The Summoning
A short story inspired by classic 90s JRPGs
🔞 Mature / 18+
This story explores themes of intimacy, grief, and healing, with emotionally and physically intimate scenes.
Inspired by the emotional resonance of classic fantasy RPGs, this story reimagines two warriors caught between guilt, longing, and something they were never meant to name.
The forest slept, save for the wind that stirred the canopy and the soft rustle of something moving beyond the firelight.
Lucian rose without a sound. He did not wake the others.
He saw her silhouette retreating—green hair like shadowed flame, her cloak trailing through the underbrush like mist and distant memory.
He quietly followed.
She was standing at the lake’s edge, unmoving. The water held her reflection poorly. Too many ripples.
Keeping himself perfectly still, he watched from a distance, uncertain whether this was a moment meant to be observed or respected.
“You’re not as quiet as you used to be,” she said, without turning. “Though I suppose Paladins don’t hide in shadows anymore. Isn’t that the idea?”
Her voice was lighter than it had been in days. Almost playful. Almost not.
Lucian stepped forward. One footfall. Then stopped. “I wasn’t sure if I should interrupt.”
“You have,” she said. “Might as well stand where I can see you.”
He obeyed. But he did not move too close.
“Alysha…” The word caught slightly. A name too full.
“Don’t,” she said, still facing the lake. “Not yet.”
Silence pressed in. A breeze skimmed the water, tugging her hair gently sideways. She didn’t push it back.
“I haven’t forgiven you,” she said after a long breath. “For what happened. For my mother. For my village.”
“I know.”
She turned then. Not fully. Just enough that the moonlight touched the edge of her face.
“That’s the worst part,” she said quietly. “You say it like you mean it. Like you carry it. That makes it harder.”
He looked down, but said nothing.
“It would be easier,” she continued, “if you were still that dark knight in black. If I could just… hate you.”
He did not argue. He simply watched her, the way she stood—shoulders squared, but arms folded tightly as if something inside was bracing for collapse.
“You don’t speak much,” she said. “Not unless it’s to apologise.”
He said nothing to that, either.
Alysha glanced away, as if expecting the water to offer something—clarity, distraction, permission.
“When I woke in the Faeland,” she said, slowly, “the first thing I saw was your face. The dark armour. The shadow sword drawn. You were standing between me and something that should have killed me.”
Lucian’s breath caught, but she didn’t look at him.
“I didn’t understand then. Why you would protect me. Why the man—the monster who razed my home would draw steel for me.”
He closed his eyes briefly, as if the weight of it had never dulled.
“I told myself it didn’t matter,” she went on, more softly now. “That you were just playing the part. That it was guilt. Duty.”
She turned to face him fully. The wind pushed her hair back, and for once, she didn’t hide behind it.
“But the thing about getting older in a day,” she said, “is that you don’t get to outgrow anything. You just wake up with a body full of questions—the kind of aches that have nowhere to go.”
Her eyes found his. “And one of them has always been you.”
He looked at her—really looked—and for one suspended heartbeat, the air between them held something almost unbearable.
Alysha stepped forward.
Just close enough that he could see the pulse at her throat. Just far enough that he could pretend this was still safe.
“I know you’ll never ask,” she whispered. “You’d rather carry silence like penance. Like a shield.”
She reached up, almost gently, and placed a kiss against his forehead—brief, dry, unceremonious.
When she pulled back, her smile was tilted and thin. “Good night, Lucian.”
She turned, stepping past him with the softness of someone choosing not to look back.
“Try not to brood yourself into legend,” she added, glancing sidelong. “It’s exhausting.”
And then she was gone, back through the trees, her footsteps swallowed by the hush of the forest.
He remained by the lake long after her footsteps faded.
The moon traced silver lines across the surface. The breeze moved the water. But he did not move.
He remembered the day she returned.
Fire in the sky. The roar of something ancient—Bahamut, perhaps, or Leviathan—but it wasn’t the summon that had caught his breath.
It was her. Stepping through the flames like she belonged to them. Or like she commanded them. Cloak cut through the wind like a blaze. Hair wild, green as the forest behind her.
Eyes harder. Older.
She didn’t look at him when she arrived. She didn’t need to.
She was power, grace, vengeance made flesh. No longer the girl who cried in the ruins of a fire-scorched village. No longer someone he could save.
And he had watched her—sword still in hand, but suddenly unsure why he was holding it. Wonder and awe blooming slowly, treacherously, in the hollow where guilt had lived too long.
That was the moment.
Not when she turned. Not when she spoke.
When he knew—truly knew—that he had no right to feel what he felt.
And he felt it anyway.
* * *
The next night, Lucian woke once more to find her spot empty.
Silently, he rose and slipped into the woods, following the thread of her scent through the underbrush. It was ridiculous, really—how distinctly he could recognise it, how it lingered like a whisper against the trees. He pretended he didn’t know it by heart, but of course he did.
Eventually, the trail led him to the clearing.
Above, the night sky stretched vast and shimmering, a cascade of stars braided through the cosmic spine. The Milky Way bled across it like a veil of ancient light.
And there, beneath its brilliance, stood Alysha.
She was motionless, radiant in the moonlight, draped in silver and shadow like a nymph conjured out of old myth. The stillness around her was not silence but reverence, as if the stars themselves had paused to watch.
He couldn’t speak. For a moment, he could barely breathe.
She turned, the corners of her mouth lifting with the faintest smile.
“You came.”
“I did.”
“I thought you would. I did a summoning: oh gracious gods of the universe, Gaia of nature, creator of past, present, and future, I command thee—bring forth, Lucian Harthbringer. My guardian. My knight. My secret wish.” Her grin crooked as she delivered the line with the solemnity of a priestess and the tone of a girl mocking fate.
