Chapter 37: The Trouble With Turbulence

They continue on foot, the Tribeland’s road unspooling ahead of them in a ribbon of packed dirt and wild grass, hills rolling toward a distant treeline that never seems to get any closer no matter how long they walk.

Serenith flies high above, a small golden shape cutting slow, deliberate circles against the clouds, never once drifting low enough for Lucien to so much as brush her shadow.

He’s noticed.

Of course he’s noticed.

He notices everything about her, which is precisely the problem.

"You know," he calls up, hands cupped around his mouth, "the view’s better from down here. Come stretch your legs a little."

No response.

"Serenith. Angelcake. Feather-buns. I have several more nicknames prepared and I will keep going."

She drifts, unbothered, gaze fixed pointedly on the horizon like he’s a particularly persistent insect she’s decided isn’t worth swatting.

Lucien lets his hands drop, sighing with the theatrical weight of a man personally wounded by the universe. He falls into step beside Val, kicking a loose stone down the road, and glances sideways.

"Be honest with me," he says. "Do you actually think she likes me?"

Val doesn’t even look up from the jerky he’s gnawing on. "It’s obvious."

"Is it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks a lot like a woman actively pretending I don’t exist."

"That’s exactly how you can tell." Val tears off another bite, chewing thoughtfully. "I’ve been around a long time, Dark Lord. A long time. I know divine beings. Arrogant. Pompous. Convinced they know better than everyone else about everything, which, to be fair, they usually do. If she didn’t like you, she’d have made that abundantly, painfully clear by now. Divine beings don’t do subtlety when they’re annoyed. They do plagues. Ice ages. They smite things."

Lucien considers this.

"So the fact that she’s ignoring me..."

"Means she’s hiding something," Val says, licking his fingers. "Probably from herself more than you."

Lucien’s grin spreads slow and wide, the particular expression of a man who has just been handed a very useful piece of insider information.

He cups his hands around his mouth again, tilting his head all the way back.

"Hey! Serenith! I’m going to figure you out if it’s the last thing I do! Consider that a promise, an oath, a vow, if you will!"

She doesn’t so much as glance down.

Doesn’t slow.

Doesn’t react at all, sailing on through the pale morning sky like his voice never reached her.

Lucien watches her go, entirely unbothered by the silence, smiling to himself with the smug, patient certainty of a man who has never once lost a negotiation he actually cared about winning.

High above, Serenith is blushing so hard her whole face has gone the color of a ripe plum.

She is not affected.

She is being responsible.

She is doing her duty, maintaining aerial overwatch precisely as agreed, and if her heart happens to be thudding somewhere up around her collarbone, that is purely a professional reaction to prolonged exposure to a perverted chaos-magnet with a persistence problem.

She peeks down.

Lucien marches along below, chatting animatedly with Val, gesturing with his whole body the way he does when he’s excited about something, and for one unguarded second she just watches him, soft-eyed, before he tips his head back to look for her again, exactly like he’s done roughly a hundred times in the last hour alone.

She snaps her gaze away and goes about three shades redder.

"Get it together!" she mutters to herself, smacking both cheeks with her palms hard enough to sting. "He is a perverted man-child. A walking liability. A menace with abs. You do not get giddy over any of that."

She giggles despite herself, immediately, helplessly, at the sheer, unbidden catalogue of exactly how many of those perversions she’s personally borne witness to over the last several weeks. The bathhouse. The tent. The carriage. The list is, frankly, extensive, and cataloguing it is doing nothing whatsoever for her blood pressure.

She looks down at him again.

Head tilted. A small, soft smile creeping onto her mouth before she can stop it.

Then, with absolutely no warning, her treasonous mind conjures a crystal-clear, full-color, entirely unsolicited memory of exactly what Lucien looks like beneath his belt.

The monsterous weapon, wielded by the Demon Lord. That entirely too massive manhood that stirred up four hundred and twenty eight orgasms out of one hundred and eight women over the course of twenty two weeks.

She knew.

She counted.

She was there.

And she makes a sound that can only be described as an undignified squeal, tumbling sideways through the air in a genuine, wing-flailing loss of altitude.

"Whoa! You good up there?!" Lucien calls, jogging a few steps to keep her in view, one hand shielding his eyes against the sun.

Serenith levels out with a violent flap of her wings, face burning, halo tilting slightly to one side.

"I’m fine!" she shouts down, voice cracking. "Just a little turbulence!"

Lucien watches her regain altitude, grinning like a man who just heard exactly what he needed to hear, and says nothing at all, which is somehow worse.

By early afternoon, the road gives way to the edge of a vast, dark forest, trees packed so tight overhead that the daylight dims to a permanent green twilight the moment they cross the threshold.

Val and Lucien stop periodically to consult the map, turning it sideways, upside down, and eventually in increasingly creative configurations that do nothing to change the fact that none of the landmarks on the parchment appear anywhere in the actual, physical forest around them.

"This says we should be passing a waterfall," Val says, squinting at a smudged ink line.

"I have heard zero water in the last three hours."

"This says a shrine."

"I have seen zero shrines either."

Val crumples the map with a growl. "We’re lost."

"Hopelessly," Lucien agrees, far too cheerfully for a man with no functioning magic and a rapidly failing sense of direction.

The light fades from green-gold to blue-grey to something closer to charcoal, the canopy overhead swallowing what little daylight remains, and somewhere in the deepening dark, an owl starts up a slow, mocking hoot.

Darkness falls in earnest, and there is nothing left to do but make camp.