fairly flexible morals was pretty unapologetic about
it. Growing up on the streets like she had had taught her that
she had to look out for herself first and getting caught up
by worrying about stuff like that was no way to survive.

When she got to the beach, she ran through her usual
warmup of practicing all the spells she knew, but once
she rapidly ran through the small handful she had managed
to learn to cast subconsciously, she quickly lost focus.
She wound up casting <force ball> and playing with Shadow
until it was time to head back to the village for lunch.
Shadow sensed her disquiet through their bond
and went out of his way to play up his delight at chasing
the force balls down. He managed to draw a smile from her
when he frolicked in the surf. Eventually, he grew tired
enough to stop chasing the balls, and when Fifi didn't move
on to practicing the <tracker's mark> utility spell she
was working on, he walked over to rub up against her.
She sat down on the sand and he rested his head on her
lap, looking up at her with his big black eyes, his
eyebrow fronds furrowed in concern. She ran her hands
over the warm scales on his neck, "thanks Shadow."

"Fifi sad, Shadow sad," he said in a hesitant hissing
voice. Shadow had spoken before, but so far it had just
been single words.

"Yeah, Fifi sad," she agreed. She wasn't even sure why.
She had controlled herself quickly and hadn't crossed
any personal lines. It was probably down to the way it
reminded her of how she had watched friends get taken
advantage of before she went to university. She had
managed to avoid it herself through a combination of
good luck, prickly attitude and sufficient competence
to be recognized by powerful underworld figures, but
she had had some close calls.

"Shadow bad?" he asked.

"No, no, of course not baby, you weren't bad. Shadow not bad."
He seemed satisfied with that, and snuggled closer to her.

==================================================================

Fifi sighed contentedly as she felt Merv's strong hands press
into her back. As a practitioner with a complete path, Fifi's
body was no longer flesh and blood, having been converted to
pure magic when she activated her second core, so her muscles
weren't really muscles, and they couldn't really ache or have
the tension worked out of them in the usual way. It did feel
nice though.

Merv's will had been slowly but surely recovering. He was still
dull and listless on his own, but when he was with Fifi he was
more engaged with the world. She still had to pay attention to
his thoughts and bolster them, but his will was now almost always
active so long as she was there to support him. It had turned
out that mostly, what the prince wanted was her, which Fifi didn't
mind one bit. Their relationship was a strange one, and could
never be equal, but she didn't really feel like she was taking
advantage of the prince since the one part of his mind she wasn't
controlling had initiated the whole thing. Considering the way
the handsome royal looked and how skillful those hands of his
turned out to be, she was certainly on board with the whole thing.
She had come to think of him as a kind of pet with incredible
abs. She had often thought about the fact that the Merv's treatment amounted
to essentially spoiling him completely rotten. She was happy that
spoiling him mostly just meant letting him do what a part of her
had been hoping he would pretty much since she had seen him.

His hands moved down from her back to start kneading her huge
ass and Fifi let soft noises of pleasure. The sensation was
quite pleasant, but it was really the reverence she sensed
in the prince that she found the most enjoyable. He wasn't
just massaging her booty, he was worshiping it. Her massive,
perfectly formed cheeks were an alter to feminine sexuality
at which he was praying. She knew he wanted nothing more than
to lift up her hips and plunge his shaft into her. In a moment,
she would let him. As she had had plenty of opportunity to learn,
the dragon seed didn't just make him more muscular than was
typical for an elf, and her loins were doing an impression of
a small furnace at her anticipation of feeling his magically
enlarged dick enter her waiting snatch.

Just as she was about to lift her hips in invitation, she
felt a ship come into range of her aura senses. Her aura
senses spread out around Aruck for 20 miles in every direction,
though they could have covered more ground if she wanted.
The hostile intent in the sailors on the new ship was obvious,
she she rolled over on her side and pushed Merv away, "Hold
on, I feel a ship approaching. They don't seem too friendly.
I think I should help deal with them."

"Oh, yeah, you probably should. Can you tell who is on it?"
Merv asked, sitting back. Despite his words, Fifi could feel
his disappointment at being interrupted.

She pushed her aura sensed further out and quickly felt 7
more ships much like the first. "They feel like a different
group of pirates. I'm not sure exactly why they are coming
here, but my guess is that they are trying to take over.
Maybe I should let them? This isn't really my business."

"We'll get caught up in it no matter what. A new pirate lord
might not be as accommodating as Andrew. They might try to
do something stupid like take Shadow." Merv pointed out.

Fifi felt a flash of anger at the thought, "yeah, I like
things the way they are. I'll be back soon." She stood up
and conjured some <force hands> to hold up her leather armor
pants so she could step into them. Another set of hands held up
the top so she could slip it on, then began cinching the laces
at the back. She had just finished the alchemal treatment to
toughen the leather significantly, though she was still planning
to inscribe some runes to make it even stronger on it once she had
practiced a bit more with high level artifice. She didn't bother with
shoes, having grown to like the feeling of sand between her toes,
and not needing to worry about hurting her path-complete feet on
much short of enchanted steel even without manifesting her dragon
scales.

She conjured her wings and leapt into the air, rapidly flying back
in the direction of the village. She spotted Andrew talking to one
of his captains on the single ship currently docked in the harbor
and angled down, landing on the deck next to them with a thump,
"there are eight ships approaching, and they don't seem too friendly.
I'm thinking I'll go tell them to get lost. You want to come?"

Andrew blinked. He had gotten used to the beautiful practitioner staying
on his island over the months she had been there, and had started to
think of her as a sort of vacationing noblewoman. Someone it was important
to keep happy, but not necessarily a person who could explode into
devastating violence at any point. Now, he remembered how afraid he had
been when she had first showed up. There was something
feral about her that had been hiding beneath the surface. "Umm, yes,
yeah, I'll come."

"Great," <force hands> formed a seat for Andrew and grabbed him under
the arms, lifting him into the air as Fifi jumped back into the sky.
He looked down at the water rushing beneath him uneasily. A small black
shape shot towards them rapidly as they flew away from the island,
and Shadow pulled along side, a fierce scowl on his face. "Shadow,
go back to James. I don't want them seeing you." Fifi said. *Lame,*
he responded through their bond. Shadow's vocabulary was still small,
but that had been one of his favorite words for the past few weeks.
"Keep James safe for me," she said, using the prince's alias due to
Andrew's presence. She felt Shadow's annoyance at being left out
give way to determination, though it was touched by a bit of suspicion
that she might just be telling him to protect Merv to get him out of
the way.

They rapidly skimmed over the waves, and within moments were closing
in on the small flotilla crashing through the waves, red sails bulging
with wind. Andrew did his best to appear calm, though it was a bit difficult
with the water rushing by faster than a galloping horse. When they were
half a mile away, an archer on the prow of one of the ships began sending
frost covered arrows towards them. With the lightning reflexes her
completed path gave her, Fifi raised a hand and conjured a shield of
necrotic energy. The arrows hit the shield and disappeared, falling towards
the waves as handfuls of dust that got blown apart in the sea breeze.
They covered the remaining distance in thirty seconds and the closer they
got, the more projectiles and spells were sent their way, but Fifi's
shield swallowed them all.

When she was a few hundred yards from the ships, she let out an aura
pulse that stunned the pirates, putting an abrupt end to the torrent
of attacks. "Do you recognize anyone?" she asked Andrew, bringing
them to a stop and hovering by extending her wings and flexing her
dragon seed.

Andrew examined the ships for a moment. Fifi cast <far viewing>, one of
the utility spells she had been working on, and light bent to make the pirates
he was looking at seem closer. She could easily make out the faces of all the
pirates with her enhanced senses, but Andrew was not so lucky. After a
few moments of study he said, "there, that's the white queen," he pointed
to a slight woman in a white three piece suit standing in the forecastle
of one of the ships, "she's another pirate lord, she must be trying to
make a play on Aruck or something."

"Hmm, well, why don't we ask her." Fifi beat her spectral wings and shot
forward, dragging Andrew along with her <mage hands>. She landed lightly
on the deck, wiggling her toes as she enjoyed the sensation of the
the smooth planks beneath her feet. She set Andrew down next to her
and walked up to the frozen pirate queen. She withdrew her aura
from the smaller woman, though she maintained her grip on the rest
of her crew. Fifi's dominion seed made it easy to maintain a firm grip
on the thousands of pirates she was keeping aura suppressed.

"Hiaya! Welcome to the neighborhood!" Fifi said with a grin and a little
wave.

"F-forgive me, m-mistress," the pirate queen feel to her knees and threw
herself on the ground in supplication, "I humbly apologize for whatever
I have done to offend you."

"Oh, no need for that, you can go ahead and get up. I just wanted to
come out here and say hi when I noticed you sailing for Aruck! I
guess there was a little misunderstanding and you started shooting
at me, what a silly little mixup! Don't worry, I understand how
these things go, you get caught up in the heat of the moment, one
thing leads to another, before long everyone is flinging spells
for no good reason."

"Th-thank you for your understanding Mistress," the white queen
was still shaking like a leaf.

"So, anyway, Andrew here, my, umm, I guess you're my landlord?
Yeah, my landlord, and I just wanted to come out here, say hello,
see if you and all of your heavily armed friends are planning on
coming to Aruck. The thing is we weren't really expecting you,
so we haven't done anything to get ready! I know, so embarrassing,
I'm such a ditz. The thing to do when you have guests is to throw
a big party, but we don't have enough to feed you all! Heck,
I don't think Andrew here has enough tables and chairs. You
don't have a secret party warehouse do you Andrew?"

"I, umm, I can't say that I do," he admitted to the aggressively
cheerful half-elf.

"Shucks, oh well. So there it is, looks like we can't set up to
host you for a good little while," she pouted, "I'm sorry, terribly
inconvenient to change plans like this, though to be fair you did
kinda forget to tell us about the plan. I know, I know, these
things happen so easy to forget stuff," she giggled, "believe me
I do it all the time. But that's the situation, so I think maybe
it would be better if we could reschedule this little get-together
for a time that's better for all of us. When's good for you Andrew?"

"I, umm, well-"

"How about, oh," Fifi put her finger on her lower lip and looked
up as if thinking hard, "how about never? Does never work? Does
that work for you Andrew?"

"Yeah, never works fine for me," he nodded.

"Great! And how about you beige bitch or whatever the fuck your name
is. Does never work for you?"

"Y-yes, th-thank you for your m-mercy," the cowed pirate queen stammered.

"Alright then, tootles!" Fifi tapped a perfectly manicured nail on the railing,
releasing a tiny drop of death magic before manifesting her spectral dragon
wings and taking to the skies once more. Below her, the rot was already
beginning to spread from the point she had tapped. It wasn't going to stop until
the entire flagship had melted into the sea, though she had made sure it would
leave the sailors untouched to be fished out of the ocean by their comrades.

===================================================================================

Merv sat with his back against a palm tree looking out at the sun washed beach
and crystal blue water. He had come back to himself in the last few months,
but he still felt listless whenever Fifi wasn't around. "Is she coming back yet?"
he asked Shadow.

The black dragon, who was still just the size of a mastiff rather than the pony
size he should have been at his age, lifted his head off his tail, "Think so,
I felt her turn around a little while ago." Though Merv and Shadow were both
magically bonded to Fifi, the nature of their bonds was quite different. Shadow's
bond was one of equals, while Merv's was and entirely one way slave bond. Even
Cora's bond was more equal than Merv's, though not by much. It meant that
Fifi could easily sense things about him, but he had no real way to track her.

"Oh, well then she'll be back soon."

Now that he was roused from his drowsing half-nap, Shadow decided to take advantage
of the fact that he had Merv alone. "Merv, why are there scale polishers in the royal
dragon stables? It seems lame that their whole job is polishing someone's scales,
don't they have riders to polish their scales with spells the way Fifi and you
do for me? You both do lots of other stuff." Shadow had developed a keen interest
in the way his kin lived in the royal court of Seravore, and as his command of
language had improved he had been using it to pry more information on the subject out of Merv.

"Well, dragons are greatly revered by my family and the people of Seravore, so
a great many servants are employed to take care of them as beings of such dignity
deserve," he explained.

"Lame, sounds like they are spoiled. Fifi says I should grow up to be independent
and able to take care of myself. She says you never know who you can trust on the
streets," the little dragon chuffed contemptuously, "I'm gonna start learning magic
soon, and then I'm going to learn to cast <cleanse> on myself so I don't need to rely
on any scale polishers."

Merv smiled, "That's very admirable, but it's not just a question of cleaning your
scales. Don't you like it when Fifi and I rub your wing muscles after a flight?"

Shadow looked thoughtful, "yeah, that is nice, but it's still lame to have someone
whose whole job is rubbing wing muscles. I bet the fire prince never did anything like
that."

Merv held down a laugh, thinking about the reputation for debauchery the legendary
warrior had. He had left that part out of the stories he had told Shadow about the
first dragon seeded practitioner. "You'd be surprised. The fire prince wasn't all
swordplay and dragonfire you know."

"Really?"

"Yeah, have I ever told you the story of what happened when the fire prince discovered
the island of Renada?"

Shadow blinked up at him, "no."

"Well not too long after he had met Hiv and awakened his first dragon seed, the
fire prince was out on his fishing boat. This was before they called him the fire
prince, back when he was just a simple fisherman..." Shadow shuffled around so he
could face the elvish prince more fully, settling in so his
black scales could soak up the sun while he listened to the story.

"...but eventually the storm began to blow itself out and the fire prince
began looking around for land..." Merv trailed off as Fifi emerged from the surf,
water streaming off her curves as she walked up onto the beach. As always when
Merv saw her for the first time in a little while, the sight of her voluptuous
form filled him with desire and he felt the listlessness of her absence disappear
as her will expertly bolstered his own. Her control was so impeccable that he
could only just feel her supporting him if he concentrated, otherwise it felt
like his own will was fully restored though he knew it was only due to her
active support.

"Hey cuties," she said, coming to a stop in front of the two of them. She
squatted down and rubbed Shadow's serpentine neck while he pressed up
into her. She leaned over and gave Merv a languid kiss that ignited his
desire even more. "Shadow, I have to fix Merv's will, do you mind giving
us a moment?"

The little dragon made an exaggerated retching noise, "fine, but you have to
finish the story later, and I don't want to feel any of your degeneracy on
the rider bond." He got up and leapt into the air.

"Degeneracy? Did you teach him that word?" Fifi asked.

"I have no idea where he got it. He's been making Cora read all those books to him,
maybe he got it from one of them."

She chuckled and sank down to straddle him. They were on the far side of the
island from the village and her aura senses told her they were alone.
"I have a feeling he's going to become even more of a handful once he learns
to read on his own."

"Ummm, yeah, I..." Merv trailed off as Fifi squirmed closer, bringing his face
inches from her nearly naked breasts.

"I could feel you missing me when I was out swimming," she told him.

"I always do,"

"Mmmmm, yeah, I know," she released the magic holding her shells in place and
cast <sand shield> to keep the sand off their skin before casting
<teleport object> in rapid fire succession to remove Merv's clothes along
with her bikini bottoms. The boost in physical power from her new body had been
immediate, but the mental boost hadn't been immediately obvious. Now, after a year
on the island, Fifi's mental faculties had significantly expanded, which allowed to
cast spells much faster than before. It had been slow at first, but her mind got faster,
crisper, and more precise with every passing day now. It was as if her new body
provided the substraight for a more powerful mind, but it took time for her existing
mortal mind to expand to take advantage of all that power. She had just recently started
some meditation techniques designed to allow her to split her mind into multiple
channels, a technique used by magically inclined high level practitioners.

Calling on her life seed, she reached out and felt Merv's lifeforce. It was stronger
and more vibrant than any mid-path practitioner had a right to, much less one who
had pure dragon cores. Expanding your lifeforce to extend your lifespan before attaining
immortality when you completed your path was considered one of the hardest things for
a practitioner to do. It could generally only be accomplished though the use of
extremely rare and valuable natural treasures, and most of those were only usable
by those with life cores. Merv's monstrous lifeforce would allow him
to live for thousands of years despite the typical lifespan of mid-path practitioners
being measured in the hundreds, but Fifi could detect that it was ever so slightly
smaller than it had been when she had probed it yesterday. It was such a minute difference,
that anyone who wasn't an alchemy genius would have had no chance of spotting it, but
Fifi's magical senses had been more precise than most late path practitioners even when she
had just a single core even if they hadn't had the same range, and path completion had
multiplied both their sensitivity and strength. *Let's fix that,* she thought to herself.

