Chapter 35
Henrik
Ilsa’s sweet pussy practically gushed onto my fingers with her submissive need.
The thick felt under her had already grown damp, and when I let my fingers part her little folds again I felt fresh wetness answer at once, hot and helpless and almost startling in its abundance.
Across from us, Mary gave a tiny, broken gasp under Sven’s hand at nearly the same moment.
Ilsa tried to continue speaking through it, as I had felt sure she must: as unusual as this shared vision appeared, the dynamics of the v?lur’s vision seemed to have remained the same.
A bed thrall with v?lva’s sight, broken on the bride saddle, recounted what she had seen most fully when under her Herra’s dominant touch.
“The branch carried us,” she said, voice shaking. “Or… we… we moved on it, and it carried us… in a… a c-current somehow…”
Mary picked up the thread with what seemed uncanny ease. “Toward… toward… oh, Herra… another s-structure or another… another tree. Not Yggdrasil… but… but connected to it, or maybe t-touching it… or somehow both it and not it?”
Sven’s fingers worked with grave patience between Mary’s thighs. I saw the redhead’s sweet body begin to betray her more plainly: the tiny lift of her hips, the tension in her mouth, the way her knees wanted to part farther, to give her master more obscene access to her most intimate places.
I looked down at my own little v?lva and found her in much the same state. Her face had gone pale, with color high in the cheeks. Her lips remained parted. Her breathing had lost any even rhythm and become the breathing of a bed thrall in need of her Herra’s cock.
I let my fingertips circle her clit once, lightly, then slide lower, tracing the damp seam of her bare little cunny and the tender flesh further back.
She flinched when I touched near her well-fucked r?vhul.
I knew how newly opened it remained, how deeply I had used it in Sicily.
So I gentled the pressure, merely resting my finger there, making her feel that I knew and remembered every sore inch of her.
She moaned in obvious discomfort anyway.
“Easy, lille en,” I murmured close to her ear.
She nodded, then shook her head as if neither motion properly answered what my hand was doing to her.
Aksel had produced a notebook from somewhere and now sat with severe attention bent toward the girls as if this were a laboratory protocol.
Giovanna watched with a cooler, more feline focus, one leg crossed, dark eyes moving from Mary’s face to Ilsa’s and back again.
I supposed she found the whole thing equal parts instructive and irritating.
“The lights,” Ilsa said, forcing the words out.
“Below our bough… branches of light. They looked like cities from above, maybe. Networks. Like their tree… like they had turned it into a… a structure…” Her hips shifted against my hand in a tiny urgent motion she plainly had not intended.
“Transmission… transmission l-lines. Consumption or… and… I… extraction, it felt like.”
Mary shivered under Sven’s touch. “And women beneath those,” she whispered. “Kneeling women, like… like us. Women used for… for…”
I felt Ilsa’s cunt pulse under my fingers.
“Used how?” Aksel asked.
His tone remained neutral. It would help, I know. He queried like a scientist, obliging the girls to answer while their bodies remembered, without trying to lead them anywhere in particular.
I put two fingers just inside Ilsa’s soaked little cunt, not thrusting, only filling her enough to remind her body of service, while my thumb resumed its work on the little bud where her need centered. Her whole body jerked. The cloth beneath her made a faint, wet sound.
“From behind,” she said at once, the answer pulled out of her by sensation as much as by memory.
“The men were behind them. In dark clothes. Modern clothes. Suits, maybe, but changing. They—” She broke off with a sobbing breath and pressed herself down on my hand despite the soreness I knew she must feel.
“They were fucking them… their bottoms… like… like us.”
Mary gave a strangled little cry. “Yes. Bent over with their bottoms up. Hair on the ground. The women… they were like… like conduits, that way.”
Sven glanced at me. I saw recognition in his eyes: of the pattern, of the old knowledge finding its analogue in another civilization. His hand disappeared more decisively between Mary’s legs. She whimpered and began to move against him with bashful but irresistible obedience.
I let my fingertip brush the rim of Ilsa’s anus again, then withdraw.
Even that slight pressure made her tremble all over.
Her body must remain close to the ritual it had known when she had gone to the tree.
So I alternated, cunt and clit and that tender little ring behind, making her remember the whole path upward.
“They fed the structure you described?” Sven asked.
“The fucking… it… it made the women feed it,” Mary said instantly.
“More… more, though…” Ilsa said, then gasped as my thumb pressed harder over her clit.
“Not… not only the women. It went through them… through their bodies.” She swallowed.
“The men were using them to draw something out, or move something through the system. A kind of energy, but… but information, too?”
“Guidance,” Mary agreed.
“An oracle network,” Aksel said softly.
* * *
Ilsa
I could feel the tempo of my body rising under Henrik’s hand.
My master already knew me too well. The humiliating cunt cloth under me was no longer merely precaution but necessity, so I didn’t ruin his trousers.
He slid his fingers out of me and stroked through the wetness I had made, and I made a helpless noise that, to my mingled distress and pride, must have sounded so sweet and needy that I felt his cock thicken beneath my bottom.
Across from us Mary had reached the same stage.
Sven remained outwardly calm, but he had begun to hold her more firmly with his free arm as if preparing for the inevitability of my fellow v?lva’s violent climax.
Mary’s face had gone dazed and luminous.
I watched her lower belly tense. I watched the involuntary little rocking of her hips.
Then I realized just how closely my own body imitated those embarrassing telltale signs of submissive need.
The pendant around my neck, which in a way distinguished me from her, somehow at the same time seemed to join us, too: wunjo… V for v?lur…
“Did you see the trunk of their tree?” Aksel asked. “Tell us about the trunk.”
