Rebellion's Price

"God made the rules. We do but use them to suit our purpose." The solemn voice and the click-click of pacing boots echoed in the granite cavern. Jetrel turned his blindfolded head as much as his bonds would allow, trying to locate the speaker by sound, but the hollow echoes seemed to come from everywhere at once. He concentrated on a heavy footfall beyond his feet, then jumped as light fingernails were drawn over his forehead. "There are two of them," he thought. A breathy hiss on his left and the prickling sense of someone beside him made him revise his estimate again. "At leat three."

"That which the Tyrant deems unnatural can free us from his grip," continued the strong female voice. "When we make ourselves abominations in his eyes, we are no longer his creatures. He uses this to threaten us; he wants us to shudder at the thought of our bright feathers curling to ash. But we know it is our strength. With our black-scaled wings we rule the night; with our tethers snapped, God is blind to us. He does not watch our smallest move; he does not twist around our thoughts; he does not whisper in our dreams. Our minds and our bodies are our own."

The speaker paused. Jetrel heard her footsteps drawing nearer, then felt her presence near his face, raising the hairs on his right cheek. Jetrel sensed that the others, whatever their number, had drawn close around him and now stood still. A slight breeze stroked his naked body, bringing the scent of damp stone and ruffling the feathers on his wings. It tickled and made him want to shake, but his wings were pinned firmly to the arms of the cross-shaped stone slab to which he was bound. He felt exceedingly vulnerable, every nerve awake and sensitive.

When the presence by his face spoke again, the voice was soft and precise.

"Is it your wish to purge yourself of God's presence?"

There were many things that God deemed wicked. Jetrel had no idea what deeds the rebels had in mind to make God cast him down, or whether he would approve of them were he free to choose. God's snaking thoughts had permeated Jetrel's consciousness for so long that it was often difficult for him to tell which opinions were his own and which were imposed upon him.

It had taken the Slaughter of the Firstborn to awaken his own sense of justice. He had swept into the first Egyptian house, cloaked in the majesty of his lord's fury, the blazing embodiment of God's vengeful fist, and gazed upon the unfocused features of the newborn child. And part of him had rebelled. An arophied piece of his soul, long stifled by the constricting will of another, had uncurled like a seedling peeking from the soil.

Pain had followed. God had struck Jetrel down where he stood, his fury multiplied tenfold. The crimson thread of God's will, woven through every fiber of his being, had leapt to a blazing inferno of agony. He had writhed on the floor heedless of his own screams.

"Whatever the rebels intend for me, it cannot be worse than that," thought Jetrel where he lay splayed on the stone. He had fled when God's attention had turned from him, fled straight to the rebel stonghold while God focused on the other servants carrying out his bloody work. At the yawning, stalactite-fanged entrance to earth's caverns he had surrendered to the rebels, let them bind his eyes and steal his awareness. He had awoken here, bound, blind, and naked, his insides churning with fear.

The speaker by his face did not repeat the question. All those around him seemed content to wait. He took a shuddering breath, and spoke firmly.

"It is my wish."

A soft sigh went up around him, and the woman by his head spoke once more.

"So be it."

The crowd around him began to move. He heard soft sounds of rustling fabric, and a dry sound like a piece of leather trailing across stone. There was a touch on his chest, gentle fingers trailing down his torso, and a noise above him that was something between a gasp and a stifled chuckle. The voice was feminine. He smelled the girl's clean skin as she leaned over him and ran her hand up his side, tracing the countours of hip, waist, and muscled ribs. There was something strange about her, a different scent, or the lack of a scent; something earthy and wild. She drew her knee over his belly, straddling him, now stroking and teasing him with both hands, and he realized what was strange.

"You're human!" he gasped. Again, she made a soft noise, more of a chuckle this time. One of God's strictest rules was the taboo against the coupling of humans and angels. Then that shock was driven from his mind as other hands joined hers, more than he could count, touching, sliding, stroking. Hands ran up his legs, inside his thighs, and he found himself aware of his suddenly erect member, aching in anticipation. But the hands parted and went up either side, soon mingling with the countless other touches exploring him from his feet to the top of his head, even sweeping beneath the blindfold to brush across his closed eyelids. More sensations were added, moist, flicking trails of tongues playing arcross his skin, lips closing around his fingertips and toes. He was breathing in heavy gasps, overwhelmed by sensation, full to bursting with his need to be touched in the one place they continued to avoid.

"The tyrant made humans for the earth and angels for the sky, pleasure to reward and pain to discourage. We bring together that which he created as opposites, twine them together until they are one. Thus do we reject his judgements," said the clear female voice.

Jetrel barely heard the words, so lost was he in sensation. Then a moist constriction on his nipple began to tighten, and he felt the bite of teeth, slowly sinking deeper. He tensed in sudden discomfort as the teeth gripped and pulled away. Now other teeth began to nibble and nip, minging with the softer touches of hands and tongues. The word "pain" slowly sank into his consciousness. What did the woman mean by twining pain and pleasure together?

He jumped again as something touched him for the first time between his legs, a silky pressure beneath his scrotum. The pressure spread up and around , encircling his manhood and drawing tighter, and he realized that he was being tied with a cord. The pressure increased, snug, then so tight as to be digging into his flesh. He was already harder than he could ever remember being, but the blood continued to pump into his aching phallus, and the silken cord kept it from flowing back. He swelled still further, seeming to surge with sensation from the pounding blood trapped within. Someone's hair trailed over hid bound manhood and the feeling was so intense that he cried out and arched his back as his phallus twitched and strained for more. His balls ached, full and tight and tender. The hands and mouths continued moving on his body, their pressure becoming firmer and deeper, but his awareness of them was vague as all his capacity for sensation seemed taken up with the the powerful straining desire between his legs.

