by N J Adel
The taste of him, so manly and delicious and hot, drove me wild.
Nur moved his finger in and out, slowly at first, then increasing the rhythm only when I was relaxed enough to handle it.
Two fingers.
Three.
I rotated my hips around my handmaid’s mouth and fingers, sucking my guard’s swollen erection, dragging throaty rasps from my student’s throat as my rosebud stretched around his digits.
“I can’t stand this any longer. I’m desperate to be inside teezek,” Nur said with urgency.
A growl, a deep, murderous one snarled from Redamun’s lips. “Khara! If you don’t stop talking, I’ll drown you right in this bath.”
Without asking, Nur reached a free arm to Redamun, gesturing at him to give him his hand, his fingers in place inside me.
Redamun banged a fist on the mosaic next to him, his eyes hooded and hazy with rage and arousal. Then he gripped Nur’s hand.
Shaking his head, he closed his eyes as he transferred his rumbling energy to Nur.
“Be with me, Reda. Are you enjoying my mouth on you?” My tongue slid along his full length.
“Yes, Majesty,” he said as if he was breaking.
“I told you to call me Meha when you’re making love to me.”
He opened his eyes. “But I’m not even touching you.”
“Do it.”
He yanked his hand out of Nur’s and dipped it in my hair. I filled my mouth with his thickness, and he ran his tongue along his lower lip.
Releasing him for a heartbeat, I glanced at Nur over my shoulder and nodded at him to start.
Carefully removing his fingers, he pushed the head of his phallus against the hole, and then inside slowly.
“It’s the tightest I’ve ever felt a woman before,” Nur whispered.
“Stop speaking,” I demanded.
“I didn’t say anything, Majesty,” he said, his voice strained, his hand braced on the small of my back.
My brows came together with a scowl. I could swear I heard him say what he said. Was I imagining things now? I looked at Redamun for confirmation, and he shook his head. “Not this time, he didn’t.”
“All right. Carry on.” I sucked Redamun again, glancing down at Tia. She’d stopped kissing my nether lips, gazing back at me with a smile, her beautiful breasts undulating as her fingers rocked inside of me.
Nur’s heart pounded and his hands trembled on my back while he pushed the rest of him all the way.
For I moment I couldn’t breathe. At all. Then the pain hit, tearing me apart. I screamed as hard as I could.
I quivered over Tia and Redamun, Nur frozen in place.
“Are you hurting her, you son of a filthy—”
“It’s all right.” I interrupted my guard, my lips unwrapping from his hardness. “It was only for an instant.”
“Tell him to stop, Meha. My beloved, why are you doing this?”
I let go of his shaft. “Because it’s intense, and I like it. Now, let’s all enjoy this without any more interruptions.”
Taking back Redamun’s penis in my mouth, I bucked against Nur, encouraging him to continue.
Nur grabbed hold of my hips and pumped into me with deep, long strokes, his manhood sheathed tightly inside.
I listened to the manly grunts and Tia’s soft moans as she watched me fall apart and make sounds I’d never made in my entire life.
I used my fist to rub Redamun instead of my mouth, afraid I might bite him in the heat of things. Then I heard Nur talking.
“The sounds you make… The tightness closing around the base of zebby… I’m going to release fire in teezek.”
Finding his face, I could tell his mouth wasn’t moving. On top of that, the sound of his breathing was too loud to be happening while he was speaking.
Was I…hearing his thoughts?
“Stop,” I told him, my gaze locked on him.
“Yes, my Queen,” he panted, throbbing inside me. Thank you.
He didn’t utter those two last words.
“Holy…”
“Yes. It’s marvelous,” he said.
For some inexplicable reason, being able to hear Nur’s thoughts, any thoughts, set my walls clenching more than all of the erotic actions of the three combined.
Suddenly, I wanted more. Much more than all this craziness.
An epic release.
An inferno.
“Tia, get up. I want to feel your breasts in my hands when I come. Redamun, make love to me with that big rod you have. Now.”
Instantly, they switched places. And without breaking Nur’s hold on me, I sat on Redamun, taking him all in with a slow, deep moan. Tia stood, her feet on either side of Redamun’s body, and I filled my grip with her breasts.
Redamun pushed his pelvis up and down while Nur thrust in and out of me, both of them hitting my walls and teasing each other. My fingers curled around Tia’s flesh. I closed my eyes, my skin painful and hot and tingling, my entire body a ball of energy that craved every move, every sensation in this union.
The four of us weren’t bodies in motion. We were something more.
Bigger than the whole world.
And I could feel it getting even stronger by the instant.
And I could feel them all.
With one loud guttural sound, I was the first to explode. Then in succession, the three of them followed as we all burned together.
Then healed together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I linked arms with my apprentice, strolling in the back garden, warm sunlight on my cheeks, my guard and handmaid behind us, my stomach tied in a thousand knots. “Tell me everything, Nur. What have you discovered?”
He looked at me sideways. “How does Majesty know I concluded my research?”
“You wouldn’t leave the vault unless you did. I don’t assume you came out this morning for a little promenade?”