They had discovered that the healing milk Fifi had used to resurrect Shadow was
a lifeforce expanding natural treasure when playing out Merv's desire to suck
on Fifi's nipples during one of their will strengthening sessions. Since then,
Fifi made it a point to keep Merv's lifeforce topped up, not least because a
side effect of pumping the prince full of life energy was a noticeable increase
in his vigor and virility. She shifted herself so she could slip a nipple into
his mouth and let down her milk. He began gulping it down greedily, though only
the first few drops had any impact on his lifeforce due to how close he already
was to the maximum for a man standing where he did on his path. The rest, was
essentially wasted though it was a natural treasure so precious that wars had
literally been fought over the equivalent of a mouthful of her milk. Despite all
her power, Fifi could never have created something like it directly. It was
a natural treasure that could only have been formed in the intense seed event
of Shadow's rebirth, and likely would have reverted to an more mundane healing
brew within minutes of the event if Fifi's path completion hadn't locked her
body into its final shape. Instead, her watermelon sized breasts were permanently
full of a natural treasure so valuable she could buy a small kingdom with a
cup.

Merv's body was filled to overflowing with life energy after the first few swallows,
overcharging his muscles with strength. His hands dug into the soft flesh of Fifi's
ass, pulling her closer to him and grinding her pussy against his throbbing cock.
She slid herself up and cast <telekinesis> to guide his girthy 10" shaft into her
tight pussy. She grabbed the back of his head and shifted him sideways, shoving him
down to the sand as his back moved off the trunk of the palm tree he had been sitting
against. Her massive tit swallowed up his face, and she cast <water breathing> on
him since he was not yet far enough along his path that his lungs had disappeared.
Through the link she had established when she had broken his will, she could easily
see what he desired, and set about fulfilling those desires as she began to ride
him with wild abandon. Though her plush body made her appear to be a soft courtesan,
there was no distinction between fat and muscle in terms of the strength of her magical
flesh, so when she slammed her hips down onto her pinned lover it was with enough force
that she would have done some real damage if he wasn't halfway down the dragon path.
Her thicker than usual frame and oversized core would already have made her far stronger than
a typical path complete practitioner, but on top of that the dragon seed was equivalent to
a might seed. It meant that Fifi had to constantly hold back, and she was doing so even now,
but if Merv wanted his accidental captor to dominate him physically, she was more than
equipped for the job. He might have been too self-conscious to ask her to do so had they
become lovers normally, but as it was there was no hiding his inner desires from the
gorgeous half-elf having her way with him.

Fifi rode him ragged gasping softly and tensing up from time to time as a series of rolling
orgasms came over her in waves. She steadily drained his stamina though she was doing
far more of the work. Just surviving the onslaught of his demanding lover rapidly drained
the reserves of vigor that her milk had created. He felt like his body was beginning to give out when
she allowed him to cum by releasing the aura grip that was preventing him from orgasming
(it turned out having a succubus for an aura play instructor meant she had the opportunity
to learn lots of ways to use her aura in bed).

Afterwards, she continued to lounge on top of him, leaving his still-erect dick inside her.
Leaning down to kiss him she said, "you're getting better faster. It won't be long now until
you're healed."

"Yeah," he raised a hand to twine a lock of her midnight hair around his index finger.
"Yeah, not long now," he ran his fingers over the tip of her ear, noting how short it
felt compared with his own.

"What will you do then?" It was a question that had seemed so far away when they first
got to Aruck, but was now feeling increasingly relevant.

"Maybe I'll stay here with you. The kingdom can survive without me. It's not as if I'm
the heir."

"Mmmmm, that would be nice. We can just live out our days on the beach, providing protection
a band of pirates in exchange for a place to call our own. Maybe we could even take to the
high seas ourselves," she grinned.

"You would make a very sexy pirate queen," he said.

"I'd make a very sexy anything,"

"That's true, well, maybe not *anything*. It wouldn't be very sexy if you polymorphed
into a trash can,"

She giggled, "you got me there."

They continued lounging in the morning sun, their limbs twined together as they
chatted occasionally but mostly just enjoyed the natural splendor of the tropical
bay. *Are you guys done being gross yet?* Shadow sent through the bond he shared
with Fifi.

*Yeah, we're done,* Fifi replied. Out loud she said, "Shadow's coming back. We
better get dressed." <teleport object> wasn't precise enough to put their clothes
back on, so they had to get dressed the old fashioned way. There was a dedicated
utility spell called <quick don> that Fifi kept meaning to learn, but she still
hadn't had time to pick it up. She had been doing less studying and more lounging
around on the beach lately.

After magically adhering her sea shells to her nipples once again, then casting
<teleport object> to summon a silk robe from her room on the other side of the
island, she lay down on her side with her head on Merv's chest. The robe and a
few others like it had been a gift from Andrew as thanks for protecting Aruck.
She had treated it alchemally to make it strong enough to stop an mundane
arrow, so she wasn't worried about the sand damaging it. Her eyes were half lidded
and slowly drifting towards total closure when she suddenly started awake.
*Shadow! Hide, dive as deep as you can,* she sent down her bond with the
little dragon. She could share spells with him through their bond, and she
used that now to cast <water breathing> on him, overcharging the spell to
make it last as long as possible.

*What's happening? Is the cabal coming?* he asked at the same time that
Merv said aloud, "what is it?"

Fifi let the robe she had so recently donned slide to the ground and called
on her dragon seed. Thick black scales sprouted over her skin, forming a
dense armor. Her nails grew into wicked claws and her eyes took on a reptilian
appearance. *Yes, let me deal with this. I don't want you getting hurt,*
she sent to Shadow while telling Merv, "your family seems to have found us.
I can feel a flight of 20 dragons approaching. Most of the cabal seems to
be with them."

"Ok, maybe don't greet them in dragon scale? Seeing a non-royal wielding a
dragon seed will make them see red and I think there's a chance we can
talk it out. I'll explain things to them. If we can get them to examine my
will they'll realize that you're in the process of healing me."

"You don't show up with a flight of half the dragons in Seravore just to
negotiate. They're trying to sneak up on us, suppressing their auras."
Anyone else would have missed them until it was far too late, but there was
no hiding from Fifi's magical senses. Ever since the white queen had tried
to attack Aruck she had been extending her senses out, reaching further and further
as her mind expanded and they now covered 100 miles in every direction.
The approaching dragons and their riders had managed to evade her senses for
a few miles once they got within range, but it hadn't taken her long to pick
them up.

"Well, they don't know the whole story, they just know I disappeared."

"Hmm, you might be right. We should at least try to talk." She moved the
robe back to her hands with <teleport object> and let her scales fade
as she put it back on. "Stay close to me though, I want a hostage,"
she grinned.

"You say that like I'm not literally your will broken prisoner,"
he chuckled.

"Oh hush," Fifi straightened. She could feel the royal cabal approaching
fast. She was still thinking about how she would try to explain herself
when a white armored figure appeared next to Merv, her hand mere
millimeters above his shoulder. Before she could react, the snow white gauntlet
had dropped to Merv's shoulder and they both flickered away. Merv had tried
to resist the teleport, but is was impossible for a mid-path practitioner
to resist a path complete space practitioner's teleport when they were in
direct contact. If Fifi had had a moment to think about it, she would have
realized the armored figure was probably Gerthi Ha'az, one of the handful
of cabalists who had completed their paths. She was never given the chance
to make that realization though because a fraction of a second later, a
lance of focused dragonfire slammed into her like the spear of an avenging
god.

Fifi had felt powerful energies stirring in the flight of approaching dragons,
but had hoped they would stand down after talking. If she had more experience,
she might have realized that the spells she was feeling were a focusing array
meant to concentrate and accelerate the chaotic deluge of raw dragonfire. All
20 dragons had pumped their breath into the array at once, creating a beam
of immolation that could batter down the very gates of hell. Dragonfire has
a physicality to it not found in other sorts of flame, so it didn't just
burn Fifi, it slammed her into the ground, driving her body dozens of meters
into the sand and creating a massive crater. A moment later Gerthi flickered
into being on the edge of the crater, taking hold of space to pin Fifi in
place.

The strike would have completely incinerated any demon below the rank of prince
completely, yet though Fifi's magical flesh blackened and crumbled to ash, when
the beam of flame abated only half of her body had been incinerated, hardly a
fatal wound for someone who had no need for any particular organs. Her flesh
was already regenerating. She was on track to be as good as new in half a
second, but the cabalists and dragons attacking her were not newcomers to their
power. Fifi had transformed overnight and her mind was like a candleflame
only just realizing that it had a whole forest of dried wood to use to turn
into a wildfire. The cabalists had had to fight and scrape for every last
scrap of their power. They were not just powerful, but deeply experienced
and, importantly, were able to make full use of the enhanced minds that their
late path bodies gave them. The dragons had no paths, but they had grown naturally
into their power, and they too could react and adapt at speeds no mere mortal
could comprehend.

Wesly Ha'az, Gerthi's great nephew, who followed the same space and
magic path as his great aunt but focused more on the distance viewing
and scouting potential of the path, was the first to notice just how fast
Fifi was regenerating. The whole attack group was linked together with
<telepathy>, so he passed on the information immediately. A bare moment
later, Crown Princess Kree Ha'zul had laid out the rotation the dragons
would follow for continuous followup strikes. Won, her big green dragon
drew a rapid half breath to deliver the first strike. It was very
under strength, hardly worthy to be called dragonfire, and it would
have sputtered out far short of the target if it were not for the spell
arrays hovering in front of each dragon's jaws, but in this case they
all understood that speed trumped power. The most important thing was
to retard the regeneration of the witch who had kidnapped Kree's little
brother.

Fifi, whose mind worked at a far slower rate, hadn't even registered that
the first strike had stopped before the hurried followup hit her. Compared
to the first, it was a squirt gun after a firehose, but it was enough to
slow down her healing. There was no gap between the second strike and
the third, as the dragon's perfect coordination handed the strike off from
one to another. It wasn't until the third strike that Fifi really realized
what was happening. She tried to manifest her scales, but there was no skin
on the front side of her for them to form on. The strikes were getting stronger
as the dragons fell into a rhythm and had time to draw breath. Her flesh
had, impossibly, been healing even while getting washed in the dragonfire
of those first followups, but after a full rotation her flesh was getting
slowly but surely burned away.

Scales had manifested on her back, so she turned around, feeling some
relief as they protected her, but the flames wrapped around her body
and continued to burn the exposed flesh along the raw front of her body.
She tried to manifest her spectral wings to escape, but they couldn't
even form under the onslaught. She tried to cast <teleport>, but the
most basic personal teleport had no chance of working when Gerthi
had locked down space around her.

Fifi lashed out with her aura, cutting deep into the auras of her attackers
with razor sharp spikes of glass smooth aura. Surprise flickered through
the ranks of her attackers through their <telepathy> network, but they
were experienced warriors and there was a reason why battles were seldom
decided by aura play alone. They withdrew their auras to defend their
cores, and Fifi couldn't break them all at once. Deciding to stop trying
to fight them all at once, she focused on one of the dragons and punched
through the last layers of its defence, taking a grip on its core and
cutting it off from its magic. She could sense it dropping from the
sky, since dragon flight is more magic than aerodynamics, she did the
same to another dragon, but found that she couldn't manage a third without
losing her grip on the other two. Through all this, there was never a gap
in the continuous column of fire pinning her to the bottom of the crater
as Princess Kree calmly adjusted for the gap in the rotation. Fifi released
the dragons and did the same to another pair, but it was no use. Her attackers
were too coordinated and experienced to let it make them break off the
assault.

If she couldn't make them stop, and she couldn't escape with <teleport>,
maybe she could escape the old fashioned way. When she tried to climb out
of the crater though, it felt like her every motion moved her far less than
it ought to have. She realized with dread that the white armored figure
standing over her was doing more than preventing her from teleporting
away.

Shadow could feel Fifi's pain through their bond, and though she had told
him to hide, he could contain himself no longer. He knifed up through
the water, his tail lashing back and forth to propel him. When he burst
up from the waves he beat his wings furiously, drawing on his core to
shunt power into their membranes so that he would push harder against
the fabric of space. Rage burned in his eyes.

*The mutt bonded with the missing egg,* Won informed her rider through their
bond when she noticed the approaching streak. Off the general <telepathy>
channel she was free to express the contempt for half-elves and humans
she shared with Princess Kree.

*Filth, good thing it's still young. Her death won't do too much damage.
Can you capture the hatchling?* The Crown Princess manifested her spectral
wings and lept gracefully from her perch on Won's back. *I'll stay here
with the main strike group.*

"Stop hurting Fifi!" Shadow yelled as he flew upwards.

Won swooped down, expertly angling her flight path to intercept the young
wyrmling. Her massive foreclaw swept through the air, grabbing Shadow in
a single motion. His legs and wings were pinned against his body, so he
couldn't even scratch at her, and his attempts at biting through her scales
were useless. "You have been stolen from your true home little brother.
We are here to restore you to your birthright," Won informed him.

"You're killing Fifi! Stop it!" he yowled.

"She is unworthy of you. Look at how small you are. She has stunted your
growth."

"That's not true! Fifi saved me! The bad necromancers stole me when I was
an egg and then Fifi and Merv saved me. She healed me after I hatched!
She's healing Merv now too! Just stop hurting her!"

Won shook her head sadly, "Oh little one, it pains me to hear the lies
that fowl creature has filled your head with. You will see the truth
soon enough. She will die here today, and we will take you home. You
will live with your family, unsullied by the touch of a half-blood
rider."

Shadow stopped struggling. Her words filled him with a rage so towering
he didn't know what to do with it. It roiled in his gut, caustic and
burning. "If you kill her I will kill every one of you." Heroes swore
oaths of vengeance in the stories Merv told him and one seemed appropriate
to the young dragon now. "I swear this before all the gods who will listen.
If you kill my rider you may have more powerful enemies, but you will never
have a more implacable one. Hear me now murderer, I will never rest so long
as you draw breath."

Won laughed, "well you certainly talk like a dragon. At least you haven't
been entirely ruined by that filth of a rider. You will see the truth of
things in time, little wyrm."

The rage boiling in Shadow's gut swelled and he felt a connection form.
Merv and Fifi had been becoming increasingly worried that he had yet to
breath any fire, which most dragons did within a few months of hatching.
Now a little more than a year after he first drew air into his lungs,
Shadow could feel the potential to push something else out. He breathed
in, sucking up more and more air. Won saw what he was doing and could have
clenched her claw to stop him, but the idea that a hatchling's breath could
have any effect on her was laughable.

As Shadow drew breath, power surged into him through the bond he shared with
Fifi. There was no way Shadow could have supplied the power that his lungs
seemed to require from his little core, but Fifi had more than enough,
despite the fact that it was constantly getting drained to heal her.
His lungs full of this new power, Shadow breathed out, but to his shock
it was not flames that emerged. Instead oily black smoke rushed out,
hanging together in a thick glob rather than blowing apart in the breeze.
It clung to Won's scales, worming its way into the cracks as if alive.
The larger dragon's amusement died. "What manner of corruption has that
witch inflicted on you?" she demanded. A few moments later, scales began
to drop off her forelimb, revealing rotten flesh beneath.

"You little pissant!" Won roared in rage. "You twisted thing. You're
no dragon." She released her grip on Shadow and snapped her massive
jaws down on his tiny body, piercing him through the center of his
torso with fangs longer than he was tall. She shifted him to the
center of her mouth and breathed out, flooding her mouth with fire
and burning him to a crisp. When she opened her mouth the only thing
that remained of him was a bit of ash drifting on the breeze.

Killing Shadow had not solved Won's problem though. To her mounting
horror she watched as the rot in her limb spread up towards her body,
dropping scales as it went. She called for help from Juli Ha'orp, the
cabal's healer, and Gerthi flickered to Juli then down to Won and
back to her post at the edge of the crater immediately. Juli channeled
great torrents of life energies into Won, but though it slowed the
rot a little, it seemed insufficient for the task. Before long the claws
of the infected limb were following her scales into the sea. She made it halfway back
to the rest of the flight before the rot reached her wings and she began
to fall. She tumbled down, too far gone to guide herself, and by
the time she hit the water her body was fragile enough that the
entire forelimb she had been holding Shadow in tore free. Juli
tried desperately to save the dying dragon, clinging to her as
they sank beneath the waves but it was a hopeless task. The light
died in Won's eyes and the trauma of her death reverberated through
her bond with the Crown Princess.