All at once, the hands and tongues began moving in unison. From his panting, parted lips to the tips of his fingers and toes, every movement, every touch was suddenly stroking in one direction, converging on the place where all of his attention now focused. It was like a whirlwind sucking him up and twisting him into a raw, helpless explosion of sensation as dozens of hands and mouths were suddenly licking, sucking, and massaging his bound manhood. It was incredible. It was ecstacy. He could not tell one tongue from another, how they were stroking or where they were sucking, save that they were never still; he was a mass of blending, swirling pleasure. He felt his balls stretching, filling even more, preparing for excruciating release. He threw his head back, toes curling, fingers digging into the stone, his whole body arching and trembling as the pleasure surged through him.

Then, abruptly, his groin exploded in pain. He screamed. The mouths and hands were gone. He felt lines of agony across his straining, dripping manhood, his mind a blank. It came again, accompanied by a swish and crack. The dozen strands of a small flogger snapped across his engorged cock and balls. He writhed, sweat and tears running beneath the bindfold, as his twitching phallus strained upward and met the third stroke.

The pain was wild, excruciating. But while his super-sensitive skin lit up in agony, pleasure continued to surge and throb beneath the surface. He lay trembling and weeping, waiting for the next blow. Instead he felt a soothing coolness as someone blew gently between his legs, and then a mouth slid down over his tortured penis. Her lips ran over the welts of the flogger, hurting and soothing at the same time, until the tip of him was pressed against her throat and her lips tightened around the base of his shaft. She was not human, for no human had a mouth large enough to take all of him in, and no human could ripple her cheeks and throat as this woman did—but Jetrel was beyond such thoughts. Tongues and lips began nursing and caressing his balls, and someone kissed him on the lips, her hand sliding up to tangle in his hair. Lines of coolness began forming on his body as people blew gently on his sweat-soaked skin. His tears were flowing freely, all his barriers broken down and overwhelmed.

Pleasure was rising through the pain. The girl with the rippling mouth began sucking harder, sliding up, drawing her lips over the rim of his phallus with a pop and sliding back quickly over his head and shaft until he slammed into the clenching muscles of her throat. She never paused, gliding up and down with a smooth, steady beat, meeting the pounding pressure of his manhood with a powerful sucking pressure of her own. The rippling contractions continued, and her tongue rubbed in swirling patterns everywhere it passed. The pain of the flogging was caught up and lost in the rising tide of pleasure, building up past the level of his previous near-release, finding new planes of ecstacy that he hadn't dreamed existed. Again, he felt the tellale sensations of his impending climax; balls tightening against his shaft, pleasure becoming a red-hot rod bursting to flame along the length of his phallus, fluids straining to shoot through him.

He was so far gone that he was completely unprepared for the sudden shock of pain that halted the process. The girl on his phallus never stopped moving, but his balls had been gripped and pulled away from his body. Fingernails were digging into his scrotum, and his balls were a mass of pain. He let loose a long scream of pain, pleasure and frustration, the ropes that bound him digging in with bruising force as he thrashed and writhed. His climax was stalled, but the pleasure kept rising. Like a mountain climber finding unguessed-at peaks above the clouds, the sheer ecstacy in his body flew higher and higher. The hands mauling his balls were replaced by a mouth, drawing them entirly inside, massaging with cheeks and tongue and sucking to pull them away from his body. The mouth on his shaft gripped tighter, and for the first time he felt her teeth. They were pointed. They scraped across his flesh as she contiued to suck her way up and slam down with bruising force. Higher the creshendo roared. He was screaming continuously now, wild, ripping screams hurled by the force of his pain and pleasure to reverberate against the stone walls of the cavern. And the pain and the pleasure melded into one.

He erupted. The force of his orgasm was an earthquake tearing his soul asunder—a solid foaming torrent of semen shot through him and deep into the throat that gripped and milked—the spasms of pain and pleasure thundered through his whole body, rushing and crashing—his pleasure was a palpable thing, gushing out of him, filling the room, driving everyone around him to searing climaxes of their own, and for a long, long time, there was nothing but the the deafening tempest of ecstacy.

Finally, there was quiet, broken only by the gasps and pants of the spent humans and fallen angels sprawled across the floor of the chamber. Lilith was the first to rise, her plump lips spread in a wide smile. There was a smell of singed feathers, and she ran her hand tenderly across the glossy black scales that now covered Jetrel's wings. She began untying the bonds on his uncoscious body, and slowly, others rose and joined her. His face now bore a pattern of black pigment across his brow and beneath his eyes, and from under his dark, tangled hair curved two small razor-sharp horns; but despite the fierce-looking changes, his expression was empty of all bitterness and turmoil, utterly at peace.

"He is a worthy one, and beautiful," she whispered, and others smiled and murmured agreement. They lifted him with exceeding gentleness, and carried him out of the stone cavern to a candlelit room and a soft, clean bed. The rebels longed to wait for him, to be there when he woke, but a hundred urgent tasks awaited them. So only one remained by his bedside waiting for him to reemerge into his new life.