Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 29

"This really isn't necessary," he waved at the bed. "I'm military, you know? I can sleep on a cot like anybody else."

The woman brushed long, dark hair away from her face and took a moment to peer at him.

'She can't see me yet,' he realized. 'Her eyes need time to adjust. That means she isn't up on the Facial upgrades.'

Zhair'lo noted her clothing next. Instead of heavy leather armour, she dressed in ill-fitting ceremonial leathers, leaving her calves and forearms exposed.

"You're not even Form, are you?"

"No, Zhair'lo, you are perfectly well aware I'm not," her detached voice chilled him as she unlatched her armour at the shoulders.

With her hair down, he hadn't recognized her, but her cold voice hit him quickly, making fresh the memory of a terrifying night so many months ago. Zhair'lo recalled the chilled feeling in the pit of his stomach as he'd waited to find out if he'd killed or permanently damaged Talla. The sense of failure rose up inside him, an echo of past impotence.

"You were there," Zhair'lo stepped back from her, despite the table between them. "You -"

"Examined you, yes," Tia removed her chest plate to reveal a simple blue blouse underneath it. "I'm pleased by your complete recovery."

Nothing of her voice or body language warmed him, even as she loosened the belts at her hips and slid out of her leather skirt to reveal a knee length blue skirt.

"Do I need to be examined?" Zhair'lo stood up straight again, trying to cover for his embarrassing retreat.

Tia turned her pale eyes down thoughtfully, pursed her lips as if to run the tip of her tongue along the front of her teeth, and focused her gaze on him again.

"Something like that," she reached for the decanter and poured two goblets full of fresh water. One of these she offered to him across the table. "You must be thirsty?"

"What's with the fancy silver?" Zhair'lo accepted the drink.

"Silver and blue are the colours of a Second," Tia paused to take a sip from her drink. "The stones are sapphires and lapis lazuli."

"You're a Second, then?"

"You already knew that from our last meeting," Tia's tone veered toward accusation. "Please don't feign ignorance. You don't wear it well."

Zhair'lo nearly stepped back again, but decided to pretend indifference and cover for it with a long draught from his goblet, all the while wondering why she wore a blue blouse instead of the bikini top normally required for a Second.

"That said, my rank is somewhat ... in flux. My Mistress will surely appoint someone in my absence and one doesn't know what the state of Beshenna will be when we arrive."

"You've lost your position?" Zhair'lo raised his eyebrows, choosing to ignore the fear mongering regarding their destination. "Just so you could come along as a healer with us?"

Zhair'lo remained certain Beshenna wouldn't need any healers.

"No," Tia looked past him as she took a long drink from her goblet.

Faced with several heartbeats of uncomfortable silence, Zhair'lo drank down his water as well.

The Second took the empty goblet from him and placed it beside hers on the table. Rounding the table, she sat on the low bed and patted a place to her left. With a shrug, Zhair'lo sat next to her, pulling up his right knee to mirror her so they could face each other. Tia took his wrist in her hand, fingers probing for his pulse.

"How are you feeling?" she looked aside, perhaps counting beats.

"About as good as I always do in the middle of an upgrade," Zhair'lo took a deep breath, a sudden cloying claustrophobia seeping into his chest. "A little ... warm."

"What do you normally experience as a Conduit?"

She had posed the question as casually as any doctor had ever asked him about his health, but Zhair'lo heard alarm bells ringing in his head, three at a time.

"There's a ... uh ... kind of tension," he improvised, starting to feel a cold sweat collect under his clothes. "Discomfort with ... I ... nine hells."

"You're fine," Tia soothed.

"The water" he accused, trying to shake his head to clear it. "But you drank it, too."

"Your goblet already had a powder in it," she pointed out. "As did mine."

Tia, he perceived quite suddenly, wore a subtle perfume which wafted over him in several floral scents. While not strong, it sufficed to rinse away the odour of sweat and leather which had permeated his nostrils for so long he'd forgotten other scents existed. Zhair'lo felt his heart begin to race as his lungs desperately drew in air.

