West of the Ceraphon Empire, the world becomes indifferent to humanity. There are powerful things there, and ancient things, and vast things. And some that are all three.
guest story by zyzzyva
tags: the greensea, heroic azuras, nsfw
Maunanatuw was older than the bones of the mountains. Maunanatuw was stronger than the bones of the mountains.
Its lazy path north took it to a field it had been in before. The dragon slowly descended onto the carpet of wildflower and low grass, and relaxed for a moment. The plants barely reached its ankles; standing on all fours, it was nearly ten meters high at the shoulder, and as it began to walk forward its footclaws dug divots out of the earth a dog could hide in. Mauanatuw did not care, or notice; destruction to lesser things was what it was.
As it approached the edge of the forest bounding the meadow to the north, it considered. It had been many years since it last passed this way. The forest had not grown much but the… being within the forest had been smaller, then. Its senses probed the fringes of the wood; Maunanatuw could feel Her, watching it, even this far from the wood’s centre.
At the very edge of the wood were a clump of odd plants, tall and stiff and tubular, like landbound green lipstick worms. They were an outpost of Her. Browsing around their bases was a rabbit, ordinary-looking but for its gleamingly green eyes; Maunanatuw could feel Her permeating the rabbit, as well. As it approached, the bunny’s ears perked up—although Maunanatuw knew She didn’t need ears to hear it—and hopped between the dragon and the forest’s edge.
Curiously, probingly, the dragon sidled a few meters to the left. The rabbit followed, keeping between it and the deep shade of the trees. Well. Dragons’ mouths weren’t made to smile, but someone who knew them well (and hadn’t fled or abased themself before Maunanatuw’s power) would have recognized amusement on its face. So She thought She was strong, now? Mauanatuw was beyond strength.
With a casual snort Maunanatuw incinerated the rabbit, and then, barely turning its head, the tube-plants as well. With one great beat of its huge wings it lofted itself far above the now-burning fringe, and flew on, course unchanged, over the Greensea.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Deep in the forest was a lake, clean and clear. Maunanatuw gracefully landed beside it and began to drink.
This far in the Greensea was everywhere. Many of the plants were Her, here, altered in subtle or gross ways, all tinged that vibrant green if you knew where to look. Maunanatuw did but didn’t bother; it was beneath it. It was here to drink, not examine a lesser being.
Many of the animals were Her, too, and it took no expert eye to see which: the ordinary ones had fled at the sound or smell or sight of its huge, predatory arrival. The other ones—the ones with green eyes—were massing as quickly as possible to assault the intruder. The dragon could sense this too, and took another long, indifferent draw of water.
Eight wolves leapt from the brush at it. Their teeth were huge fangs, sharp and hard as iceaxes, in jaws more powerful than a crocodile’s; their fur was thick with armoring lichen. The attack was from every side at once, the wolves moving in a perfect single-willed unison; Maunanatuw slapped one into paste with its tail and snatched another, wriggling and snapping, with a foreleg, but the others were under and on it, biting and ripping the dragon’s thick, horny, black scale.
Behind them came more of Her: elk with bladed antlers lashing like whips, huge hedgehogs firing quills like archers, bees swollen with poison stinging and swarming and simply diving into the interstices and rents in its armour to burst in hot acid splashes. Vines thick as snakes and snakes green and leafy like vines curled around its limbs to try and pin it in place. From the lake, a pair of huge turtles, nearly as armoured as it was, crawled up, snapping their crushing jaws as they approached.
A human would have seen a sudden burst of furious chaos. Maunanatuw saw the perfectly coordinated dance of a single will that it was. As an attack that would have pulverized a knight and charger in seconds washed across it, it considered its options.
The wolves had learned from the Greensea in their generations of incorporation. They were one with the other attackers around them now but even without a threat, the pack was linked. They hunted as one, rested as one, cared as well as animals could for their sick and injured. Maunanatuw could feel, beneath the green tide of the forest, the more delicate linkage of the wolves.
It was a weakness.
