The story of Lucius’ journey to the southern desert is now almost at a close. Indeed, the morning after defeating the demon, he returned to the deck of the Blazen Arrow. Lady Raine Bellafont greeted him like a long lost friend and promised to bring him and his army north to Puerto Vida even faster than the winds would allow. The two of them exchanged every cordiality that could be expected between a victorious noble and a captain of a ship, but for Lucius the trip was nothing more than a necessary delay.

His mind had already flown north and dwelt in the future with Aisha. If I were to write this tale strictly about him, I confess I would have next to nothing to say of the sea journey north, but this biography is not quite so limited.

This was also a time of re-experience for Golden, once an angel then a mortal once more. His mind had shrank from the domineering will of the magical to the limited scope of what his hands could grasp and the urges of the flesh. Hunger, both of the stomach and of the loins found a fresh grip on the reins of his will and he came to realize this when he beheld Lady Bellafont once more.

At first, the whole day, he didn’t know what had come over him. His heart fluttered and his blood burned. To the unaccustomed, he at first thought himself sick. Aboard an overcrowded ship, sticking to the gills with homesick soldiers, hardly anything could be done to aid his health.

There was a doctor aboard, but the poor fellow was nothing more than a carpenter handed the tools of bone breaking. The merest question of medicine made the man blanche in terror and begin to babble about what wonderful apothecaries he knew the world over, every port in fact.

Golden tried to content himself with mild food and a draft of spirits. This did nothing for him at all. The idea that certain foods excites a heat in one’s appetites is nonsense(1). It was Lupa that identified the issue, and she spoke without tact about it. Boldly, she asked, “And here I thought you were some kind of eunuch after the lord got through with you. Is it the oarsmen that have you in a stir?”

Golden scowled, pressing himself to the one spot of railing where he had room to spread his elbows. “What nonsense are you accusing me of? You think I have such base desires?”

The hungry wolf of the desert planted her hands on her hips, handling the sway of waves with grace as she examined him. “You’ve got it bad, don’t you? I’d think it was the lady captain but she is a small fire beside the bishop.”

“I have no interest in that child!”

“Oh? So it is the lady captain then?”

Golden’s retort caught in his throat as he realized it was her that kept his gaze. “Nonsense,” he declared, but as soon as she quitted him with a smirk, he fled below deck. Lucius was asleep, his body still recovering in the minute ways after his fight with the daemon-infused Primarus. “Boy, waken!”

Lucius grumbled, rousing against his will to find golden wild eyed within inches of his face. “Is someone dying?” he asked.

“Mayhaps,” the former angel said, before trying to explain what had become of his body.

Lucius stirred not an inch from his hammock. When golden stopped speaking, the boy said, “Fuck off.” Then he rolled over and buried his face into his hammock once more.

Golden didn’t trust me enough to ask, knowing rightly that I would give him a not-quite false answer that would lead him down the wrong path. That left him no recourse but to confront his being himself. For several hours, he kept himself wedged into a corner of the cargo hold without a scrap of light. He let the ocean rock him and the din of sailing dull his ears. The meditation was far worse than a temple cloister, but it eventually let him gird himself to confront the source of his agony.

Captain Bellafont seemed to embody the vitality and exuberance of a victorious army finally returning home. Her golden skin glowed in the sunlight, further reminding him of his return to his homeland. Her stride across the deck was catlike, her voice a cheerful goading whenever she needed a sail trimmed or a line pulled. Every remark from her was returned with a smile from her crew, wry at the worst.

To Golden, it made his heart race. Every pound of wet flesh became a clammy shell about his soul. There was a phantom urge through his spine to his fingers that tried to draw them forth and grasp onto her, to feel the warmth of her skin. It made him stare at his own flesh, barely able to control his breathing.

Until then, he had thought the spell Anubi had given him meant he was still essentially a divine beast, that he was more than mortal. When Lady Bellafont approached him, he learned that he had become a slave to the chemicals. He was mortal.

