Dawn broke through the shutters of the bedroom she shared with her husband, and as always, Tybella woke before him, sensitive to the faintest traces of light, a habit not born of her elven heritage but instead a legacy from her days of travel, research, and danger. From the time she was a feared conjurer and a famed adventurer.

She shifted under the covers, moving closer to her husband, resting her head on his shoulder where her sensitive ears could listen for the heartbeat that was her entire world. Still sleeping, he lifted one hand to place on her shoulder, keeping him close, and she purred from deep in the back of her throat. Soft lips kissed his skin.

Tybella had been one of the world’s greatest heroes, famed for her skill with magic, her knowledge and understanding of countless languages and tomes of ancient lore. She’d helped to save the world. Travelled its length and breadth. And then, one day, back home in Lon Llyrith and not intending to stay long, she’d met the man who would become her husband, and immediately felt a connection to him that had never grown weaker.

She lay against his sleeping form for a long while, breathing in the scent of him, kissing him occasionally, still as deeply in love and as deeply delighted with him as she had been from the moment they met. Eventually, though, it was time for her day to begin, a little while before his own.

She rose and padded silently across to the door, careful not to disturb her husband, nude except for the steel wedding collar she wore, its clasp fastened and padlocked firmly on the left.

Into the bathroom she went. Her conjuring staff, once her most useful weapon, rested here every night; taking it up, she kindled a fire below the great copper bath, then summoned a water elemental to fill it. She moved on, taking care to keep the door to the bathroom closed enough not to wake her husband. Instead she went downstairs, where more fire was summoned into the heavy cast iron stove. She checked the wards on the door, then walked back upstairs, dismissing the water elemental and quenching the flame below the bath.

The steaming water would scald her human husband, but he wouldn’t be getting in until it had had time to cool. She made her way back into the bedroom, smiling brightly, licking her lips in anticipation.

She slipped under the covers as silently as any adventurer she’d travelled with (well, nearly) and without disturbing her husband. He liked to sleep in, but their situation wasn’t one where he always could. Especially not during the week. As powerful as she was, Tybella couldn’t change that, but she could definitely make it a lot more pleasant for him when he had to be woken.

She crawled up the bed, between his legs, and nuzzled at his thigh until it shifted, its owner still more than half-asleep, and revealed her prize. Soft lips planted kisses on each ball in turn before she ran her tongue enthusiastically up the seam on the underside of his cock, then, holding it up by the tip of her tongue, took him inside her mouth.

He was hard before he woke up, coming erect in mere moments, a wave of pleasure filling his body - she knew this, for his pleasures always echoed through her, and she was delighted by the shiver of satisfaction that ran up and down his spine. She smiled like a cat with the cream.

Her breasts grazed against his thighs as she rocked back and forth, head pistoning up and down on him, lips, tongue, and teeth working together to tease and coax him. Her sharp ears were listening eagerly for a deep, satisfied grunt that would be muffled by the bedsheets, but she knew it was well as she knew the sound of his heartbeat, the tone of her own voice, and she loved it as much as either. It was the grunt that showed he’d woken up and was fully aware - and appreciative - of what she was doing for him.

She loved that, just as she loved him, more than she could say. It was a shame she couldn’t really take her time with him that morning - there were days when he didn’t have to hurry off to work where she would see how long he wanted her to suck before he tapped her gently on the top of the head, a signal that he wanted her to move on, but on days when he’d have to rise before long she took the part of a good wife, a responsible one, and hastened events herself.

As she felt him tense in her mouth she pulled her head free and crawled - no, prowled - on all fours up the bed, under the covers, until her head emerged above his, smiling down on his sleepy, satisfied, possessive eyes. By that stage her pussy was just above his tip, and she brushed her lips across it with a twitch of her hips, grinning down.

“Have I ever told you, husband, that you are the best decision I ever made?” she asked. She had. Of course she had. Some variation of this question came out every day. But, as she bit her lower lip, awaiting his reply, she knew she would never get tired of the question so long as he always gave her that I-can’t-believe-you’re-mine look before he answered.

“It seems to me like I’ve heard that before,” he told her, grinning broadly. He put his hand up against her cheek, then slid his fingers into her hair, curling them into a loose fist, and her scalp tingled with all sorts of devilish, horny ideas.

She couldn’t hold back any longer; she flexed her powerful thighs, pushing down on her haunches, and her pussy swallowed his cock as eagerly as her mouth had just minutes before. Her hands crept onto his chest, where her long nails traced lines of pleasure along the nerves of his skin. His hips bucked, again and again, thrusting her into the air over and over again as she rode his hips, taking him as deep inside her as she could.