It turned its face towards the wolf still pinned under its forelimb. Its eyes, always glowing like coals, flared to fiery life as they met the wolf’s vibrant green ones. A connection. Maunanatuw could feel the wolf, subsumed but undissolved, in the most literal sea the Greensea had. But Maunanatuw was an inferno. The Greensea boiled out of the wolf in an instant. The wolf might have howled in agony but it would take an instant more for its body to do that and in that instant it too was consumed by the molten iron of Maunanatuw’s will. It spilled through the pack’s link and into the others, an unstoppable pyroclastic tide.
They had no time to cry out, either.
It released its extension-self. The rest of its new flesh was already leaping from its back onto their erstwhile comrades. The Greensea took a moment to recover the vigour of Her assault and in that time it cleared a space for its wings and then took off once more.
From below, agonizing pain filtered up as its extension-selves were overwhelmed and destroyed by the furious Greensea. It ignored that without a thought. There was an ache behind its left rear haunch where a bee had dived and somehow managed to splatter poison beneath its armour. That irritated it. It hoped its consumption of Her wolves had hurt the Greensea more.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
High above the deepest depths of the Greensea, raptors circled. Their vast wings were green and translucent as leaves, because they were leaves, gently photosynthesizing as they circled on the thermals. Maunanatuw ignored them, with its usual indifferent contempt, until they began to dive.
It was confused by what She was trying to accomplish—even together, a dozen raptors were far weaker than the force She’d assembled at the lake—until the first, plummeting unhindered like a beak-tipped rock, ripped through the membrane of its right wing just behind the knuckle.
Maunanatuw howled, and snarled, and flipped in the air, lancing fire up at the flammably leafy birds descending on it. It hit four, incinerating them in midair like torches; another three missed entirely, out of action for the long minutes it would take to climb back up, and one bounced off its underbelly no more effectively than a pebble. The last two hit. Another rent in its right wing and, fatally, one in its left, too.
Maunanatuw hit the canopy still raging and lashing out with its claws and flame. Even the huge branches of the great trees here couldn’t hope to hold its weight, and it tore through them like the birds had through it. It left a tunnel of burning foliage behind it, as it ragingly tried to hurt Her, too.
The Deep Greensea was, in a very real way, what forests dreamed of becoming. It was a vertical kilometre from the canopy to the dark, damp soil below. Maunanatuw had plenty of time to build up falling speed again before it hit the ground.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
It was as dark and cool and still in the depth of the Greensea as it would have been a kilometre beneath the true ocean. Maunanatuw rose aching from the crater it had gouged, alone. There was nothing else here but it and the Greensea. From the tops of the ironwoods to the edge of the bedrock however far below, every living thing except it was Her.
This far in there weren’t even animals. Near its head, a vine like a centipede crawled through leafmould. In the air far above, flowers, their petals buzzing like hummingbird wings, danced around each other. A ball of spiny fungus carried nuts down a trunk to its burrow.
Maunanatuw could see Her plan, now. Its wings were too torn to fly and it would take months to reach the edge of the Greensea on foot from here. Every step of the way, Her limitless self would harry it, until it was finally destroyed. It could feel Her patient expectation.
Her plan, of course, didn’t matter. She had hurt it, and the only thing that would happen now was its avenging that. And it could escape and punish the Greensea at the same time.
It walked, limping, to the base of the nearest of the great trees. It was wider around at the base than even Maunanatuw’s uninjured wingspan. It reached out with one talon and touched its bark gently.
It spoke a word.
The bark crumbled to dust beneath its touch, and then the heartwood too. The ironwood, a kilometre tall and thousands of years old, suddenly buckled under its own weight and fell towards Maunanatuw, who did not even flinch. The consumption burned up the trunk faster than it could fall, tearing through branches and leaves and vines and symbiotic denizens of the foliage until nothing was left but an arc of putrid, toxic ash drifting to the forest floor.
