by Aran Ashe
And as at last the morning light of bright grey dawn filtered through to Anya's dreaming state, she stirred. Her fingers brushed against the smooth white sheet; she breathed that familiar but as yet unrecognised faintly spicy scented air, and dozed once more, and heard but did not understand the weighted meaning of those footfalls, those sounds of busying about, those precise and careful preparations being undertaken - for her benefit alone, and for her education, the education of so very beautiful a slave - here, within the Taskmistress's apartments.
10
The Lover and the Loved
The Taskmistress of Lidir was nervous. And, what was stranger yet, she was nervous in the presence of a slave - a slave who slumbered now in Ildren's bed, a slave so very beautiful, a slave who had been dubbed a living legend, a slave who had somehow, through a very brief acquaintance, captivated the Prince's impressionable and superstitious heart, a slave deemed by Lord Aldrid to be matchless in delectability and lickerishness of spirit - in short, a slave whom Ildren would take the most exquisite, belly-liquifying delight in subjecting to the rigours of the Horse, and certainly, if Ildren herself did not pass out with suppressed desire before they reached that supreme stage of pleasurable edification, that much deeper intimacy of the Rod. And it was this - if Ildren were to take the time to analyse the situation - that was making Ildren nervous, and sending those tumbling butterflies through her belly and those delicious unannounced contractions through her sex - the thought of watching as that succulent, exotic fruit was slowly and very fully moulded to that instrument of pleasure, for Ildren's sole delight. Ildren shivered at the vision now conjured up before her - that moment of exquisite anticipation, giving way so slowly yet so definitely to that very deep and very honeyed pleasuring of her slave.
Ildren looked upon that sweet and dreaming freckled face, those locks of fire outspread on Ildren's pillow, and she wished - oh, how she wished - that she could kiss those lips now, and press them to her body. But she dared not reach to touch those lips to hers; she would not break that sleep - for this was Ildren's rule. The slave must never be disturbed, but must be allowed her rest, to awake refreshed and in her own good time, for Ildren then to take her in the manner she saw fit. Yet merely looking upon this slave, in Ildren's present state of nervousness, had fired her lust until that luscious feeling there in Ildren's belly was almost too heavenly to bear. The Taskmistress, not to satisfy that passion, but rather to feed it in its yearning, had to draw that wanting to a focus, and to parallel the slave's protracted need, and her denial.
And so, retiring to her storeroom, Ildren sought out a simple aid to pleasure, then placed a knee-high stool before the full-length mirror, and in her fully disrobed state, she placed one foot upon the stool. The golden chain, attached to the golden pear inside her, dangled down her leg. Then Ildren, throwing back her head, lowered that simple, knotted leather cord inside her mouth, to wet it with her spittle, and slowly drew it out again, then wrapped the end for two turns round her index finger. She very carefully split herself and closed the lips around the cord, and drew it slowly through them. The feeling there - as each spittle-covered knot, in sliding upwards, drew along the inner surface of her lips and then slipped across her knob - that feeling almost made her whimper. She wet the cord again and this time pushed her belly out and watched, in reflection, the drawing of her lustfulness - the gripping fingers, round her flesh, the slipping cord of pleasure, with its knotted bumps erupting through the tight-sealed tube of Ildren's lips - and she imagined a lover doing this to her body, forcing ecstasy upon her in this very special way. Ildren nearly passed out with the surging in her veins. She allowed herself - that drawing pleasure three times, after which she felt her body could not take one more slippery bump of stimulation without her dying on the spot from pure delight.
Anya's dream had been so beautiful. She had lain within the Prince's strong and tender arms, her back curved against his body warmth - two love-spoons nested up together - and slept, whilst the Prince's hands extended round and very gently spread across her belly. His strength supported her, enfolded and protected her; his hand pressed reassuringly against her with each breath she took.