Princess Kree's eyes rolled back in her head and her spectral wings
flickered out. She started to fall, but was snatched out of the
air by Kit, one of the dragons in the flight, almost immediately.
He held her gently in his claw even as she began to spasm. *Gerthi,
Kree needs Juli, she can't help Won anymore,* he said. Shock and
rage bloomed among the attackers, but they kept up their meticulous
attack.

The magical bombardment continued, making steady progress at burning
away Fifi's increasingly resilient flesh. It seemed that the more
wounded she was, the faster her wounds healed, as if she was dumping
more and more energy into healing. Still, the assault was making
steady progress at burning her body away. Gerthi, assuming command
now that the princess was incapacitated, ordered the dragons to
double up, breathing with the strength of two at once. The adjustment
proved to be enough to get the job done, and after they sustained
the new pace for another thirty seconds, the last of Fifi's flesh
was incinerated.

"Tough bitch, I'll give her that," Gerthi said before teleporting
back to the flight.

"There was no need to kill her you idiots. She was perfectly willing
to talk it out. She was helping me." Merv should have been angry, but
without Fifi to bolster his will the listlessness and apathy he so
hated had returned with a vengeance.

"I'm sorry your highness, but we can't take your word for that right
now. The kingdom's best mind healers will assess you and do what they
can to undo the damage she did," Gerthi informed him.

"She didn't, well, she did technically break my will-"

"What!?!"

"but, but obviously, she was fixing that. I mean, I wouldn't be talking to
you right now if she hadn't been. She didn't mean to do it, it just happened
when she awakened her final core."

Gerthi looked at him sharply, "so then she did use the stolen egg's hatching
as a seed event. Was her final core a dragon core?"

Merv didn't want to let on let on just how many seeds Fifi had used to awaken
her monstrous second core, but he knew a dragon seed alone wouldn't be able to
explain how resilient she had been under continual dragonfire. The seed he most
wanted to conceal from them was the rebirth seed. He didn't want them to take
any steps that could make it harder for her to come back. If he told them her
final core was pure dragon they might think she had some already activated life
cores, but they might still be suspicious about her resilience. "Yeah, it was
a dragon core, but there was a life seed in there two."

"So then she committed treason twice over even before she took you." No one but
the royal family was allowed to seed a dragon core or bond with a dragon. "Who
was she anyway? How could there be a practitioner on the cusp of completing her
path that we don't know about?"

"Her final core was a compound core. She was just some street alchemist before
all this. Must have had an accident that caused core merger or something. I
know she was planning to be a wizard at some point. Even went to the royal
academy." He hadn't exactly lied, but he knew his words would leave the impression
that she had made it decently far down her path before her unawakened cores
merged. The idea that a practitioner with just a single pure magic core could
manage to awaken a merged core that consisted of all ten of her remaining cores
was just too absurd for anyone to consider.

"And she managed to awaken it anyway? I suppose there would have been no other way
than a greater seed event. It makes sense why she would risk attempting a dragon
seed."

Merv wanted to reiterate that it had been an accident, but he knew the head of the
royal cabal would not listen. Right now, the best thing for Fifi was if he tried
to set his family's mind at ease by acting as if the whole episode was over. He had
faith that given time she would grow in power and return to finish the job of
mending his will. A part of him felt like he should tell them everything. It felt
bad to be hiding things from his family and their retainers immediately after being
re-united with them. So instead of arguing, he simply said, "you're right. Only
a dragon seed could have finished her path."

=======================================================================================

Fifi burned with rage as her shade floated in the void of the afterworld. She had
been ready to receive the cabalists in peace and they had attacked without mercy
or restraint. They had stolen her lover and killed her dragon, shattering the idyllic
existence they had found on Aruck. By far the biggest target of her rage was herself
though. She had known she was ignorant and inexperienced when it came to the ways of
high level practitioners, but it was humiliating to have been so thoroughly dominated.
In terms of raw power, she should have been able to scatter the royal cabal with a
twitch of her sleeves, but compared with them she was a newborn babe when it came to
combat experience and killing intent. No normal practitioner got to the end of their
path without attaining great power along they way. An ordinary path complete practitioner
had mastered esoteric and powerful techniques, forged or discovered unique weapons,
and sharpened their mind to a razor's edge by the time they took the final step.
By contrast, Fifi had done none of that. True, her gargantuan second core likely
contained orders of magnitude more raw power than even the king of Seravore, and
with six seeds she had unheard of flexibility when it came to using that power.
None of that mattered if she was lacking in technique or armaments to put that
power to use though. Fifi had been too enamored with finally being able to study
higher magics. She should have chosen an infernal craftsman or blood tyrant for
her demonic tutor rather than a succubus librarian.

She could feel her rebirth seed tugging her back to the material world, but
didn't want to return immediately since she wasn't sure how much control over
where she emerged she would have. It would not do to come back only to be killed
again. For the moment she resisted the pull. There was another reason to linger
in the afterworld. Having just resolved to master powerful new techniques and
acquire unique armaments, it was time to get back to her roots as a craftswoman.
The afterworld represented a unique opportunity to gather materials. All around
her was the void, but it was not an empty place. Billions of shades flew through
the darkness, endlessly wandering. Compared with Fifi's shade they were insubstantial
things, most the ghosts of mere mortals, but even the remnants of practitioners were
like ants to her. It wasn't just the power of her core that made her so much more
real and substantial in this place. Her rebirth and death seeds both lent her unique
power and reality in the afterworld. In the material world she might stand at the
pinnacle of power, but here she was truly a goddess.

Fifi tapped her dominion and death seeds, taking control of the void around her.
The space responded far more eagerly than she was expecting as if welcoming its
long absent mistress. "I will be returning to the world of the living soon, and
any who wish to do so may come with me. To do so you must swear yourselves to
me, submit yourselves utterly. I will not be turning you loose to haunt the living
as hungry ghosts. I will use you for my own ends. If you choose to follow me,
expect to be nothing more than my tools." Her sultry voice reverberated through
the void.

The response was far greater than she had expected. Despite her harsh demands
for submission, the shades surrounding her began taking her up on her offer
immediately. She could feel them committing themselves to her by the hundreds
of thousands. Her dominion seed settled over them, worming the grip of her
control into their souls, and once it did she understood why they were so
eager to become her slaves. They were bored and she was the most interesting
thing to happen in the whole history of the afterworld. They would do anything
to escape the endless monotony of their wandering through the void. Of course,
the fact that she shone with the power of a goddess, lighting up their desolate
home didn't hurt either.

Far more shades had taken Fifi up on her offer than she expected. The void
grew thick with them as they drew close to her, worshiping their new goddess.
Realizing she would need some way to carry them with her when she left, Fifi
flexed her will and began directing them to the only place she could think of:
her expansive cleavage. The departed souls of the dead streamed into the
chasm between Fifi's pale mounds, their insubstantial bodies packing in
tighter and tighter. A whirlpool of shades formed above her tits as more
and more shades swore themselves to her. The commotion was drawing more
and more attention, and as more shades realized what was happening the
flow of submissive ghosts thickened. Millions of shades were gobbled up
by Fifi's greedy cleavage every second. It wasn't long before the density
of shades in the afterworld had started to visibly thin. The voluptuous
half-elf's offer had sparked a gold rush mentality in the bored ghosts,
and few of them stopped to really consider what it meant to become the
slave of a practitioner. If their simple minds had not been so degraded
by death, and the rush to fit into what appeared to be limited space in
their new goddess's cleavage hadn't sparked such intense FOMO, many likely
would have made different decisions. Fortunately for Fifi, in the face
of her resplendent power and overwhelming beauty, few of the shades
stopped to think. They just dove in, surrendering themselves utterly
to the warm yet totally implacable embrace of the black haired beauty's
enormous bosom.

As quickly as it began, it was over. The last of the shades was sucked
into Fifi's cleavage and the void around her was empty. She slid her
hands over her watermelon sized tits, biting her lower lip and shoving
them together. Exercising her dominion seed always made her horny, and
using it to command the submission of every shade in the afterworld made
her feel incredibly powerful. Her hand wandered down in between her
legs, "Wow, you all must hate the afterworld if you were so eager to
become my slaves, or maybe there was a different reason?" she teased.
She could sense a not-insignificant level of lust coming from the shades
towards her, which was especially flattering given that death muted
the passions of ghosts, "Could it be that I'm sexy enough to stir even
the dead?" She could feel their lust grow. "mmmmmmm, don't worry I'll
be a nice goddess." She slipped two fingers into her slit, gasping
and moaning as she went to work on herself.

She lost herself in passion for a time, but her bliss was interrupted
when the void lurched around her. Her core exploded with power as shades
re-appeared around her. In hurried confusion, she examined her core
and saw that her death and dominion seeds had begun to rapidly orbit
one another. "Oh, mmmm, fuck they're merging," she dug her fingers
deeper into her snatch, moaning in delight at the windfall.

Cores naturally attuned to a single seed which was part of why multi-seed
cores were so rare, but this fact meant that multi-seed cores were
unstable. One a single seed core was awakened it was locked in, but under
rare circumstances multi-seed cores could be altered by powerful seed
events. The larger the core, the harder it was for this to happen, but
evidently establishing dominion over every shade in the afterworld was
big enough to initiate seed merger even in Fifi's monstrous core.
When two seeds merged, it always resulted in a greater seed. Fifi's
already had two greater seeds: her rebirth and dragon seeds. Even
a single greater seed represented a significant power boost, making
the core they occupied about three times more power dense than it
otherwise would have been. This added density from her two greater
seeds, was what made Fifi a monster of raw power even beyond what
her freakishly oversized core would have allowed on its own. Now she
was going to get a third, pushing her power to unimaginable heights.

She clutched at her breasts and the world lurched around her.
When she noticed the shades had reappeared, she realized what must
be happening. The afterworld was merging with her cleavage. She had
packed all the shades between her huge boobs and emptied the afterworld
of souls. The nexus of death energy had changed and now it was her
cleavage that was the center of gravity towards which all departing
souls were drawn rather than the void. *My boobs hold dominion over
life and death,* she realized. Her milk contained the shining power
of rebirth and endless vitality and her cleavage had become
the final destination of souls. In that moment she felt as if she
was not at the end of her path already, but instead at the beginning.
Who could say where the limits of her power lay if she could turn
the entire afterworld into a stepping stone?

Reveling in her new power, Fifi's fingers worked at her snatch
feverishly while the void around her reverberated at the way she
mashed her breasts. Her death and dominion seeds orbited one another
faster and faster until they made contact in a great explosion of force.
Fifi came as she felt her power swell to new heights, her core surging
with new strength. Her pussy clenched hard around her fingers, grinding
her knuckles together with the strength of her inner muscles. Her
long lashes fluttered as her eyes rolled around in their sockets while
she let free a wanton moan.

She collected herself quickly, realizing that time was of the essence
before her core re-stabilized. The smoothness of her core had made her
aura much more formidable and she didn't want to lose that asset just
because she had picked up even more unimaginable power on her trip
to the afterworld. With an expert hand, she turned her attention on
the roiling power that swirled within her. The last time she had done
this, she had been new to her power, but now she had had time to
grow into it, even if only partially. The chaotic power was quickly
tamed and brought to heel, reaching its old glassy smoothness in
moments. She noticed with surprise that there were not five seeds
but seven now occupying her core. One of the three new seeds shone
brighter than even her dragon and rebirth seeds, and she could feel
the remains of both her death and dominion seeds within it, but the
other two were unfamiliar. She thought she had an idea about one of
them, but at the moment it was more important to make the most out
of the last few seconds of instability. Her core was already as smooth
as it had been, but she was determined to do better. She focused all of
her attention and considerable skill on removing even the tiniest flaw
from its surface, stretching her mind to the limit. She spread herself
over the whole surface, polishing her power with utmost intensity.
As she strained her mind, she felt it begin to split, following the
groundwork she had been laying with her meditation recently. It
was sooner than she expected, but she wouldn't turn down the good
luck of the breakthrough now and she pushed the schism through.
It was a little strange at first, but she hardly missed a beat
as she bent both tracks of her mind to her nearly flawless core.
She had just finished smoothing away the last few imperfections when
she felt her core solidify into a flawless gem of unrivaled power.

It was only after her new core had stabilized that she really
took a look at it. "W-what the fuck? Is that really..." she muttered
in awe as she felt her new seed. It was clearly far more than just
a greater seed, but it was only now that realized the true magnitude
of its power. Her seeds no longer floated independently in her core,
but were connected by a grid of thin lines of power. She could sense
her new seed bolstering the others. It could mean only one thing.
As far as she knew divine tier seeds were only theoretical. Only
true elites developed even greater seeds, the lowest tier of seeds
with more power than a typical seed. Every few millennia a rare
lucky genius might arise who managed to form a legendary seed, but
from what she had learned in university, there was no record of anyone
ever forming a divine seed, though magical theorists had modeled how
one might behave. One property that most theorists agreed a divine
seed would have would be the power to bolster any other seeds in the
same core up a level. She could feel the increased potency of all her
seeds, which meant that her dragon and rebirth seeds were now legendary
tier and her remaining seeds had become greater variants. It was a
truly shocking jump in power. The difference between Fifi now and
her previous fully awakened form was even greater than the difference
between her fully awakened form and her mortal power. It was honestly
difficult to imagine that any practitioner could achieve the power
she now held. She doubted the royal cabal could harm her now if she
stood still and let them try their hardest for a thousand years.

Her two new seeds were interesting. One she quickly recognized as a
lust seed, likely due to her orgasm during the merger of her death
and dominion seeds. She had been practicing faking a lust seed with
aura manipulation since beauty like hers required an explanation
if she wanted to disguise herself as a lower level practitioner, so
she was intimately familiar with its signature. The other was less
familiar, but she placed it soon enough, remembering the signature
she had learned in her magical lore course at university. It was
a sin seed, useful for curses and mind control, it was illegal in
Seravore. "I guess it is pretty sinful to trap the ancestors between
my tits and get off to the power it give me," she chuckled. Her seeds
were versatile enough that she could play the part of anything from
a heroic paladin to a gentle healing sage of nature, but there was
a clear bias towards more of a dark goddess role, especially
given her new divine seed. It was clearly unique to her, but if
she had to give it a name she thought "death goddess" was the most
apt. Death and dominion had been combined to form an overbearing
and ominous power, and a spark of divinity suffused the whole thing
to give it even more weight. An air of inevitability emanated from
her new divine seed, a reminder that all souls were now destined to
spend eternity in the domineering embrace of her heavy bosom.

All the same, her problem remained the same. She had unfathomable power,
but lacked the skill and experience to use it. She could easily get
Merv back when she returned to the realm of the living, but she might
wind up destroying all of Landing to do so. Much as it pained her, she
would take the time to develop a little finesse before she attempted
to return to the job of fixing the prince's broken will.

She waited a bit longer, floating in the void that was also her cleavage
for a few days to give the cabal time to withdraw before she finally
swam back towards the world of the living. She no longer feared them, but
she did want time to get used to her new power before confronting them
again. It turned out her fears had been premature, since she instinctively
felt the shape of the world as she swam back towards it and realized she
could emerge at any point where the material realm and afterworld met.
She could even sense the world through the veil once she grew close
enough so she knew the cabal was long gone when she emerged beneath the
sea and walked back up onto the beach.

She fished Shadow's soul from her cleavage and flexed her now legendary
seed of rebirth. His ghostly form grew solid and he hit the sand with
a dazed expression. "Fifi! Fifi! You're alive!" he lept at her and
she caught him in her arms, glad for once that he grew so slowly.

"I wasn't for a minute there. Neither were you. I thought I told you to
hide. Next time you gotta listen to me," she was too happy to see him
to really put any energy into the scolding, and she undercut herself
by nuzzling him with her cheek.

"I'll kill them all," Shadow hissed.

