Red Sonja: All A Hero Needs Is A Quest Restart (Patreon)

Vicca lost her virginity on the same winter day she lost her parents. Her parents were good, loving people. She didn’t enjoy being rid of them. Her virginity, though… thankfully, that departure she was able to delight in. It was as sublime for her as everyone had expected it would be for the man who first sampled her.

While Vicca’s beauty was appreciated by the local townspeople with a sort of civic pride, outsiders were far more vocal in their enthusiasm for it. Every man she met wanted to fuck her and would tell her so; either with unrelenting stares or outright propositions. Sometimes, their advances were physical, though those had been as unsuccessful as the other overtures Vicca had received. When travelers came to call, Vicca’s brothers tended to accompany her around town. When the army rode through, Vicca was hidden out in the woods.

After her carefree childhood had developed into an adolescence of dodging flirtation and worse, she’d become convinced she didn’t want to lie down and spread her legs, not ever. The only man she even wanted to have look at her was Karne.

He was handsome, in an unprepossessing way. His features clean and well-formed, his smile showcasing a full assortment of straight teeth, his eyes clear, his fuzzy facial hair at least trimmed enough not to be an embarrassment. His nose was a bit prominent and his chin too narrow and his cheeks too drawn for him to really strike Vicca as a looker, but his vest—open over a thin layer of spun cotton that served as jersey—showed cobblestone abs on his admittedly slender trunk. And, through his trousers, his legs were well-formed, with the walking muscle of a man who had to trust his own two feet to deliver him to wherever he sought.

Vicca was in love with Karne. Sometimes, she caught herself staring at him in the way men would look at her. It wasn’t that she was trying to communicate anything, she didn’t think. She just couldn’t take her eyes off his boyish smile and the twinkle in his sharp blue eyes—his finest feature, to her mind.

So when Karne began bringing her little gifts and engaging her in conversation and working with her on her chores, she didn’t think to defend herself—any more than she would treat a squirrel in the grass the same as a ravening wolf. Somehow, he even took over guarding her when untrustworthy males were visiting the town, relieving her brothers who had long since grown weary of protecting her virtue.

The village matchmaker couldn’t help but see what was obvious to everyone else. Uncaring of the bribes offered by well-off widowers and elders who wanted her beauty in their children’s family, he set the engagement, which Vicca and Karne were happy to validate.

With her aged seventeen and him aged sixteen, the wedding raiment began to be tailored, the chapel decorated, and Karne began building a hut for them to move into after the ceremony. He built the bed first, lovingly stuffing it with down and buying the softest of sheets from the city for the consummation of their relationship. As agreeably as he’d abided by their Kamolian customs and Vicca’s own reluctance, he looked forward to the day when she was finally his.

Then the attacks began.

A year and a half later, the wedding was still postponed. They couldn’t get married in the wake of a raid—the shaman had been killed in the first one—and it seemed as soon as the memory faded and the stars were in alignment for another ceremony, that once more they would hear the cruel staccato of driving hooves and know that whatever meager possessions they’d scrounged up since the last victimization, they were forfeit now.

The fine sheets of their would-be marital bed were stolen; the next time, the hut they were to live in was burnt.

Now they were at an age when they should’ve been parents at least once, but the threat of attack still lingered, coming between them like a curse on their happiness.

Vicca moved through the woods, taking little joy in the majestic sequoia trees that surrounded her. She gripped a small dagger, just in case. She didn’t think she’d be able to defend herself—certainly not kill anyone—but if raiders did happen upon her as she was gathering firewood, she might scar one of them before she killed herself. She didn’t know precisely what they did to the women who they took with them, but Vicca was sure she would rather die with a violent smile upon her face then find out.

When the bushes rustled beside her, parting with an anticlimactic fanfare for such an imposing threat, Vicca was so frightened that she thought to slit her own throat first, then bleed out while attacking her assailant like a whirling dervish. Such thoughts took time to shoo from her mind, even when she saw that it was Karne and not a scout for the raiders, not a lone ravager who thought to amuse himself with what sport he could find between larger offenses. A few villagers had survived such outrages and when a townsperson went missing, it was usually concluded that they had run afoul of the nigh-supernatural pall the raiders cast over the town.

“Don’t scare me like that!” Vicca gasped, putting away the knife she had brandished—thinking a little of the irony that now she had less reason to be scared, with Karne to protect her. She had lived through many raids, not knowing what to do, but at least knowing Karne was there with her in some hiding spot he’d led her to.

“Sorry. Come with me,” Karne said. A small talker at the best of times, he’d grown extremely light on conversation under the oppression of the raiders.

He stalked away and Vicca followed him, pulling the empty sled for firewood behind her with the hatchet lodged in its crooked wood. “Where are we going?” she asked him, like she wasn’t already going with him.

“You’ll see,” Karne grunted.

