Chapter One

 

“It’s looking at me.”

Liv’s spine was ramrod straight. Her body was tensed, coiled like a spring. She looked ready to fling herself out of the window. And considering the young demigoddess’ recent explorations of her powers, it was a fifty fifty shot as to whether she would land safely on the streets of Babylon or soar off into the sky like a wingless Valkyrie.

Liam looked up from his daughter, who was chewing happily on her knuckles. “Marion is not an it.”

“It! It! It! It!” Brax Junior, Liam’s  son, started to leap up and down. He spread his arms above his head, then started to run in excited circles, in the way that only a boy of his age could. Well, a boy of his mental age. The actual biological age was screwy when you were a half human, half lizard hybrid created via the application of ancient pseudo-magical artifact. From his mother, Fizit, Liam knew that his son was growing up slowly by lizard standards, but from his human perspective, Brax was growing up so quickly that he felt like a blink would make him a moody teenager, and another blink would get him out of the house and living on his own.

Meg pushed Liv forward, then down to her knees.

Marion burbled, her eyes wide. She had the same electric blue eyes as her mother, but her hair looked like elongated feathers, each one shimmering with a rainbow iridescence. Scales glinted along her neck, and a whip-chord thin tail was twitching around incoherently, occasionally slapping Liam’s face. He was used to that.

Where Brax had been the result of Liam and Fizit’s chance meeting in a mystically induced, ritually vital orgy (long story), Marion was the end result of Liv’s enforced captivity slash secret conspiring with Brax’s namesake, General Brax the Golden.

Also long story.

But where Fizit and Liam had done their best to shower Brax in what affection they could spare between their jobs of spymaster and president of the largest city-state in Purgatory...Liv had retreated into a private sanctum and spent months practicing to do her best Kratos impression. Admirable, from a grand geopolitical perspective, considering Ares had gotten delusions of monotheism and was currently engaged in a brutal, grinding civil war that was tearing the Dodekatheon apart.

Less admirable from the perspective of her daughter.

Liv, though, had undergone some transformations. And they didn’t end at her now pure white hair now reaching her rump. She slowly leaned forward, her eye narrowing as she looked at Marion.

“Hello,” she said, her voice soft.

Marion burbled.

And in the distant, a roar of cannonfire could be heard as the newest recruits for the newest artillery regiment were put through their paces. The war in the Dodekatheon might be fought between gods. But the Free City of Babylon wasn’t going to stay out of it forever. Liam frowned as he watched his son run to the window, to try and get a glimpse. But the training fields were far out of the city, beyond the old walls, among the vast profusion of irrigation ditches and farms that fed the growing city.

As Meg showed Liv how to hold a baby – Liam stood and walked over to his son.

“I wanna join the Cross Guard some day,” he said, cheerfully.

Liam knelt down. He had read about stuff like this in a million books and seen it in a thousand TV shows. But cliches came easily when you had absolutely no idea what you were doing. He put his hand on Brax’s lightly scaled shoulder, feeling the smooth intermixing of skin and scales. “Brax, fighting isn’t for fun. You only do it when you absolutely have to. When you have to stop bad people who won’t stop any other way.”

Brax blinked at him, then nodded. But his tail spoke more eloquently than any other part of him could: It wriggled and twitched with excitement, then flicked upwards as another rumble of distant gunfire echoed across the bustling city. Liam sighed and felt his stomach knot. So, he resolutely, tried to distract himself by picking Brax up by the ankles. His son squealed and hissed like an excitable teapot, wriggling as Liam started to sway him from side to side. “This is more fun anyway!” Liam said, laughing.

As he stomped across the play room – scattered as it was with toys and tomes and scrolls and other bits of his children’s lives – Liam saw Liv poking Marion on the nose. This produced a giggly laugh from the smaller child. Initially, Liam had been a touch confused about Marion aging far more slowly than Brax. But the obvious answer had been obvious. Brax had inherited a human’s longevity. But a human’s three score and ten (well, closer to four score and ten now) was nothing next to an elf’s unending centuries.