"I think you already got one," she pulled Won's shade from her cleavage.
The once proud dragon squirmed helplessly in her grasp. Her mind was
shriveled by death, but the new queen of death granted her enough power
that she could converse once more. "You killed my Shadow," she said
to the ghostly dragon accusingly. "It didn't take obviously, but still,
I can't let something like that stand."

Feeling the overwhelming weight of Fifi's death goddess seed, Won
begged and pleaded for Fifi to spare her soul, but there was no
pity in Fifi's amber eyes. She clenched her hand into a fist, flexing
her death goddess seed and Won's soul was ripped to shreds. Feeling
a sudden hunger when he saw the scraps began to drift away, Shadow
darted his head out to snap them up. The insubstantial scraps of energy
were dragged down his greedy gullet. "That was good," he said.

"Hmmm, maybe the souls of our enemies is just what you need to grow big
and strong," Fifi said, scratching him affectionately under the chin.

===============================================================================

Preston Key had been tracking a cluster of auras approaching his tower
for half an hour or so when he decided to go out to great them. He made
his home nearly on top of a minor hellscar, which made the whole landscape
take on a hellish aspect, so few dared venture close. It was an excellent
way to avoid the distraction of having to deal with young tribesmen who
had more bravery than good sense who thought that slaying a necromancer
warlock was a good way to win renown. The hellish energies also made
many of the rituals he performed easier. On the other hand, it did cut down on
the supply of high quality corpses, so there were definite drawbacks.
Four of the auras approaching were demonic in nature and the last belonged
to a mid-path mortal practitioner with a mixed death and magic path. There
was something else in the aura from the early cores and it took him a
moment to realize the approaching practitioners had begun their path with
lust cores. *Must be a courtesan with a career change. The demons with her
aren't too bad either. A fairly powerful succubus, some nightmares and, is
that an infernal wyrm? How did she manage to get one of those in her
service at her level? Even if it is a minor one that's pretty impressive.*

"Marsh, we have visitors, get me my hat," he didn't really need to talk
to give the hulking flesh golem a command, but after so long alone with
nothing but his research and his undead to keep him company, Preston
made a habit of it.

The stitched together monstrosity made a guttural bellowing noise that
might have very charitably been interpreted as "very good, sir," before
moving off with far more grace than anything that big or that dead
had any right to. Preston cast a quick <close shave> followed by
a tiny <hellish sucking cold> to collect his fallen stubble, then
cast <cleanse> to clean and smooth his somewhat rumpled clothes.
He held out his hand and pulled on the bond he had with his cane,
and the rod of dense ebony flew into his hand. Red eyes glowed from
the silver skull at the top and the whole thing exuded an air of
polite but firm menace. Marsh returned with his hat and Preston
took it, placing it on his head and dropping his cane to the
floor with a bang, "Thank you Marsh, as dependable as always."

The muscle-bound nightmare made a wet gurgling that sounded vaguely
like, "one tries, sir."

Preston emerged from his tower just as an infernal coach came to
a stop outside his door. Rather than wheels it sat on a cloud of
blood, and the whole thing was constructed from the bones of
some infernal beast. Two nightmares were hitched in front of it,
their shadowy manes billowing the wrong way in the slight breeze
and their clawed feet digging into the dusty ground. The succubus
was driving. She wore her demonic form opening, all red skin and
sinful curves. Preston could feel the infernal wyrm and the practitioner
inside the coach. A coach like that didn't come cheap, and he found
himself wondering how many innocents the strange practitioner had
sacrificed to afford it. He admonished himself at the base thought.
It unbecoming of a gentleman to be envious of one's peers, doubly
so towards less advanced practitioners. If he had wanted a large
supply of innocents to sacrifice it would have meant the headache
of administering a cult, and who could get any research done in
that sort of working environment?

The door of the coach opened and the most beautiful woman Preston
had ever seen emerged. Her inky hair was piled high on top of her
head so he could easily see the short yet still pointed ears of
a half-elf. It emphasized her elegant neck and bare shoulders, but
he could spare little attention for that when the neckline of her
clingy black dress left the tops of her massive breasts completely
bare. She made the succubus look flat by comparison. There was something
domineering about her bosom. The sheer size of it, the perfection of it
made it difficult to think about anything else, but there was something
else there as if those enormous breasts somehow contained more power
than any mid-path practitioner had a right to. She was so gorgeous
that Preston almost didn't notice the small infernal worm that followed
her out of the coach.

The unfamiliar woman sashayed up to him, her wide hips moving in
her slinky dress as pale flesh flashed through a slit in the side
of the dress that ran nearly to her hip. "Hi, I'm Fifi Mazz. Lovely
to meet you," she held out a black satin gloved hand expectantly
and he bent to kiss it. As he did so, Fifi could feel a faint trickle
of sin energy get generated by the interaction. When she had formed
the sin seed she had no real idea what it could do or how it worked,
but Cora had been able to explain it to her. Essentially it allowed
her to generate sin energy every time she exploited or used another
person for her own ends. That was a bit vague, but it seemed to trigger
whenever someone acted more in her interests than their own. For
simply greeting her to generate some sin energy, it must have been
atypical for Preston to greet strangers rather than setting his
minions on them.

"Preston Key, I'm quite sure the pleasure is all mine. Would
you care to come inside?" Preston had little patience for the
sort of barbarian visitors he usually got out here, but this
woman was an entirely different sort. A larger surge of sin
energy entered Fifi's core. There was a limit to how much she
could store, but considering it was determined by the size and
power of her sin core there was no danger of ever hitting it.

"That would be lovely. May my companions come as well?"

"Of course," he nodded.

"My coachwoman goes by Cora, and this little guy is Shadow,"
she said affectionately gesturing to one of the most feared
varieties of demons as it trotted along beside them towards
the door of Preston's tower.

"Cora, Shadow, I'm quite pleased to make your acquaintance.
Can I get any of you three any refreshments? I'm afraid my
pantry is rather undiversified. An old coot like me can
all too easily get lost in research and neglect the finer
things in life, but my man Marsh is a deft hand with a
skillet."

Shadow looked up at him, "You got any still beating hearts
of a virgin?"

"Shadow! Don't make such extravagant demands of our host!"
Fifi scolded. *Did you put him up to that?* she asked Cora
through the familiar bond.

*No mistress, not directly,* Cora replied with obvious pride.

*You're a terrible influence. He's having far too much fun
pretending to be a demon,* she admonished, but amusement
leaked through the bond.

"Sorry Fifi," Shadow hung his head.

"Oh don't worry, I can send the ghouls out hunting. It's been
a while since I've let them run," Preston offered.

"That's quite alright, really," Fifi demurred.

"Well, here we are, Marsh will bring out some tea in a moment,"
Preston came to a stop in the foyer of his tower, "please, have
a seat," he snapped his fingers to cast <mass cleanse> to take
care of the dust that had accumulated over the years, "forgive
me, I haven't had proper guests in quite some time."

"Thank you," Fifi sat down in a wooden chair and crossed her legs,
making her dress slide to the side and revealing legs every bit
as flawless and alluring as the rest of her. Her aura slid over
Preston's with impressive control.

"Is that a Landing accent I detect?" Preston asked, taking
a seat across from her. "I would welcome any news from the city.
It has been a long time since I paid attention to anything besides
my research."

"Good ear, yes. Is it fair to assume you're originally from Landing
as well?"

"I am, although when I was a boy it was still called Hawthorn Bay,"
he said with a twinkle in his eye.

"So you remember the elvish conquest then?" Her large amber eyes
widened in interest.

"Not intimately, no, I was studying at the university of Molsonshire
when the white ships appeared, and by the time I heard about it the
whole town had been bathed in dragonfire. I was pure magic and pure
theory back then, so if I had been in town I would have just gotten
turned to cinders with the rest of the Jamish nobility. I was a bit
of a hothead back then, but even I had the good sense not to take on
a flight of dragons and so I fled the university and hid with a peasant
family for a while. I only made my way back to Landing a decade after
King Qinme had built the dragon palace."

"That sounds like quite the formative experience," many with elvish
blood would have grown nervous if they learned that the nearly
path-complete necromancer they were sitting across from had been
a Jamish noble before the conquest, but despite her pointed ears
being on full display, Fifi did not appear nervous.

Preston chuckled dryly, "that's one way to put it. I doubt I would
have lived such a long an interesting life if the elves hadn't
shown up."

"I never knew about the university of Molsonshire. I, umm, I
don't think I even know where Molsonshire is, or was I guess."

"Well, not many do these days. Jamish history is not widely
taught in Seravore. Molsonshire was wiped out when the dons
decided to defend their university. It took the massed power
of every dragon at Qinme's command, but in the end the university
and the town around it was wiped off the map. The elves would
have you believe that they brought high magic to the continent,
and while there's some truth to that we weren't all running
around with elemental seeds. Enough ancient history though,
what news from Landing?"

"Well I don't know much of anything about what's been going
on in highborn circles, of late I've been rather focused on
cavorting with demons and whatnot, and before that, well,
there's not much a common whore learns about great happenings-"

"I find it difficult to believe a woman of your beauty didn't
command a small army of highborn clients if you were a
courtesan before stepping onto the path of magic," he said.

Fifi opened her plump lips in mock surprise, covering her
mouth with a gloved hand, "you flatterer, stop, you'll make
a girl blush!" Her beauty hit him like a hammer blow, stirring
up urges the old necromancer had thought long dead. He hurriedly
checked to see if she was applying her lust seeds to him, not
that she could have done anything to a late stage practitioner with
her first two seeds, but as far as he could tell she had used
no power on him.

"At any rate, I don't mind if you have no highborn news you're
willing to share. I'll settle for the tavern rumors."

"I think I can manage a few of those. Trade with Balin has slowed
down a bit since the Eastern Islanders have gotten more aggressive
in their piracy. There's rumors that one of the princes, not sure
which one disappeared or something. The guards were
turning the city upside down for a minute there and I hear the
cabal flew out on some business or other. I couldn't say if it's
true or not though," she lied.

"Interesting, well, can't say I mind hearing that Qinme's house
has fallen into some mild disarray."

"I can't say I mind watching the pointies scurry about either,"
she giggled. When she noticed his slightly surprised look at
her use of the slur, she laughed and raised a gloved hand to
her ear, "what, you think the halfblood daughter of a whore and
some elf lordling is a great defender of elvish honor? No, I've
always preferred my human half." Fifi had been blending truth
with fiction to sell the persona she had come up with for herself,
and this was fairly close to the truth. "Not that I'm one of those
human nationalists or anything like that, I just like seeing
it when the rich and powerful get taken down a peg or three.
Wouldn't mind being the one to to the takin' em down truth be
told," she allowed her accent to slip down closer to the street
cant she had spoken as young thief.

He smiled at her, "a sentiment I can entirely understand."

Marsh arrived with a tray carrying a gleaming silver tea service.
His mouth opened and a sound issued forth that could have been interpreted
as, "do you take sugar miss?" by someone used to conversing with
rusty iron gates. At no point did Marsh's lips tongue or teeth
appear to move.

Fifi beamed at the colossus, "Oh I adore your flesh golem.
Would you mind translating?"

"Marsh wants to know if you take sugar."

"Oh, yes thank you, no cream," she gave Marsh another thousand
watt smile. The golem's chest puffed up proudly.

"He likes you,"

Fifi gave him a lazy grin, "men always do." At her confident
declaration Preston could feel his body respond in ways
it hadn't for centuries. A trickle of sin energy would have
told Fifi his decision making with respect to her was becoming
impaired if his aura didn't already tell the same story.

He cleared his throat, "well, yes, I suppose I can, well, I
can see why."

She giggled, "Sorry, I really shouldn't tease you so. It's
a bit of an old habit I'm afraid," her hand trailed down her
chest, tracing the darkness of her cleavage for a moment
before she reached out to accept her teacup, "thank you
Marsh, you're positively delightful."

Marsh made a noise like a dying seal and withdrew.

Preston was having increasing trouble keeping his eyes off
Fifi's chest. The scorching hot vixen was making him feel
like a young man again, and it had been a long time since
he had had to curb the urges that were suddenly surging
through him. Fifi easily noticed her host's building lust.
He hid it well, but no one could read an aura like Fifi so
to her it was plain as day, and besides the steady trickle
of sin energy made it impossible to miss. "Could you tell me a little
more about what your life's been like? I imagine you
had a long road to go from a pure magic student studying
magical theory to a warlock whose name makes demons
tremble." She clasped her hands in her lap and opened
her eyes wide in a pleading expression, her elbows
compressing her massive breasts so that more cleavage
was squeezed up out of the top of her low cut dress.

Preston's cock strained against the inside of his pants
at the display, but he soldiered on, "I will have to get
the name of the demon who pointed you my way you know.
You're a lovely guest but it wouldn't do to set precedent."

"I'll tell you if you tell me how you took your first
step on the crooked path," she offered, "oh, but don't
go too hard on them. I didn't offer much choice in the
matter," she gave a vicious grin that somehow sent a
shiver along Preston's spine and called his little soldier
to an even stiffer salute at the same time. *I would
love to see her breaking demons, she clearly has a talent
for it,* he thought. The trickle of sin energy thickened.

"We'll table that for now then. The story of how I first
became a warlock isn't as glamorous as you might think.
It really just came down to running out of book. I didn't
swear any blood oaths or anything like that, just wanted
to finish my education really,"

She grinned at him, "so you were a good, diligent boy?
Cute. I wish I had been there to corrupt you."

"I can assure you I would have put up negligible resistance,"
he chuckled.

"Awww, really? That would have been no fun," she pouted
prettily, "I like my fish with a little fight in them."
She delighted in the lust that continued to build in his
aura and the way the continual stream of sin energy indicated
that the old necromancer was rapidly growing less able to make
sound judgments when it came to the temptress before him.

He cleared his throat, "well, back then, I was no more than
a minnow," *and I'm starting to think you're a shark," he
thought to himself. "But you weren't there, so I had to
stumble into corruption all by my lonesome. Humans were
frozen out of formal magical education in those days, but
you could still get some books on it in used bookshops
and whatnot. I found a book on summoning and a demon
genealogy text, then bought a lot of salt, some cold iron,
and some silver knives and I was off to the races."

Preston told his tale of seeking forbidden knowledge
and finding ways to trigger increasingly large seed events
while under the nose of the guards. He found that it felt
good to tell someone his life story after so long alone,
and he found himself including details that it really
would have been wiser for him to leave out, but it was
difficult to remember to do so when Fifi was so achingly
pretty. The whole time he spoke, she encouraged him with
questions and exclamations, and it was as much the delight
she seemed to take in his tale as getting to share it after
so long that made Preston enjoy himself. Fifi seemed to have
a habit of squeezing her arms together whenever she asked
a question, and the way it caused her cleavage to surge
when she did so frequently left Preston having difficulty
concentrating well enough to respond. It wasn't uncommon
for the sexy half-elf to have to prompt him a second time
after one of her interruptions, and he never had the bandwidth
to spare a thought for weather her questions were really
something he should be answering.

Fifi's nipples stiffened against the black satin of her dress
every time she asked one of her increasingly bold questions.
Preston was so infatuated with her that he didn't hesitate to
reveal secrets that no practitioner would ordinarily share
with a stranger. Each time, a surge of sin energy entered
her core. He was already completely wrapped around her finger
and she hadn't done anything more than wear a clingy dress and
flutter her eyelashes at him. When she had reincarnated, a
new body had formed, but this time with a lust seed in her core
her beauty had been even further heightened. The fact that she
had managed to reduce the old practitioner to such a state
without making use of her lust seed or any sort of aura
manipulation was evidence enough of the heights to which her
beauty had risen.

Eventually his story came to a close and Fifi beamed at him,
"wow, I'm already learning so much from you! That's actually
why I came. I am hoping to become your apprentice. I'm a witch on a death/magic
path just like you, and I'd like to learn from the best. I've come a long
way in a short time through demon tutors, but to maintain my momentum I
need the perspective of a practitioner while I attempt to activate my later
cores. I would like yours."

Preston was nearing the end of his life span, and he had been unable to
take the final step along his path for the last 150 years. He really
couldn't afford to devote the attention to an apprentice that would
be required if he wanted to reach immortality. If she had brought it
up when she had first arrived, he would have turned her down, but now
having spent some time with her, he thought having the gorgeous half-elf
around would be worth the distraction. Her presence was certainly making
him feel young again, perhaps it was just what he needed to regain the
youthful vigor required to complete his path. "I wasn't looking for an
apprentice, but I think you would make an excellent one. I would be
honored to help guide you on your path."

