"Someone should really get round to maintaining these lands a bit better." Agatha had to resort to hacking through thick shrub and vines with her knife, sharp as sin but ill-equipped for the task at hand. Jermid followed cautiously in her footsteps, keeping a keen watch on the nighttime sights and sounds of the forest. All of this was well within the boundaries of Elfland domains: forest land that the wood elves had been occupying for centuries. But brassfeet like Jermid had dwelt in the citadel for all their lives, seventy years in his case, and he was not used to travelling this close to wild animals. Wood-elf civilisation was difficult for those of the citadel to comprehend, given how their networks of shared life seemed utterly inscrutable. It looked like it was all just forest with no buildings or edifices of any kind. But the wood elves had long been cloaking their presence from the outside world and if you knew where to look, you could uncover a vast, interconnected web of houses, stocks of food, armouries and all manner of other utilities that made up the city of Lethland.
Coming upon a little clearing in the middle of a thicket of birch trees, Agatha held her hand out, stopping Jermid in his stumbling tracks. She bent, collecting some soil between her fingers and bunching it together before bringing it to her nose and sniffing. "Hmm... the dryads are close to the surface. That's... odd."
"You can smell dryad?" Jermid asked.
She turned to look at him with a wry smile playing across her lips. "I can smell the last time you had yourself a wank, Jerm. I can smell anything."
Ignoring Jermid's bright pink face, she continued to stride forwards. An end to the long hibernation of the dryads meant little to the humans south of them and the citadel elves to their north, but for the wood elves, it could well be the most significant event of the century. Their last period of activity saw the entire forest being reconfigured in embittered retaliation to the mechanical Ohrcraft that had been decimating the lower reaches for timber. When the Highfather of the Citadel did nothing to stop Vothar Carlewe's rape of the forests, the wood elves as good as cut off contact with the High Council and joined with the dryads, naiads and other elementals in their protests. That impasse only came to an end when Agatha's grandmother became the matriarch of Lethland and agreed to become one of the Highfather's consorts. But even then, wood elves were still seen as little more than scum among some quarters of the holy mountain.
"So explain to me who I'm supposed to be again?"
Jermid nodded, opening out a scroll from the pocket of his cloak. "You would be... Lord Essilar of Ismara, among the Emry Isles. Basically a princeling from one of the three duchies there."
"New money?"
"New enough. We've been holding Ismara for a few years now, mostly for proxy trades with the southern Rahathian coastal merchants. It'd add up that you racked up enough to be a viable candidate for marriage. That and the fact that the Vothar can't necessarily afford to be picky anymore these days."
"Hmm... I suppose that'd do."
"But if I could ask..." Jermid said, waiting for a response.
"Yes, ask away Jer. Let me guess. You want to know why any of this is even remotely necessary."
"Something to the effect, yes. It feels like a waste of our time and resources and as the Highfather said, there are risks involved if word ever gets out that we're holding descendants from the old regime. To be honest, I can't even understand why the Highfather agreed to let you do this. It doesn't make any sense."
"The long game, my love. The longest of the long games. For instance, why do you think we've had this arrangement with the Helathian Vothars to share Ohrcraft going back... what is it... seven centuries?"
"Because the Elflands and the event zone are on the same landmass as them. So it pays to be on their good side, to eliminate any risk of incursion."
Agatha snorted. "Incursion. That's what they teach you in highborn schools these days, yes? Before we gave them ships and guns, the Helathians were not much more civilised than the reavers up north, perhaps even worse because of their terror of magic. If they ever had an army big enough to even consider incursion, which is in itself questionable mind you, it'd only be because we made them that way." She turned to him, tapping her forehead. "So why?"
"I..."
"The long game. How many generations longer do you think we can live this life, stuck up next to the mountain, sucking Thawn from it like it's some primordial teat? We once lived all across the world, young Jermid. And the long game is to build that back for our future. That's why your job even exists, holding land, trading, maintaining a presence in the human world incognito... It's all to stir them, influence them, guide them towards their own destiny."
"Okay, but what does any of that have to do with Primrose of Helathe?"
Agatha leaned next to a girthy tree trunk, pressing her fingers into a carpet of moss covering it. "Shh," she muttered. The moss parted gently to her touch, opening out a gap just big enough for her to slip through. She held the door open wide enough for Jermid to step through behind her, hearing his soft gasp as she closed it and made sure the seal held. On turning, it was clear to see the source of Jermid's wonder. Before them, cleaved deep into the earth, was a vast underground cavern. Thick bioluminescent growth over the rocky roof lit everything in a yellow-green light, the bottom covered in grass, pocked by odd little cottages. A number of caves split off into different directions on the distant sides of the cavern, connecting it to the other ones that marked the living zones of the wood elves.
