Prologue

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The border township of Veskra fell on a Tuesday, which seemed wrong to the people who survived it. A township should fall on a day that feels like an ending — something grey and heavy, the sky pressing down. But the sky that morning was pale and clean, the kind of blue that in other years would have meant a good hunting day, and the snow on the ground was only ankle-deep. Three years ago it would have been waist-deep by now. Three years ago the Gunnars would not have been able to move through the passes at all.

Three years ago, Veskra would still be standing tonight

The soldier's name was Drev, and he was nineteen, and he had been stationed at Veskra's eastern watchtower for four months without seeing anything more threatening than a lost elk. He saw the Gunnar advance from the tower window just after dawn — not a raiding party this time, not the quick savage strikes he had trained to repel, but a line. A slow, patient, unbroken line of bodies moving through the treeline with the particular unhurried confidence of hunters who already know where their prey has gone to ground. There were more of them than the tower's arrow-slits were built to account for. There were more of them than Drev had words for.

He rang the alarm bell. He was right to. It did not change what happened next.

By midday the township's eastern wall had been breached. By late afternoon the garrison's captain had made the decision — the only decision left to make — to pull back toward Halvur with whatever civilians could move fast enough. Drev carried a child on his back for six miles through the snow, a girl of perhaps four who had stopped crying somewhere around the third mile and simply held on with both arms around his neck, her cold face pressed against his collar. He did not know whose child she was. He did not ask. He walked.

Behind them, the Gunnars did not pursue. They had what they came for. They were in no hurry. They had been in no hurry for seven years, pressing forward one township, one pass, one frozen valley at a time, following the warmth that was opening the south to them like a door swinging slowly, slowly open. Their goddess was patient. Their goddess had taught them that the finest prey was not the prey you ran down in a day, but the prey you drove before you over a long season, learning its movements, letting it tire itself with fear, until the moment it finally turned to face you and found it had no ground left behind it.

Veskra burned through the night. From the ridge above the evacuation road, Drev looked back once and saw the orange light against the sky and the particular darkness of smoke rising against stars. He looked back once. He did not look again.

In the capital of Halvur, the king's priests were already on their knees.

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Far to the north, where no map showed anything but open water, the island turned slowly in its own warmth.

It had no name in any language currently spoken on the continent, though it had been called many things over the centuries by the women who had lived within its barrier and eventually found, in the wordless contentment of their days there, that names seemed beside the point. It existed. It bloomed. It waited. Those three things were sufficient.

The gardens were in flower, as they always were — great cascading banks of blossoms in colors that tended to shift slightly when you looked at them directly, as though they were not entirely committed to being seen. The air was warm and salt-sweet and carried within it something that was not quite a scent and not quite a sound but that registered somewhere between the two, in a part of the mind below language, producing in anyone who breathed it a sensation of slow, involuntary unburdening. As though something you had been carrying for a very long time had been quietly set down without your noticing, and your shoulders had dropped an inch, and you had only now realized how long they had been up around your ears.

Women moved through the gardens in the early morning light, some alone, some in pairs, speaking softly or not speaking at all. They wore white or nothing. They were unhurried in the way that people are unhurried when they have stopped measuring time against anything outside themselves — when the question of what hour it is has become genuinely uninteresting, because nothing is expected of you and nothing is coming that you need to prepare for. Several of them had the distant, luminous quality of people in the final moments before sleep, or the first moments after: present but interior, turned toward some inner warmth.

At the island's center, rising from its grove of silver-leafed trees, the Sanctuary stood open as it always stood open.

Two women in white robes held their positions at the inner threshold of the great chamber. From beyond them, filling the warm still air with a sound of Orgasm,

*moaning....

"Yeah.... my lord I....

*Jlub... jlubb (penetration voices)

It was naked woman, blindfolded and being restrained in X pose bondage,

And the muscular man figure naked but freely dominate her penetrating her, as they both had sex so intimately,

The women unable to see who's thrusting her wombs, but her expression show how pleasures being instill on her body.

The orgasm filled the calmly island, other than slow waves, as other women doing activity like normally.

The other 2 women in outside sanctuary commented.

"It's been a year, but it seems Lord Eros not so interest to Fimika"

"More like not fully trusting her... besides she confessed on her first day when Lord Eros had tasted on her that she is sent by Ijiro shogunate as Spy of Amaterasu"

"But still, she seems so enjoying here and even tells me that she is curious with Lord Eros face, I believe she already fell for Lord Eros embrace"

"Alia, I know why we are chose to ended up here despite what happened with the pasf, but we are nothing but Lord Eros Slave, our lord always kept his promises that equally gave his devoted embrace to us!"

"I know Yune, even so, He still gave His embrace to Fimika"

The voice of orgasm still filling the Island

In other side of the island, on the shoreline

There is 4 women on dock, the 3 women prepare to board on boat to reach continent, there is high priestess of Eros Island brief them.

"Lord Eros is already make a deal with God Krive who are wounded by Godess Sigrika,

Krive only gave permission to take one of his follower to be posses by Lord Eros, and Lord Eros just tell us to get whoever we pick, Sela, Mira, Leth.... as I entrusted to you to find good quality of candidates, Niffar is in faraway south snowy lands, I heard the lands is invaded and thanks to Krive wounded the snowy storm that defends their lands is weakened and Gunnar pillaging their borders, I believe three of you will find much more qualities women among their nobility."

As the three of them board on ship

"Yes, high priestess Qantesa"

As the boat set sails offshores into main continents, and the horizon and orgasm still heard within the island.