Chapter 32
Henrik
I couldn’t have spared Ilsa the pain of her first anal sex even if I had wanted to.
The pleasure her adorable bottom, covered at this point with the marks both of Roman and of Viking discipline, gave to my rigid cock as I plunged in and out of her littlest hole simply overwhelmed any temptation I might have felt to go easy on her.
More important, the pain she felt comprised an absolutely essential element of the vision she had just entered: her first true v?lva’s trance.
I heard Giovanna speak from behind me. Her voice, for a change, held no skepticism; in fact, she sounded positively awestruck.
“Message from Sven,” she told me. “Mary says she can see Ilsa, too. Apparently a brother of yours named Aksel thinks it may be a quantum entanglement effect. He’s in the chamber with Sven, observing.”
“Good,” I said, though the word came out rough and low, nearly a growl.
Then I gave myself over more fully to the labor and privilege of opening my bed thrall’s little r?vhul on my cock.
The saddle held her exactly as the old craftsmen had intended.
Her thighs stayed spread, her waist fixed, her wrists secured forward, and beneath her the bride’s consolation kept grinding against the little nub that made her twitch and sob and climax with such helpless sweetness that I felt half maddened by it.
Every time I drove deep into her bottom, her body seized around me with a thrilling combination of resistance and welcome.
The tight, hot clasp of her anus on my shaft threatened my self-command from one stroke to the next.
I fucked her with long, hard thrusts, my hands on her hips at first, watching the pale skin of her back shudder and the marks on her bottom brighten under the effort.
She cried out again and again, and every cry had the same quality now: pain, certainly, but also awe, need, and the utter abasement of a girl discovering that the most shameful use of her body opened the highest faculty of her mind.
I watched her sweet little wunjo pendant swing back and forth, and I wondered about destiny and quantum effects.
“Talk to me,” I told her. “Tell me what you and Mary see.”
Ilsa sobbed and came again before she could answer.
I felt it in the whole of her: the clenching of her cunt against the saddle’s knob, the trembling of her belly, the convulsion of the muscles around my cock buried in her anus.
She seemed scarcely able to survive her own sensations, and still the old rite drove her further upward.
When she found enough breath, the words broke out in fragments.
“She’s with me… oh… Herra… she’s with me in the branches…”
I thrust harder. The pleasure of it made my teeth set. I had wanted this girl from the first moment I had understood what she was, but now, using her in the old way while she rose into Yggdrasil before my eyes, I felt a kind of fierce gratitude to my forefathers for preserving the ceremony intact.
“She follows me,” Ilsa cried. “She’s behind me… no… not behind, not exactly… she can feel where I’m going… oh, God…”
“Where are you going, lille en?”
Her head tossed. Her braid swung. Her voice came out thin with strain.
“To the branch… the branch where the Chinese girl is… where she was… Mary can tell I know the way…”
Behind me I heard Giovanna draw a breath. Mateo said something softly in Italian I didn’t catch. I scarcely cared. I was too deep inside my bed thrall, too deep in the old pleasure, too aware of the way her sweet little bottom struggled and yielded around me.
I looked down and saw, just beneath her waist, the iron-bound handles built into the saddle’s sides; another practical innovation of our ancestors, meant for exactly this moment. I took them both in my hands and used them, to immediate effect.
With that greater purchase, I could ride her as the carved warriors had ridden their brides.
I drove into her with harder, shorter, more punishing thrusts, using the fixed strength of the saddle against her.
Ilsa screamed and came so violently that her whole body shook under me.
The old wood creaked. The leather straps groaned.
My cock felt every desperate flutter of her ravished little anus.
“Yes,” I said through my teeth. “That’s how a v?lva serves.”
* * *
Ilsa
Something about the way Herra Henrik’s thrusting cock felt, when he had taken hold of the handles—yet another feature of the terrible saddle that I somehow hadn’t noticed—the change in his rhythm and his angle…
it felt, in my vision of the Worldtree, like a gale-force wind at my back.
The pressure of it seemed to drive me bodily along the bough.
Mary came with me. Somewhere in the back of my head, a rational observer said, In two senses. Mary’s orgasms matched mine, and she accompanied me. My reason told me I might have giggled, if I had thought of the wordplay under different circumstances.
The movement itself, our progress among the branches of the tree, had become shared between us, as if my master’s cock in my ravaged bottom and her own master’s in hers had put us under the same pressure, accelerated us through the same unreal medium.
I felt her there beside and slightly behind me in the branches, red hair streaming in a wind that was not wind, her pale face bright with the same terrible astonishment that must have been on mine.
Below—or elsewhere, in the chamber my body still occupied—Henrik drove into me again with that new, brutal leverage, and I cried out and climaxed so hard that the branch under my dream-feet flashed white.
The orgasm seemed to deepen the vision.
Until now I had assumed climax would represent an apex, a breaking point after which one either returned to oneself or lost coherence entirely.
Instead my body’s repeated surrender seemed to feed the spell.
Each climax made the Worldtree more legible.
The bark, the leaves, the twigs… they ceased to feel merely symbolic and acquired detail: fissures, mossy damp, ancient sap, the grain of some living thing too vast for ordinary cognition.
“More,” I heard myself sob in the chamber. Whether I meant more cock, more vision, or more understanding I couldn’t have said.