"Took you long enough," they heard an old, raspy voice come up along the hilly route to the entrance before the hunched profile of an old crone made herself visible.
"Aunt Agnes!" Agatha giggled, bending down to kiss the old elf affectionately on the forehead. Agnes swatted her away and looked suspiciously at Jermid.
"Oh, this is technically your great-nephew twice removed or something like that. Jermid, Aunt Agnes. Aunt Agnes, Jermid."
"Brassfoot don't mean shit to me." Agnes dug her feet into the grassy floor, drawing her green cloak tighter around herself. "Don't touch anything, you. Come with me and let's get this over with."
They followed Agnes through a well maintained rocky path in the middle of the grass, walking for a good few minutes before they arrived at the door to a little cottage. Following her through, they found a well lit room with an Ohr receptor pointed up at the roof, thrumming with the energy it was absorbing from the event zone miles to the north. Underneath the receptor was a plush seat with a few bowls of unguents and pastes kept on a table next to it. Agatha was already stripping off her cloak, tunic and leggings, leaving her in just her underwear.
"All of it off, Fernkin." Aunt Agnes snapped at her. "I done pulled ya out of yer mother's cunny. I seen it all before."
She could see from her peripheral vision that Jermid was staring with wide-eyed wonder as she took off her bodice, revealing her tanned brown stomach, abs rippling all the way up to her perfectly formed if a little widely spaced breasts, nut-brown nipples pebbling as the fabric graxed against it. Turning around and giving him a playful wink, she bent, taking off her leggings to reveal a taut, round ass with a few deep scars running along her side, all the way down to her thighs. A little fringe of red hair covered the cleft of her pussy from view as she turned back and presented herself to Agnes. The old elf spread some of the green unguent around her nipples, chin, hips and right between her legs before washing her hands and switching to the pink paste, which she spread on the tips of her ears.
"Right. Now..." Agnes said. "This could either hurt like yer giving birth or it could make you randy. Whatever it does to ya, I don't wanna hear a single sound come out of this house. It's late."
Agatha nodded. "Yeah, of course." She sat down on the chair and instantly felt the Ohr start to course through her from head to toe, concentrating on all the parts of her body where the pastes sat. Agnes calibrated some of the knobs of the receptor till the muffled vibrations in Agatha's ears sharpened into a perfect ring. Stepping in front of her, Agatha began to mutter a series of incantations under her breath while rubbing the unguent onto her hands. She moved her hands experimentally in front of Agatha and at first, she felt nothing particularly different.
And then she began to feel a sharp knot behind each of her breasts, a sensation that built and built till she felt like there was something ready to explode there. Agatha gritted her teeth, looking down to see her nipples and then her breasts slowly begin to recede, the skin wrinkling and sagging at first and then beginning to tighten. She could feel her shoulders widen a little to accommodate the change of shape. But the far more curious feeling was between her legs, where it felt like those same knots were growing and slowly expanding out of her. While she couldn't see much, she could feel a sharp pressure at the entrance to her pussy and then a feeling of everything inverting there in a sudden, sharp jerk, making her gasp. A series of such sharp pulls followed, pounding against her clit more and more each time. She held on to the armrests in a tight vice, focusing on Agnes' muttering voice and guiding hands to distract from the sensation down below, which was some odd cross between pleasure and pain. Steeling herself to look down, she could feel her clit begin to grow with each thrum, skin forming around the new growth and covering it as it picked up inch after inch. The raw growth stopped when it looked to be about seven inches, and then it began to pick up girth as a mushroom-like ridge formed at the top of the shaft. Agatha tried to open her mouth to speak and found a hard constriction at the base of her throat, leading to a series of low coughs racking through her body. As all the other modifications died down, she could finally feel her ears start to shrink and form into a rounded human shape.
"Right then," Agnes muttered, washing her hands again. "None of that's permanent, I'm sure I don't need to remind ya. I'd give it a couple months at best before things start changin' back."
Agatha got up, feeling strange development in the musculature all around her body. The sharp erection at the core of her body began to die down, her new penis becoming flaccid and starting to ache. Her fingers closed around the wrinkled sack underneath and then traced up along her flat chest, broad shoulders, raised bump at her throat and finally traced out all the subtle changes in her face. "Lord Essilar of Ismara..." she said, her voice now much deeper than it was before. "Aunt Agnes, you've really outdone yourself."
Agnes wrinkled her nose. "Human and male. Feckin disgusting. Now..." she turned to Jermid. "What'll it be for you, brassfoot? Just the ears or you want tits and a cunny as well?"
Jermid coughed.