Fifi bounced excitedly, "oh, thank you! Thank you, thank you, you won't
regret it!"

=================================================================================

Preston entered his workshop, or what had been his workshop before his new
apprentice had taken it over with half a dozen projects. He had just returned
from a six day journey across the steppe to the great oasis markets of
the Larinthian desert. It would have taken far longer if he had ridden on
horseback, but the team of six nightmares he had hitched to Fifi's hellish
coach for the journey could move far faster than mortal horses. Most of the
trip had been devoted to buying the alchemal supplies his precocious
apprentice needed for her experiments. It was getting quite expensive to keep
the voluptuous half-elf supplied, but Preston had quite a store of gold,
and he couldn't bear the thought of slowing her incredibly rapid progress.

It turned out that Fifi Mazz wasn't just mind-meltingly gorgeous. She also
possessed a frightening talent for magic and magecraft. When she had arrived
at Preston's tower her knowledge had been strangely spotty. She had a rock
solid foundation for the most basic skills, and a knowledge of low level
alchemy that far exceeded his own, but her skill with higher level magic
was much more spotty. It was quite evident that she had experienced a recent
rapid breakthrough before arriving at his tower, and since she had awakened
her seventh core with a pure magic seed since arriving it was evident that
her burst of progress was still ongoing. In the six months she had been
with him, Fifi had maintained a feverish pace of study, hardly pausing to
sleep, and often only remembering to eat if he or her succubus familiar brought
her a plate. In that time, her progress had been remarkable. She had clearly
managed to develop a multi-track mind, which was very impressive considering
her place on her path, because he often found her reading half a dozen books
at once, carrying and flipping through them with <mage hands>. Her spellcraft
had grown by leaps and bounds, and she seemed to pick up a new greater spell
ever day. The speed with which she learned new things was astonishing, and
only seemed to be getting faster. Preston had always been gifted when it came
to magic, but compared with his young apprentice he felt like the village idiot.

If anything, Fifi's talent as a magical craftswoman made her skill as a mage
seem not worth mentioning. He had never seen an alchemist with even a fraction
of her talent. He had taught her to make a zombie berserking potion, and after
watching him make it once she had immediately come up with a version that was
three times the power, a quarter the price in ingredients, and took a third
of the time to brew. Her version required a fiendish level of precision and control
over the reaction that even Preston struggled with, but evidently that degree of reaction
control was trivial for her. These days, Preston had little hope of understanding the
alchemal concoctions his ostensible apprentice was working on, and his understanding
of some of her item enchantments was hardly better. It felt like it wouldn't be long before
her skill eclipsed him in spellcraft as well. At that point the only thing he would have
on her was the power of two additional awakened cores, though despite his greater strength
he was already starting to lose more often than not when they practiced sparring with
necrotic energy. It was clear that Fifi was a genius of her generation.

Now he walked around what used to be his golem bench but was covered in a suit of nearly
finished dragon-scale plate armor that Fifi would soon enchant. She had already
made a full suit for herself and her familiar, and now she was working on one for him.
He wasn't sure where she had gotten the dragon scales, bones and claws she had used
for many of her creations, but they seem to have come from a good sized beast.
Fifi was standing at the far side of the room, looking up as a swarm of <mage hands>
moved around a bronze cauldron the size of a small carriage. She wore a tight strapless
black dress that clung to her ripe ass like a second skin and came mid-way down her
thick thighs. She was facing away from him, but her breasts were still clearly visible
from behind. The sight of her sent blood surging to his loins and for a moment it
was difficult think of anything but her incredible curves.

He was so distracted by her appearance that he almost didn't register what she was
doing. He could feel the power pouring steadily from her in far greater quantities than
she should have been able to manage, empowering each rune as it formed and maintaining
the entire lattice of power as she went. She was performing a live enchantment, which
meant she had to apply it all in one go. Live enchantments were more powerful than
ordinary enchantments, and possessed the ability to repair themselves, so they were
highly sought after, but they were still quite rare because performing one got harder
with every additional rune. Few enchanters could manage more than a couple of dozen
runes in a live enchantment. Fifi was attempting one that seemed to consist of tens of
thousands of runes, and somehow she was holding it together.

There was no way she could be doing this with just 7 awakened cores. She must have had
some sort of breakthrough while he was gone. He reached out to probe her core and
was shocked to find not eight or nine active cores as he had expected, but just two,
only the second core was so massive it was hard to believe. It was so smooth that
he was unable to get any sort of read on what seed or seeds she had activated it with,
but he realized that with the size of it she was clearly stronger than him. *Has
she always been like this?* he wondered.

"Hey Preston!" Fifi turned to give him a heart-melting smile while her hands continued
to work on the enchantment in the background. "Did you get the ingredients I asked
for?"

"Umm, y-yeah, yeah they're out in your coach. Umm, Fifi? Did you have, I mean, what
happened?"

"What do you mean?" she looked at him innocently.

"Well, you only have two cores, and you're, well, a lot stronger."

"Oh, well, I thought you would take a little more time with your trip so I thought
I could go all out with this project, but then you came back, and, well, I couldn't
break off the enchantment when I felt you coming. I guess the secret's out of the
bag. I really did have a big breakthrough recently, it was just a little bigger
than I let on. I thought you might be, well, intimidated if I revealed my full power,
and I'm pretty good with my aura, so I decided to hide my power a little."

"So then, why-"

"I came because I needed time to study. I have a lot of power but I haven't had time
to really get used to it. I wanted somewhere out of the way, and your tower seemed
nice. I suppose I could have done this alone, but I wasn't lying when I said I wanted
the perspective of a practitioner. I'm glad I came, you've been extremely helpful!"
She beamed at him.

Preston felt a thrill of pride at her compliment. For some reason he had never gotten
a feeling of accomplishment more intense than when Fifi recognized his hard work.
It was her talent that let her gain skills so quickly, and now he realized that
she had had the mind of a path complete practitioner the whole time, but the
demonic tutors he had introduced her to and recommendations about where to focus
her efforts had helped her make good use of her talents. "Well, it's certainly
been an experience. I always knew you had your secrets, but I never guessed
it was something like this."

"Mmmm, let's talk more after I finish this cauldron. I don't want the rune structure
to collapse." She turned back to her work. "You can stay and watch if you want."
Preston wasn't about to turn down the offer. He had grown dangerously infatuated
with his so-called apprentice. The combination of her beauty and talent gave her
a singular magnetism that made him want to be around her whenever possible. This
latest revelation of her true power came as a shock, but rather than feeling any
sense of betrayal it only made her all the more enthralling. He watched her directing
her swarm of <mage hands> and was struck by the overwhelming abundance of her power.
The way her ripe curves strained against the tight fabric of her dress seemed a
metaphors for her overwhelming magical power. Her abundant feminine flesh threatened
to overwhelm the thin fabric of the dress in the same way her magic seemed ready
to overwhelm the world. She was a goddess, and Preston could only count himself
lucky that he was allowed to watch in awe as she worked.

Hours passed before the last rune was etched, and then with a great surge of power,
including a flood of life-energy, Fifi sealed the enchantment. The life energy
surprised Preston. She had been concealing her core with aura tricks, but it
was impossible to fake having a seed, so he already knew her second core was
multi-seeded with a pure magic and death seed based on the magic he had seen
her work. Apparently, she had been hiding a life seed the whole time. He
wondered if her overgrown core had even more unknown seeds lurking beneath
that impenetrable glassy exterior.

"I'm on a bit of a role here, do you mind if I jump right into my next step?"
It was a little rude to keep Preston waiting even longer, but Fifi could easily
tell that he felt lucky just being able to watch her work so she figured it wasn't
a big deal.

"Wha-ummmm, yeah, yeah of course," he mumbled. She noticed he seemed to have fallen
into a bit of a trance due to the combination of the incredible intricacies of her
magic and her overwhelming beauty.

"Great, I've been looking forward to this. You got back with those ingredients
just in the nick of time." She floated up and stood on the rim of the massive cauldron
and began to strut around until she was facing him, her six inch stilettos clicking
loudly against the narrow path with every step. She moved with the grace of a hunting
cat, and though the thin lip didn't seem to present any issue for her balance wise
it did mean her broad hips swayed even more than usual. She could feel in Preston's
aura that he was becoming more and more hypnotized with every step she took.
When she got to the far side of the cauldron, she turned to face him and peeled off
her dress in one smooth motion, tossing it behind her as she stood in all her naked
glory. The old necromancer came helplessly at the sight of her bare breasts bouncing
free and Fifi chuckled as she felt the fluctuations in his aura. She reached up and
squeezed her boobs together, relaxing her nipples so the life-attuned milk in her
huge chest could escape. Milk flowed down into the cauldron in thick streams, as
if she was holding two garden hoses above the cauldron. The milk regenerated just
as quickly as it was released since it was part of her eternal magical body. There
was some draw on her power as she "healed" the missing milk, but she hardly noticed
the expenditure.

Despite the speed with which Fifi's milk gushed into the cauldron, its volume was such
that it took nearly an hour to fill. The entire time, Fifi used the cauldron to prevent
the life attuned energy from leaked out of her milk. When she finally cut off the flow,
she stood above a small pond of her breast milk. The myriad expensive ingredients floating
next to her drifted over to the cauldron one by one and were dropped into the large brew.
Whenever they entered their volatile magic was released with explosive force that Fifi
effortlessly contained and smoothed out, blending their power into the backdrop of life
energy provided by her milk. When the last of the ingredients had gone into the brew,
Fifi reached into her cleavage and withdrew a dragon tooth as long as her leg. It turned
out the afterworld made a pretty good purse, and the time for hiding it from Preston
had passed. She took hold of the tooth with <telekinesis> and lowered it directly into
the center of the cauldron. Immediately, the milkly brew began to churn and swirl, forming a
whirlpool around the tooth as it was lowered deeper and deeper. It hadn't been obvious
at first, but the roiling brew was slowly shrinking, getting drawn into the tooth submerged
in its center. The processes continued for several minutes until the potion had been drawn
down to a level where the tooth was once more visible. It took longer than one might have
expected since the tooth that was revealed did not look much like the one that had gone in.
It was the same ivory color, but it had shrunk to a length of nine inches or so and lost its
shape, becoming nearly a rod with only the barest hint of the taper that used to end in a wicked
point. Dragon bone does not change shape easily or willingly, and dragon tooth is even less willing
to change. So drastically reshaping a dragon tooth displays an incredible level of skill on Fifi's
part.

Once the last of the brew was sucked into the tooth, Fifi brought it over to float in front of her,
then began rapidly etching runes in its surface. These runes were small enough that she didn't
bother with <mage hands> to carve them. Instead she directly burned them into the surface with
concentrated dragonfire. It was harder, but it was what she needed for work this delicate. Just
as with the cauldron, she maintained the lattice of power without completing or stabilizing it as
she worked. The runes worked their way up the enamel rod, each so tiny it could not be seen with
the naked eye. They were arranged in a spiral pattern, with thirteen gaps between sections of runes
left blank to be filled in later. The closer they got to the tip the more intense the life energy
emanating from the rod became. When the runes had finished their slow march to the tip, Fifi reached
out and took it in her hand, bringing the tip down to dip into her cleavage. She ordered the countless
souls of the dead to emerge, and the shades obeyed the new goddess of death, flooding out of the
afterworld though the gateway that Fifi's abundant cleavage provided. They never had the chance to
make their way out into the world. As soon as they emerged from her cleavage and into the real world,
they became not wandering shades, but hungry ghosts and were immediately drawn to the intense life
energy in front of them. Fifi flexed her death goddess seed, forcing her enslaved souls to flow down along
the shaft of the bone rod. She burnt new runes into the tooth and braided the shades together, shoving
them down to fill up the tiny channels of the symbols she now carved. She used them like fiber to weave
a sheath for the bone, spending thousands every second. She finished carving the last set of runes
and encasing the tooth in shadecloth, but she didn't stop there. She continued to braid together the
stream of souls emerging from her cleavage to form a long whip extending from the tip of the rod.
It was only after she had spent millions of souls that she finalized the enchantment. The whip
that floated in front of her radiated intense life and death energy. It possessed a menacing aura
that promised to subjugate any who dared oppose its wielder. It was truly a weapon befitting a
dark goddess. Fifi smiled in satisfaction and tucked it away in the afterworld.

Satisfied with her crafting session, Fifi finally looked up to acknowledge Preston. The
ancient necromancer was prostrate on the floor of the workshop, his forehead pressed hard
into the ground. He was trembling, and Fifi could easily read the rush of powerful
emotions in his aura. She hopped off the edge of the now-empty cauldron and strutted
over to him, her heels clicking on the hard floor. She stopped in front of him and reached
out with her toe, hooking her foot under his chin and turning his face up towards her.
Though his balls were long-since empty, they convulsed helplessly at the sight of her
flawless body. "G-g-goddess," he declared. When she had opened the gate to the afterworld
and commanded the shades of the dead he had felt a power beyond what any practitioner
could hope to wield.

"Mmmmm, I suppose I am, now rise, I have something for you,"

He got to his feet. She slid her fingers through his hair, "I've taken up your precious time
that you should have been spending looking for a breakthrough. You have served me diligently
and faithfully since I got here, would you serve me still?"

What else could he say? He stood before the goddess of death, "Y-yes, yes of course."

She smiled, "I'm glad to hear that. Now, the servant of a goddess can't very well be a
washed up practitioner at the end of his lifespan, can he?" She laced her fingers through
his hair and dragged his head down to fit a thick nipple between his lips. She let down
her milk, tapping into her rebirth seed to take direct control over the energy that suffused
her milk. Preston's shriveled life force soaked up the power she filled him with, growing
rapidly under the treatment. His body also benefited. It would have shed the years on its
own, but Fifi decided to take a more direct control over the process. To let herself see what
she was doing, she snapped her fingers and his clothes were pulled off of him. Under her guidance,
his muscles swelled and took on more definition. His salt-and-pepper hair darkened, though she prevented
it from going completely black, deciding that she liked the silver fox look on him. His
wrinkled face grew more handsome, though once again she decided to keep some of the lines that
lent his face character. Finally, she directed her attention down and his cock and balls
swelled to a size that most women would have found daunting.

When she pushed him back, Preston looked down at his new body in wonder. "Gods, this
is amazing,"

"You like?" Fifi grinned, "I was planning to bargain with this at first, but then you
seemed willing to take me on for free," she squeezed her boobs together and winked at
him, "I wonder why?"

"Ghu, umm, I-" Preston's brain struggled to re-start in the aftermath of her gesture.
Fifi grinned and shoved him hard onto his back. She stepped forward to stand over
him, then squatted down, pressing her wet snatch against the tip of his newly enlarged
member. He desperately wanted to cum, but when she had enhanced his cock she had given
herself full control over his ability to cum.

"You're mine now," she purred, her nails pressing into the thick slabs his pecs had become.
"pledge yourself to me, forever and for always." The feeling of power she had gotten when
the souls of the dead submitted to her had been intoxicating, and she wanted more.
She engaged her death goddess seed to offer him a magical bond. She could have easily forced
it on him given their power disparity, but it would be stronger if he willingly accepted
it.

Preston could sense the finality and tyrannical imbalance of the bond Fifi was offering.
The once fiercely independent minded late-path practitioner would become nothing more than
a tool for the voluptuous goddess above him, but there could be no question of
hesitation, "I swear myself to you, I'll worship you forever."

Fifi grinned, lowering her hips to engulf his iron-hard member. "Of course you will."
As their bond was established, Preston's final core began to sputter alive, and Fifi's
eyes widened briefly in surprise. She could feel the seed forming in his final core as
if it was within her own. There was a connection between her death goddess seed and
the seed lighting up Preston's final core. In fact, his new seed seemed to be a shadow
of her own much more powerful seed. She found she could control the roiling power in
his core just as easily as if it were her own, so she reflexively smoothed it out to
a mirror finish to grant her new servant the boon of the glassy aura she enjoyed.

As Preston's new core stabilized he instinctively realized that his new seed was
something more than the seeds he had manifested so far. It was at least a greater
seed, but there was something more to it. It was not entirely his, in fact it
wasn't his at all. He could feel in his soul that it truly belonged to Fifi, and
his goddess was just graciously lending it to him. It was her brand upon him,
marking him as her property, her worshiper. Nothing had ever felt so right.
"Thank you, thank you goddess. I am unworthy of you!"