When he looked up, he found that the doctor who had entered his tent had become a woman with dark hair and intense, blue eyes.

"Not again," he gasped, feeling a bead of sweat run down the side of his nose.

"It won't be like that," her voice softened as she collected his hands between hers. "But we must shore up what you hold."

Zhair'lo had no doubt about the power of the Temple's potions - or powders, as the case might be. A beast began to burn inside him, reminded him in stark terms that the magic held inside his body did not belong there. Without any prodding from him, that energy wanted out and knew of only one exit. He'd held it in check all day, what with the nausea, pain and exhaustion. But here, in this tent, with this dark haired woman unbuttoning her blouse and sliding it off her shoulders, his needs became the focus of his attention.

His hands, left listlessly in his lap, twitched as the darkness of Tia's nipples came into view, and a moan escaped his lips as the tips sprouted into the cool air.

"Breathe," she kept her voice soft as she took his hands and brought them to her chest.

Overwhelmed, Zhair'lo didn't resist until his middle finger made contact with the very end of her stiffened points. Tia closed her eyes and exhaled, briefly but sharply, as he took control of his hands and gently drove her nipples in gentle circles with the lightest contact of his fingertips.

When he captured her aureolae between thumbs and forefingers, she opened her eyes and reached for the laces on his leather pants. The erection that sprang forth surprised her not at all.

"It is not easy for you."

Zhair'lo found his throat parched and managed only a nod.

"You are very young for a task such as this," she reached for his erection and stroked him.

"I can't -," Zhair'lo coughed.

"Can't what?"

"Come?"

"Not until we get to Beshenna," she pulled his hands tightly against her chest. "If you came inside me, it would be a disaster for both of us."

Despite the haze of the potion, that gave Zhair'lo pause.

"Would it make you a Sorceress?"

"Outside of a Temple?" Tia shook her head. "It would kill me."

Zhair'lo tried to keep a grip on his mind, to fight off the forces at work trying to pry his head open. Talla, whom he couldn't sense right then, had known that only three women in any Temple could hold any one of the Perfections. A terrible fate awaited a fourth person who tried to reach that level. But Talla had known nothing about the effects of a Perfection outside of a Temple. And here, a High Officer entrusted him, a man barely in his adulthood, with a fact kept secret even from women.

"Kill you?"

"Don't worry about that," she soothed him as she continued stroking him. "You can't upgrade me now."

"The potion."

Tia nodded confirmation and conversation paused and Zhair'lo felt her searching his eyes even as he kept his focus on the dirt floor.

"Something else? You are afraid?"

Zhair'lo twitched, his hands falling away from her body to his lap while his eyes met hers with anger and offence.

"I'm a Soldier," he replied sharply, clinging to at that small piece of his identity.

"Then tell me what bothers you, Soldier," Tia did not take her hand from his rock hard erection.

"I remember last night," Zhair'lo's hands gripped the edge of the bed, resenting the way the potion drove his body and slowly forced parts of his mind to hunger for sex.

"When you took the took the Goddess's magic?" Tia's concern played false to Zhair'lo, as she gave him no reprieve other than the softness of her voice.

"Afterwards," Zhair'lo's voice darkened. "So angry. I can't ... I won't ..."

Tia's hand came away from his manhood then so she could cup his jaw and turn her to face him.

"Is that what worries you?"

He nodded, staring with wild-eyed fear.

"Do you see guards here? Anyone to restrain you?"

Zhair'lo shook his head.

"That was a different potion, Zhair'lo, trust me," Tia's nose brushed against his. "This will not be like that."

He felt his jaw drop in shock. They had made him enraged on purpose?

"Why?" he stammered. "Why would they want me to hurt someone?"

"You're young," Tia said. "To take on magic so heavy, for so long, we needed your most powerful emotions."