The reason why was still a tiny string of bitterness between Liv and the rest of the household.

Liv had, through the exploration of her powers, uncovered a massive chunk of truth about Purgatory’s very existence. It had been in line with something Liam had suspected for some time. Purgatory had not been a magical hole that an ancient Christian sect had used to toss away the old gods. Rather, that sect had been the tool of aliens. Literal. Actual. Aliens. Liam knew that he shouldn’t have been so weirded out, considering he regularly fucked shapeshifting goddesses, shortstack goblinesses and literal actual winged superhumans. But it still made him have to do a double take.

Aliens? Really?

They had built Purgatory as a laboratory, to figure out how humans had actual gods living among them. But the gods had rebelled, and the whole of Purgatory had regressed in the chaos. Now, the descendants of the aliens lived among Purgatory’s society. Their short lived brute force slave labor were called lizardfolk. Their clever pilots and mechanics? Goblins.

And the immortal ruling class who had called the shots?

Elves.

Liam tried to imagine what it would be like if he met Jesus and learned that God could have made the entire human race immortal and just...hadn’t. Not for any greater reason, but just because giving humanity immortality would have been mildly inconvenient. That was what had to be going on in the back of Fizit’s head, every time she saw Liv.

The fact that they had only tried to kill one another once was rather impressive.

As if his brooding had summoned her in an effort to cheer himself up, Fizit strode through the door. Liam grinned at Fizit as she stepped in – but then his face fell as he looked past her generous curves and athletic build to see what she was holding. More intelligence reports. But before she could speak, Meg flared her wings, soared in a quick jump, then landed behind Fizit. Her hands immediately cupped Fizit’s breasts through her filmy silk shift and squeezed as Meg purred in her ear. “Helllllllllo.”

Fizit squeaked in shock as Meg’s wings closed around them both, to conceal what Meg was doing. Liam quickly clapped his hand over Brax’s eyes, but his son just laughed. “Hi Mom!”

“Meg!” Fizit escaped from the clutches of Liam’s wife with a hiss that didn’t quite hide her pleased smile. Her free hand adjusted her shift to cover her hips more completely as she looked at Liam. “I know you said you wanted to forget the war for the day. But this can’t wait.”

Liam sighed, quietly. Brax’s smile had vanished as quickly as it had come. His son wriggled out of Liam’s grasp. “Sorry, kiddo,” Liam said, quietly.

“I understand,” Brax said, his voice dull.

“Auuh!” Liv sat bolt upright, her hand clapped to her ear. It seemed Marion had grabbed on to the curious protrusion that her normal Mother and Father lacked. Meg laughed.

“Sorry, should have warned you. She does that sometimes.”

Liv looked cross. Then completely flummoxed as Brax decided that, since Dad was going, Mom Liv would have to suffice and had thrown himself at her. She was still stammering as Liam followed Fizit out of the room. She held out a sheaf of paper to him as they walked and he took it. It was a topographic map – and he had to admit, the valkyrie they had positioned in the Blinking Stars were getting good at drawing these things.

The Blinking Stars were one of the inventions that could only exist in Purgatory, and could only have been put in place with the unique combination of racial talent and magical and technical knowledge that came from Babylon’s melting pot nature. Ceramic sheds, each one big enough to hold two valkyrie and their supplies, lifted into the air and placed in the null-gravity point between Purgatory’s inner surface and its artificial sun. Add to that thermal transfer spells that moved the excess heat from the ceramic shields to various points on the ground, and you had a fantastic combination of (practically) infinite thermal power and a low tech satellite communication and observation network.

They, more than the cannons and the muskets and the gunpowder and the vast urban population of artisans and factory workers, were Babylon’s ace in the hole. Liam was just counting down the days before Ares figured some way to knock them down.

The topographic map, though, looked like…

“A hole,” Liam said.

“A hole that’s more heavily defended than New Athens. Or, as it’s going by now, Jerusalem,” Fizit said.

“You’re kidding,” Liam said, stopping dead.

