Chapter Text
On the southernmost island, the island of Sand-in-the-Mists, are the baths of the rellis, the most blessed of young ones.
Rellis, of course, are elves that are not quite mature, but are not children, either. Rellis are elves that have had their first heats, and are ripe and ready to bear children for their elders. Rellis are to be protected and cherished, oft-times even spoiled. And so the baths of Sand-in-the-Mists were long-ago reserved for them, so that they might have a place to themselves.
Anka did not frequent the baths.
He didn't need to. Every island in the elven nation of D'laniara had its lagoons, and each lagoon was assigned to some three or four families to serve as a bathing pool. Anka's family, the elven clutchline called Weds-Leaves-To-Sea, shared its bathing pool with Watches-The-Sky and Honors-the-Roots and Guards-the-Branches, and with some non-elven friends. Their pool was in a large cave, burbling up from a freshwater river that thrummed with naiad song. Anka's clutchline had it for eight hours each day and eight hours each night.
More than enough time to bathe himself. And more than enough time for the use of his children; his uncle Kouvi; his uncle's spouse, Orrak; and a few more friends informally adopted into their household. For Anka and those friends, the aforementioned non-elves, the communal bathing had been a bit of a shock, but they had acclimated.
Anka, for his part, now enjoyed it. The water in their pool was warm and clear, and he had liked learning to swim in it. He liked even more to be still in it. To sit on a little ledge and relax, seeing how the bright, clear blue water played lights on the walls of the cave. He would always have a few seconds to do that, even if soon enough his children, Kip, Kalki, and Elly, would interrupt the fragile peace of this by then cannonballing into the water.
But he didn't mind even that. It was a joy to spend time with them. To scold them for splashing, and to hold them close while he washed out their hair and made sure to scrub behind their ears.
His little ones. Born from him, carried by him. Elly was his smallest and oddest, and the one that knew him best. Kalki was his wildest, always concocting excuses for which mummy should forgive him a bit of wickedly fun splashing. And Kip was his gentlest -- much, much larger than his brothers, not elven-looking in the least -- but sweet, sweet as his uncle Orrak, who he resembled a great deal.
In Monrovia, a nation of humans, carrying these children had made Anka perverse. In D'laniara, the nation of elves, it made Anka worthy of respect.
Not that he was ever disrespected here. His countrymen were kind to him. Gentle with him. From the moment he'd alighted on D'lani shores about six months ago, it had been to find himself plied with attention from mature, handsome naiads and dryads. Elves of siring age. They came to visit him during the day, and stopped to call greetings up to his nest at night. They sang out little flirtatious ditties to him when they saw him in the branches, and stepped aside with proper elven bows when he passed them on the roads.
He was popular. Liked.
Wanted.
It frightened him sometimes. Not that it should have. No dryad or naiad would touch him without invitation, he'd been told. They were not like humans. They would listen, if he told them no.
Still, they seemed to want a yes dreadfully. Anka could not give that yes. Perhaps in time he would. But right now, as things were, he would close his eyes at night and fall into his past, feel the nightmares of his time in the human world building and churning in him, leaving him terrified, but pitiably wet and needy, too.
So, when sung to flirtatiously, or bowed to respectfully, Anka tended to go green and scurry away as fast as possible.
Little wonder, then, that he had few friends among the mature dryads or naiads. His friend Hil'ki was old enough to sire a clutch, yes. But that was it. And Kouvi was his friend, and he was mature as well, but. Well. Kouvi was also his uncle.
So perhaps Anka wasn't really popular.
For young, clutch-bearing dryads and naiads, the antidote to this was to find friends their own age. Other mothers, or those who might become mothers. But Anka was painfully shy about this. He felt embarrassed among the other dryadlings, the heart-stoppingly lovely, golden-haired, brown-skinned ones. The ones that flirted openly with their elders, that courted and laughed and seemed to have no troubles to speak of.
Anka wasn't like them. He didn't even look like them. He was the only dryad to be pale -- such an ungainly, washed-out color he had -- and to have such dark hair and eyes. Kouvi said he was like an ink-black sea-bird, and Anka thought that must be true. And of course everyone was kind to him, but the other rellis -- the other young mothers -- treated him with a sort of respectful remove.