Herra Henrik gave it to me without hesitation.
In my imagination, Mary seemed to surge past me, and then another thrust from my master caused me to lurch beyond Mary, and then find her again at my shoulder.
She turned to me, not speaking, but with a look that conveyed the same wild imperative I felt myself: search.
Find her. Find out what stood behind the Chinese girl and the men who used her.
The… the… the Fellowship.
The name didn’t appear in letters in the air. It took shape in my mind as if I had come to an inevitable conclusion. It’s called a fellowship. And I knew it had a Chinese name, too, but I knew also that I wouldn’t find it because I didn’t know Chinese.
The rational observer in my mind noted the fascinating quality of the interplay between my conscious and subconscious minds, and how it shaped my imaginary journey among the boughs of Yggdrasil… how having a man’s rigid member in my anus made me see things that felt as if they lay beyond reality.
The branch beneath me and Mary forked into several great limbs, each trailing smaller growths like pathways of consequence, and somewhere below them, through leaves and shifting glimmers, I sensed power flowing. A different kind of power from the one that propelled us… and…
A different tree?
I couldn’t have explained it, but it felt to me as if the current I sensed represented a leakage between two worlds’ different Worldtrees.
As if different worlds—Norse, perhaps, and Chinese—shared the idea of a tree without sharing the details, and thus the women who could go to the tree in one culture could sometimes see and feel what took place in the other Worldtree.
The power I felt seeping into Yggdrasil felt less wild and more… connected. Networks. Transmission. Extraction. The image felt totalizing, almost industrial in a way that Yggdrasil itself didn’t. I knew I had to learn more.
I reached, and I felt Mary do the same.
In the Viking bridal chamber where my Herra brutally fucked my no-longer-virgin bottom, the next climax struck me.
My body on the saddle seemed to have become less a body than a receptacle for repeated shocks of pleasure and pain.
Henrik’s cock filled my anus with the same hard, sovereign certainty, while the bride’s consolation kept rubbing me into helplessness.
I felt my cunt pulse around emptiness, my belly tighten, my thighs strain uselessly against the old leather, my pendant swing against my chest. Then release broke over me again and Mary and I traveled down in the canopy, to another level.
The bough under us narrowed and bent over darkness full of moving lights. I understood that Mary and I remained in Yggdrasil, but could see the imaginary world of the other tree—the Chinese tree, my mind couldn’t help calling it.
The lights looked, at first, like stars caught beneath leaves.
Then I understood that they resembled cities seen from an airplane at night: linked nodes, glowing lines, grids of consumption.
Some of the lights pulsed green-gold, sickly and rich.
At the center of one cluster stood something that was not a tree and not a tower but somehow both—a trunk translated into steel and glass, drawing force upward and downward at once.
Shanghai, some part of me thought at once, though I had never been there.
Or maybe not Shanghai literally? But the place in the language of this vision that meant their center.
Mary shuddered beside me. I felt her fear, but also her need to know, just like mine. She had the same scholar’s greed, perhaps in a different key, that I felt in myself. The branch beneath us trembled and hummed as if carrying a massive current.
Elsewhere, in Sicily, I heard voices through the roaring in my body.
Not words at first. Only the fact of speech around me while I remained bent and spread and used.
Fragments sharpened.
“Rouen…”
“Ask him…”
“Aksel says…”
Giovanna’s voice, cool even now. Mateo’s lower murmur. They seemed very far away, yet somehow threaded into the same structure as Mary’s awareness of another chamber, another observer, another man trying to make this impossible thing submit to analysis.
The name Aksel flashed through my mind with no image attached at first except precision.
Then, faintly, from somewhere that was not exactly my own perception, I got an impression of a tall blond man in a stone room beside Sven, his gaze fixed and technical, as if he meant to dissect a miracle into usable mechanisms.
The thought itself might have made me laugh, if I had had any breath to spare.
Henrik drove deeper and the almost-laughter became a cry.
“What do you see?” he demanded.
I tried to answer at once. The answer fractured under another climax.
“Lights,” I gasped. “A tower… no… a trunk made of power lines… energy—”
“Be precise,” Giovanna said somewhere behind or beyond me, sounding infuriatingly professional while I was impaled by my master’s manhood, atop a Viking relic and coming out of my mind.
I tried. The effort itself seemed to pull me and Mary farther along the branch, as if articulation could function as a kind of steering. We moved toward the industrial tree, as if direction meant nothing in this utterly non-Euclidean space. That tree was and wasn’t the same one where we were.
The imagery thickened. Young women knelt beneath it, naked. Men crouched behind them… over them. The girls knelt as conduits, faces down and bottoms up. Their heads were bowed to the ground as their masters fucked their bottoms, their hair spreading over the soil around them.
From their thoroughly used bodies rose filaments of light that fed the larger structure.
Behind them the men, in dark modern clothes, their rigid manhoods jutting from their flies, drove them onward.
Their faces would not hold still. Executive.
Priest. Engineer. Party official. The vision slid among categories, refusing to settle.
A sisterhood, I thought suddenly. A sisterhood to serve the fellowship. The way the Order of Ostia served the Pretorian Guard… the way bed thralls, v?lur, like Mary and me served the Sons of Odin.