Fizit shook her head. “He’s appropriating iconography from quite a few Earth religions. His shock troops? Paladins. And his priests are being trained in converting people by explaining their gods as fitting into his mythology – and the people who don’t buy it get burned at the stake.”

Liam frowned, then looked back down at the hole. The next sheaf of paper was a larger map of the region. It was in the region north of Neriad, the capital city of Poseidon. The coastline of the Platonic Sea, Purgatory’s only large body of salt water, broke into a complex delta of rivers and marshland. Large parts of Purgatory were nothing but thick jungles, and few of them had soil that was worth trying to farm. This had been the cause of most of Purgatory’s wars before the modern era and why Babylon had sunk an ungodly amount of gold and silver into magical terraforming to turn a desert into a breadbasket.

Which was why it confused Liam to see a rather sizable city marked out among the delta. The name written beside it was called Hellespont. He grunted. “Wait, I know this place...” He said, trying to remember where he had heard it from.

“It’s the last Hellenic city before we get to Aesir territory,” Fizit said. “Two days ago, three galleys flying the Monodeist flag sailed up the river and shelled the city. The fires destroyed most of it, and the survivors have fled into the wilderness to avoid any more raids.”

Liam frowned, slowly. “What are they doing here?”

“We don’t know.” Fizit sighed. “But that mine has nearly as many guns as Jerusalem-”

“We’re not calling it that,” Liam said, flatly.

Fizit arched a single scaled eyebrow.

“We’re not!” Liam exclaimed. “It’s...fucking sacrilege.” 

Fizit shrugged, slightly. “Moving on.”

The two of them paused at the end of the corridor, near the door that led to Fizit’s tiny office. She had never moved and seemed content with the space available, despite all the renovations that the palace had gone through. The interior of the office was stuffed with papers, reports, maps, and other esoteric tools of Fizit’s trade. Cipher sticks, pages of gibberish, decoding rings, magical crystals enchanted to glow when they touched certain elements. And, Liam was sure, a few hidden weapons.

“What’s the plan?” Liam asked.

Fizit clicked her teeth, her tail flicking as she considered. “There has to be something valuable there. And the amount of material that’s being sent there opens up some interesting possibilities.” She rubbed her chin. “If we can figure out what is going on, we might be able to slip into this war and throw over the apple cart.” She flashed him a grin. “Hell, just attacking their shipping lanes might be enough for an opening salvo.”

“Sounds like a job for our new goblin friends,” Liam said, his hand sliding along her back. Feeling the silky smooth fabric of her shift under his fingertips sent a shiver along Liam’s arm. Fizit stuck out her tongue at him.

“Why don’t you go tell them what their newest prey is.” Her eyes sparkled. “And I get some agents into the jungles around the big hole and see what I can fish up while you’re enjoying some smaller holes...”

Liam pursed his lips. “Spymaster! Are you insinuating that I will end up fucking our newest privateers in the course of giving them perfectly lawful orders? While you are working your tail off?”

Fizit snorted, then turned and headed into her office, swaying her hips as she slammed the door in Liam’s face with the tip of her tail.

 

***

 

Lieutenant Simone Fong leaned on the edge of the railing on the balcony of the second story of the Free Lord’s Palace and looked down at the walkie talkie in her hands. The rugged, rubber shrouded hunk of plastic and metal crackled with a snowfall of static. She frowned as she clicked along the radio bands, her thumb teasing the plastic ring forward, tick by tick. Each tick changed the song of the static to a different pitch.

None turned into understandable words or signals.

Simone sighed and drew her eyes up from the walkie talkie to the courtyard below her. The Palace had a large courtyard within its walls, giving a broad mass of greenery for the inhabitants to enjoy. A fountain had been constructed in the heart of the garden, and the water it threw out cooled the breeze down there, making the gardens more pleasant.

Simone wished she was there. But up here, she got a better signal.

And so, hoping against hope, she lifted the walkie talkie to her face and clicked it on. “This is Lt. Fong to all elements of Project Orpheus, over.” She paused. “Lt. Fong to all elements of Project Orpheus, over.”

