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"Would that I had two mouths," Rittan murmured, "or perhaps three."
"Shall we summon your fellows to help?" Dol'ya laughed darkly.
"I'm not good at sharing," he protested lightly, and refocused on his work as she made gentle circles about her aureola.
"That's it," she said. "Just the tongue now ... very fast. I can feel the wetness."
"And I can see it," Rittan agreed, and thereafter said nothing.
As much as her insides ached, Dol'ya began to feel the rush of arousal seizing her body, the cold sweat of anticipation – not just of the Service that rushed toward her, but the significance of her contribution and the pain that certainly awaited her.
"That's good, Rittan," she pulled her hips away from him. "I don't want to come."
The third-rank soldier, still in the light beige clothing Fighters wore under their armour, stood and backed away. Dol'ya closed her thighs carefully and stood, hiding a wince. Her blue work shirt fell back neatly into place, far enough past her waist to reach the top of her pubic hair.
"This is what it's like to be one of the Priming girls, isn't it?" Rittan raised an eyebrow as he looked thoughtfully at the ceiling.
"Quite similar, yes," Dol'ya nodded. "I thank you very much. Perhaps I can repay the favour some day."
"There was no pain in giving you pleasure," Rittan objected and bowed. "I need no gratitude for doing my duty, though someone should thank you for doing yours."
She waved him politely away as she reached for her skirt, deciding that she ought to be properly dressed for her next guest.
-----------===================-------------
When Zhair'lo arrived at the giant tent, the guards bade him wait outside the awning, though they gave him no explanation. He waited, darkness gathering both in the sky and in his heart as he wondered how he could fail tonight.
A man came out of the tent, ducking under the blankets as he parted them and consequently nearly ran into Zhair'lo. He walked and stood as Fighters did, though he dressed more lightly this evening than a Fighter on the march ought to, and wore his hair more in Zhair'lo's long, unkempt style instead of the standard Fighter crop.
Zhair'lo waited patiently as the man made several stumbling starts at a sentence.
"Listen, kid," he finally said, his voice low as if to confide a secret, "Be careful in there, all right?"
The dark haired man looked away, found nothing else to say, and walked off toward the campfires.
"You may enter," one of the guards prodded.
"Yes, Mistress," Zhair'lo tried to spit the words out, but didn't care enough to really try for sarcasm.
They had set up the inside of the tent as before, giving him the chilling feeling that the army had travelled no real distance in the last day. The sole difference lay in the woman in blue who stood beside the bed, to the left of the table.
"I don't think we've met," she said, beckoning him forward. "Dol'ya, formerly Second of Pussy."
"Zhair'lo M'han," he replied, walking slowly toward her. "Fighter, Conduit, obedient servant of the Temple."
'Still not enough irony,' he chided himself.
"Drink," she waved to the drinks the table but made no move in that direction. "The one nearest you is yours."
Wondering at her frozen posture, Zhair'lo took up both drinks and brought them to her. Gingerly Dol'ya sat on the nearest corner of the bed before taking the drink.
"Are you alright?" he came around and sat cross-legged to face her.
"Not exactly," she replied. "We must speak before we drink ... this ... concoction."
Zhair'lo shrugged in response.
"Two nights ago, while you received the Goddess's magic, I was busy in a nearly empty Augmentation Chamber," Dol'ya licked her lips. "They upgraded me, you see, so that instead of nine upgrades in Within, I could bring ten to this very tent."
She looked around at the effect the shifting, flickering torchlight made against the multicoloured fabrics.
"To you," she added, focusing on his eyes again.
"So you're a Second of Pussy and Within?"
"Something like that," Dol'ya exhaled a bit of air through her nose. "Who can say what will happen to us all in Beshenna? Many have died there certainly, not just a Queen and Sorceress. I will serve there as needed, just as I must Serve tonight."
"Must?" Zhair'lo repeated the word harshly. "What reason do you have for not enjoying this?"
"Were you not a Seal Breaker?" her mouth hung open in astonishment as she awaited his reply.
"Yes," he replied slowly, wondering if she meant to imply an insult.
"Then you should know how sensitive a woman is after an upgrade," she chided him in a Teacher's voice. "Add to that I've walked some ridiculous number of kilometres since, giving my insides no time to heal."
"Oh," he mouthed softly.