She remembered Geoffroi, smiling at her, giving them his blessing: You’ve done more than enough, he said, and you deserve this. Go, settle down. Enjoy your new husband. Have some kids. We’ll come by to visit, and who knows? When it’s time for us to retire, too, perhaps we’ll settle nearby and we’ll all grow into our lives of blissful retirement together.

Without his blessing, and the blessings of her other friends, she could never have walked away from her life of adventure, no matter how eager she was to settle down with her husband. She wondered when the rest of his prediction might come true; then her husband’s hands found her nipples, and wondering anything, remembering anything, anything clearer than living in the moment and riding her husband for their shared pleasure, was gone.

*

Afterward, the two lay against each other briefly and Tybella breathed in his scent, delighted; then she slipped from the bed and rose again, padding toward the door. “Your bath is ready, my love,” she told him over her shoulder as she reached the door, where she paused.

Her apron hung on a peg beside it, where she had left it when she came to bed with him the night before. She took it from the peg and slipped it over her head, feeling the cloth against the back of her neck, just below her close-cut hair, just above her collar, as she tied the apron tails just above her bare buttocks. “Breakfast will be ready before you come down for it,” she assured him, turning back to face him with a warm smile.

He was dragging himself from bed, but he met her smile with one of his own. “What would I do without you, I wonder?”

“Let us hope you never have to find out, my husband.” Her affectionate smile became a grin and she made her way downstairs. For most of her life, Tybella had not been a great cook, or anything more than a barely passable one. All of which was fine when it was only her own nourishment in question, but she had a husband now, one she wanted with every fibre of her being to please. ‘Good enough’ was never going to be good enough again.

By the time he entered the kitchen, she’d worked a type of magic she’d never learned as an adventurer, and the plate waiting for him was filled with delicious food cooked exactly to his liking. She stood beside his chair, waiting for him to sit, and poured a piping hot mug of triple cream coffee.

She sat opposite him and smiled as she attended to her own food. When he was ready to leave, her husband rose and circled the table to her side. “Exquisite as always, my angel,” he said.

“Yours always,” she said quietly.

He stooped, holding her gently by the back of her head, and she opened her mouth to his kiss, hungry as always for his love. The desire he had for her had become, somewhere in the past couple of years, how she measured her worth, and she was priceless.

Eventually he was gone, off to the university where he worked and where they’d first met. She’d been trying to find the key to a mystery, one Wynestor and herself had been so focused on at the time it was almost hard to believe in hindsight. Knowing the answer had to be somewhere in the past, she’d buried herself in the Lon Llyrith university archives, chasing from text to text, author to author, hunting down her prey by stray references and half-formed asides.

As it often did, this took days, and Tybella had never been good at remembering to sleep (indeed, her constant desire for her husband was the only thing that had brought her back to sensible sleeping patterns). She’d dozed off with her back to a bookshelf, and it happened that one of the local professors had found her before Wynestor.

A mutual fascination having almost instantly sprung up between the two of them, they were inseparable, leading to Wynestor’s surprise when she simply delivered him the information she’d found and told him she wouldn’t be coming with him to finish the job. Her fellow adventurer had been shocked, had even passed comment, but her mind was made up; thankfully, Wynestor understood, seeing the way she and her husband were together. In his usual overblown, flowery language he had promised her that the matter would be solved without need to disturb the two of them. He’d even agreed to hurry back afterwards for the wedding.

It was good, Tybella thought, that her husband still worked there, that they retained that link to the place where destinies had become entwined. Her own studies were set aside, her time given over to the serious business of making a home fit for their love.

She spent the day in cleaning, in maintenance, in washing his clothes and in preparing dinner, and she did it all with a song in her heart, all the while mulling over how strange it was that Geoffroi and Wynestor had both made their way into her thoughts that day. While the three of them - and their colleagues - had worked together in crazy, highly intense circumstances, and while she remembered Geoffroi, after the wedding, talking about sharing retirement with them eventually, her world had changed, and her thoughts chiefly concerned her husband, the most important part of that same world.

She often went months without thinking of the life she’d lived before. It wasn’t important.

…saving the world… not important?

Tybella shook her head. Of course, she told herself firmly, saving the world had been incredibly important. Of course it had. But it was behind her now. She had achieved great things, and she had decided, at the height of her powers, skills, and knowledge, to turn away, for the love of a good man. She had decided, at the height of her powers, her skills, and her knowledge, to become a housewife.

