NOVEL NEXT 96. The Ride Down South
After a long and incredibly satisfying hour, Aurora lay sprawled out over her messy bed. She was thankful that she had used a towel, although she was still concerned that some of the mess she had made soaked through and into her sheets.
Her arms and legs had a satisfying tingle gently pervading them, while there was a slight soreness lingering in her core.
She let out a contented sigh as she remained enjoying the pleasing sensations, taking the time to reflect on the eye opening experience she had just been through.
Now her thoughts were not so clouded, Aurora was a little more reserved about how she felt. But despite that, she couldn’t help but agree with her previous thoughts. The enjoyment she had felt during her experimentation was definitely something that she would not wish to give up.
The memory of her prior actions however caused a sense of shame to wash over her as her cheeks became red with embarrassment. While she didn’t exactly do anything too embarrassing for a woman, the fact she ended up moaning so loudly and lost her self control, fully forgetting who she was and her former dignity.
Aurora took a deep breath, feeling conflicted. Was her dignity so cheap?
Her thoughts drifted to some of the other sexual encounters she had in the past causing her to shake her head. There had been plenty of shame involved in some of those experiences, but it was only now that she was now getting all worked up over something similar.
As she thought about it, she couldn’t help but sigh in exasperation. Relieving herself like she had was natural for a woman, which she had become. Granted, she may have lost control a little, but she was in private, so it was fine.
The main issue lingering in her mind was that of her male pride. How a man should act had been ingrained into her since she was young, either by trying to copy her father as a young child, or being taught how to behave as the Branford heir when she became old enough to understand.
Dignity, gentlemanly behaviour, pride and respect. These principals had guided her actions and behaviour her whole life, so engaging in something like self penetration was the least dignified and unmanly thing she could have done.
While there were those men who did not mind those sorts of activities, to her, the idea of having something penetrate her was the most demeaning thing she could do.
She had always held herself to high expectations, but she had thrown them aside, had sunk into behaviour that was far from masculine, and went against the principles of her male dignity.
And she thoroughly enjoyed it.
But at the end of the day, she was not the same person she had been before. She was held to different standards. She was no longer a man, and was making massive progress towards fully embracing her new identity.
As she thought more about it, she could only mirthlessly laugh. Chester was dead, and Aurora was now alive. She knew that her ingrained pride would be hard to remove, so instead she decided to change her perspective.
So far she had managed to shift her self imagae from that of Chester to that of Aurora, going from dignified masculinity to her interpretation of its female equivalent. Gracefulness and class, with her underlying pride and beliefs.
Femininity, however, had not been a part of that. There was acting like a woman, sure, but that was just acting. It was not completely embracing who she now was, and every facet of it. She knew she needed to overcome her pride and embrace what it actually meant to be a woman instead of just pretending.
While it may sound like a very minor difference in its outward appearance, in her mind, the gap was massive. It was the difference between acting on a stage or living the life of the person depicted on stage. She needed to get over her ingrained beliefs and adapt them to who she was becoming.
It didn’t exactly require her to do anything particularly different, just to overcome the final tethers her pride still clung to that prevented her from freely acting as a woman. And she felt it would not take as long as she imagined based on how much of an impact her last actions had just left.
She already felt less hesitant to engage in the female side of sexual pleasure while her mind was still clear, and she imagined the remaining hesitation would fade with time.
Still, the whole experience was the start of what was to be the final conflict between what remained of her male self and actually becoming a woman in spirit as well.
****
Aurora spent a little more time relaxing before going for a quick shower to clean herself up. As per her earlier request to maids through Harold, the spa within the manor had been prepared for her.
The spa had gotten little use since her parents had passed, so she had been a little surprised to find out that it had been prepared instead of her own bath, but either way she took the chance to relax the day's stress and fatigue away.
After an hour of much-needed rest, Aurora had returned to her room in a far happier and more relaxed state, the pressure of her current life situation far lighter on her shoulders than when she had first returned home.
Without much delay, she dressed herself in a different set of sports clothes that Ben had picked out and reentered Caelus.
****
As Aurora's senses refocused, she opened her eyes to observe her surroundings, letting out a relaxed sigh upon seeing everything calm and peaceful.
She was now back in Caelus and stood amongst the group of trees where she had hidden Sapphire the night before. With a quick glance to her in-game clock she confirmed that it was midnight and that she had not lost that much time.
At this moment, her focus was to catch up to the gnolls before her guild’s army encountered the nomadic tribe. Well, it may not have exactly been a regular army, but it was as much of an army as 300 random new players being told to march in the same direction could make.
She looked over to Sapphire who stood proud in the dim moonlight that filtered through the clouds, seemingly to be quite energetic thanks to all the rest she got last night before being sent to wherever horses went when players logged out.
With relative ease thanks to her growing familiarity with her body, Aurora mounted Sapphire and continued to follow the rough road again towards the west at a quick pace.
As she had hoped, she came upon a small section of the road that looked particularly messy with wide swathes of long grass on either side having been trampled by a large number of beings' footsteps. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that this was the route the gnolls had taken on their trip south to let loose their rage.
Thanks to the tribe's lack of care, her path forward was nicely highlighted for her, even in the dim nighttime light. With one last glance towards the mountain range that filled the width of her vision whenever she looked to her right, Aurora turned Sapphire away to the direction the gnolls had travelled and started to move off the road and follow their tracks.
Due to the rough nature of the rocky plains that border the mountains, Sapphire’s travelling speed became marginally slower as they followed the crushed grass left in the wake of the gnoll tribe. Despite Sapphire’s slowed pace, she was still fast when compared to the gnolls as she maintained a relatively swift canter across the landscape.
The view of the landscape remained relatively the same as they travelled, only influenced by the eventual rising of the sun as day eventually broke. The morning sun illuminated the highland plains that were covered by dry types of grass and various plants, some of which would have interested Aurora had she the time to spend gathering them. She made a mental note to get some new guild members to come over and do it for her later on.
Other than the monotonous flora, she also came across the occasional streams that flowed down from the mountains and across the slowly sloping plains towards the heart of the empire.
However, unlike their usual and pristine state, they had become a mess thanks to the passing gnoll tribe. The shallow flow of water had become a muddy mess as the gnolls had likely tried to get a drink as they passed, while their footfalls changed the surrounding area into a small muddy swamp.
Due to the occasional obstacles like these, Aurora had to skirt around them to prevent Sapphire from ending up stuck. Thankfully they didn’t really slow her down, so she still managed to make particularly good progress.