Dol'ya took a turn to observe him.
"This is not pleasant for you, either?" she offered.
He looked down at the deceptively clear potion where it waited in the silver goblet in his hand.
"This ... concoction ... changes me," he told her, more honestly than he'd intended. "And being Served by you here tonight, if you can call it that, may keep me unconscious until dinner tomorrow – at least at the rate things have been going so far."
"We have our duty," Dol'ya told him carefully. "No more viscerally pleasant than any other Fighter here preparing for the possibility of pain in combat."
"Duty," he repeated, and this time the sarcasm came through.
"I only ask that you let me lead, so I can ... control things."
"As you wish, Mistress," he raised his goblet and tilted it toward her before draining it in one go.
She met his eyes, seeing perhaps for the first time a darkness there more profound than her own, and slowly took her own drink while watching him over the silver rim.
"We do what we must to save lives," Dol'ya chose her words as much for herself as for Zhair'lo. "Neither pain nor death are excuses when so many other lives are at stake."
Zhair'lo realized that Dol'ya really believed in the Temple's dogma of the catastrophic consequences of a Fall. It seemed to him that someone of Dol'ya's rank ought to know the real score, the game behind the lies, but she spoke like every other deluded outsider.
He felt a surge in his heart and recognized it as the first effect of the potion.
"It comes so quickly to you in your youth, doesn't it?" Dol'ya reached over to touch a hand against his chest.
"Everything comes quickly to me," Zhair'lo said, feeling a darkness clouding the perimeter of his vision.
Tara would have made a joke, something about boys who couldn't even hold on long enough to get into a mesh. He missed Tara's presence, and regretted the lack of frivolity in this tent. He had only Dol'ya, who ignored the potential for humour and gently unlaced his shorts before she pushed him on his back so she could slide them off.
Zhair'lo felt the urge strike him, worse than before, and he wondered whether they'd given him a stronger dose this time or if the severity of his reaction signalled a weakening of his body. He watched his burgeoning erection push away from his stomach and schooled his arousal as Dolya swept back her dark brown hair and leaned over to reach for him with her mouth.
He knew Dol'ya directed her oral efforts not at his pleasure, but at her own protection. The way her tongue moved, deeply slathering his manhood with copious amounts of saliva, defined the goal of her endeavour as lubrication.
Still, his body found it pleasant and the sensations radiating up his spine demanded a reaction. He let his erection grow, but resisted any urge to thrust or even twitch inside her mouth.
The Second backed off, a string of saliva between her mouth and his tip breaking as she moved away, and observed the glistening rod in front her.
"It's good you're so calm," she whispered. "Now I do my part."
'There is no point in pursuing orgasm,' he instructed himself. 'I can not win.'
Dol'ya unlaced her skirt, revealing a dark triangle of luxuriously soft hair between her legs, and gently put her leg over his body so she straddled him.
"One presumes you are ready?"
Zhair'lo nodded, willing the sexual part of himself not to act, nor to react to anything the woman did with his body.
'There is only one path to victory,' he told himself.
As Dol'ya set the entrance to her vagina against the tip of his erection, where the moisture of her insides met the saliva she had layered upon his flesh, Zhair'lo recalled a hot, sunny day when a girl named Atani had visited him.
Dol'ya pushed down and Zhair'lo called upon all his strength not to react.
What had Atani and Marie said? That Atani owed him an orgasm because she'd let him see her pussy? He'd been confused and tired that afternoon, and he'd accepted it as a gift, but found occasion later to be insulted. They'd treated him like an animal, a beast unable to resist the simplest urges. As if the brief revelation of a woman's genitals would confound his brain for an entire afternoon and render him incapacitated, unable to finish his work on the roof.
'No, sisters of the Temple,' he beamed at them. 'I am not weakened by the sight of a woman's body.'
The woman straddling him winced as she forced the head of his penis past the ring of her entrance. The copious amount of natural lubrication didn't make up for the painful tension down the length of her tunnel.
"If I can just -," she winced again, "- get you – all the way – in."
He felt her pushing down, striving against her own body, centimetre by precious, hard-earned centimetre. He had to acknowledge the woman's conviction, even if he couldn't agree with her beliefs. Though the Temples' fear mongering teachings about the severity of a Fall might be false, no one could question Dol'ya's desire to do what she believed would benefit her people.