And she had never been happier.

As if to demonstrate this to herself, she looked up from the mop with which she was cleaning the floor of the kitchen and met her eyes reflected in the mirror at the centrepiece of their dresser, knowing the contented smile she would see on her own lips.

That smile is exactly what she saw. It was something else that made her hesitate, and then take a few steps closer, worried, to examine herself more closely, to assure herself that she was imagining things.

She was shocked to realise that she hadn’t imagined anything. Set in the throat of her wedding collar was a crystal, empowered by their love, which glowed a soft, sparkling pink at all times, enough that if her husband woke at night he could make his way about the room by its soft glimmer. Since their wedding, her eyes had glowed with that same soft pink whenever they were open, a conduit for her love and devotion to her husband.

(Remarkable, she remembered Wynestor saying on their wedding day, when he and her other friends first saw this. Truly remarkable. I… confess I worried that you might be making a mistake, as unlike you as that is. It’s clear now to see my worries were over nothing, and I humbly ask your forgiveness for my doubts. He had chuckled, staring off into the distance. I should doubt my own instincts ahead of yours. Yet I always forget that.)

This morning, the light in both her eyes and her collar was dwindling, nothing like the healthy glow she expected of herself. Her first instinct was to feel guilty. Had she done something wrong somehow? Had she failed her husband and, in failing him, caused the magic of their love to falter?

Tybella stared at her reflection for a long time, wondering. She decided finally to set it aside, to ask her husband when he returned. He’d forged the collar, after all, in order to have something worthy of their wedding.

By early afternoon her tasks about the house were largely done, and she settled herself on a chair by the window. More and more she was thinking about her old life, about her time as an adventurer. A time she was determined not to return to, she reminded herself firmly. Hadn’t her wedding been all about that?

*

For the most part, they had managed to keep the wedding private. Her husband had contact with little of his family - she had never asked for details, respecting his privacy the way she did - so there had been only one or two of them there. On her side, only her most trusted fellow adventurers had attended. The temple had been more than halfway empty, but the alternative - practically a state event, with hundreds showing up to cheer the heroes of the realm - just felt wrong.

What Tybella shared with her husband was personal. It was private. And the only witnesses she needed were the ones who would understand; who knew who she was, and could see what it would mean to devote and dedicate herself to a true love. When Geoffroi led her up the aisle and she saw her husband waiting there, all smiles, with the priest and with Wynestor standing by, her heart lifted. Whatever else might be happening in the world, she knew she was in the right place. The perfect place.

She didn’t remember anything the priest said, her attention all on her husband’s face, a smile plastered across her lips. What she remembered clearly was the pivotal point in the ceremony, where she was invited to kneel, and settled to her knees, not to one knee. Her husband’s brother stepped close, holding the beautiful steel collar on a red satin pillow.

Her husband began to speak. “Tybella, you and I know how deep our feelings are for one another. We know how close we came to never even meeting our soulmates. And now, I pledge my oath before the Goddess of Love to take you as my wife, to treasure you, to love you as you should be loved and accept your loving service as you offer it. I swear with all my heart, you will never again know sadness, you will never know fear, and you will always be happy in my home, as my docile wife.”

With every word he spoke, she could see the crystal on the wedding collar shine more brightly, as if is words were charging it up. The solemn oath he took to accept her service and direct her life relieved her of any need for sorrow, fear, or concern; she only had to accept his love, unconditionally, and all would continue to be well.

He took the collar from its cushion and held it, open, around her neck as she smiled up toward him. It was her turn to make her oath. “Beloved, my only, you are the light that fills me. Your love gives me shape and purpose. I pledge my oath before the Goddess of Love to serve you as your wife, to be your trophy, to love you as you should be loved and to offer loving, devoted service all the days of my life. I swear with all my heart, I will never question, I will never contradict, and you will always be happy in my bed, as my lord husband.”

And he closed the collar around her neck in response and fitted the lock in place, then stooped to kiss her. Tybella kissed back hungrily, her eyes already shining pink, as her adventuring colleagues applauded.

*

Tybella smiled, remembering the wedding. Yet she couldn’t help herself wonder… why was it she’d never learned the name of her husband’s brother?