She leaned down, smushing her breasts against his broad chest. "None of that,
you're my first priest, of course you're worthy," she kissed him hard and
began to ride him, moving her hips slowly at first, but picking up speed
quickly until she was fucking him with wild abandon. It did not take her
long to begin cumming. Establishing a linked and decidedly subordinate relationship
between Preston's new death's slave seed and her own death goddess seed had
been a huge turn-on, and the feeling of the dick she had custom made to fill
her pussy to the max was more than enough to rapidly bring her to climax.
She continued to take her pleasure until she was thoroughly satisfied and
her new follower was an exhausted wreck despite his newly enhanced body.
It was only then that she finally allowed him to cum.

======================================================================================

Bakar was irritated. He should not have to personally deal with a situation like
this. Trade in knowledge with mortal warlocks was the lifeblood of hell, and
hell almost always came out on top in the end. Practitioners traded chunks of their
lifeforce and ritually sacrificed victims to provide power for the great engines
of hell. They took action on hell's behalf, helping sow discord in the mortal realm
to ensure there were always people desperate enough for power to come knocking
on the demon door. They even came to hell itself to serve as mercenaries for a
time in the constant war against the myriad heavens. Almost always it was the demons
who came out of the trades on top, but there were occasional practitioners who got
the better of their demonic trading partners. With the sheer number of deals being
done, it would have been impossible for it not to happen from time to time.
Demons who made a bad deal would usually hide the evidence. If it was bad enough
that their liege had to deal with the issue, they would usually be discorperated
for a few centuries before being allowed to reform. Very occasionally, a repeat
customer was so adept at pulling one over on the hosts of hell that the drew the
ire of a small group of special problem solvers. Like casino pit bosses, they took
notice when someone was beating the house more than they should and put a stop to it.
Violently.

Most of these problem solvers were higher demons specializing in possession, since that
was usually the easiest way to get on the material plane and eliminate a target, so
when a precocious witch had caught their attention by refusing to make deals with her
summoned demons and just directly dominating them instead, they had followed procedure
and made temporary possession deals with some nearby warlocks. The trouble was that
they were immediately detected when they attempted to assassinate her, and several were
dispersed back on hell when some sort of variant dragon guarding her hit them with
its incredibly deadly breath weapon. So far there was no sign of them reforming, almost
as if they had been killed for real, which shouldn't be possible. They were really
starting to get worried when the witch was arrogant enough to start physically going
to hell. Delighted at the opportunity to bring their full power to bear, a group of
archfiends had ambushed her, only for her to disperse them just as thoroughly as her
dragon did using an enchanted bullwhip. It was at this point that the matter was brought
to Bakar's attention. More than anything, that should have been impossible. The king of
hell should not have to take notice of any particular mortal. If he did, that mortal
was very unlikely to have a happy life, or a particularly long one.

Now, the arrogant witch had once more returned to hell, this time entering Bakar's
very own harem. The absolute gall. It would not stand. He teleported into the
bedchamber where his palace wards had detected the intruder and was immediately
greeted by the sight of three of his wives tangled up in bed with the troublemaking
witch. His wives were all succubus queens, their beauty nearly incomparable, yet
somehow next to this mortal witch it was they looked who looked mundane. Brianna
was laid out beneath the intruders abundant ass, desperately lapping at witch's
pussy while Honey and Malikaria were latched onto her huge breasts, their faces
swallowed up by the pliant flesh as the witch clamped their faces to her bosom
with hands at the back of their heads. All three of his wives were moaning into
the witch's flesh, unable to control their passions despite literally millennium
of practice in the bedroom arts. The witch's amber eyes met his and she smirked.
Bakar's cock stiffened and his awareness became consumed by the sensation of
fullness between his legs.

It wasn't just the tableau of physical domination Bakar had been so struck by,
but the aura landscape he sensed when he first arrived. Succubi were known as
masters of aura play, so it was shocking to see how his wives auras were fully
penetrated by the tyrannical aura of this intruder. Her aura was infused with
the power of a lust seed, which she used to make the three succubi helpless with
desire for her. She had beaten them at their own game, one versus three. It was
incredibly shocking. So shocking that he hadn't noticed as her aura penetrated
his with incredibly precise threads, so subtle they were hardly detectable until
they wormed their way to his core and struck like a viper, cutting him off from
his power and flooding him with the power of her lust seed. Before the king of
hell could do anything about it, his world shrank down to his hard cock and
the perfect woman utterly dominating his wives in front of him. Involuntarily,
he unbuckled his trousers and let them fall so he could jerk off to the sight
in front of him.

Fifi bit her lip at the sight of Bakar's enormous manhood. Once she was done
rifling through the minds of these succubi, she was definitely going to take
him for a spin. She was about to go back to going through the minds of the
three queens for magical knowledge when she realized he wasn't some guard
like she had originally thought. *Ooops, did I just accidentally dominate
the King of hell? I knew he might come after me, but I thought it would be
an actual fight, heck I thought I might have to just run away if he showed
up. I guess becoming the goddess of death made me a lot stronger than I
thought. Fuck, that's hot.* Her pussy clenched and she felt an orgasm
ripple through her. It wasn't the first, and she didn't lose her aura
grip on the cores of the four demons in the room with her, but it was nice.
She decided not to break off her pilfering of magical secrets, but she did
change what she was doing a little bit. She started deliberately telegraphing
the deep memory probe she was doing to Bakar, making it obvious just much
she was helping herself to the secret arcane knowledge of the three most
powerful succubi alive. Much of it she already knew, but there were a few
new tricks that she filed away for later study and refinement.

It was only after she had rummaged through the minds of all three queens
to her hearts content that she tossed them aside and rose from the bed.
She strutted over to Bakar, her heels, the only thing she was wearing,
clicking on the stone floor with every step. Reaching into his mind she
pulled out the location of his throne room and grabbed his cock, teleporting
them both onto his throne a moment later. It was a tight fit despite the
size of the throne of hell. "If I'm gonna fuck a king, I want to do it on
his throne," Fifi explained to the enthralled demon king, "though this is
a little tight." She spun around so she was the one sitting on the throne,
it's dark crystal cold against her ass, "I have an idea though," she said
before chain casting <reduce person> on Bakar until he was 8 inches tall.
A quick <teleport object> flicked his shirt away from them.

Bakar looked up at the boobs looming over him, each as big as a barn from
his perspective. They were perfect, divine. There was no room in his mind
for anything but worship of those massive udders. He continued to mindlessly
masturbate to the mortal practitioner who had fucked his wives in front of him
and enthralled him just as easily. Seeing what the king of hell was thinking,
Fifi smirked. Her new lust seed was awesome. She grabbed him roughly by the
legs and flipped him upside down before throwing one leg over the arm of his
throne and shoving him head first into her hungry snatch. She pulled back on
the induced lust and let the indignation and humiliation she had been suppressing
bubble to the surface of his mind. The king of hell began to struggle, putting enough
strength to shatter star iron into his escape attempts, but making no progress
towards escape as he did his best to escape Fifi's grasp. Fifi moaned in delight
at his desperate attempts to escape from his fleshy prison, his every struggle driving
her to ever greater heights of passion. She released his legs, so she could bring
both hands to bear on her own nipples, but even with her hand out of play he had
no more luck escaping than before. He managed to turn himself around and he would
occasionally manage to claw his way out a little, clearing his arms and head from
her lower lips, but then she would just flex her inner muscles and drag him
back in as he desperately clawed at the air, futilely trying to prevent himself
from getting swallowed up once more.

Fifi came again and again, getting off on so utterly dominating the king of hell
on his own throne. As she writhed around in the throws of her own pleasure, the
throne of hell was looking more and more the worse for wear. The magical obsidian
beneath her ass began to chip and the arms of the throne cracked when she leaned
against them. Cracks began to spread through the base of the throne. If she hadn't
been so wrapped up in her own ecstasy, she might have noticed the new seed flickering
to life in her bloated second core earlier. When she felt Bakar's will break, the
seed roared to life and she could no longer miss it. It was a bit of a surprise,
but after her experience in the afterworld, she reacted quickly. This new seed
meant another opportunity to pump her already overpowered second core. She did
her best to get a sense for the concept behind this new seed, and though it was
unique she quickly got a feel for it. The best description she could come up with
was "wanton infernal empress". Her sin and lust seeds were gone, their merger
having provided the catalyst for the new seed, but clearly she was also experiencing
a seed event that was feeding into the character of the new seed. With a practiced
hand, she smoothed the roiling chaos of her core, restoring the unnatural tranquility
that always served as such a force multiplier for her. That done, she peered deeper
into the concept of the new seed, and teased out the complex concept of the seed
event feeding into it.

Fifi had thought about the way she had handled her death goddess seed event, and
concluded that while she handled it well for the most part, she had made one major
mistake. Her new divine seed bolstered all the non-divine seeds it shared a core with,
making even ordinary seeds multiply the base power of her core. That meant the more
seeds she had the more powerful she was, no matter what kind of seed they were. She
could have a sun seed and it would make her stronger at night. What she should have
done was look for secondary seed events going on and pulled them apart from the main
seed event so they could form mundane seeds to be empowered by the divine seed. It
was an understandable mistake because she had had no real idea what was happening, but
now armed with experience, she didn't want to make the same mistake again. After some
study, she realized the main seed event taking place was that she was claiming the
throne of hell. In fact, she realized she was doing more than that. The throne of hell
was a divine artifact, one of the remnants of the old gods. It should have been impossible
to damage, and yet Fifi was doing so as she her power spread into it to claim it. It
was only possible due to the divine spark in her death goddess seed. This impossible
feat was the main seed event going on, but it wasn't the only thing going on.

The most obvious thing she was doing was utterly dominating the king of hell. She
teased that out of the seed event and used it to form a new seed. She still
had access to most of the power of dominion from her death goddess seed, and she
could already tell that the wanton infernal empress seed would have much of the
same power, but she missed her old pure dominion seed and it was nice to have one
back. That is it would have been if that was the seed that formed. Instead, she
got a tyrant seed, which was similar but no longer felt like it contained the
possibility of benevolence. She was also doing all this while pursuing her own
pleasure, and of course Bakar, despite his humiliation and rage at the situation,
was more aroused than he had ever been in his long existence. She pulled that out
and formed a new lust seed to replace the one that had merged to create the wanton
infernal empress seed.

The throne of hell was crumbling beneath her ass more rapidly now. The fact that
she could damage it was a testament to her power, which was hot, but the actual
consequences of a destroyed throne of hell were not something Fifi wanted to
deal with. Before the throne of hell had been created, hell has been as disunited
as the myriad heavens, with predictably violent results. The warring demons had
continually spilled out onto the material plane and recruited warlock mercenaries
so heavily that they depopulated whole countries. By comparison the forever war
with the myriad heavens were a border skirmish since neither side really found the
environs the other occupied hospitable in the long term. The old gods had finally
put a stop to it by forging the throne of hell, which granted significant power
over demon-kind to whoever managed to sit it, and mostly put a stop to the
demonic civil wars. If the power of the throne was destroyed along with it,
Fifi would accidentally throw hell back into chaos.

To avoid that scenario, Fifi reached out and took hold of the divine power in
the throne, tapping her death goddess seed to get a grip on it. The throne itself
clearly wasn't long for this world, but she still needed to put the power somewhere.
Drawing inspiration from the way she had accidentally turned her cleavage into the
afterworld, she began to draw the throne's power into her meaty ass. Its power suffused
her flesh. It didn't want to take root in living flesh, having been created for a static
artifact, but Fifi managed to force the issue, drawing on the concept of her ass being
a seat to make it fit. It seemed as if it wouldn't take for a moment and then something
clicked and the power of the throne of hell began to rush into her ripe booty. Never one
to miss an opportunity, Fifi noticed a new element to the seed event and used the fact
that she had just prevented the return of the hellish civil wars to form a new
seed of protection. The fact that she had been protecting the world from herself
had no bearing on her ability to form the seed. The throne's
breakup accelerated, and Fifi squirmed her ass back and forth, relentlessly grinding the
throne into powder. She came again and again, her pussy clenching around Bakar with
enough force that he would have been dispersed if she hadn't cast an enhancement spell
on him she he could survive the onslaught. The throne didn't look much like a throne
anymore and her legs slid further and further out as her perfect ass gobbled up the divine
artifact. In the end she was left sitting on the floor as her core stabilized once more.

She examined her new core with pride. Just like the last time she had gained a divine
seed, her core now held an absurdly massive amount of power compared with the power
she had had before. The difference between her now and the power she had wielded before
consuming the throne of hell was even more stark than the difference between a path
complete practitioner and some who had only awakened a single core. It was an absurd
power jump. No mortal practitioner was ever intended to wield even a fraction of the power
Fifi now held in a single finger, and that was just counting her physical power, which
really was one of the least impressive things about her. Just as she had been feeling
like her mind had been starting to catch up to the enormous potential her body provided
for it, she could feel immense new amounts of cognitive substraight for her mind to
expand into.

*If you beg me to let you be my loyal slave for the rest of eternity, I might let
you cum,* she telepathically said to the former monarch of hell. His mental response
wasn't verbal, but Fifi still picked up Bakar's overwhelming desire to become her
possession. She finally allowed him to cum and he did so violently, blacking out
from the intensity of it. Fifi reached down and pulled him out of her pussy, wiping
him off on her thigh before implanting a memory packet with her instructions for
how he was to manage hell in her absence and tossing him over her shoulders. She
snapped her fingers to clean herself off from head to toe, pulled a silk robe
from the afterworld and then opened a portal back to the material plane. It
was probably about time to stop gathering knowledge and power and start taking
action in the mortal world. It was true that she still had lots of growing to do,
but if she was accidentally taking over hell, she was ready to deal with a few
puny elvish royals. There really was such a thing as overkill.

======================================================================================

Fifi pursed her lips and fluffed back her hair, examining herself critically
in the mirror as Preston cinched the cord at the back of her armor.
The whip woven from the souls of the dead curled on her hip in combination with
the figure hugging dragon-scale of her armor made her look every inch the dominatrix.
She had alchemally treated the scales so they became as flexible as leather except when
struck and the souls woven into each of the miniscule runes covering her made the
magically treated scales black as night. Her armor was in three pieces, pants that
looked like she had been poured into them, a corset that shoved her tits up, presenting
her perfect mounds to the world and leaving the flawless skin of her shoulders bare, and
a jacket which she kept stowed in the afterworld unless expecting battle soon. It
was so that she had continual access to her dimensional purse that she kept her
jacket off, well that and she liked looking hot enough to make succubus queens
develop self esteem problems.

In the few months since Preston had become her servant, she had continued
learning and building power, despite knowing that she was more than capable
of acting. For her whole life, Fifi had had some goal to orient
off. When she was a street rat she wanted to get out, to learn real magic
and become a rich and powerful mage. That goal had been shattered when she
learned about her merged second core, but it was replaced by the goal of
honing her skill with alchemy to the absolute max during her years in
university. After that, her goal was more modest, to live a quiet, if
mildly illegal, life practicing her own special brand of alchemy. Her
crippled path had dealt her a tough hand, but she had been proud to have
mastered her magic better than any other single core practitioner she knew
of. When Shadow's hatching had woken her second core her life had been
turned upside down, but she had still had a goal. It had been a simple
goal: escape. After that, since she never meant to break Merv's will, she
had wanted to set things right with him, but she had never really decided
what came after that. Then the royal cabal had ambushed and killed her.
After resurrecting herself she had felt a burning need to master her
vast power since it was obvious that there was a huge skill and experience
gap between her and practitioners who had gotten to the end of their
paths the hard way.

Now she had made significant progress at mastering her powers, so significant
it turned out that she had stumbled into becoming the eternal queen of hell.
The biggest change was that her mind had expanded to catch up with her body.
It had been slow to start, but its growth became exponential once it began expanding
into the virgin cognitive substrate of her new body. It was still expanding
in fact, but she had long since surpassed the point where a normal path
complete practitioner would have stopped. She was confident that the cabal
would no longer stand a chance against her.