I shook my head weakly, not in refusal but in sheer overload. “Steel and glass,” I whispered. “No… that’s not right. That’s how my mind translated it. A tower like a tree. A headquarters.” I breathed in raggedly. “Shanghai, maybe?”
Mary picked it up at once. “The center,” she said. “The place where the lines converged.”
“And the name?” asked Aksel.
There was a pause. I could see on Mary’s face that, like me, she strained toward language.
I could see it in her face and feel it in mine: the challenge of vision trying to become speech without fully collapsing into interpretation.
My master stroked my poor pussy more firmly, and I cried out under my breath and nearly rose from his lap.
“A fellowship,” I gasped.
Mary breathed, “Yes.”
My hands clutched at my Herra’s sleeve. “A… a Fellowship of the Tree.” I could hear the capital letters in my enunciation.
“I don’t know the Chinese words, but I knew…
I knew that was the sense of it. Men organized around the structure.
Women beneath it. Girls…” My whole body convulsed once, with a near-orgasm I somehow held back. “Girls of—”
Mary’s voice came in like an echo from the same branch. “Guanyin.”
The room went still around the word.
My body shuddered violently. Whatever further veil had remained between recollection and bodily surrender had just torn.
Henrik worked my clit in the firm little circles that always threatened to undo me, then he moved a fingertip further down and let one finger rest lightly, possessively, against my abused anus, not penetrating, only claiming.
I felt my wetness spill over my master’s possessive hand.
I couldn’t keep trying not to move. I ground herself on Henrik’s fingers with shameless urgency.
“The Girls of Guanyin,” I said, hearing in my voice that I had begun almost to chant. “Used to see. Used to guide them. Used for strategy, for power, for… for energy control…”
Mary’s words ran with mine, braided and breathless. “Corporate men. Priests. Executives. The same thing in different forms…”
“Watching the world through the women they fuck,” I whispered.
Then we both saw the final shape of it together. I knew it before either of us said it, because my body told me, and the sight of Mary’s said the same.
“The Fellowship of the Tree,” we breathed, almost in one voice.
Henrik and Sven made the same choice at nearly the same instant. They held us tightly and drove us on.
I broke first by less than a heartbeat, or perhaps Mary did; in truth it felt simultaneous.
For an instant I felt the pendant burn against my chest like a brand, and then the climax hit me so hard that I tried to arch entirely off my master’s lap, but he locked one arm around my ribs and the other over my thighs and held me down on the soaked cloth while I came.
I cried out once, sharply, then dissolved into a string of helpless sounds, my cunt fluttering against Henrik’s fingers, my whole body trembling with release.
Across from me I saw Sven gather Mary in the same implacable grip, pinning her writhing sweetness against him while she climaxed under his hand with her red head thrown back against his shoulder.
For a few moments the room contained nothing but our orgasms and our masters’ quiet, masculine effort of restraining us through it.
Then the peak of it passed. I sagged against Henrik, still quivering. He kept me tightly held, more from instinct than necessity I thought, and I felt myself struggle to breathe and then finally return to myself. My thighs remained weakly parted over the soaking cloth.
Sven had not yet released Mary either. I saw him meet Henrik’s eyes over the top of Mary’s head.
“Well,” he said at last, voice low and very controlled, “that is inconvenient.”
Aksel was already writing rapidly. “A Chinese organization employing sexually induced female oracles in a structurally analogous system. Possibly linked to energy infrastructure. Possibly already aware of parallel channels of perception.”
“Possibly,” Giovanna said dryly, “we have just discovered that barbarian mysticism globalized before anyone informed the Pretorian Guard.”
I felt myself stir against my master’s chest. I heard myself make a tiny sound. Henrik shifted me more securely onto his lap, supporting my weight.
“Aksel,” he asked, “could we have water for our v?lur?”
Aksel stood and went to a side table where I noticed a pitcher and wooden goblets. He filled two and brought them over to us. I realized only then how dry my mouth had become, when my master held the goblet to my lips and I drank with small obedient swallows, eyes half closed.
When I had finished, I looked around, not quite able to see Henrik’s face and having to settle for the serious expressions on Sven’s, Aksel’s, and Giovanna’s. I realized I still had something to tell.
“I think they felt us,” I whispered.
The interest in the room seemed to sharpen.
Sven’s hand, still resting possessively between Mary’s thighs, went still. “Why?”
“Not certainty,” I said. My voice remained rough. “A warning. The structure below… the lights… they seemed to become responsive. Like pressure in a network. Like if we looked too long, something could look back.”
Mary nodded immediately from Sven’s lap. “I felt it too.”
Aksel leaned forward. “Before or after you saw the name of the fellowship?”
“Right after… right before we fell away,” Mary said.
“Just after we understood the danger,” I added. I pressed my face briefly against my master’s shoulder. The act of continuing to speak while so spent required somewhere to rest. “It was why we stopped.”
Giovanna uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Then perhaps your Chinese counterparts are not merely passive instruments.”
“No,” Sven said. “Or perhaps the men behind them are not.”
“It fits capital flows,” my master said, his voice steady, as if his words represented thought rendered into final form.
Aksel and Giovanna looked intently at him.
“Or, from another angle, there’s a reason why you folks…
” he nodded toward Giovanna, “… put so much store in controlling the grid as a way to save civilization. If one wishes to influence the future at scale, energy remains the cleanest choke point. If one also possesses predictive or intuitive mechanisms unavailable to competitors…” I felt him incline his head as if had glanced down at me, on his lap.
“One could build a frightening advantage.”
Giovanna gave Henrik a sidelong look. “There. The businessman returns.”
“He never left,” my Herra responded.
Sven’s mouth shifted faintly. “No. And we will need him.”
Mary stirred. “What happens now?” she asked softly.