Nothing.

She frowned. “If you can hear this,” she said, her thumb turning white as she stabbed down on the transmit button. “Make your way to the large city in the desert. If you look up and see the ocean, find the island shaped like a horseshoe. Looking up from that, you’ll see the city. If you are on the ocean, then look around the horizon at night. You will see a large light-house that-”

Her radio let loose a hideous squawking sound. Simone jerked it away from her ear, frowning as she looked at the receiver. The noise  grew louder – a babble of nonsense words. Then, clearly, she could hear a cultured, educated sounding male voice speaking out of the speaker. Thanks to the…magic cast upon her, it came out as English.

“Who is this?”

It wasn’t any of her people. She shut the walkie talkie off as quickly as she could and barely resisted the urge to throw it down into the garden below her. Instead, she holstered it on her belt, her hand shaking slightly. Bronze aged people shouldn’t have been able to understand what a radio was, let alone transmit to her. As Simone tried to process that, a faint sound of conversation rose up to her.

She frowned and looked down over the balcony.

There was her target – the whole pretext behind Project Orpheus.

Liam Vanderbilt, on the whole, looked similar to the file photos of him: Broad shouldered and muscled like a body-builder, the last two years of surviving on a world where a sword was an important tool for not ending up in a ditch at the end of the day had honed his Earther physique into something that stood out all the more on Ceres, where people tended to be slighter and shorter. He towered over most people, and the shock of blond hair he had been born with made him even more distinctive. But he hadn’t gotten through his adventures here unscarred. Even from a distance, Simone could pick out his missing left foot, replaced by a prosthetic that rivaled anything she had seen in the VA or private hospitals back on Earth.

According to him, it had been a gift from fucking Hephaestus.

Hephaestus.

The Geek god.

As if to accentuate the point, two goblins walked beside Liam.

Goblins. Elves. Gods. Lizard-folk. Simone still felt as if she had fallen into a dream. If she had had her squad and the egg-heads, it would have even been a pleasant dream. She opened her mouth to call down to Liam – then stopped herself as Liam sat down under a tree. The angle of the branches gave her a perfect view as he caught the slightly curvier, more muscular goblin and tugged her to his lap. Her white hair flared slightly as she fell into his lap, billowing down her back as she settled onto Liam’s lap. She’d have looked like a child, if it weren’t for the sheer size of her breasts, the delicious curve of her ass. Her laughter carried farther than his words and Simone felt her cheeks flush.

This world had...different attitudes, considering Liam was apparently married. And yet, no one batted an eye when he-

“Whoa,” Simone whispered.

Liam had, with the practiced ease of someone who had done this a lot, taken hold of the gobliness’ tunic and peeled it over her shoulders. Her bright green breasts bounced fetchingly as they were exposed, and the other gobliness started to skim out of her short skirt. As she bent forward, Simone caught a glimpse of her sex – completely hairless and glittering, even from a distance, with her arousal.

Simone’s face heated.

She...should go…

Then the black haired gobliness finished her stripping and knelt down beside Liam. Her hand cupped his cheek and turned him away from the white haired gobliness’ neck, where he had been kissing and nibbling. Simone’s teeth sank into her lower lip as she felt a tingling heat buzzing through her thighs. Her hand brushed along her belly, feeling her tough shirt crinkling under her fingertips. The temptation to slip her fingers forward grew more intense as Liam’s hand cupped first one goblin’s ass – then the other’s. Then the two women kissed one another, with just as much eager passion as they had kissed Liam.

Simone breathed out a slow hiss between her teeth as her finger teased the edge of her pants. She had gone without for…

She did the math.

Jesus. Had it really been two years?

Yeah.

Yeah it had. The last time she had gotten drunk enough to ignore her dysphoria had been two years back, right after the election. She had gotten absolutely blitzed in a ‘the world might end tomorrow’ sort of way and woken up with a pounding headache and deliciously tingly ass and a strange man’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. She hadn’t bothered learning his name – she had been shipped out to a different assignment the next day. But thinking of him was easy in the heady, lusty atmosphere of Purgatory.

