Kena
Rivers Between Us tossed the completed artifact to Root of the East. It glimmered for a moment in the light of the volcano, catching rays of flame light and flashing them about the room as they traced along the intricate orichalcum circuitry. It was a marvel of the Age of Sorrows, completed in less than a tenth the time a mere Dragonblood could develop such a wonder, but he tossed it aside with mingled disgust and distraction.
Root of the East muttered, in sing-song cant, "Another wonder falls from your forge like the golden rays of heaven on a bleak, dark, disgusting..."
Rivers muttered, "Thanks..." and waved his hand. He turned his back to his servitor and leaned against the adamant that shielded him from the lava flows. The elemental maundered off to the arsenal.
"Well, this is pathetic."
A small voice, like a reedy whisper, escaped from the ornamental boach that clasped his tunic together. "Two kisses and the greatest artificer in all of Murakan has become a sulking oaf. Summon a nymph and be done with this!"
Rivers frowned picked at the hearthstone setting on his tiara. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Please, this is agony. Your heaving sighs nearly tangled the essence flows in that harmonic adapter and you woke up so late this week I almost thought you expected wonders to work themselves. I'd kill you and wait for the next incarnation if it wasn't so laughably impossible. Put us both out of our misery."
Rivers tore the cloak from his shoulders and tossed it in the waste bin, striding out of the forge. "This is what I get for spending all my time with elementals, minor deities, and automatons. You just don't understand."
A long limbed silver spider rose from the trash and skittered across the floor, shouting after him, "Don't give in to your animal instincts. I can site over a hundred examples of lawgivers that fell in love before their third century... and they all ended very very poorly! Sex with fabulously beautiful and compliant slaves is perfectly satisfactory substitute!"
The door slammed shut in the least god's metallic face. Rivers pushed past Obsidian Vigil and sent a sylph skittering in circles looking for invisible demon houseflies. When he reached the apex of the volcano he sat facing the fading sun and flicked stones into the gaping maw of the deadly cinder cone. "Nymphs... hmph..."
For a moment he allowed himself to think back and remember her... crimson lips and ivory cheeks, eyes like glittering shards of ice... the hair cropped boyishly short to fit in the helmet, raven black with pixy whorls at her temples and unruly spikes at the crown of her head. But the lips... the touch of the lips was feather-light, like the first snow flake of winter, heralding a blizzard that numbed and burned as it buried him in wave after wave of sensation. He leaned back, and for a moment he tottered on the brink of the volcano, barely buoyed by the super-heated thermal currents, barely protected by his own flaring anima banner. He looked up at the iconic images of essence waving above him in clockwork symmetry, an image of a fortress impenetrable and marvelous, ever-changing and evolving.
A flurry of sparks wafted past his face, and he came to his senses and scrambled away from the edge of the precipice.