Was he even an elf to them? It was hard to say. Anka was half-human, raised entirely in the human nation of Monrovia. He could not even speak D'lani properly. He still had a decided Monrovian accent.
"Anka," Hil'ki often told him, "our people admire you. If you would only reach out to them, you would see that they like you!"
But he was afraid they might not. And he already had so many people who did seem to like him now. Really like him, in a way that did not demand he serve them or bare himself to them. He had Hil'ki and Kouvi and Orrak; he had a grandfather and he had his children; and he even had human friends, Euphemia and Mr. Audley, and even sometimes the polite camaraderie of their friend, the great wolf-man Wrollf, Jem. None of these people wanted to fuck or hurt him. They always seemed only to want to talk to him, pass time with him. He was really very lucky in that sense.
He did not want to push his luck. It really seemed inconceivable to think that he might ever find more acceptance than this.
So he was not entirely sure why he agreed to go to Sand-in-the-Mists.
It was said to be good fortune. It was very popular with elven mothers. And it was simply -- custom. If a young elf was blessed with a clutch, then that young elf had earned a place in the warm, lovely mothers' baths, earned a place in the mothers' circle.
So said his friend Hil'ki and Hil'ki's brother-in-law, Tai'vi.
"You will like it, Anka," Tai'vi promised, kissing Anka's two green-tipped thumbs in the traditional gesture of blessing and affection, before they paddled out to Sand-in-the-Mists. "I promise."
"And if he does not, you will bring him back at once," Anka's uncle Kouvi said firmly. He and Hil'ki were standing just behind them on the sands, surveying Tai'vi's canoe. "Anka-Eleyi need not do anything he does not wish to. Not here."
He, too, kissed Anka -- the top of Anka's head -- with almost paternal affection.
Hil'ki, though he and Anka were only friends, seemed to sense that Anka needed more than that. He gathered Anka up into his arms. Though he was a mature dryad, he was not as tall as most mature dryads. If he'd been a man, he would have been of medium height. But his shoulders were broad and his arms well-muscled and athletic, and Anka liked being embraced by him. Hil'ki never seemed to do it with any kind of grasping want.
Perhaps this was why Anka's whole body -- a body he had little desire to show to anyone not of his own clutchline, anyone he did not trust -- warmed a bit, being held by him.
"You will dazzle them," Hil'ki told him firmly. "Everyone will be delighted by you, Anka, and will want to know you better."
But Anka did not feel he could trust in this, and stared with no small amount of anxiety back at the shore as Tai'vi's spouse, Yann, rowed them out and southwards.
-
He had to leave his clothes in a great hall made of living trees.
He was not normally self-conscious about stripping. Anka had spent a great deal of his life naked. But rarely had he stripped in front of other young elves. Tai'vi was also peeling off his clothes, revealing his child-rounded belly, pretty little brown cock, and milk-swollen brown breasts with their green-tinged nipples. He rubbed them a bit offhandedly. The sight was rather nice. Anka looked away, ashamed of himself. Yann -- a mature elf who was the sire to all Tai'vi's clutches -- was just outside, smoking a cheroot of spiced grass.
"None of that, pretty," Tai'vi clucked at him. "You are among your peers now. No one minds if you want to look at us. They will be looking at you, you know--"
"They will?" Anka stammered out.
He didn't know why it frightened him. Plenty had looked at him. For years, to be looked at and touched and fucked to soreness was all he'd been good for. But since coming to D'laniara he'd had his own little nest-corner with his children, away from eyes or hands he did not want.
It was like -- like being a person.
He must have stepped back, against the tree wall. He must have shown his fright. Because now Tai'vi's gaze went soft and worried for him.
The pretty blond elf ran a hand through Anka's hair, loosing a hank of it from its braid.
"It's alright, love," he said. "What happens here is -- it won't be anything you hate. I promise. And it won't be spoken of outside of this hall. It won't be used to embarass you. Come on, love."
And he tugged Anka towards a great door, carved of coral, at one end of the hall.
Beyond, there were the baths.