Damn it. Ceres.

Her face beaded with sweat as she panted, feeling the press of the desert heat against her skin, as she watched the two goblins start to tug at Liam’s kilt. They took their damn time at it, playfully teasing his chest with their fingers and lips, pausing to kiss and caress one another. In the end, Simone was almost breathless with anticipation as she leaned against the edge of the balcony. Her face tingled and her heart hammered – nerves mixing with the lust to get her even more...excited.

Her pants strained as she watched.

And then Liam’s kilt finally came free and his member slapped against his chest.

Simone had been in the Rangers. As special forces, they were quite good at being quiet when need be. Infiltration and guerrilla tactics were a huge part of their wheel-house. For fuck’s sake, their motto was Rangers Lead the Way. In modern war, that usually meant being very fucking quiet and very good at hiding. But this was not a battlefield, and there was a difference between seeing some tangos in a place you didn’t expect and getting smacked in the face with something like that.

She had to clap her hand over her mouth to keep herself from yelping. But once she had gotten her shock under control and the two goblins had gotten their mouths against Liam’s fucking monster of a cock, Simone did slid her hand to her throat, then to her chest. She squeezed her breast and crooned. “Holy fuuuuuck.”

Calling Liam hung like a horse was a fucking insult. To Liam. Though...Simone wasn’t sure if that was because he was actually that big, or if it was the fact that two goblinesses were pressing their breasts against his cock, their nipples grinding against one another as they trapped his shaft between their emerald green bodies. They kissed the tip of his cock, making it nice and sloppy. Their drool dribbled along his dick, slicking it brightly in the sunlight that shone from overhead.

Simone ached with a sudden, fierce curiosity.

What would that...feel like. Inside her? Stretching her. Her toes curled and, not for the first time, Simone thanked God she liked anal and that lube existed. Her hands tightened on the railing of of the balcony, to keep herself from sliding a hand into her pants and ruining the moment by remembering…

The faint sounds of footsteps drew Simone’s eyes. She turned around, trying to get her face under control, reaching down to adjust the hem of her pants as the balcony entrance filled with the broad wings of Megara Vanderbilt. The valkyrie remained the most intimidating woman that Simone had ever met personally. Though she was a head shorter than Liam – and thus, shorter than Simone – she radiated a kind of dangerous strength that made her seem at least twice as tall as she looked. Add to that her wing-span. Even mantled against her shoulders like a large cape, her wings were hard to miss.

She put a single finger on Simone’s lips, stopping Simone from saying a single thing as she stepped past her and to the balcony. Quietly, Meg crooned. “Ah, this is the best fucking part.”

Simone knew, intellectually, that Meg had to be...okay...with what Liam did.

But…this okay?

Meg casually knelt down on the balcony, hiking up her shift one handedly as she leaned forward and narrowed her eyes to get a better view. “Mmm, look at them go to town on that dick,” she whispered, her finger teasing her own hairless pussy. The smell of her sex filled Simone’s nose and Simone went almost cross-eyed as she looked down at Meg.

She was just...jilling off!

Right there!

In front of her. Simone opened her mouth to say something, but Meg glanced over at her and cut the knees out of her reaction with a simple: “Wanna join in?”

“No!” Simone hissed, kneeling down to look into Meg’s eyes, which sparkled with amusement.

“Wow, you Christians really are prudes,” Meg murmured as she casually slipped her middle finger up to tease her clit. She actually had some kind of pubic...well, not hair. Instead, she had a small tuft of public feathers. Simone gulped, slowly.

“I’m not Christian,” she said.

“Huh,” Meg said, cocking her head. “What are you?”

Simone shrugged. “An atheist, I guess. I mean, I was raised Christian. But just about the time I realized I was a Simone and not a Simon, I...I figured that the church wasn’t for me.”

Meg nodded. Then, looking somewhat shy, she said: “Can I ask you a question that might be a touch rude?”