Not a flake of it settled on Maunanatuw, or its newly gleaming red and gold scales, or the fresh, perfect wings it unfurled as it lifted off again through the hole it had torn in the roof of the Greensea. Behind it, She howled.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
On the north side of the Greensea, an orc clan had camped. From the air, Maunanatuw could see them milling in panic as it approached. Dragons’ mouths aren’t made to smile, but someone who knew them well, someone like an orc, might have recognized amusement on its face. This was how a dragon was greeted by its lessers (and all things were its lessers): with fear and obedience.
It landed in the centre of the camp, its wings knocking a few tents flat as it descended. The only orc still around was the chieftain, flat on their face before it, in supplication and a desperate attempt to avoid its gaze.
“Great one!” babbled the orc. “You honour the Lightstep with your presence.”
Maunanatuw spoke a word.
It was a perfect physical specimen of an orc. Half a head taller than the chief, fitter, with tight breasts and firm biceps and rippling abs. Its torso was covered in tattoos, done with clean artistry in the Lightstep style, proclaiming it to be an undefeatable warrior and a supreme chieftain and an unmatched lover. Naked in the centre of the camp, one could see how: its cock big and hard and beneath and behind that, a pussy warm and tight and slick with arousal. Only its eyes, still smouldering with inner fire, were not the eyes of an orc.
“I am pleased,” it purred, in perfect orcish. “Do you have an offering, my host?”
“Yes,” said the chieftain, urgently and loudly. “They are coming.”
A moment later, three orcs emerged from behind the tents where the rest of the clan was cowering. They, too, were naked, except for quickly-torn strips of cloth they had used as makeshift blindfolds. Maunanatuw laughed, a cold approximation to an orcish laugh that made the chieftain before it shudder. As if it needed to use its eyes to overwhelm these creatures.
“I have chosen to offer myself to you, on behalf of the clan,” each orc said, one at a time. The three of them were an assortment: one tall and burly with big tits and a softly furred pussy, one small and lean—by orcish standards; they would have made a mightily powerful human—with a nice little swollen intersex clit, and in between one of moderate size except for quite a large cock indeed.
“I will take them all,” Maunanatuw said, inevitably.
The chieftain managed a nod and then squirmed away on their belly, unable to turn their back on the dragon but equally unwilling to lift their eyes. It laughed again.
It turned back to the offerings, who were standing still and blind before it. “Now,” it said, “I will use you, and make you mine.” Its voice was honey and poison dripping into their minds and they shuddered in unison at the awful pleasure it provided, even as it corroded them from within. “You,” it said, pointing with one perfect finger. “Kneel before me.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The next morning, when the dragon was gone and the offerings were being cleansed by shaman Renizek, chieftain Kebenep went out to the edge of the Greensea, where offering Junil had been waiting out of sight until it left.
“She thinks you are cowards,” said offering Junil, without preamble. Their eyes glowed green.
“We are not afraid. We are weak. We are reeds, not trees. We bend with the wind, and stand again.”
“I know,” said offering Junil, rolling their eyes. “But She is a forest. Winds go in and are dispersed. That thing ate Her flesh and wood and strength. She is angry like I have never felt.”
“What would She rather we have done?” asked chieftain Kebenep. Sincerely: the Lightstep clan needed the sympathy of the Greensea as it travelled east across Her margin, which was why offering Junil had entered Her in the first place.
“It will return someday. She will be stronger and She will destroy it.”
“If She called, we would fight it with her, you could tell Her that as well as I can. But it is older than Her, and stronger.”
“And wiser, and more puissant; but proud, so proud. Its pride will let Her destroy it.”
“She cannot think that She can overcome it.”
“She tells you: reeds bend. But trees grow.”
Author’s Notes: Devi and I had been chatting about their long-in-progress Plentgorls Plantgirls story for quite a while, and I greatly enjoyed their ideas. One evening I suddenly got the idea for Trespass and wrote out the whole thing that weekend. Devi liked it and thought it was in-line with their ideas enough to make it the official introduction to the Greensea. (It had better line up, the setting is mostly their ideas from the last few months. 
)
But more than just the Greensea, it’s got Big Scary Things out west of human lands, and orcs that live there amongst them. All three of these will be back, sooner or later…