Seeing the woman suffer atop him, it made him think of how they'd made him hurt Talla, and how closely parallel tonight ran to that afternoon so long ago. Then, as now, his body had become an instrument of pain. An innocent woman consequently suffered, and the Temple took its gains in orthodoxy and control.
And no one, Zhair'lo realized, ever blamed a man.
What had Illya said that day?
He'd complained of the unfairness of Talla's punishment versus his own utter lack of penalization. Illya's words came back to him, clear as the waters he'd swum through to meet Talla.
"Yes, it is fair. You're a man. Men aren't responsible for -"
He'd exploded, interrupting her, but he had easily imagined the next word in her sentence as "anything".
Dol'ya reached the base of his shaft and sighed with relief, even as her eyes, welled with tears, glittered in the torchlight.
"Now I just need to make myself come," she mewled.
'This is how I win,' Zhair'lo realized. 'I can't win on the outside, not today.'
The woman in blue – Zhair'lo noted she had not removed her top – began gently working her hips in circles.
'I win by refusing to be the animal,' he told himself. 'I should have refused Atani, if I'd understood what she and Marie meant when they'd offered her body to me.'
But as Dol'ya began to grind him in earnest, he felt the strength of the potion inside him. More demanding than before, it threatened to break through his reserve, to let the beast inside rule his body.
"Not today," he spoke aloud, gritting his teeth.
Zhair'lo's erection, ignorant to its predicament, swelled inside the confines of the Second's moist and twitching tunnel. His body, railing against the restrictions of his mind, began to tremble and shake with the stress of the conflict. He clenched the bedsheets in his fists, redirecting his frustrated energy away from his genitals.
Dol'ya, ignoring his outburst, placed her hands on his shoulders, pinning him in place. He made sure not to resist, making limp every part of his body outside his genitals, even as random parts of his body shivered and spasmed. She let out a whimper of pain as she used him to poke at her frail insides, trying to find an angle, a location, a position – anything at all to bring her a slight edge in pleasure over pain, a single technique which might, with some speed, take her to a place closer to her orgasm.
"Found it yet?" he fought off a shiver that racked his body from head to toe.
"I think ... so," she muttered back, her face a study in pain. "There!"
Dol'ya had twisted her hips just slightly, the left a bit forward of the right, her body canted off to one side so his penis pushed against the right side of her tunnel. From this position, she gently rocked back and forth.
It brought her pleasure, certainly, but the approach of orgasm tightened her further. She fought through it gallantly and, though they weren't meshed, Zhair'lo's sensitivity served to sense the inevitability of her approaching climax.
He watched as Dol'ya focused on her own pleasure and endured her self destructive torture, knowing as she did that a great deal of suffering awaited her at the end of the line and well into the next day. Even then, with the violence twisting all about him, his body strove to react and he sought to remain calm.
In the end, as she screeched out a painful, vaginal muscle clenching orgasm, Zhair'lo reached up and clasped Dol'ya's shoulder in a bid to fight off his urge to thrust. Shaking uncontrollably, he felt his consciousness fade away and his vision blacken.
-----------===================-------------
Dol'ya looked down toward her genitals, watching in shock and pain as a soft, blue glow gently pulsed down toward the twitching young man beneath her, invigorating him with her energy, reinforcing and buttressing the magic already present.
As her insides relaxed and her orgasm faded, the agony of what she'd done to herself struck her, an aching burn that might last days.
'So the Temple asks; so the Temple receives.'
Gingerly, she began to extricate herself from her impalement, for though her orgasm had finished, Zhair'lo still stood long and hard inside her. The mesh never permitted people to separate before their mutual orgasm, so she'd never had to endure such a difficult withdrawal. To her surprise, she found his hands still seized vigorously to her upper arms.
"It's okay," she soothed. "Let go."
But Zhair'lo didn't react. Though his eyes stood open, no awareness flickered in them and his body shook with a strange tremor.
Pushing against his grasp, she painfully slid forward to remove his erection from her body, an ordeal only slightly less painful than the insertion.
Rolling over, she pulled him in to her chest, letting his head rest against the cloth of her top. If not for the way he clenched his teeth together, she would have offered him the bare bit of milk in her breasts to soothe him. Instead, she held him until the tremors ceased and he collapsed in her arms.