Anya awakened; she slowly stretched her limbs and turned upon her back. She opened her eyes to find the Prince was gone, and then to hear a soft cry, almost like the whimper of a small cowering creature. The sound seemed to have come from beyond the open door. Then Anya's mind was thrown into very great confusion at the realisation of where she was - or rather, at the recollection of where she ought to have been, but most definitely was not. For this was not Lord Aldrid's chamber, and this was not Lord Aldrid's bed. And that whimper - it had come again - what was that? Those exotic drapes and fineries were gone. Anya sat up to look around. The walls were bare. Then Anya saw, with a slowly creeping chill, that the walls were not as bare as she had thought, but had inset rings in various places and at various heights. Anya turned, with mounting fear, to look upon the wall behind her, and that was Anya's very sad mistake. For on that wall, adorned as it was with rings and chains and manacles and straps, was a large, framed portrait of the Taskmistress, nude and stretched upon a bed like this one.
Her arms were fastened above her head, her legs were spread very wide in the air, and her toes were pointing out and upwards. But what made Anya's belly turn to ice was the fact that Ildren's hips were drawn up - lifted from the bed. A golden chain was figured, extending like an arrow from a point beyond the frame, directly to the joining of Ildren's thighs, where it seemed to disappear, to impale itself within her body. Anya realised, with shock and shaking horror, that the chain was somehow fastened up inside this woman's body, that in some horrific way, her sex, her inner self, her very womanhood, was tethered to the ceiling of the room. Anya forced herself to look away from this image of cruel degradation, but she could not stop her eyes from drifting upwards, towards the thing which she knew would be there; that hook secured to the ceiling, above the foot of the bed, had drawn her frightened gaze against her better judgement. And then she knew that this picture was no work of vile imagination, but a record of a scene which had surely been enacted upon this very bed. Anya shivered; her breasts and belly shook beneath that awe-inspiring vision of baseness and complicity, and to her everlasting shame, the sleeping pearl of love awakened, pulsed to life again, a tiny throbbing beacon of Anya's unsatisfied desire.
Another whimper had drifted in; it had seemed much more drawn-out and anguished than the last one had, as if someone were being subjected to some very controlled torture. Then Anya heard the sound of footsteps; quickly, she lay down again, pulled the covers up about her, closed her eyes and tried hard to breathe slowly and evenly, as if she were asleep. But her heart was thumping in her throat. That spicy fragrance billowed down around her; she froze and held her breath, for now she was filled with terror. Ildren's scent receded and Anya dared to breathe again, but she was too afraid to open her eyes. She fought against the black despair that sheathed its sadness round her, and hoped and prayed that all of this might be a dream, and that she might wake up - not in his bed, for that was much too much to dare to wish for - but anywhere away from this place, even in Lord Aldrid's bed. Although she had hated that endless torturing of her body with delight, she had, even there, sensed some hint of gentleness behind that grey, lined face. But in these apartments, there dwelt nothing but evil, calculating cruelty.
The bedroom had fallen silent. Anya could hear nothing but the whispering of her own breathing, and the brushing of the coverlet across her ear with each and every heartbeat. She opened her eyes, and panicked. Those deep brown searching eyes stared back at her from a distance of a handsbreadth; they froze her gasp within her throat, and locked her as certainly as if her neck were broken - more surely, in fact, for Anya could not even move her eyes; she dared not even blink. The tautness ebbed right out of her. She felt her throat was severed, and now the last dregs of her life blood were seeping weakly out of her, pumped by a slow, tired, unloved he
art.
"My dearest darling bird of love, your song shall greet the dawn ..." The Taskmistress's voice was velvet soft - so deep and so seductive. She pressed her luscious lips to Anya's; Anya could not move away. Ildren then knelt back from her, beside the bed, and Anya drank her in. Her black-brown hair, no longer tied, reached straight down to her shoulders; it framed her face - those high cheekbones, those matt-dark eyebrows, so precisely drawn, and those very large deep eyes, which seemed so soft and tender, so deceptive, like those very full warm lips. To Anya, this woman's face seemed full of sensuality; it did not appear cruel, and yet she knew so well what she saw was but a mask to Ildren's nature. Anya's eyes were permitted to move downwards. The Taskmistress was bare to the waist, at least - Anya could see no further. Her breasts were full, yet firm, with long and violet nipples, which were also very pointed, almost as if they had been drawn out forcibly from her breasts and sharpened to that shape, and perhaps thereby had gained that colour. Anya noticed, near to their base, small, darker blemishes - pits or tiny scars - as if the flesh had been cut or damaged and had not knitted over.