She hadn’t met him before the wedding… well, she dimly remembered a meeting, but the more she tried to bring that memory into focus, the less clear it became. She couldn’t even picture his face. He had to look similar to her husband, presumably, and she knew every inch of his body, his face and his cock especially…

Perhaps, she told herself, that was the problem. A less-perfect version of her husband… perhaps it was no wonder she only barely remembered him.

Her hand went to her collar, and she stroked the metal affectionately. In the short life of her marriage to date, her wedding collar had become truly a part of her. She bathed in it; she would occasionally touch the lock, but only to confirm it was still in place. She liked that it was locked on; it symbolised the permanence of her pledge to her husband.

It didn’t feel nearly as good, touching it that afternoon, as it should do. The collar symbolised their connection, it was a mark of how their love bound them together. But as she touched it again, the metal seemed somehow harsh, the symbol not of love but of a man marking his property.

A stray thought caught up with her, sparked earlier in her reverie but taking some time to fully form.

What was her husband’s name?

She hadn’t known the name of his brother, but it now came to her that she didn’t know his, and she had no idea how she could have failed to notice that. She had pet names for him by the pocketful, and the word ‘husband’ filled her with such joy that it was often the first thing she went to, but they hadn’t always been married, and she was sure he would have introduced himself - of course he would have introduced himself - and when he did, she would have remembered.

Except she didn’t remember. She frowned, casting her mind back to the shelves of the Lon Llyrith university archive. Surely it had come up in their first meeting? Was she so sleep-deprived at that meeting that she’d forgotten?

*

They’d first met when he roused her at the foot of a tall bookshelf, of course. Their eyes had met, and…

…and…

Tybella frowned. Like the memory of his brother, the more she tried to concentrate on that moment, the less clear it was. It was as if her mind had assembled it out of whole cloth.

She closed her eyes and just tried to conjure up first impressions of her husband, seeking to approach her memory another way. And the first thing she remembered was all emotional; it was surprise, and fear, and shock.

She could understand being surprised when awoken, but fear made no sense whatsoever. She was one of the world’s greatest conjurers, she’d faced down all manner of monsters, and she’d done so without batting an eyelid. Tybella felt she knew herself too well to ever call herself fearless, but a university professor had inspired fear in her? A university professor she loved enough to abandon her life and marry?

The image of that meeting swam before her minds eye and came back into focus, but she wasn’t sleeping beneath the stacks; she was in an alcove, a little nook in the restricted section, at one of the raised desks they kept there for scholars to examine books that couldn’t be safely removed from the library, and her attention was entirely on the three books and the scrap of notepaper with which she was doing her work.

So engrossed was she that she ignored the warning of her sharp ears, only vaguely aware of the footsteps approaching her. The first she really registered of it was the sudden touch of cold steel around the back of her neck, and then the collar was snapped into place. Some of her hair had caught in the joint, stinging as she whirled to see what was going on, and he used that time to snap the padlock into place.

Tybella didn’t have her staff to hand but that barely mattered to her; there was enough power and talent in her hands to suffice.

“Whoever you are,” she said levelly, “know this; you have made a powerful enemy this day, and if you don’t make amends this instant you will understand just how powerful.”

She saw fear in his eyes, but he smirked, and he finished his gestures and his incantation. Her body jerked from a combat stance into an upright attention, all straight line and rigidity, and as she reached out mentally for a spell she could cast while paralyzed, her thoughts slipped from their track. Over and over again, as she tried to find ways to fight back, her thought process would jolt and crumble, until she was standing, immobile, with a mind that couldn’t complete a single step of logic.

She could feel a warmth in the hollow of her throat, right where she would later learn that the collar’s crystal rested. As she looked at the man in front of her, the anger she held was changing. Drop after drop of love, devotion, and desire spilled into her thoughts and her attitudes until her anger was diluted enough to be gone.

The gorgeous man who collared her was still smirking. “Come with me,” he told her, and he turned and swept out of the restricted section. Tybella padded eagerly after him, so happy to have something she could do for him. Doing what he told her made her feel so good, so eager… so wet.

“You’ll find,” he told her, “that you have better things to do than your old life. You might already understand that.”

Her eyes opened in wonder. “I do!”

“Good. What’s your name?”

“Tybella,” she told him, “my love.”

She heard him chuckle, and it was the best thing she could imagine, to know that she’d pleased him.

*

Tybella was angry again, and her anger was doing what it had done when this… this…

Words failed her. There were words for him she wanted, on a habitual level, to use for him, and they were words she couldn’t bring herself to use. And choosing another word was hard when the remaining power of the enchantment around her throat meant that any attempts to use that anger fell apart in a tangle of incomplete thoughts.