A sad look came to her eyes, for she could offer him nothing else and had no way to salute his courage.
-----------===================-------------
He smelled breakfast.
Zhair'lo hadn't smelled breakfast in ages and this morning the scent of a meat rich potato hash, seasoned with rosemary and paprika, hit his senses before anything else prodded his awareness. The smell stirred him toward consciousness and he saw the sun rising through half lidded eyes. That felt new, too, waking up early enough to catch the slanting, orange rays of dawn. The rumbling of the cart, a noise no more notable than his own heartbeat at this point, failed to register until he fully sat up and blearily rubbed at his eyes.
"Well," Tara muttered next to him. "You look ... better ... ish."
He turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised.
"No, really," she said doubtfully. "Yesterday, you looked like a corpse someone had warmed up."
"Thanks."
"It's all about having a positive outlook," she reminded him. "Now eat your breakfast. That Is'ka guy sent that bowl specifically for you."
Not only did Zhair'lo look better, he felt better and a chill ran through him as he realized why.
When the Goddess had imbued him with her magic, he'd let violently anger loose in his body and the effort had made him weak. With Tia, he'd tried to overcome the power of her potion, and that had cost him almost the entirety of the following day.
But with Dol'ya, he'd basically given up, fought by refusing to fight, or at least by fighting a different battle. Knowing he couldn't win, refusing to take out his hatred of the Temple on her body, he had done his job and exerted himself no further.
'If I obey, meekly, I don't suffer as much.'
With a disappointed twist in his lips, he started shovelling down the porridge.
What purpose could have lain in any protest he might have made last night? Hurting Dol'ya wouldn't have proven anything, would it? Yet, he felt bad for having relented; giving in to the Temple, and the reward for his self-betrayal came to him as peace the following day.
Alongside his wagon, he caught sight of a familiar beast: Sunrise, riderless, but saddled up for a passenger regardless.
'Is that me?' he wondered.
He didn't like the idea of letting the women control him, training him the same way he used to break horses, but no doubt remained in his mind about what he had learned last night.
"He only gave me that one bowl of porridge," Tara waved at the empty wooden container in his lap. "I hope it was enough."
"Yeah, I'm good," Zhair'lo stretched his arms, feeling a rush of blood as his heart began to race. "Really good, actually."
Tara let out an ambivalent harrumph.
"How fast are we marching?" Zhair'lo tried to gauge the speed of the wagon, but the Fighters packed together so tightly now they felt more like a sea of armour than people walking. Without a clear view of the ground, he couldn't measure their pace.
"Pretty hard, since they debriefed that runner last night," Tara pointed out. "We want to reach the last camp outside Beshenna as early as possible so we can get a good long rest tonight."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah," Tara's eyes darkened. "It sounds like the place has gone to the nine hells."
Zhair'lo yawned, "I must have missed that update."
"Sonja was at the council last night and she told us this morning," Tara said. "Enraged men had already taken over the city outside the Temple before the runner left. They'd begun assaults on the gates of the Temple."
Zhair'lo's jaw dropped in disbelief. Did these people really think they could carry the ruse that far? Once the army arrived in Beshenna, wouldn't people realize they'd been played for fools?
Unless ... unless some form of violence really had started. What if the Temple had tried to hold on to its control without the aid of the Goddess's brainwashing magic? Did Beshenna have rebels, as Gern did, but more formidable? When they arrived in Beshenna, would they find themselves opposed by people who ought to be Zhair'lo's allies?
Eagerness seized Zhair'lo. After all the time he had wasted with Chet's barbarians, here came a chance to meet the actual people who made the Temple women quake with fear.
If true, his duty lay in escaping the Fighters currently surrounding him and finding his way to his new allies. Once he gave such people his identity, and they realized he had come to Beshenna as the Temple's salvation, they would surely welcome him into their ranks and do whatever it took to keep him out of the hands of the women.
He reached out for Talla ...
-----------===================-------------
The morning's increased density of Fighters around her had alarmed Talla. Shanata had explained the nature of military grouping and that this sudden formalization of marching indicated an army preparing to fight. This did nothing for the cloying smells of so many bodies marching and sweating in such close proximity. Talla wrinkled her nose and looked up at Shanata.