Anka had thought there would be one pool. Just one, as he had in his own little lagoon, for his own little clutch. One they could spend an hour of relative privacy in.
There were three. Three huge pools, their sunken walls made of naiad pearl. Some thirty or forty young elves frolicked in them. These elves were not children, not little, like his Elly, Kalki, or Kip. But neither were they mature. They were like Anka. Fertile, of an age to bear children. Many had rounded bellies like Tai'vi, and chests plump with milk. They swam and dove and laughed, and sat close by the side of the pools, smoking cheroots. Their laughter echoed off the hall.
Tai'vi caught Anka's hunted expression again.
"Too many?" he hummed. "Come, darling. We'll go to one of the smaller halls."
"There are more?" Anka managed.
There were two more halls beyond the great one, with pools dappled by a ceiling of leaves; pools whirling with hot, lovely water; pools sunken so deep only naiads seemed to frequent them. Then a series of small corridors, from which there were even smaller, more private pools yet. Sand-in-the-Mists wasn't a bathing hall so much as it was a bathing warren, warm and cluttered with giggling, naked elflings.
Tai'vi pulled them into a room that was not a room at all, that was a series of steps leading to a pool built onto a sort of cliff, out in the sunshine. It was small and hot, and there were only three other elves here.
Anka blinked at them. They blinked at him. Though he knew them vaguely (the small one was Dumayi Leaps-Freely, the very pretty one with the serious brows was Arrat Honors-the-Roots, and the long-legged one was Dai'nat Flies-the-Green), and he supposed they knew vaguely of him, they all regarded him for a moment with perfect surprise.
He did the same to them. Dumayi was sitting on Dai'nat's lap, with a hand on Dai'nat's cock. Arrat was -- there was no word for it. Arrat had an oblong phallus of pearl, which he was...was using.
Anka should not have been shocked. It was little more than what Anka himself had done all his life. Sex. Fucking. But -- but to do it with other young elves, with ones like them, to do it as a mere pastime or form of enjoyment--
"Close your mouths," Tai'vi said wryly. "And put your toys away, my darlings, or you shall frighten off our Anka-Eleyi. Don't worry, Anka-Eleyi. We do not expect anything of you."
"Unless you want to give it," said Dumayi, who was lovely as a sunbeam and whose D'lani was so perfect Anka was nearly envious. He smiled, and Anka -- Anka almost did want to give it.
Tai'vi prodded him down the steps into the pool, as Arrat put aside his phallus and Dumayi climbed off of Dai'nat. The water was lovely and hot, made hotter by the noonday island sun. Beyond the edge of the pool, beneath the cliff, the blue sea sparkled. Anka let the water close over him. It submerged him almost totally, to the neck. But it was so clear he could still see every inch of his own skinny, pale body.
He clutched himself, self-conscious.
Tai'vi carefully tugged him to one of the ledges at the edge of the pool, so he could sit.
For a moment, there was silence as Anka avoided looking at anyone. He should not have come. He was not like them. He was half human and Monrovian-pale, and spoke ugly D'lani. He had never gaily taken pleasure the way they obviously did. How could he? He had no reason to. He saw nothing pleasant in himself, or for that matter in being touched by others. He knew what it was to feel pleasure. But, for him, it had only ever come hand in hand with pain, and since coming to D'laniara he'd supposed he would simply have to swear off of both.
He was relieved at that, in a way. Yes, it meant he would have no avva, no beloved to wait for him outside, as surely all these beautiful creatures did. But that was fine. His children -- his three children who were here with him -- they would be enough.
Still. Now he felt keenly how odd he was, compared to other elves.
What could he even have to say to these four? How could he possibly make friends with real elves?
Someone cleared their throat.
It was Arrat. His hair was a shade paler than the others, his skin like the gleaming near-black of the sea at night. His eyes were a clear, bright blue, very large, and terribly pretty. Now that Anka was looking at him, he almost didn't want to look away. He wanted just to take Arrat in.
Arrat, a real dryad.
"Shall we tell stories, then?" Arrat said. "I think it is the hour of stories."
Anka was surprised to find all the other elves chiming their assent.
"Good," Arrat said. "I will begin."