Her silken words shook him as she asked, “Is everything alright, Priest?”

His lip trembled before he resolved himself with the fact that even the lowliest mouse still could exercise its might of will. His flesh could urge, could reward and punish, but it could not control. “It will be shortly,” he answered, before picking up a spare mooring line and tying it around his body. Without answering anyone what he was doing, he leapt into the ocean.

The cold salt doused the fires of his body and I intervened to stop them from turning the ship about. I told them to let the fool soak. He never heard my description, which meant he thanked me when he finally dragged himself back aboard like a wet dog. Indeed, he had a serene expression as he sat upon the aft railing and stared at the approaching port.

Deferring to her first mate, Lady Bellafont cornered him. “Do you intend to explain that madness?”

“‘Twas not madness! Nothing more than a rational recourse to tame my unruly flesh that yearned for your touch. I could not stay upon the ship in sight of you and not feel such tremors through my core that it would have driven me close to breaking to not throw myself upon my knees before you. Such is the effect you have upon me, but I am a man of will you see.”

The captain took no offense to his words and grinned at him, sizing him up anew. “Are all priests as silver tongued as you?”

Pride flared and he turned up his nose. “Nay! Hardly any. They listen to songs and stories but their minds can only recreate. They have no soul to innovate. That is left to the bards.”

“A man of will and wit, aboard my ship. Relaxing still, all sit as port comes quick, save those I put to test with amor-jest, But I confess I’d not you obsess, rather alleviate my stress.”

Her words were careful and tonal, enough to squirm through his defenses and not his mind. There they fluttered about between his ears until a sinister idea rooted. He had already demonstrated that he could deny such urges. Surely, true conquest of them would be to willfully indulge.

Port was soon made and all attention centered around Lucius as well as the wastelanders he brought with him. Panic swept through the harbor and city guards were marshaled. The suzerainty of Vassermark was challenged and Jean’s identity denied. Every moment, more officials arrived to swing their political weight. Before the sun set, every man of means save for the city lord had transformed the harbor into a forum.

At last, I had to bring an end to it alongside Lucius with a simple pronouncement. “There are hundreds of armed men and women waiting patiently for you as the sun drops. A sun which they have hardly beheld in their lives and they certainly have never suffered darkness. I suggest a warehouse be found to barracks them with plenty of lamps and fires or things will become chaotic.”

Fear proved to be an astounding motivator, and the blanks were ushered into a warehouse of a defunct trading company. Some decaying goods were still there, but the city surrendered them as amusements for the foreigners.

Here, our party split with Lucius seeking out the absentee city lord and Captain Bellefont securing herself a comfortable room. Her task to the army had been completed and she was at leisure to act in the name of the king. The next day she meant to sail east to disrupt supply lines from Aillesterra as it was said, licensed piracy by another name.

Golden stole off from us, moving through a familiar city in an unfamiliar body. He dabbled in food and wine until the stench of pepperleaf candles perfumed the cobblestones. Th en he challenged the limits of his mortal body and met the captain in her inn. They drank. He boasted. She took him upstairs.

I found the poor wretch the next day abhorring his own body in the nearest temple to Shepherd. The priestesses thought him a raving lunatic. The reverend mother shut herself into the cloister to pray as she was the only one there to recognize the language he wailed and muttered in, ancient as it was.

I doused him in well water and drummed him upside the head before shoving clothes into his grasp. The one upside in my opinion was that it convinced Lucius he had not made a mistake by keeping himself away from her, though her perhaps misunderstood Golden’s anguish. In later years, I confirmed he had not one shred of negative memory from that night, save that the flush of enjoyment proved to him how much he had changed from the elegant beast of will he had once been. The choice had been his own however, and he resolved to live with it.

For clarity’s sake, I shall specify that the regular food of common people does nothing for the mind’s inclinations. Plenty of medicines, poisons, and arcane elixirs can stir up the imbiber.