"Perhaps you would care to test them ... with your lips?"
Anya was so abashed at this, but Ildren only smiled and bent towards her once again. The point of Ildren's tongue licked slowly and precisely across Anya's upper lip, and then up the ridge of flesh between her nostrils. Ildren then stayed very close and whispered to Anya.
"It is time," she said. Anya did not understand at first. "It is time for your captive flesh to be released - for your flower bud to open; for you to make over your body to pleasure, my sweet ... to pleasure in its fullness." Anya felt her belly turning over. "We two shall make the most delicious love you can imagine ..." That churning now was mixed with fear. "I shall penetrate your body ..." and now, with consternation, Ildren held up something white. "Turn over ... now, my darling ... that I may join you in your bed."
The sensation, as the Taskmistress slid her body in beside Anya, was as if a poisonous snake had slipped beneath the covers and was rippling up to bed itself against her warmth. The downy hairs of Anya's body bristled as Ildren snuggled up behind her. "Mmm ... You feel so warm, my precious pet," the snake announced, and bit her in the neck. That poison venom dripped its fiery droplets of forbidden lust into Anya's bloodstream, as Ildren's cool and very pointed nipples pressed mercilessly into her back, and Ildren's hand came round, exactly as the Prince's had, and moulded to her belly. Ildren's fingertips investigated first the well of Anya's navel, then brushing upwards, lightly tested each of Anya's acorns. "So very firm," she whispered in her ear, and licked her neck beneath the lobe. "The way I like them ... to begin with ..." She rolled her palm across them in a slow seductive circle. "Before I work them to the fullness of their compliancy ..." Ildren softly laughed. "Do not have your body stiffen at my words, not yet, that is, for your pleasure is my purpose, and you shall submit your body fully to delight." And with that, the Taskmistress slipped down below the covers and Anya felt the woman's breath, low down upon her back. Ildren's tongue lapped, flatly, in very slow upstrokes, like a cat's tongue, against the soft pile of baby hair in the small of Anya's back. Anya somehow felt that slow delicious pulling tickling underneath her nipples. It made her arch her back away from it, whilst wishing that the tongue would follow, which it did, until Anya's body was bowed and tight, and trapped between the stirring, sticky stroking of that flat tongue in her back, and Ildren's fingertips, brushing leisurely back and forth against her tight round pushed-out belly. Then Ildren licked upwards, for the length of Anya's back.
"And now," she said, "your Taskmistress shall remove your pearl of love." Anya stirred uneasily. She feared that this would hurt, for she remembered all too vividly the cruel way in which the pearl had first been fitted. But Ildren did not turn her slave upon her back for this unyoking; she had her lie upon her front. "This way shall be more ... interesting for you," she said, causing consternation in her bondslave, who was wondering if Ildren might be referring to that item she had glimpsed before Ildren had slipped into the bed. Ildren insisted that her slave should now move up the bed and, taking a very firm grip with both hands around the top bar of the headframe, should allow herself to hang, so her body formed a smooth and downward sweeping curve of the kind which Ildren found so deliciously inviting, and of such a flexure that the slave's first point of contact with the mattress was taken low down on her belly, whilst the slave's breasts hung free, and available at any time for Ildren to render to a suitably compliant state.
