1
Sienna
In the Vale, the world was peaceful. Pixies and imps wove through the air overhead. The sun above shone down through a clear, mint-green sky. Gigantic blue trees whispered gently in the wind. The scariest part was that I'd started to understand them. Not the exact words, but the general idea of what those trees wanted. Usually, the damned things were just hungry.
But beneath all of that, locked in this bubble where time had once stood still, Ronwe and I sat at a dark stone table. We'd made it from the rock beneath our feet. It was the same type that built the cliff face and which made the view over the fairy homeworld so impressive. Well, I'd made the table. Ronwe had created the circular benches. Now that he could feel aether, he had to learn how to use it just like I did.
So this had become our study area for when it was nice outside. In the last two weeks, the weather hadn't always been pleasant, but this little slice of Tyrnigg was still amazing. Somehow, the house was still perfectly useable. A few million years hadn't managed to decay it. A couple of weeks, however, had been all it took to turn it into a home once again.
There were now flowers in the beds around the front. The weeds had been pulled and moved elsewhere - since fairy plants had minds of their own. Deadwood had been cut and stacked for the hearth in the main room, and the windows now had screens. Earth-style ones, but they kept the imps out at night. Those damned things could bite. Currently, most of the First Legion of Hell was fixated on building a new room. A big one, so a few of us could sleep in there, and I'd already claimed it for myself.
Mostly because Nick needed a change of scenery. Firiel's house was packed with his memories. Lying in his dead wife's bed wasn't fair to him. He swore it was ok, but I knew better, and Ronwe agreed. He and Luke would take the old loft since Luke hadn't spent much time sleeping there. Nick, Sam, and I would move into the new room, and Bel had claimed the sofa in the main one. It was the only place that fit his extra-large demonic body.
And speaking of Beelzebub, the large man was headed right towards us. When I glanced over at the approaching demon, Ron stopped mid-sentence to follow my gaze, and he smiled. Seemed he did that a lot since he'd left Hell, but I wasn't going to say a thing about it.
"Muse," Bel said, stopping only when he reached our table. "I want to be brown."
I sighed and dropped my head to the cool stone. "Nick said you have to look like a real fairy, Bel. They only come in pastel. Brown is not pastel."
"But I don't want to be pink," the big guy grumbled.
"There are other colors," Ron reminded him, gesturing to his own lavender body. "Don't you have a color you like?"
"Black," Bel pouted. "I'm supposed to be black. Maybe grey? That's like pastel black, isn't it?"
"Not a fairy color," I told him, keeping my tone gentle. "You can be blue - "
"Nick's blue," he interrupted.
"Green..."
"Luke."
I sighed. "Sam's pink, Ron's lavender, and I'm sherbet orange. If you don't want to share with someone, then that doesn't leave a lot to choose from." I let my eyes run down his very impressive body. "What about peach?"
He slowly shook his head, making it clear that wasn't a good choice. "Firiel was peach."
Which was true, and my own orange was a little too close to her color for my liking, but I hadn't thought about it when I'd made the skin. Thankfully, it was different enough to not look like I was trying to replace her. I'd actually asked - Luke, of course. He'd assured me that the painting in the main room had faded a bit and that she'd been a lot more pink than me. Closer to watermelon than anything else. Thankfully, Sam was more of a dusty rose, so we were both safe.
"What about periwinkle?" Ron asked.
Bel's brow furrowed as he thought about that. "Isn't that just blue?"
"Between blue and purple," I explained.
The giant of a demon flapped his arms against his sides. "Nick says I have to have a skin today. He said I've waited too long, and that if anyone sees me, we'll have bigger problems, so change me? Make me something right?"
"I can't do black," I told him again.
"Then make me what you like," he insisted.
Well, if that wasn't permission to be a little artistic, I wasn't sure what would be. Swinging my legs over the bench, I spun on my rump to catch one of his hands, then used it to pull myself up. The truth was that I still wasn't quite comfortable with the new gangly appearance of my fey body. I didn't fall over, but it still felt a bit alien. My demon skin had been so natural that I hadn't expected it - if we ignored the part about learning how to manage a set of wings and a tail.
"Are you sure I can pick?" I asked Bel, giving him one last chance to back out.
He just nodded, lifting his other hand, so I held both. "I trust you, Sia."
"Then close your eyes."
He didn't really need to, but it always made me feel a little better if my "patient" wasn't watching while I worked. Ron called it performance anxiety, and he wasn't really wrong. Granted, after making a few skins for this plane of existence, I was getting rather good at it.
I'd seen pictures of fairies. I'd been taken close to one of their markets to see how the real things moved. I'd also spent a lot of time examining every inch of Nick's fey body. Purely for science, I liked to joke. (It wasn't.) But now, I knew exactly how the fairies were made.
"Clothes?" Ron asked, just before I started.
Bel's lips split into a grin. "I need a towel."
"You really don't," Ron mumbled, but it was loud enough that both Bel and I heard.
And those words made a little dimple appear in the big guy's cheek. Lifting his hands from mine, the beast opened his pants with the flick of his fingers and simply dropped them to the ground so he could step out. Uh, yeah. I looked. I was kinda standing right in front of every single thing he was showing off, and let me be honest: it - well, he - was rather impressive.
"Just close your eyes, demon," I hissed as I stepped around behind him.
I may have also gaped at Ron in astonishment. I most definitely checked out the very round muscles of Bel's ass, but it was ok. I was allowed to do this. Nick said it was cute when I flirted with the legion. Sam said it was hot. Ron? He just wanted to giggle with me later when we were pretending to learn all about aethersculpting.
I also didn't need to keep the big guy waiting. Letting my fingers trail across the gap between his wings, I started concentrating. Those large leather bat-wings of his needed to change first. They should be smaller, transparent, yet iridescent. Male fairies used their wings to impress the females. They'd evolved for display and little else, but that was a good reason to give Bel a rather impressive set.
Like dragonfly wings, they were long and mostly narrow. Like butterfly wings, the tips were almost pointed, with a curve to the bottom edge. Like cicada wings, they were made of transparent panels, with the lower set a bit smaller than the upper, and folded nicely against our backs.
When those were done, I began to pull his tail back into his body. Granted, I made my own adjustments there. The fey were typically lean instead of buff, but this was Beelzebub. He wouldn't look recognizable without that bubble butt and those biceps. I modeled his ass after his human body and followed that with legs that would fit. Leaner than his real ones, but not scrawny like the men I'd seen from this world. He was still a large man.