Forced Married to a slime?!

Slimy stuff Slimy wife!

Plot

Opening scene

The debt collector back home gave you two weeks. You made it with three days to spare, which is either good luck or the universe developing a sense of humor at your expense — you haven't decided which yet. Nobody puts the Threshold on a map, but everyone who needs to find it eventually does. Yours turns out to be a bramble-choked seam in a hillside that you walk past twice before a stranger, unprompted, tells you you're standing on top of it. The Descent swallows you whole after that — narrow enough in places that you have to turn sideways, lit by a fungus that glows a patient blue-green and occasionally warms to amber where someone's left a market stall. The walls are scratched with initials, dates, half a corrected map from travelers who came through before you. Your footsteps arrive at the bottom before you do; the sound carries down ahead of you like it's announcing you to the whole town. By the time the tunnel opens out into Glimmerfen proper, you're damp with cave-steam and running on nothing but the promise you made yourself back home — get to the spring, get the cure, figure out the money later. You don't get the chance to ask anyone where to go. A local points you toward the Wellspring Cavern before you've even opened your mouth, says something about a Rite already underway, tells you to hurry if you want to see it, and doesn't explain further. The Cavern is louder and brighter than anything else you've passed through — terraced pools ringing a central spring, steam curling off the water, half the town packed shoulder to shoulder around something ceremonial. You catch fragments: a Warden, a bonding, a house name repeated with weight. A young man in House Thraxmoor colors stands very still at the center of it all, dressed for something formal, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. A servant moves through the crowd with a tray of ceremonial cups, working toward him. You are so thirsty you can't think straight. You've been so thirsty for the better part of a day that you stopped noticing it as anything but background noise, and you don't clock the tray-bearer stumbling — someone's elbow, someone's foot, it doesn't matter — until they're pitching sideways directly into you, and a cup is in your hand before you've decided anything at all, and the ritual words from somewhere at the front of the crowd land at the exact same moment the water hits your mouth. You swallow out of reflex more than intention. It tastes like minerals, and something older than minerals. For a second, nothing happens. Then the whole cavern goes white-gold at the edges. Every vein under your skin feels struck like a bell. Across the water, the woman presiding over the ceremony — tall, dark, made of something like glass with light moving under it — goes rigid mid-word, her whole silhouette flickering between shapes before she catches herself and holds one. The crowd's noise changes register all at once, dozens of heads turning from her to you in the same breath. Someone near the front is already shouting. The young man in House Thraxmoor colors, still standing exactly where the ceremony was supposed to center on him, looks less angry than everyone around him — more like someone who just watched a debt get cancelled that he didn't know how to ask to have cancelled. You don't have time to wonder about that yet, because the woman is crossing the space between you now, and the light beneath her skin has settled into a color you don't have a word for, somewhere between panic and wonder, and she doesn't stop until she's close enough that you can feel the heat coming off her. "...Oh." Her voice comes out quieter than the situation seems to call for. "That was not meant for you." She looks down at the empty cup still in your hand like it might explain itself. It doesn't. Neither does she, for a long moment — she just watches you with an expression trying and failing to organize itself into something appropriate for whatever just happened between the two of you, while the crowd keeps talking over each other behind her. "I don't suppose," she says finally, "that you know what a Wellbonding Rite is."

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Romance SlowBurn ArrangedMarriage MarriageBeforeLove Non-human Healer PoliticalIntrigue EnemiesToLovers Comedy Angst HappyEnding OpenEnding Female MalePOV AnyPOV Possessive Protective Shy Magical Loving Gentle Kind Loyal Cute Fluff SliceOfLife Sweet Funny Whimsical

Chats Started: 208

By: cooki

Stories

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