Male vampire & male Appaloosa kelpie - best friends having a tender moment in Starfall Springs (Patreon)

Pure sfw fluff. Surprise! A bonus short story for you. Just two best friends being soft and gentle with each other. Enjoy! Hopefully they'll get stories of their own one day!

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The kelpie pond bubbled and roiled, the surface heaving, kicking up clouds of silt beneath the surface, and the priest looked up from tending his private vegetable garden with a scowl on his face. It had been boiling away like that for hours - since before he’d even left his duties in the temple. Something had to be amiss. 

With a sigh, he set down the trowel he’d been using to tease out the weeds from the carrot bed and stood, knuckling the small of his back. The sun was bright, but he had a broad brimmed hat on and dark glasses, and every inch of his body was covered from neck to toes, so he was in little danger of catching fire. Besides, he actually liked the daylight. When it wasn’t trying to kill him. 

He shook his head and wiped his grubby garden gloves on the green cotton apron he wore and strode over to the pond. 

“Max?” he asked, leather-gloved hand on hip as he stared at the froth on the top. “Max, whatever is the matter? Did you eat something out of the trash again?”

At that, a lanky, spotted horse stuck its head above the water and screamed an insult in Fae that Eadric didn’t have a hope of understanding. 

“Is that a yes?” he asked, knowing it had to be more than a spot of digestive discomfort. 

The horse, who was in fact not a horse but an unusually coloured kelpie, reared and cantered towards him, splashing out of muddy water and then coming to a dead halt and simply standing there dripping miserably on the shore. 

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Max,” the vampire scoffed. “You look like a wreck. What happened this time? Another failed date, I presume?”

Max snorted and champed bitterly, his eerily predatory mouth hinging far too wide for an ordinary horse. His Appaloosa colouring had earned him many nicknames over the centuries, from ‘Spot’ to ‘Clown Horse’, but through all the stormy years, he and Eadric had been best friends. Closer, at times, but not currently. 

“Come now,” Eadric smiled, ushering him towards the garden, where a massive sycamore tree spanned upwards towards the cloudless sky and at its roots a circular bench ran the circumference of the trunk. “Come and talk it over.”

“I don’t want to talk,” Max hissed in his reedy, unearthly voice. “I… I… I’m fed up with… with…”

“Fed up with what? What happened?”

He rolled his eyes in a flash of white and pawed at the ground with his front hoof. 

“Don’t do that!” Eadric admonished him. “You’ll tear up my nice lawn and it makes you look like an impudent young steer.”

Again, Max snapped his teeth together and then trotted after his friend, tail held indignantly high. 

“Wait there,” Eadric said, suddenly darting away into the temple and leaving his frustrated friend behind. When he emerged, he winced as the contrast between the cool shade of the marble columns and the brilliant sunlight outside struck him anew. “Here,” he said holding out a crisp, green apple. “Sharp and crunchy, just how you like them. I saved it for you.”

“Wasn’t that a temple offering?” he asked warily, snuffing at the air with hope all the same, nostrils flaring. 

Eadric grinned. “I’m simply redistributing the gifts. The gods certainly wouldn’t eat mortal fare, and it’ll only go onto the compost heap. I can’t eat it.”

“Why do you grow all this shit when you can’t eat any of it?” Max asked, nodding at the raised beds of vegetables on their right before stepping forward and biting the apple in half as it lay his friend’s palm. He’d never have eaten like a common horse out of anyone’s hand but Eadric’s.

“I give it away. And I enjoy tending it. It’s nice for a creature who survives by taking to give for a change, you know? And you’re not distracting me so easily this time. Come, tell me what’s got your pond in a froth.”

Max snatched the rest of the apple and then awkwardly folded his legs and sat down on the warm grass beside the bench with a deep grunt as his body hit the floor. 

“I should have known it’d never work out with a gnoll…”

“Didn’t try to steal a bite, did they?” Eadric chortled, eyeing Max’s rump. The answering snort from Max only made him smile all the more, revealing his sharp canines. 

“No, but… he was very… mouthy.”

“I thought you liked ‘mouthy’…” Eadric ventured. 

Max snapped at a few blades of grass with his incisors and then lay completely flat on his side with another sigh. His spotted coat - white with brown dots, each about the size of a two penny coin which dwindled to little more than freckles on his muzzle - gleamed in the midday sun, and Eadric smiled, grateful as ever for his dark glasses. He took his over sized straw hat off and laid it on the bench. He wouldn’t burn in the tree’s shadow. Not yet anyway.

“I’m just fed up with it not working out,” Max groaned without moving. 

Eadric smiled fondly, if sadly, and pushed himself up off the bench. There was a patch of dappled shade near Max’s shoulders and he settled himself on the ground beside him and leaned his head against Max’s thick neck. The kelpie twitched an ear. 

“What a pair we make, eh?” Eadric murmured, taking his thick leather glove off his left hand and running his fingers through his matted blond hair before putting his palm on his old friend’s cheek. He stroked the soft coat there for a while before moving towards his ear and caressing the velvety curves of it. 

Max drifted off to sleep, comforted and soothed by the presence and trust of his oldest friend. No matter what happened, the two of them at least had each other.