“No, I did not. I came to share my results with Majesty.”
“Yet you indulged for hours in our escapade without saying a word, and now you’re escorting me on a walk, doing your best to block your emotions from me.” I paused, glancing up at him. “I can assure you it’s not working. So tell me. How terrible is it?”
His jaw flexed as the afternoon warm air filled his nostrils. “It depends on Majesty’s interpretation. But knowing my Queen, I know you’re not going to be pleased.”
I wished I could have heard his thoughts now—it didn’t happen after those incidents in the bath—and got this whole matter over with. Then I wished I would have never heard those particular thoughts. The dismay dripping from his reluctance, tinting his soul, hinted that we might have reached the same conclusion I couldn’t bring myself to believe.
In the past two days, I’d come up with a theory of my own about our new selves. Because of its atrocity, I refused to share it with any of my companions. Even Nur.
Instead, I’d been sedating my mind with all the sinful pleasures, burying my head in the sand, dismissing my assumptions, afraid to test them myself.
Scared I’d prove them to be true.
Now the time had come to stand face to face with my own fears.
I couldn’t run anymore.
“What could be so terrible Majesty isn’t going to like?” Redamun approached us, Tia trailing behind him.
Nur looked at me for permission to speak.
Was I ready for the truth? Were they? Would we ever be?
We had fifty more days before we confronted Bessen Ra. Should we live them in oblivion? In a false state of peace of mind? Or should we confront ourselves before our enemy?
Redamun took a closer step toward me. “What’s happening, Majesty? Should we be worried?”
I nodded at Nur once. “We’re all in the same boat. Speak freely.”
“I fear there has been a malfunction in the mummification process,” he said.
“Other than the time error?” Redamun inquired.
“Unfortunately, yes. The whol
e mummification process was based on slowing our bodies to consume the minimum amount of energy possible during the early stages of the Long Sleep until they froze completely.”
“Like the dead. We know that.”
“Yet as a precaution, our bodies would store a tiny fraction of that energy over the course of the Long Sleep to get us to—”
“Wake and survive on Awakening Day,” Redamun interrupted. “We’d gone through this a hundred times before we set foot in that tomb. What’s the problem now?”
“Would you let me finish?!” Nur’s hands clawed in the air. “This is a serious matter, so stop interrupting me and listen.”
Redamun didn’t comment or start a fight as he normally would. Perhaps he’d felt Nur’s rare anxiety and realized my well-composed apprentice wouldn’t have been that nervous if it hadn’t been for something grave.
“With the time error, we thought we’d accumulated enough of that to last for ten days instead of one. It turned out we were wrong,” Nur continued.
“For how long then?” Tia asked.
“I don’t know yet. There is…no practical way to tell for sure.”
Redamun exchanged glances with Tia and then with me. “Am I missing something here? This doesn’t sound like the calamity you forebode.” He turned to Nur. “What is the real issue?”
Nur’s eyes dimmed. “Our bodies realized that we hadn’t been dead. They’d developed an unexpected conditioning method.”
“What would that be, Master Nur?” His unease filled Tia’s voice.
I knew the answer before he said it. I could feel it from the moment I woke. It continued to happen every day since then. But I had deluded myself from the truth when it was as clear as the sun. Another conditioning method but for mind to keep its sanity.
For now, at least.
The sound of Nur’s gulp contracted the muscles around my heart. “Behaving as if still alive and in need of energy to survive, our bodies were afraid to run out of said energy…so they turned into storage vessels for it.”
“I don’t understand… Does that resemble when a person is trying to lose their weight rapidly but their body won’t cooperate, shocked at the sudden loss?” Tia asked.
Blood slipped from my head and face, and I suddenly felt so cold. “Instead of losing the weight, it guards all the fat even if the person is not eating.”
How did I miss that?
“I still don’t see the issue. Camels do that all the time, store fat and water inside them so they would last in the desert for months.” Redamun shrugged. “So we stored some energy more than we needed at the moment, which, unlike camels, has given us some unearthly powers. It’s a blessing not a curse.”
Nur winced. “A blessing?”
“Yes. Obviously, no human body could take all that sum of energy without some changes…what do you call that? Yes…adaptations. And so we turned into these…evolved versions of ourselves. The only problem here, other than the damn fire, is the number of cows we would have to eat to sustain that energy and not run out. I don’t think there’s enough in whole Kysis.” He chuckled.
“Your sense of humor eludes me right now. We’ve been accumulating this energy for one thousand years, Redamun.” Nur pressed a trembling palm to his chest. “It’s all here, and it’s not going anywhere.”
Redamun ran a thumb over his brow, scratching his chin with the other hand. “We’re not all scholars here. Would you for the love of all the Gods out there explain why this is such a bleak misfortune?”
“Because we’re not camels!” Nur pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not months we’re talking about here. It’s all eternity.”
My head spun in circles, pressed by an invisible rock twice my weight. The delusion I’d tricked myself to believe dissolved when I heard what I feared the most spoken out. Nur’s words made it all undeniable for me to see. No mind tricks would conceal the dreadful truth now.