She added, “Looks like it worked.”
“Alysha—”
But she raised a hand to stop him. “Before you say anything—Lucian, you know you’re not babysitting me anymore.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m a grown woman now.”
“Hmm… theoretically.”
“I am fully capable of making my own decisions.”
“And I respect that.”
“Good. Then we’re on the same page.” She drew in a breath, steady but charged. “So. What were you about to say?”
“I…I don’t think—”
She moved like wind, fluid, quiet, crossing the distance before he could finish the sentence.
“You don’t think this is a good idea,” she said, her voice low, not mocking this time, just certain.
Lucian hesitated. “No,” he said at last.
“Right. Care to know what I think?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
She smirked, but it was laced with something softer—something that ached a little. “You haven’t changed, Lucian.”
He opened his mouth to respond, then thought better of it.
She stepped closer. “You may think you have—with all the paladin-of-light business, all that polished armour and sense of purpose. But deep down, you’re still the same man who hides behind honour and loyalty and duty and all that codes as armour. Anything to avoid—”
She stopped. Her eyes, luminous in the dark, were full of stars now—stars and questions.
“Do you ever let yourself want something?” she asked. “Not for anyone else. Not for a cause. Just because it’s yours to want?”
“Alysha…”
“I see you, Lucian. You can hide behind it all. Call it Atonement. But you can’t hide everything.”
She paused, meeting his gaze with hers.
”Not from me.”
She reached up and touched his face—lightly, tentatively—as though unsure if she had the right. The warmth of her palm undid something in his chest.
“Tell me you don’t feel anything.”
He wanted to lie. It would have made things easier. Clearer. But the lie never came.
“Tell me you want me.”
He didn’t speak. He tilted his head instead, leaning into her touch, the answer written in the way he closed his eyes.
And that was enough.
She drew closer and kissed him—softly at first, lips brushing his like a question. His reply was reverent, restrained, as if he feared the moment might break if he pressed too hard.
She stayed there, lips against his, drawing slow, tentative circles, until his breath caught and he reached for her—hands at her waist, drawing her in.
Something in him cracked.
Their bodies met, unspoken truths dissolving in the hush between heartbeats. The kiss deepened—still controlled, still aching with reverence—but with growing hunger beneath the surface.
When they finally broke apart for air, Lucian could barely speak.
“That was…” he said, breathless.
“Good?” she teased, brow arched.
“I still think. Maybe we shouldn’t—”
“Oh gods, Lucian. Shut up.”
And she did shut him up. With another kiss.
This time, he didn’t hesitate.
Their lips met again—deeper this time, unhurried but urgent, like something long-forbidden finally granted permission. The tension that had lived between them for years unravelled in a single breath, and then another, until neither of them remembered what it felt like not to want this.
Alysha’s hands found the back of his neck, fingers threading through the silver strands of his hair. She tilted her head to pull him closer, and Lucian followed with a kind of silent gravity that’s carved into his very being.
One of his hands slid to her waist, anchoring them both, the other pressing between her shoulder blades as if to hold her together—though she wasn’t the one trembling.
Starlight poured across the clearing, quiet as breath. Moonlight dappled through the canopy, catching in the stray wisps of her emerald hair.
And Lucian thought she had never looked more alive—cheeks flushed, breath quickened, eyes bright with something deeper than mischief.
When she pulled back to look at him, her gaze lingered on his mouth for a moment, then lifted to meet his eyes.
“This okay?” she asked softly, the teasing edge in her voice long gone.
He didn’t answer with words. Just touched her face with both hands, reverently, as if afraid she might vanish if he blinked. She leaned into the warmth of his palms.
Then she kissed him again, slow and searching.
And the world around them fell away.
She guided him down first, fingers slipping through his as they knelt in the grass together. The earth was soft beneath them, the air still warm from the day.
He lay back without hesitation, his gaze never leaving hers, and she followed, fitting herself against him with the kind of ease that came not from practice, but from inevitability.
Lucian held her carefully, the curve of her waist beneath his hand, the quiet rise and fall of her breath against his chest, the arch of her spine against his touch.
Alysha pressed herself deep into him. And kissed him hungrily as if he were her sin. Again, again, and again. As if trying to memorise the shape of him through her mouth, her hands, her skin and all her aches.
And he answered each kiss with the restraint of a man who had waited too long, who did not dare ask for more than what was freely given.
Their intimacy unfolded like the slow bloom of a flower in moonlight—tender, radiant, and entirely unhidden beneath the open sky.
No shadows. No hiding.
Just the touch of skin to skin, the hush of breath shared between them, the aching sweetness of something real.
Lucian whispered her name once, low and hoarse, as if it had taken root in the centre of him. And when she leaned in and brushed her nose against his, eyes closed, she murmured his back—
Like answers to their prayer.
Later, they lay tangled together, soft grass beneath them, still warm with their joined breath. Her head nestled beneath his chin, his arm curved protectively around her.
The stars blinked overhead, indifferent and eternal, but the clearing felt sacred now, like something consecrated by touch and truth and the long-overdue collapse of a barrier neither had been brave enough to name.
She traced idle shapes over his chest with one finger, and for a long time, neither of them spoke.
They didn’t need to.
Not tonight.
Author’s Note
This story was inspired by one of the great classic fantasy RPGs of the 1990s—those unforgettable games that etched melodrama into pixels without apologies. It’s an homage to that particular flavor of nostalgia: a little overwrought, a little cheesy, but heartfelt in its earnestness.All character names have been changed, and the story itself is entirely fictional. No actual game characters were harmed in the making of this tale. Any resemblance to softly-brooding paladins or elemental-commanding summoners from your childhood save files is purely coincidental (and emotionally intentional).