The question was, what did she want to do with all this new power? She
knew she wanted to get Merv back to finish healing him, but there were
a dozen ways to go about doing it. She could lay waste to Landing and
take him from the ashes of the palace. She could overcharge a teleport
to punch through the palace wards and kidnap him instantly. She could
teleport the whole palace away. She could come to him in his dreams
and slowly heal him without anyone being the wiser. She didn't really
want to go all goddess of destruction. It would hurt too many people she
didn't have any quarrel with. Even just destroying the royal cabal,
who she was still very angry at, would destabilize Seravore and lead
to lots of suffering for the common people. She was sorely tempted by
that option, but growing up an orphan in Landing had been hard enough
in a time of relative prosperity and she didn't want to make any more
orphans. Well, maybe a few, but not if their parents didn't have it
coming. She still wasn't satisfied with a surgical kidnapping though.
She wanted to watch the royals squirm for what they had done to her
and especially what they had done to Shadow, and she wanted it to
creep up on them slowly. Watching them struggle would be more satisfying
if they didn't immediately realize how little chance they had. Today
was the day she set her plan in motion.

She strode out of her command tent and packed it away with a snap
of her fingers the moment Preston had cleared the entryway after
her. The tent flew through the air to be sucked into her cleavage
to be stored in the afterworld along with the rest of her army's
baggage, not that there was much of it. The undead didn't have many
logistical constraints and her army was a lot smaller than she had
hoped to be able to accumulate by this point. Despite visiting
half a dozen old battle sites, corpses were frustratingly hard to
come by on the demon wastes. It turned out a land crawling with
necromancers meant all the good skeleton armies had already been
claimed by someone. The situation was certainly not helped by
the fact that the steppe tribes of men and orcs who made their
homes in the wastes burned their dead to keep them out of the hands
of enemy necromancers.

Of course, Fifi didn't need any of the 3000 or so skeletal minions
she had been able to scrape together, but she had decided she didn't
want to do this all based on personal might alone so her piddling
army was annoying. She'd fleshed out her skeletons with 10,000 or
so ghosts that she just directly pulled out of her cleavage, but
incorporeal undead just didn't have the same gravitas. Fortunately,
Fifi wasn't just the goddess of death, so all it took to flesh out
her ranks a bit was opening a gate to hell and calling up a tiny
small fraction of the demonic forces at her command.

"Mistress, the scouts have made contact with the Jal clan outriders
directly to the north," Cora reported. She was clad in similar armor
to Fifi's, though she wore her jacket already. Fifi had already reached
out with her monstrous aura senses to get the same information, but
if she was going to play a warlord she was going to commit to the
bit hard enough to post scouts and pickets.

"Alright, tell everyone to saddle up. We'll dismount the dragoons once
they make contact with their screening forces and charge with the
demons and cavalry on the wings."

"Yes Mistress," Cora jogged of towards her nightmare so she could
assume command of the wing of skeletal cavalry under her command.
Fifi used <telepathy> to relay the same orders to her remaining
sub-commanders as she watched her succubus familiar mount up.

Fifi herself turned and took a few quick steps before leaping up
into the air. Spectral dragon wings unfurled from her back and
she beat them twice, propelling herself through the air faster than
an arrow from a path complete pure-archer path practitioner. Enchantments
on her armor smoothed her passage so there was no boom when she broke
the sound barrier, and she stopped as quickly as she started, dropping
onto Shadow's back as he glided lazily over her army. The demon wastes
had been good to Shadow, and though he was still a little under-sized
for his age he was now as large as a smallish elephant and could easily
bear Fifi's weight. While Fifi had worked to master her magic, Shadow
had been hunting. He spent plenty of time stalking mundane prey and
magical beasts, but his primary targets had been the numerous malevolent
spirits which haunted the numerous clots of evil magic which gave the
demon wastes their name. The partial ritual he had been subjected to
while still in his egg seemed to have left him with the terrifying ability
to devour the souls of his enemies to grow stronger, and this ability
made him the natural predator of all sorts of spectral entities. Hungry
ghosts, shades, and demons possessing mortals were all on the menu.

"I still don't see why we don't just fly into Landing and slaughter
them all," Shadow huffed.

Fifi rubbed his neck, "that's your family you're talking about."

Shadow spat and a sizzling ball of darkness flew down towards the
earth, "they're no family of mine. Spoiled rotten, the lot of them."

Fifi gestured towards the ball of concentrated death and a portal
to the afterworld opened up in front of it. Once it entered her domain,
she safely dispersed it, "mind my army please, and don't I spoil you
a little?"

Shadow chuffed, "I suppose."

"Come on, the battle is about to start. We have to wait for our queue."

"Oh come on, they're still setting up. It won't get exciting for a while
longer," Shadow said sullenly.

Fifi laughed, "Oh Shadow, you've really gotten quite bloodthirsty haven't
you?" She could feel his annoyance through their bond, but she just sent
her own amusement back at him and bent over to kiss the warm scales on
his neck, "it's very cute."

"You're so embarrassing," the death dragon muttered, tucking his wings
to do a low pass over the army. Fifi's undead soldiers didn't react, but
the demons on the wings began cheering raucously as their queen buzzed
them on dragonback.

Fifi decided not to continue teasing her lovably moody dragon and instead
just focus on the troops below. She occasionally reached out to her subcommanders
telepathically to help coordinate, but for the most part she just watched.
Skeletal horses galloped forward in the center of her line with five or six
skeletal infantry hanging off each horse. All at once they began to wheel
and ride off towards the wings, leaving most of the skeletons clinging to
them behind. The soldiers dropped off quickly formed into units of 10,
and accepted swords and shields from two designated skeletons that had
been holding them in big bundles. Each of these units of ten linked up with
nine more groups to form units 100 strong, which moved into place. Before long
the infantry block had formed into a single unbroken shield wall at the front
with reinforcing blocks of 100 soldiers held in reserve at regular intervals
about 50 meters behind the main line. An equal number of archers deployed in
a chaotic looking group in front of the shield wall, milling about in a confusing
mass that would make it hard for the enemy to get a good look at what they were
dealing with.

Once her army had deployed in formation, the movement below ground to a halt
for a while. The Jal clan was entirely mounted, so if they did not want to
give battle she would have a hard time forcing them into an engagement without
resorting to overwhelming magical displays. With a little luck they would
choose to give battle to defend their territory though. Fifi and Shadow watched
the chaotic swarm of orc riders in front of her army for several more hours,
until finally a change appeared and they suddenly wheeled in large numbers and
began charging towards her army. Her demonic cavalry surged forward to meet
the charge of the heavily armored warg vanguard.

In the center, orcs on horseback rode towards her front lines and released arrow
after arrow into the mass of her skeletal soldiers. Paper seals wrapped around the
arrow shafts flared with a dark power whenever they impacted. It would have knocked
the souls free from undead raised by an ordinary necromancer, but how could such minor
magics undo the work of the goddess of death? Fifi's own archers returned fire
before retreating through the shield wall as the approaching cavalry drew closer.
The mounted bowmen wheeled their horses rather than meet the blades of her infantry,
firing more arrows as they returned to their army. Orcs and horses were left scattered
on the plain behind them, pierced by arrow shafts. In contrast, Fifi's skeletons were
almost entirely unscathed. Evidently the Jal clan leadership had realized that their
normal anti-undead tactics weren't working this time, because after a while the
orcs one more formed up for a charge, but this time rather than bows they had
loosed the straps on the long-handled war mauls that they carried. If they couldn't
deal with the necromancy animating the skeletons directly, good old fashioned
blunt force trauma would have to do. There were no shortage of might practitioners
among the orc clans, so it was a style of combat they were well suited to.

The Jal clan's heavily armored warg riders were already engaged on the wings, so
they had to make due with regular cavalry as they smashed into the line of skeletal
infantry, but even so the impact was terrific. Holes were immediately torn in the
too-thin line and the reinforcements had to be immediate deployed to fill in the
gaps. It was an inauspicious start to the battle to say the least. Bone shattered
and flew in all directions as the orcs laid about themselves with all the massive
strength of might practitioners going wild. Their heavy war mauls were larger
than sledge hammers and often enchanted to make them much heavier than they
looked, so they were the perfect counter for the skeletal soldiers. If the
skeletons had been raised by anyone else, the battle would have been over quickly,
but they were raised by the goddess of death herself, so how could the skeletons
be expected to stay down? No sooner had the skull of one of Fifi's shield bearing
skeletons been smashed to bits than the fragments would begin to draw back together.
She could feel a faint pull on her death goddess seed as energy was drawn to
continually re-raise her legion, but the draw was so slight compared with her
natural regeneration speed that her reserves didn't dip at all. Any other necromancer
would have been quickly exhausted by the effort.

As the battle devolved into a chaotic melee, the orcs and their mounts began to
fall, but Fifi had plans for them, so as their souls faded into the afterword,
she parceled them off to keep track of them. The battle on the wings was not
going as well as in the center. Having shared the demon wastes with warlocks
for centuries, the steppe riders were accustomed to fighting demons, and Fifi
had deliberately avoided bringing out the strongest soldiers of hell. It seemed
she may have underestimated just how effective the orcs could be, because her
forces were definitely not getting the better of things. She considered opening
a gate to hell and calling in more reinforcements, but that would be a display
of force she didn't want to make just yet. She wanted to play the role of minor
warlord a while longer. Of course, that might be difficult given what she had
planned for after the battle, but she would at least avoid flashy battle magic.

Eventually her demons and skeletal cavalry were scattered, but by that point the
undying legion in her center had taken a heavy toll on the main body of the
Jal clan's soldiers. The heavy warg riders lead a charge that shattered her
troops like bowling pins, but they re-formed and counter-attacked as soon
as the momentum of the charge was broken. After several grueling hours,
the Jal clan was worn down and the pack of warg riders carrying their banner
broke for the open plain. What was left of their army did its best to
follow.

"Now that they've seen what we have to offer, let's go open negotiations,"
Fifi said.

Rather than answer aloud, Shadow tucked his wings and dove towards the
Jal clan's banner. He landed hard directly in front of the small group of
leaders, barely breaking on his way down. Dirt flew up in clods from the
impact and the giant wolves the orc nobles were riding came to an abrupt
stop, snarling in anger. Shadow let out a menacing hiss and the wargs
abruptly stopped growling.

Fifi swung off his back, gracefully sliding to the ground and sauntering
over to towards the Jal clan leadership, completely unafraid to be
mere feet away from the massive jaws of their wargs. "Would you like to
discuss the terms of your surrender?" As she spoke, she unleashed her
aura, simultaneously penetrating the defences of everyone in front of them
and cutting them off from their power. As a matter of habit, she exerted
minor pushes on their auras to push their emotional state towards a mix
of fear and lust. Having arrived on dragonback and looking the way she
did, it didn't take much.

Jal-in was glad he was mounted because the sudden weakness he felt at the
sight of the practitioner strutting towards him was probably
enough to make him collapse if he were on his own feet. Her hair was piled
up on top of her head in an elegant arrangement that left a few delicate
strands dangling down, and it put her pointed ears on full display. A
bone deep hatred welled up. The elves had conquered the humans when they
arrived from over the seas, but they had exterminated orcs wherever they
found them, hounding them mercilessly on dragonback until they were driven
far to the west. When she drew closer, he realized that her points were
stubby rather than long and sharp, and the flames of his hatred cooled.
Half-elves were usually the by-blow of some eleven lord. He didn't blame
them for the sins of their fathers. "What do you want?"

"I want you to ride for me," she replied, "I have plans that I would rather
not fulfill with demons and the dead."

"After today, there aren't enough of us left to do you any good," the orc
chieftain said bitterly.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Fifi stretched out her hand and cast
<recall object> to drag the corpse of an orc warrior through the air.
Her fingers sank into his breastplate with a loud screeching sound as the
magically reinforced metal deformed under her hand like wet clay. She
dipped her fingers into her cleavage with the other hand and fished the
soul that resonated with the corpse out of the afterworld. She allowed
it to take on a humanoid form and gripped it casually by one
leg as if it was a chicken. She allowed the orcs to take in the sight
for a second before tapping her rebirth seed and slamming the soul back
into its body. The wounds on the corpse rapidly closed and the orc warrior
in her hands gasped back to life.

Jal-in and his captains could clearly feel the strong life attuned energies
she had used to resurrect the warrior, had having spent their lives in the
demon wastes they were very familiar with undead. They knew she had not
merely created a zombie. He knew resurrection wasn't impossible, but it
always came at a heavy toll for the caster. Raising someone from the dead
was only possible if you were very powerful, had a specialized seed, or
both, but this woman had done it casually. "Are you saying you'll do
that for-"

"all your soldiers, yes. Now, and in the future. You'll be just as undying
as any litch. More, actually."

He was silent for a long time. It wasn't because he didn't know how to respond. Orcs
respected nothing if not strength, and it was an incredible deal. It was just taking
a moment for his world to adjust to the new reality. "How?"

Fifi grinned, "I'm kinda the goddess of death, but don't tell anyone ok. It's a
secret." The gods were gone, but Jal-in believed her.

She put the warrior down and he immediately knelt in front of her, prostrating
himself on the grass. "Thank you goddess," he said as the next core on his path
sparked to life. Just as with Preston, Fifi could feel a peculiar connection
between her two divine seeds and his awakening core. She could instinctively feel
the ability to draw power from it or cut him off from accessing it.

She smiled down at him, "Didn't I say it was a secret?"

"S-sorry goddess," he remained prostrate.

"Oh, get up," she chuckled, "now, I've got to do that little party trick a few
thousand more times."

========================================================================================

Fifi handed a vial of gently glowing purple liquid to Cora and fished
a fresh empty vial out of the dimensional rift between her breasts.
"That will let the drinker merge with a rock to examine its memories
for an hour," she said. Cora dutifully noted down the effects of her
mistress's latest invention and tucked it away next to the fifteen
other unique brews that Fifi had come up with that morning. She would
find a scout to give it to later.

Unifying the demon wastes was turning out to be a bigger chore than
Fifi had originally thought it would be. Her army swelled with every
battle she won, as her vanquished enemies took the same deal she had
offered to the Jal clan, but there were so many different tribes,
clans, bands, independent practitioners, and cults populating the
vast expanse of the wastes that she hadn't managed to get through half
of them even though she had already been at it for six months. It
was an incredible degree of success by any standard, but Fifi was already
growing bored with it. She had turned to her old discipline of low
powered alchemy to stay occupied, squeezing every last drop of power
out of the ingredients and challenging herself to make due with lower
and lower quality inputs. Of course, low power now had a very different
meaning for her, so her concoctions were each enough that she could have
tested as a grandmaster alchemist back in Landing on their basis alone.
When one considered that she wasn't working off an existing recipe,
her potions were impressive enough that academic alchemists would
likely have to come up with a category above grandmaster. Coming
up with new concoctions was normally a laborious and expensive process
of trial and error, but with Fifi's vast and still expanding mind
she could simulate trillions of experiments a second with enough
accuracy that she hadn't wasted an ingredient in months.

She leaned down from her warg (Shadow wouldn't deign to walk for
miles at a time), and scooped up a wildflower at random. She
scanned it down to the smallest atom with her magical senses
and began considering what she could do with it. A moment later
she cast a rapid fire series of spells, first pulling grass pollen
from the surroundings, then summoning a tuber from three miles
away, picking a single tiny down feather from the giant owl one of
her scouts was riding. The ingredients floating in front of her
were telekinetically pulled apart and separated into several hundred
component pieces. Fifi held up a finger and dragonfire whooshed into
being at the tip. The ingredients floated over and began combining
together in a dizzying dance so quick and complex that no one besides
Fifi herself had a chance of even observing it much less comprehending
it. For serious alchemy, she would use a cauldron of course, but she
didn't take what she was doing now seriously. It was just something to
pass the time. If any other alchemist knew she thought of it that way,
they would have coughed up blood in shock. She was innovating the field
in who knew how many ways, but she thought of it as nothing more than
fidgeting? Indeed, every time Fifi came up with one of these creations,
she could feel her pure magic and dragon seeds trembling as they
tried to merge, but she would suppress it every time. She wouldn't
let them merge unless she did something really impressive.

A moment later she was done and she ushered the floating liquid into
the vial. "This will make the drinker blow away in a cloud of pollen
and reform randomly somewhere between fifty and one hundred miles away,"
she informed Cora.

"I'll find someone who can use it, Mistress."