My worst nightmares had gathered and manifested in one that was huge and obnoxious. And real.
“We evolved into energy-sucking creatures,” Nur mocked bitterly. “Our bodies are now conditioned to endlessly absorb and accumulate energy from any source. The sun, the water, the earth, everything.”
Redamun narrowed his eyes at him and then shifted his gaze toward me. “What?”
“Don’t you see it yet? We will not run out, my friend. Even if we want to.” I gripped his shoulders, bracing myself, lifting my head to the sky so I wouldn’t burst into tears. “We will remain unchanged. All of us.”
“Majesty, I…” my student sighed. “I could be wrong, my Queen. There is no one else to test but us.”
A hysterical laugh exploded out of my throat. “Except there is. And just like the four of us…” I took my hands off my guard as fireballs crackled in them. “…that son of a dirty whore won’t die.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
With flames flying off of me everywhere, at the top of my lungs, I let out a bellowing scream and a frenzy of swears in all the tongues I spoke.
“Majesty, please!” someone said, but I didn’t pay attention who. Arms enfolded me along with hisses of pain. Wrath blinded from seeing whose they were.
This was all my doing. I cursed all humanity with one vain act; I refused to die, and now a monster that had no issue killing his own blood for his gain would walk this world.
Invincible.
Undying.
And I would have to live with that.
Endlessly.
I should have died when I could have.
The flames burned out as my mind gained back its awareness of the surroundings. The pond a pit of hell. Parts of the grass exhaling smoke. Drusus coming out of nowhere, running around with basins of water. The three of my friends all over me, taking the fire from me.
I fell to my knees, taking them down with me, my chest burning with a thousand other fires. “Let me burn, my friends. Let the earth crack open and swallow me whole. Drown me in the Nile and feed me to the crocodiles. Let me burn for what I’ve done.” A long moan seeped out of my mouth. “Holy Gods, what have I done?”
Nur tightened his embrace around me. “Majesty, please. We still have time to figure out a solution. There must be something we can do to defeat Bessen Ra. There has to be.”
Redamun cupped my face, his hands firm yet gentle, ushering me to look into his eyes. “My Queen, my love, you’re the most intelligent person I’ve ever seen. You shall find a way. As long as it takes. Even if I have to imprison him and guard his dungeon myself until you do.”
I stared at him, my head spiraling. “And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll do it for all eternity if that’s what it takes to keep you safe.”
“He can’t be immortal and neither can we, right?” Tia’s lips trembled with a reluctant smile. “Majesty has always said there’s no such a thing.”
My eyes twitched as one thought dominated my mind. I slid out of their grasp and rose.
“Majesty?” she whispered.
“Majesty, where are you going?” Redamun stood.
Without looking at any of the three, I started through the burning garden. “Stay here.”
“Majesty…” Nur’s voice and feet trailed behind me. His heart skipped a beat. Trepidation filled his core. He must have deduced what I was about to do. My brilliant pupil who had always understood me without words.
“No!” He hurried after me, the other two following.
I spun, raising my hands at them, yanking them up and throwing them all the way to the opposite wall. “I said stay here!”
While their shocked yelps filled the air, I entered their minds. “And don’t follow me until I get back.”
If I get back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
With one goal in my mind, I jumped to the kitchen. I tripped at one of the preparation tables as I landed, realizing I hadn’t visited this part of the house since I set foot in it.
Dizzy from the jump, I scanned the room, looking for the
one thing that might terminate all our sufferings.
Where did Drusus keep the knives?
My teeth clenched. Drusus. I only compelled the others and forgot all about him. He would be coming after me now.
It didn’t matter, though. I’d just have to work faster.
The sun speckled on something shiny on the table. I darted toward it and saw it was a cleaver with its blade dug inside a skinned cow thigh.
Even better.
I snatched it out of the meat, slicing the bone without intention. “That sharp, huh? Exactly what I need.”
My companions’ shouts calling out Drusus’s name turned into an incoherent noise in the background. Separating my consciousness from the surroundings, I focused only on the blade in my hand.
I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with the hot kitchen air. I shall test that theory right now.
With one hand squeezing the table thick edge, and the other jerking up to my neck, I grated and grumbled and made a bunch of other sounds I didn’t realize I was making.
This was not as easy as I thought.
Footsteps scurried, approaching fast. Drusus’s. I could smell his sweat, hear his banging heartbeat, his voice screaming, “Majesty, don’t.”
“Just one swift slit. You can do this. I have to do this.” My throat bobbed as the piercing blade grazed it.
My fist tightened around the handle. “Gods at the crossing, I hail thee. Guide me in death as in life. May I walk in truth and balance that my heart is pure and light upon the scale. Turn not thy face away from me.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tilted my head back. Then I speared the cleaver in my neck and, with all my force, slit sideways.
“Majesty, no!”
In the darkness, the world grew silent for a moment.
Only one.
And just when I thought I’d finally found peace, the sounds crawled back into my ears.
One clink.
One gasp.
Two distinct heartbeats.
Three yelling voices.
A thousand body particles buzzed like a swarm of bees, working diligently.