Anya felt the covers moving back and sliding down her body, "the better to look upon your beauty and your lewdness," Ildren stated very clearly. "Now keep your legs very straight." The Taskmistress first adjusted the position of the bondslave's chain of gold, moving it up her back a little until it hung down from her belly, then took hold of each of Anya's feet and lifted them across, to point towards each bottom corner of the bed. Anya's legs were angled outwards from her body. "Point your toes - keep reaching; your legs must be as straight and pointed as the truest arrow." The stretching and the tension in her muscles moulded each of Anya's buttocks into a smooth tight hard round mound, which was surely Ildren's purpose in this matter. And with the bunching tension reaching down from Anya's shoulders, her body seemed divided into two very clear halves, with a deep dark shadowed furrow extending from between her shoulderblades, down that sharply incised and very flexible downcurved spine, to that deeper, darker recess which cut those globes so deeply that it curved down underneath.
Anya hung; the tongue-tip struck its soft wet rounded smoothness first at Anya's nape. It dabbed and tickled liquid pleasure down that shadow-line; it moulded to that crease; it crossed the line of gold; it tasted smoothness in her skin and then it tasted velvet. Ildren's tongue now formed into a brush-like point, which whispered round the velvet black of Anya's bottom. The sweet forbidden tickle in so lewd a spot made Anya's body shake with pleasurable delight. "Be still, my wanton darling, and I shall let your blackness kiss and suck my tongue-tip." Anya's heart was thumping, at her lickerishness and lust, at the way she angled her legs more widely and reached out with her toes, and tried to lift and spread her bottom, to separate her mounds of flesh and pout her tight black knot of tenderness, to meet at last that tantalizingly held-back hard wet tongue, and push her secret mouth around it. She gasped and cried; her bottom pulsed repeatedly as it sucked upon the tip. And then she tried to grind her belly against the surface of the bed. She wanted that tongue to penetrate her to completion, whilst she took her pleasure in this way, with the smoothness of the cover sliding back and forth beneath her moving sex and polishing her nubbin.
Ildren's hand pressed in her back to slow her in her wanting. "You delicious, lustful thing," she said, "you have earned your pleasure by virtue of your lewdness." Anya felt no shame at this; her cheeks were red with the lust that boiled inside her. "And now I shall remove the pearl and spring your little pip of love from bondage. You shall feel a tiny pinprick; that is all." Anya did not care if it should cause a stab of pain, for she knew that nothing now could take away that weighted swell of pleasure deep inside her. In fact, her body would turn that little pain into a pleasure. Anya tried to lift her hips for Ildren then to reach her.
"Ah ... But there is just one thing," said Ildren with suppressed delight. "You shall beg me first to do it." Anya begged her there and then; she now felt quite shameless about it. But Ildren was not fully satisfied with such ready acquiescence in a slave. She made Anya memorise, and then recite, this unequivocal declaration of the status of her slavery:
"I beg of you, ma'am, please satisfy my ..."
"Go on," the Taskmistress encouraged her, as she stroked within the groove spread before her.
"My lickerish desires. For I am - I am nothing but a slave to love ..." Anya hesitated. The Taskmistress waited. "And I will submit ... I will freely submit myself to any pleasurable abasement," Anya whispered, and then she coughed; she had difficulty in going on with this degra
ding affirmation, "to which my Taskmistress shall, in her wisdom, choose to commit my body. For my body belongs only to Lidir, to use ..." she faltered. Ildren pushed the tip of her finger into Anya's bottom. "To use as Lidir thinks fit."
Now Anya's belly felt so tight and queasy at what her voice had said; her tongue had swelled; her spittle had thickened so she could not even swallow; her heart was racing, as if she were a frightened captured doe, and yet those deliciously uncontrollable ripples kept on shaking through her body. And then she felt Ildren's fingers slipping underneath her and gripping the pearl, opening the tiny clamp, and then the sudden burning pain, as her liberated point of flesh distended. Her nubbin seemed to swell and sting, until she was sure that it was larger than the pearl had been. Ildren took Anya's leaves and separated them very fully, and holding back the flesh that hooded round her swollen nub, she made Anya lower her belly - with her legs still outspread, and in their tense and pointed state - until Anya's open sex lay against the silken sheet. The brushing smoothness felt so good to Anya.