"This is taking too long," Fifi complained.

"Should we force march?"

Fifi shook her head, "no, not the march, the whole thing. Subjugating the
wastes."

"Well, you could just go person-"

"Abubup! I don't want to hear it." It wasn't the first time Cora or Preston
or Jal-in had suggested she unleash her personal might to bring things to
a close quicker. "The problem is that we can't split the army up since
I have to be on hand to resurrect everyone." She had thought about making
some enchanted items to resurrect her soldiers, but it was very difficult
to make magic items that worked with such high level life magic. She had
come up with a few designs that could use her breast milk as fuel, but
her milk lost its potency after a while and really the solution just felt
a little undignified. She had been playing with another idea for a while
now, and if she was being honest with herself she probably liked it because
it would let her let loose a bit in the outer planes. "We'll camp here
for now. I'm going to be gone for a little while, just sit tight until
I get back."

"How long will you be gone Mistress?" Cora asked.

"Not long, should be no more than a few days." She swung off her warg
and lept into the skies, manifesting her spectral wings to cut through
the air. Before heading out in earnest, she ducked into a cloud bank and
stripped. She would stick out a bit with her black dragon scale armor
and big bullwhip woven from the souls of the departed where she was
going. After stowing her usual clothes in the afterworld, she flexed
her life and rebirth seeds, making vines begin winding around her
naked body. Leaves covered her, gathering thickly around her privates
and leaving gaps elsewhere. A few large colorful flowers bloomed on her
legs and torso, while smaller ones grew in her hair.

With her new look in place, Fifi reached out and tore open a doorway
between realms. It was a lot harder than opening a gateway to hell
or to the afterworld, since she had no connection to her target,
but she had gotten pretty good at dimensional magic with the ability
to reference the folded up dimension between her breasts and the
fact that her ass had become a divine artifact with authority over
an entire dimension. Once the gateway was large enough, she stepped
through into the Vale of Tranquility. The Vale of Tranquility was one
of dozens of nature themed heavens, and Fifi had chosen it because it
wasn't claimed by any particular pantheon of divine beings. The old
gods were gone, but all manner of angles and divine beasts still resided
in the myriad heavens and took care of the duties that had been laid
out by the old gods. Most of the heavens were claimed by organizations
of these beings, and they would be suspicious of outsiders. The Vale
of Tranquility was different though, it was a commons shared by
all manner of minor nature divinities.

She let the portal close behind her and strode off towards the large
hill which dominated the heaven. The hill looked close, but it she
drew closer to it far slower than she should have. Fifi didn't mind,
the surroundings were gorgeous, and she was of a mind to soak in
the scenery. She drew on her life and rebirth seeds, and flowers
sprouted in her footsteps as she decided to play up the persona
of nature goddess. The land responded to her, and her awareness
spread through the loamy soil. To her surprise, the distance warping
effect began to lessen as she walked. At first, she thought it was
just that the land was resonating with the life energy she was pumping
out into it, but she soon noticed her death goddess and wanton infernal
empress seeds resonating with the land. The heavens were meant to be
ruled by gods, and the gods had been absent for so long. The
Vale of Tranquility could sense her divine seeds and it was
instinctively recognizing her as its mistress. Fifi chuckled,
"I'm really just passing through, not conquering, I promise," but
she didn't rebuff the eager heaven. If it wanted to become her
property she wasn't going to prevent it.

With the space warping effect almost gone, she soon arrived at
the base of the hill. She had been noticing other figures approaching
the hill for a while now, and now she was close enough to wave at
the divine animals resolutely walking towards the summit of the
hill along side her. They were all moving much slower than her
as they still struggled against the warped space of the realm,
and they were all carrying containers of some sort. Rabbits hopped
along with little tin cups in their mouths. Deer wore empty wineskins
like saddlebags on their backs. She even saw a well organized group
of ants carrying a silver thimble. There were humanoid figures
carrying buckets, and birds of prey flying along with flexible
containers made of waxed leather rolled up in their talons.

At first, they had paid her little heed, but the divine animals
began to stare at her with reverent eyes as she casually strode
past them. She had released the suppression she usually kept
on her beauty, and now that they could see her clearly the
animals were struck dumb with awe. The humanoid figures had
it worse. She could clearly feel the overwhelming lust coming
from them. She blew a kiss at a musclebound man with a large rack of
antlers, and then giggled as he came hard enough that he fell over.

She walked up to the top of the hill, her wide hips swaying hypnotically
as she moved over the lush grass. As she neared the summit, the space
around her warped and passageways of all sorts from other heavens became
visible. A celestial river flowed through the void of space next to a
golden staircase. Mechanical otters rode clouds of steam alongside a giant
vine carrying a steady stream of silver ants. Angels flew up through a patch
of open sky and dolphins swam up through a chaotic sea. Mutually impossible
environments were overlaid over one another in space in a way that would
have driven a mortal mind insane, but which Fifi was able to take in at
a glance. At the center of it all was a giant stone monolith sitting in the
center of a round basin. The rock was rough, and it held an air of deep
time as if it had been there longer than the rest of the universe and would
last long after everything else was gone. A trickle of silvery liquid flowed
down from the top of the monolith in streams that jumped back and forth more
than ordinary water would. It collected in a shallow pool in the basin. All
the various water bearers scooped up the liquid souls from the pool before
turning back to their respective heaven. Just as with the passageways, the
space at the edge of the pool didn't make much sense. Far more water bearers
were able to fit along the edge than should have been able to, and the pool
remained full despite thousands of bucketfuls being removed every few seconds.

As Fifi walked up to the edge of the fountain, she felt the connection she
had developed with the Vale of Tranquility spreading out. All the myriad
heavens connected together at the fount of souls, so the other heavens were
now able to sense her presence, and just like the Vale they rejoiced at
the presence of a goddess, eager to recognize her as their mistress. Fifi's
nipples stiffened and she could feel herself grow wet at the rush of power
she felt when all the myriad heavens so eagerly submitted to her.

She had been planning to just scoop up a bit of liquid souls for her little
project, but looking at the monolith in the center of the fountain, she
suddenly felt a hunger. The fount of souls was like the throne of hell, one
of the few genuine divine artifacts left behind when the gods departed.
She had already absorbed one into her body, maybe she could absorb another.

Instead of bending down to dip some water from the pool, she stepped into it,
her feet splashing through the virgin souls as she approached the monolith.
With every step, she grew larger until it only came halfway up her calves.
Somehow the stone basin seemed to have grown larger than her so the water
spread out all around her. The water bearers had stopped dipping their vessels
in the fountain. They could sense her majesty and power. One by one, they
dropped to their knees, willingly submitting to her just as the heavens they
hailed from were in the process of doing.

The vines wrapped around Fifi's body receded, leaving her perfect body
bare in the silvery light of the soul water. Reality itself seemed to
tremble with desire for her over-ripe curves. Every jiggle and quake
of her breasts, each now the size of a small hill, brought the space
around her further and further under her dominion. She bit her lip
and let out a soft moan so alluring that the ancient stone beneath her
feet trembled with desire. One hand rose to cup a massive breast
while the other slid down to fit two fingers into her wet slit. She
played with herself for a moment, her lust hastening the submission of
the myriad heavens, before squatting down to slide the massive stone
monolith into her hungry snatch.

As the assembled water bearers watched, the half elf goddess wantonly
fucked the most sacred artifact in existence, using the ultimate source
of life as a giant dildo. Her black ringlets bounced, her massive breasts
heaved, her amber eyes glowed with unfathomable power, and her giant
domineering ass slammed down onto the sacred stone with crushing force.
The unfathomably old rock would have crumbled under the onslaught if
Fifi hadn't extended her power to protect it. The trickle of soul water
that had flowed for untold eons was cut off. Not a single drop managed
to escape the vice grip of Fifi's snatch. Every one of the fresh souls
that the divine fountain produced was hungrily gobbled up by Fifi's
womb.

Though she wasn't grinding it down like she had with the throne of hell,
the divinity of the fount of souls was slowly but surely getting sucked
up into Fifi's womb. She could feel her rebirth, lust, and life seeds
trembling, and it wasn't long before they began to merge, throwing her
core once more into flux. She moaned in delight at the feeling of a new
divine seed taking shape, and expertly took control. By this point, she
was an old hand at managing seed mergers, so once they had merged sufficiently,
she began looking for other seeds to form during the window of instability.
If she didn't maintain a bunch of non-divine seeds she wouldn't be able
to take best advantage of her divine seeds, and the path to creating more
divine seeds would be cut off.

She easily created a new lust seed to replace the one getting merged,
then drew of the fact that she had arrived from the Vale of Tranquility
to form a nature seed. She peered deep into the core of the fount of
souls and used it as a basis to form a seed of creation. She could
tell that it was a higher grade seed even without the boosting from
her divine seeds, so it would make a good replacement for the rebirth
seed she was loosing to the merger. She had to move quickly to create
as many seeds as she could, so she wracked her brain to try to think
of other seeds she could nurture. Remembering the sin seed she had
merged to create her wanton infernal empress seed, she realized
nothing could be more sinful than using the most sacred object
in existence as a dildo. Sure enough it was effortless for form another
sin seed. At the same time, she was being recognized by all the myriad
heavens, so she felt the beginnings of a seed that was almost the opposite
of the sin seed. It took her a moment to feel it out before a holy seed
formed.

Fifi didn't want to get too greedy. She had already increased the number
of seeds in her core by three, even after merging three seeds into a new
divine seed. She might have been able to form another ordinary seed, but
she decided to consolidate her gains and smooth out the chaos roiling
her core. The divine energy of the fount of souls continued to gush
up into her as she smoothed out her power. When the last drop entered
her womb, her pussy clenched as she came hard. A flash of golden light
ignited at the point where her lower lips met the rough stone and a
ring of power traveled down through the stone and into the basin below.

Where the ring of light passed, the rough stone was transformed into
flawless white marble that glowed with a faint inner light. Fifi stood
up, and as the monolith exited her snatch a similar ring of light played
around her pussy lips, transforming the rough stone into a golden statue
of Fifi herself. The statue couldn't compare to Fifi herself in beauty, but
it was still easily the second most beautiful thing in existence. Golden
vines like the ones Fifi had arrived in twined around its form, and
once Fifi stepped away from it soul water began to gush from its upturned
hands into the marble basin below. All the divinity had been sucked
away from the fount of souls, and its power had settled fully in Fifi's
two ovaries, but she knew it would cause no end of problems if there
was not a fresh supply of virgin souls to be placed in new life, so she
maintained a connection between her womb and the new statue.

Vines once more covered Fifi as she walked away, "Well, that was a little
more than I had planned on doing, but I guess I can't complain," Fifi
chuckled. She loved the feeling of getting stronger, even though she
was already more the powerful enough to dominant all the other practitioners
in the world combined, she would never say no to yet more power.

She shrank back down to normal size, then flexed the power of tyranny
stored in her ass to bring the myriad heavens under her sway in the same
way the endless hell was. The heavens had willingly submitted her, desperate
to fall under the thumb of the seductive half-elf practitioner who had
so casually conquered them with little more than a sexy strut, but Fifi
wanted more than just willing submission. She wanted absolute control.

She tore a hole in space and stepped back into the skies of the material
realm. With a thought, her vines were gone. She withdrew her tight dragon
scale armor and donned it quickly before flying down to the vast camp
of her army. She needed one last ingredient to bring her plan to fruition,
and she could get it from numerous places. She thought about using Preston,
but then decided to make for Jal-in's tent instead. Night had just fallen
and her wings were soundless in the darkness as she glided down towards the
large felt tent. The sentries at the door started when she dropped down
in front of them with feline grace, but they fell quiet when she pressed
a finger to her lips.

She pushed open the tent flap and strode inside. Jal-in and his wife
Jal-kir were in bed together. They started up as she came inside,
not having expected their warlord to appear so suddenly. "Mistress,
what can we-" Jal-kir was cut off as the voluptuous half-elf arrived
at their marriage bed and climbed in. When she stopped suppressing
her beauty, the two orcs were flooded with lust. Jal-in's foot-long
cock sprang to attention and Jal-kir felt herself grow wet despite
never having been interested in women before. Feeling the lust in
both of them, Fifi expertly stoked it with her aura, taking a magical
grip on Jal-in's balls to prevent them from erupting too early.

She slid her dragon scale pants off, stowing them in her infinite
cleavage before she crawled on top of Jal-in. To her satisfaction,
he was naked beneath the blankets that she tossed aside. Jal-kir
watched as the dark haired goddess dragged her snatch over her
husband's dick. Jealousy and humiliation welled up within her,
but she was frozen, unable to do anything but watch as Fifi's
wide hips settled into place. Fifi slid herself along Jal-in's
shaft a few times before reaching down to line him up with her
snatch. She gave a lusty moan as she thrust down, engulfing
him. It took her a few pumps to take him all the way, but
she got there in the end, settling herself atop him. He was
completely overcome with lust, his hands gripping her tight
waist as he thrust up into her. Her ripe ass rippled with
his every thrust. Jal-kir found that she had slipped two
fingers into her own snatch as she watched the beautiful
half-elf dominant her husband.

Fifi straightened up and pulled her thick mass of black ringlets
aside, "help me out of this," she turned her back slightly towards
Jal-kir, indicating she wanted the other woman to unlace her corset.
She could have done it herself with <mage hands> of course, but
that wouldn't be as much fun.

Jal-kir swallowed nervously and went over to do what Fifi was
commanded her to. Fifi was not a small woman. Like most elves
and half elves, she was six feet tall. There was very little
variance in height among elves. There was also very little
variance in body type, elves and half elves were almost all
very slim. Fifi broke that mold completely. The corset Jal-kir
was undoing was large enough to smuggle watermelons, and
the plush ass spread out over her husband's hips was just
as impressive. Despite this, Fifi looked small next to the
two orcs. They were each over seven feet tall and powerfully
built. Next to them, she looked practically petite. She
was no less in charge of the situation for it.

Jal-kir worked diligently to undo the corset of the woman
currently fucking her husband, which was made difficult
by the motion, but eventually she got there. Fifi raised
her arms on cue and Jal-kir pulled the stiff garment off,
letting Fifi's massive breasts bounce free. Jal-kir may have
been taller than Fifi, but the smaller woman had her
heavily outclassed in the bust department. Jal-kir wasn't
exactly flat, but Fifi's boobs were five or six times
larger than the bigger woman's.

If it were any other woman doing what Fifi was doing in front
of Jal-kir, she would have flown into a rage, but the sexy
half-elf dominating her husband existed on a different level.
She was a force of nature, a raw unbridled storm of sex and
power. Getting angry at her was like getting angry at a blizzard.
Jal-kir found that her hand had found its way between her legs
where she was working at her hot wetness. Fifi's giant plush
ass slammed down again and again on her husband, the goddess's
soft flesh spreading over his legs with every bounce. Her massive
breasts were easily visibly from behind, their every inciting
jiggle seeming to rock reality. Fifi seemed more real than the
orc beneath her, more real than everything else around her.
Jal-kir's fingers plunged into her womanhood, working with increasing
passion as she watched her war-leader fuck her husband into submission.
Unbidden, she felt herself moan with pleasure. Her mind was in turmoil,
her emotions to volatile to name.




// She merges her life and rebirth seeds into a goddess of creation seed
// Does so by birthing a new race called the undying legions to serve
// as her soldiers (they are life attuned part-plant humanoids who
// are extremely difficult to kill). To do so, she needs to secure a
// source of souls, so she makes her way up through the Myriad Heavens
// to the Font of Souls in the Highest heaven. Since she knows none of
// the heavens will ally with the queen of hell she decides to absorb
// part of the fount of souls into her womb and winds up absorbing the
// whole thing. Afterwards she has to reassure representatives of the
// various heavens that she will still provide them with souls to
// ferry down to the material world.



// council of 13 unification scene, everyone on the demon wastes swears
// allegiance to her at the council. Her strongest support is amung the
// human on orc steppe riders who worship her as a goddess. Many of them
// have awakened death goddess seeds. The necromancers and warlocks bow
// to her might.


// Gets Merv back in a negotiation with Seravore


// She merges her dragon and magic seed into a divine arcane dragon seed
// She figures out how to draw power from the world after experimenting
// with drawing power from her worshipers, and after all her alchemy
// experiments.