Simone sighed, quietly, feeling her arousal dampening. Slightly. “Go ahead.” She looked away from the half-naked woman. This meant she ended up looking down at the garden, which did quite a lot to bring the heat between her legs flaring to full, furious life. The white haired gobliness was laying on her belly, her face nestled between Liam’s thighs. She was licking eagerly at his balls and at the slit of her lover, who was currently spread wide and sitting on Liam’s cock. The black haired gobliness was riding him like she was a fucking pro. Her small body took his huge cock with ease, and the slick sounds of their fucking, mixed with the wet slap of thigh to thigh, reached the balcony, along with the loud moans of pure bliss that escaped her lips. It was an even bet as to which was giving her more pleasure: The tongue teasing her clit, or the monster of a cock filling her.

Simone had read once that most women on Earth didn’t climax from penetration. Either goblins were built differently…

Or Liam was just that good.

“Why haven’t you asked more about the ritual for Atlantites? I’ve even bugged Tethis into getting the supplies!” Meg said, cheerfully, pausing to lick her fingers clean.

Meanwhile, in the garden, Liam had driven himeself to new heights. His hips were leaving the grass and the two goblins were kissing one another. The black haired gobliness’ hand was trapped between her lover’s thighs as the white haired gobliness arched her spine and held her lover rooted against Liam’s thighs with an almost shocking amount of strength. Their tongues met and played together, even as the black haired girl’s fingers plunged into her lover’s pussy and thrust almost as eagerly, almost as roughly, as Liam’s immense cock plunged into her cunt.

“Because I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Simone said, her embarrassment making her blunt. “And I was told to not accept to or agree to anything until I know what’s going on. The last thing the brass wanted any of us wanted to do was get tied up into some local politics.”

Meg arched an eyebrow, her wings rustling. “And they shotgunned you across Purgatory with M-16s?”

Simone sighed, loudly. “Murphy’s Law. The probes never had more deviation than fifteen miles. Not fifteen hundred.”

The scream of bliss from the garden drew both their eyes. White cum was frothing out of the black haired gobliness’ pussy. It dripped along Liam’s balls, pattering onto the grass. The gobliness twitched, her eyes rolling back into her head as what seemed to be four orgasms rocked through her at the same time.

Meg inclined her head. “Still, you were clearly born male-”

Simone felt as if she had been smacked – and once more, her lust vanished. A thousand old, whispering insecurities came crawling out of the woodwork. Passing, as a trans anything, was an endless combination of impostor syndrome, utter joy and nightmarish horror. The joy came when everything clicked. When you felt loved and accepted and right in a body that had, for your whole life, felt utterly wrong. But the nightmare came when you saw people in the crowd around you, seeing you. Seeing through you.

Simone could still picture their faces. The man or the woman who suddenly didn’t see Simone Fong. They saw a freak. A monster. A pervert. It was like walking down a street and suddenly being surrounded by ravenous wolves.

Meg’s brow furrowed. “Are you okay?”

Simone forced her face to normality.

In the distance, a yipping, gasping voice echoed up to them: “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Glancing over, the two of them saw that the white haired gobliness had taken her shot. Liam had stamina to go to town on her. The black haired gobliness was on her back, watching with a slightly glazed expression, while the white haired gobliness had...grown several sizes. Now, she looked like a curvacious, incredibly muscular woman of Liam’s size, and Liam was taking full advantage of that. His palms were planted on her shoulders, forcing her down to mash her face against the grass and he was fucking her.

Hard.

Really. Really. Really. Really hard.

Simone looked back at Meg, her cheeks beat red. “I’m fine.”

Meg shrugged. “I was just wondering if you wanted to undergo one of our rituals? Yours was...” She paused. “Not. Great. Which, to be fair, according to Liam isn’t strange. Earth doesn’t have healing magic.” She lifted her palms. “But in exchange, you have the Internet. It sounds like a fair trade to me.”

“I think Liam might have given you a white dude’s view of the Internet,” Simone said, smirking slightly. “But, uh, what ritual are you talking about?”

“One that makes you a girl?” Meg’s  brow furrowed. “What other ritual would I be talking about?”