He led her under the enormous boughs of the sequoias, creaking and swaying in the strong wind that whispered, and sometimes whipped, through the last of the autumn leaves. Vicca smiled despite herself. She wondered what surprise Karne had for her. As anxious as he was for their married life to begin, she thought nothing of neglecting her chores. She had lost quite a few brothers in the raids and her father’d had his arm crippled. Karne shouldered with her the responsibilities of a dutiful child, his own parents having passed in his boyhood, and the awareness of how unfair it was that she had to make up for the deficiencies caused by the raiders introduced a certain sense of anarchy into her well-ordered, conservative life.

Karne eventually brought her to a fallen tree trunk—a deadfall leaning against a living cousin, its length covered by branches propped up against it. Pulling aside a few of the branches, he revealed a nook, a hollow in the living tree that stood tall. There, row after row of precisely cut firewood waited. Vicca just needed to load it onto her sled and the day’s work would be over.

“Karne!” Vicca gasped in pleasured surprise, turning to him and letting him reap her appreciation of his efforts. “This is… this is more than I’ll ever need… for years, at least. How…?”

“It was easy, once I got into it,” Karne said modestly. “And you said your hands were getting blisters.”

Vicca guffawed a disbelieving laugh. All this just to keep her hands soft and silky. What a husband he would make. What a shame he wasn’t one already.

Karne stepped closer to her. Not too close, but there was definite intent in his movement. Something that made Vicca flustered. He walked towards her not like a skittish deer, but as he’d approached his own well-trained horse. Knowing it would not bolt, but would in fact enthusiastically accept a bridle—Vicca’s thoughts wildly careened ahead—now remembering how eagerly some horses took being harnessed. They knew it meant a hard ride and a sweet treat ahead of them.

“Your parents won’t miss you for hours,” Karne said leadingly. “They’ll think you need all that time to gather wood. But that’s all taken care of. You can do whatever you want while they think you’re working.”

Nerves and intrigue competed for the forefront of Vicca’s mind. It was so clear what he meant for them to do in this window of opportunity he’d made for them. His plan might be enough to divest Vicca of her virtue entirely—she feared that. But it touched her, too, how Karne had so carefully thought out how to get her alone and carried out his course despite the backbreaking labor. She could not help but wonder what he thought he might get from her for his efforts… and whether or not she might give it to him.

“And what do you want to do?” she asked him, trying to fit multitudes into her words. A bit of chiding, a bit of encouragement. She didn’t know what she wanted him to answer, but Vicca was open to anything that sounded good.

She wasn’t a trollop—she wouldn’t do something just for the sake of it. Though if he could ply her further, and as skillfully as he had so far…

“I want to keep looking at you,” Karne said, with the insinuating innocence of a naughty schoolboy.

Vicca bit her lip, not sure if she was encouraged or discouraged or if it was all her. If there was anything he could say that would dispel the attraction she felt towards him, that she had always held for him. “You can always look at me,” she said, putting an emphasis on those simple, slight words.

“Your father would grab a pitchfork and chase me off, I looked at you this way for long,” Karne contradicted her.

“Why would he do that?” Vicca asked, matching his affected innocence with her own.

Karne bit the inside of his cheek, though what he was really doing was chewing his words before he said them. “Because right now, you’re his little girl. And the more I look at you, the more it gets to be that you’re mine…”

“Yours,” Vicca repeated guilelessly.

“Yeah.”

“And you’d be mine too, I suppose?”

Karne blinked slowly at the suggestion. Like he would open and close his eyes in a dream he was trying not to wake from. “All yours.”

Vicca tried to quibble, but the breath to scud her words was coming up short. “I don’t know if I could take all of you.”

“Take some of me. Let me have a little of you. See how well I’d treat a hair before you give me all of you.”

“A hair?” Vicca giggled. The tension left her. Without it, her defenses were gone—the bricks in her walls had no mortar. “We can start you off with more than a hair, young squire.”

She undid the cords at her bodice, relieving the pressure on her expansive bosom. The vest spread and opened, pushed aside by the fullness of her breasts. Karne gawked, then winced. Looking down, Vicca could see him bulging in his leather trousers. Her chest, though still covered by a thin layer of blouse, was too much for his bodily control. He swelled and surged, growing too big for pants that had been tailored for him soft.

He kissed her, making it short and gentle. Forcing it to be. Where it touched her, his body felt like a boiling cauldron. Shaking with the heat and froth held inside. He was not sure that this gesture would make her his. Vicca imagined a stony certainty if this were their wedding night—a sure knowledge that he would not be denied. And she, too, would know not to rebuff him. But without the rings, without the vows, it was all so volatile. She didn’t know whether Karne would ask; she didn’t know what her answer would be if he did ask.

His hands sought out her receptiveness in her covered breasts, in her lips when he wasn't kissing them, in her cheeks and the line of her jaw, and in the briskly combed hair that he made wild and unmanageable. Mauling it as he would her body if she'd only give him a little more leeway. He found excitement, but perhaps not willingness.