She got up and paced through the house aimlessly, trying and failing to think.

She couldn’t now even remember what Geoffroi said when he gave her his blessing. Couldn’t remember passing her notes on to Wynestor.

Was it possible that as far as her friends were concerned she had simply vanished, years ago, with no trace? She’d left her husband’s house so rarely since then…

Time ceased to have any meaning. From time to time she would pass a mirror, and the site of her irises without their pink glow added to her anger and her despondency.

She was free, except that she couldn’t think, and she couldn’t channel her anger, and except that she had spent years being trained to love and serve him unconditionally. Even her anger felt like a violation of her wedding oaths, and even now that the memory was all but lost and clearly fictional, she found that they mattered to her. That they held weight in her mind.

She had picked up her conjuring staff somewhere in the middle of her walking. She wasn’t at all sure when, or why, but its familiar grip in her hand gave her some comfort.

Tybella was so preoccupied in her walking that she didn’t hear the front door open. Didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs. But she heard him call out “Tybella?” and she froze, suddenly panicked.

She stayed quiet, but when he appeared in the doorway she knew he’d be able to see at a glance what was wrong. But seeing at a glance went both ways; as she watched him take in the absence of the enchanted pink in her eyes, the spike in her anger broke through the last of the power remaining in the collar. “You,” she growled. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

She was already calling power to her on a level she hadn’t in years, delighted to find the clumsiness and lack of skill she’d imagined she would have if she returned to combat magic wasn’t the case - it must have been another illusion - but hurling that magic was still something she hesitated over. It wasn’t easy to embrace hate when your body had practiced giving love for so long.

“You don’t want to do this,” he told her, and Tybella glowered.

“Try me,” she said.

“No. I mean, you don’t want to do this. Four years you’ve been under my spell-”

“Don’t remind me.”

“I will remind you. Four years. And in that time, you were never upset, never unhappy. You knew exactly who you were and what you wanted, and you had it - everything to make you happy. And if you do what you’re thinking about now, you’ll never have that again.” And he began to cast, moving his hands through the complex sigils of his spell.

She should have struck him down where he stood. But there was certainty in his voice, and she had been listening to that voice for guidance for four years. Just knowing that it had all been a lie didn’t cancel out the mental reflexes she’d learned.

She was just forming the spell that would put him to sleep in her head - the better to turn him over to authority - when he completed his casting.

Immediately, her body jerked from a combat stance into an upright attention, all straight line and rigidity; her conjuring staff, released by disobedient fingers, clattered to the floor beside her, and as she tried to decide whether or not to fight, her thought processes jolted and crumbled, until she was standing, immobile, with a mind that couldn’t complete a single step of logic.

She could feel a warmth in the hollow of her throat, where her heart’s desire was shaped and decided. As she looked at the man in front of her, the confusion she held was changing. Drop after drop of love, devotion, and desire spilled into her thoughts and her attitudes until she could smile warmly through her paralysis.

“Thank you, husband,” she said softly. “Thank you for coming back for me.”

She watched his uncertainty become that same proud, possessive smile she loved so dearly once again. “Husband?” he asked, and her heart ached that he even felt the need to confirm her love.

“May I kneel?” she asked, her body still unmoving. He nodded, and she fell gratefully to her knees and bowed her head. “Beloved, my only, you are the light that fills me. Your love gives me shape and purpose. I pledge my oath before the Goddess of Love to serve you as your wife, to be your trophy, to love you as you should be loved and to offer loving, devoted service all the days of my life. I swear with all my heart, I will never question, I will never contradict, and you will always be happy in my bed, as my lord husband.”

Tybella couldn’t know if her husband remembered their wedding, but she knew now at least, with complete confidence, that he had heard her oath, heard what she believed and what she felt.

Her eyes were on the floor, but she saw his feet as he approached and touched her head, stroking her hair, then take her by the chin and lift her up so that she was looking at him, meeting his eyes. “Good girl,” he said softly, and a shiver of happiness ran down her spine at the words. “You’ve done well.”

“Thank you, beloved,” she said meekly. Her eyes flicked down to his crotch, and she lifted a hand to fumble his cock free, hoping to show him in the clearest way possible how eager she was to make amends.

He laughed, and she took it for permission; leaned forward and took him into her mouth, welcoming his love with her own.

“I’ll teach you the spell,” he told her, “and the next time you notice it failing, you’ll cast it for me.”

She purred her agreement along the length of him.