Ember wakes to a pained groan beside her in the bed, and sleepily nuzzles into Camellia’s warm arms.

  “What is it, delicious?”, she murmurs. Her gaze lingers on Camellia’s bare breasts, where her head had been resting a moment before.

  Camellia groans. “My back,” she says. “It — it’s not shaped right, something’s digging into it —”

  She rolls over to face Ember. “These sandbags are a bad way to sleep…”

  Ember sits up. It’s strange, she can see the room perfectly clearly. Silver starlight picks out the silhouette of Camellia’s body — and the knobs on her back that jut out from her shoulder-bdes and spine.

  The sight knocks a little of her lust out of her, and Ember’s voice goes hushed. “Camellia,” she says. “I think… I think you’re growing wings.”

  Camellia blinks, and awkwardly reaches back to feel her own shoulder.

  “So I am,” she says after a moment. She closes her eyes. “I always did want to fly.”

  Ember bites her lip. If Camellia is changing, then — she could be too. The thought of becoming an animal comes back to her mind. Could Camellia be becoming a bird…?

  “Is there anything for me,” Ember asks. “Anything like that?”

  Camellia nods. “Your lips and eyes are glowing,” she says. “And — so is your sex, by the looks of it. And the beds of your nails. All dull red, like coals in a firepce.”

  Ember nods. It’s hard to focus. The warmth in her is insistent that she should be paying attention to Camellia’s nude body, not her words. But this is important. This matters.

  “We’ll get through this together,” Ember says. She extends a hard to Camellia. “I’ll be here for you. You’ll be okay.”

  “Okay,” Camellia says, taking Ember’s hand in turn. “I believe you.”

  Ember gently runs a hand through Camellia’s feathered hair. “Rest,” she says. “You need your sleep. I’ll be here in the morning.”

  Camellia takes a deep breath, then nods and ys her head against the sandbags again.

  “Alright,” she says. “For you.”

  Ember smiles, and ys down next to Camellia. “You were there for me,” she says, “So I’ll be there for you.”

  Camellia nods and kisses Ember’s nose, then closes her eyes.

  Ember closes her eyes as well, and for a while the room is only filled with the steady sound of soft breathing.

  Ember tries her best to sleep, but she can’t help but want to feel Camellia up, to taste her body and cim it as her own. They’ve done a lot of that, today; but she’s still not sated. The heat in her wants more, and with her eyes closed there’s nothing else to focus on.

  Eventually, she sighs and cracks open an eyelid. Camellia is fast asleep.

  Ember’s hands go up to her own breasts, teasing at her nipples casually. The heat in her burns at her touch, craving a release.

  That tears it. There’s no way she can sleep, and if she stays here she’ll disrupt Camellia’s rest…

  Ember takes a deep breath, sits up, and gets out of bed. Camellia unconsciously clutches at her waist, but she’s able to disentangle herself with a little care.

  She has practice to do. Who knows what else she can do with the release technique, if she focuses.

  Out she pads, into the night, into the practice yard where the silvery moon holds court. The chill autumn night air barely bothers her, not when the fme in her is stoked this high. She’ll just do a few more releases to bleed off some energy. That’s all she’s doing.

  She sits down cross-legged on the cold ground, and her body prickles delightfully at the soft sensation. Absently, her hand goes to her clit, and she starts stroking herself gently. Her body doesn’t seem to chafe now; she’s been mixing in touches to help herself focus on the technique for half the day, and it still feels just as good as this morning. Ishaza didn’t correct her, so it must be okay.

  She slips two fingers inside herself, focuses on the technique, and channels raw pleasure and fme up through her clitoris and heart. It feels fucking incredible. She’s been practicing to see how long she can hold the orgasm: this one sts almost fifty shuddering breaths as she focuses the technique and lets the fme spill out of her as fast as it produces more of itself. Her hips tremble, her body shivers, her sex clenches around her fingers — and more and more pleasure burns through her mind, a steady stream of bliss that she’s quickly getting addicted to. It’s incredibly easy to do the technique, now that she’s practiced it for a while. Easy enough to focus on through orgasm. Easy enough she can come just by thinking about it.

  She slowly eases off on her orgasm after a hazy interval of maybe five minutes, letting tingles of pleasure radiate out through her whole body and ease out all the stiffness in her limbs. Goddess, this is going to absolutely ruin her for regur sex. Even her best experiences before she was kindled are nothing next to this; the pleasure is sharper, richer, more detailed somehow, as if she had been wearing gloves for her whole life and had just now taken them off to feel with her bare skin for the first time.

  She takes her time. There’s nothing to wait for, nobody to be accountable to. Just her, her body, and the unjudging moon. She feels alive and wild and free and whole and untainted for the first time in her life. She is herself, free at st of stupid petty concerns like her family and trying to be a good student. All she has to do is feel, and she can do that with a crity and vividness that still takes her breath away.

  Camellia…

  The thought of her is intoxicating. She wants to go back to bed and wake her and go another ten rounds with her. She wants to feel her skin, taste herself on her lips, to taste that sweet sex of hers again and be one with her again, again, again. The memory of two nights ago is alive in her mind, intense and raw, followed quickly by more recent memories of her taste, her skin, her press against her…

  Ember lets out a shuddery moan and clenches around the fingers inside her, quickly reaching her peak again at the thought of her lover. God, Camellia’s so good with her tongue, it makes her want to grab her by the hair and see if she’s improved any more in the past couple hours…

  There’s some reason she’s not doing that, but it’s kind of blurry. Something about not wanting to disturb her? That seems fake. She certainly had enough fun eating her out this morning…

  Ember lingers in the orgasm, happy thoughts of Camellia drifting through her mind, one image after another of her body against hers. There’s no reason to come down; all she needs to do is feel this in every particur, her memories pying half-remembered sensations through her body. With focus, even those blurry recollections become sharper, clearer, more vivid; she flops down on her back in the dirt and strokes, strokes, strokes, jilling herself even as she comes, her whole body melting in pleasure and satisfaction. Even the cold dirt against her back reminds her of Camellia’s touch.

  She barely even comes down from her orgasm; instead she goes on stroking, a rolling series of spikes of pleasure, less and less fme spilling from her each time she comes as she refines the technique. Her breath comes hard and shivery and her legs twitch in the dirt as she works herself over, feeling herself up btantly in the silvery moonlight.

  Goddess, yes. Kindling was so worth it just for this. She can die happy now, not that she’s going to anytime soon. She grins and giggles, a hitch in her breath as she crests the wave of another orgasm, and slowly, methodically starts to melt away her brain in pleasure, pushing aside everything but the thought of Camellia and the feeling of her own body beneath her hands.

  It sts for a long, long, long time. Long enough that the sun crests over the horizon and illuminates her with its rays. The pleasant warmth just matches the heat inside her.

  Some fragment of memory remains, telling her there was something she was supposed to be doing; but she pushes it aside with another wave of bliss. There’s nothing more important than this, right now. She’s almost perfected the technique, after all.

  The waves of pleasure come and go with her whim. Mostly they come, really. But sometimes she lingers in the drifty warmth of the afterglow, feeling deliciously satisfied rather than intensely needy. It adds a little variety. And even her fme-fed body is starting to grow tired.

  In one such deep lull, her eyes slip closed, and sleep cims her.