"But Sonja ... I struck her ..."

"Sonja?" Tia laughed. "You spanked her?"

Zhair'lo wondered about Tia's sense of humour. Nothing seemed funny to him right then.

"Yes," he admitted. "I didn't ... I lost control of myself."

"Zhair'lo," Tia tilted her head in bemusement, "do you really think you could hurt someone like Sonja? By spanking her?"

He exhaled, trying to relax well enough to think.

"This isn't funny," his voice sounded hollow and distant.

"It is if you imagine the great Adjudicate, bent over a wooden desk somewhere."

Zhair'lo stared at Tia in bewilderment. "Aren't you a doctor?"

"I drank almost the same potion you did, young man, give or take an ingredient," she reminded him. "And I don't have the burden of your worries."

While her left hand still held one side of his face, her right slipped underneath her blue skirt. Her body convulsed and, a moment later, she brought her hand back up and held it before his face, the middle finger glistening in the candlelight.

"I've never ... never used the potion at this strength," she confessed with a gasp, her left hand trembling where it touched his face.

She looked him in the eyes again and, with little warning, shoved him back on the bed.

"Your concerns are handled," she breathed as she straddled him.

"What will happen this ti-", he began to protest, but found warm, wet flesh against the head of his shaft.

"I need to come," she declared to the room at large, and Zhair'lo felt as if he had ceased to exist for her.

"But I -"

With a glaze in her eyes and no further warning, Tia slid herself down, enveloping him. Zhair'lo considered the good fortune of having a Goddess one night and a Second of Within the next. Two of the most most amazing vaginas he'd ever encountered and the potion would prevent him from coming inside them.

"For Beshenna," Tia crooned to the ceiling of the tent. "For the desperate people ..."

Her muscles twitched, hardening his erection, and he gazed vapidly at her breasts, one brightly lit by the torches, the other in the first's shadow, both of them swaying back and forth in hypnotic progression.

A great deal of grinding passed before she deigned to notice him, lying beneath her with his arms stretched out helplessly. Zhair'lo knew full well the potion blocked his path to orgasm and hardened his mind against any futile participation. Tia, however, wanted more and leaned over him dangling her breasts in his face.

"I need to come hard to seal in the magic," she glared into his eyes. "Here, suckle."

She lowered her breast into his open mouth, forcing her nipple on his tongue.

"Suck," she insisted.

Zhair'lo, torn between the resistance he'd planned and the arousal of both a full day's frustration and the effects of the potion, closed his mouth with her entire aureola inside and gently bit down on the surrounding flesh. Her breast released liquid into his mouth.

"Yes," Tia sighed. "Not much milk, but some. Just enough Abundance to keep me going. Suck more."

Overwhelmed, Zhair'lo pulled hard on her breast, part of his mind hoping he could overwhelm the potion and make himself come inside her. Wouldn't that surprise them? What if he defeated them, the way he'd done it with the Fighters and their Initiation? What if, amongst all the other powers he had, they had underestimated him in this respect too?

Blind with lust and anger, he decided to go for it. With a twist of his hips, he rolled Tia over without leaving her vagina. He grabbed her hips and pulled her to edge of bed so he could he plant his feet on the floor. Willingly, she spread her legs as widely as she could so he could hammer at her with all the force he could muster. Vaginal fluids leaked out of her with every full length plunge of his erect penis into her depths. Without his mouth at her breast, she resorted to squeezing them herself, forcing the little milk they contained to squirt into little raindrop spatters all over her chest and the backs of her hands.

She screamed out her orgasm, clenching her breasts in a death grip as her vagina twisted and wrenched at him. Long after her pleasure faded, Zhair'lo continued to pound her wet tunnel. He began to see spots before his eyes and blackness started in from the edges of his vision. Soon, he could see only the face of the woman whose body he relentlessly penetrated.

A moment later, even that disappeared.