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Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 01

By: xtorch



Four girls, wearing nought but the shortest of white skirts and tops just big enough to contain their breasts, walked slowly down cobblestone streets. The afternoon heat beat down on their heads, bleaching their dirty brown hair, reflecting off the bright, clean streets and the light brown of the sandstone buildings around them.

The heat had left the streets quiet, a spooky feeling when one considered the thousands of women that were living within the walls of the Temple.

'So we're sweating,' Talla thought, glad that the shortness of her skirt left her thighs to the gentle caresses of the occasional breeze.

In front of them walked a woman in orange, apparently unaffected by the heat. She was something to behold. Her rank and age put her a great distance above her charges. It also gave her breasts that made the girls jealous. Even Talla, who was no slouch in the that department, didn't compare. And those legs, taut and muscular ...

They came to a bronze gate large enough to admit, were it completely open, at least two horse carts side by side. As it was, the doors were cracked just wide enough for women to pass in and out.

A pair of leather armoured women guarded the metal doors. They wore the scant kind of armour selected by those who weren't in any actual physical danger. It went no further below the waist than the girls' skirts and left a good space of hardened mid-riff exposed to attack.

There never were attackers, were there?

Talla's lips twisted in derision.

'I wish I knew people who would attack you.'

But the Temple had a lot of well trained guards. And where did one find those against whom they guarded? Talla certainly didn't know.

"Women of Endowment," the guard challenged them. "What business have you in the triangle of Sweetness."

"I am a Orella, a Teacher," the woman in orange responded. "I bring them here to see the Wall."

The Wall? You could hear the capitalization from the way Orella spoke.

The guard bowed politely and waved them in.

Talla knew that it wasn't common for women of one Division to enter the triangle of another. As she came from Endowment, Talla had spent most of her few weeks of Temple life in that section. She had been through Sweetness once, with permission, when she'd been late for an assignment.

She'd been in Form's triangle twice, neither of which occasions had been pleasant. The only reason she knew of that any outsiders went to Form was to be part of a trial, either as witnesses or accused. Talla had been both, her last journey there having set her at odds with the Temple's idea of justice.

The five of them passed through the gate, taking a moment to notice the way the doors had been embossed with thousands of triangles -- that being the symbol of the Division of Sweetness.

'So proud you are,' Talla thought. 'Most elevated of Divisions, even highest on the hill upon which the Temple slopes.'

The last time she'd been rushing through this triangle, taking a short cut to her child-minding duties, she'd seen what she'd assumed was construction. There had been men here, apparently disassembling a wall to use the stone elsewhere.

That broken wall, however, was still there. It was still broken and, furthermore, still unnecessarily thick. There was just no reasonably need for a wall of this strength in the middle of the Temple.

It was in front of this strange wall -- or perhaps "Wall" - that Orella stopped.

"Trini," Orella turned to the girl next to Talla. "When was Gern sanctified?"

Easy stuff, even for the timid Trini.

"The Temple of Gern was sanctified in the year two hundred three," Trini answered.

"Correct," Orella answered. "Behind me, you see what is left of one of the original defensive walls of the Temple of Gern."

This had been an exterior wall once? That explained the thickness.

"The damage you see was done over six centuries ago in the year two hundred sixty three," Orella explained. "At the time, most of the warlords who lived in the area had been subdued and were enthralled to the Temple."

Talla gulped. Warlords. It sounded like the stories Shanata had told her in her very first History lesson. War was something not discussed with children. It had come as something of a shock to find that human beings had waged deadly battles against one another throughout history and that many of these battles had been fought by anti-social men against the Temple.

"Sixty years after Gern was founded, however," Orella went on, "three such warlords, the most powerful in the area, made an unprecedented alliance. Seeing that the future was the Temple, and disliking that future, they gathered their forces together and brought great weaponry to bear on these walls."

Orella walked through the line of girls and stood behind them while they continued to stare at the broken wall.

"At the time, this area behind me was heavily forested," she explained. "Although we try our best to clear away any trees blocking our lines of sight, resources are not always available. The men were able to hide their catapults and launch boulders from the cover of darkness."

"Women of Endowment and Sweetness stood atop the walls and fired volleys of arrows into the night," Orella explained, swinging her arm in an arc over their heads to indicate the flight paths. "It was the women of Form who slunk off into the woods, working their way outside the range of the arrows, to get into the encampments of the men."

"When the wall finally fell, the catapults went silent."

Orella paused there, letting Talla transport herself back in time. How would that have felt, to know that the defences were broken, that wild men could invade the Temple?

A shiver ran through her. Was that what she wanted? To bring down the Temple?

It was Nadine who spoke.

"What then, Mistress?" she asked.

"Then nothing," came the reply.

"Nothing?" Talla asked.

All of the girls had turned their heads in surprise.

"The men didn't attack?" Trini added.

"They awaited orders to do so," Orella said. "And no such orders came. Their leaders, you see, had been disabled."

So no feral men had crossed this broken threshold. They'd waited out in the forest, expecting their leaders to rally them into the breach, and their leaders were -- what? - dead? What did "disabled" mean in this context? It wasn't like the teachers to use euphemisms for death. They weren't shy about describing the hazards of war.

"When the morning came, the men surrendered," Orella went on. "Hundreds of them had been killed in the night, along with a great many women of every Discipline, both inside and outside the Temple. The men were inducted into the city and helped to rebuild what they had destroyed."

"The Temple was expanded to four times its size. It's old boundaries became the Goddess's Domain while three new triangles were built around it. This wall, repaired in a great rush and thus with poor quality, crumbled over time with the force of erosion. It was decided to leave this broken portion untouched, so that we would not forget."

'I won't forget', Talla thought. 'I won't forget that your walls can be broken.'

But that painted an interesting picture, from an engineering standpoint, which was how Talla was being trained to view things. The original Temple had been a small triangle -- equilateral as Temples always were. In its first expansion, the Goddess claimed the old Temple as her domain and had three triangles built around it so that the whole thing formed a larger equilateral triangle.

That second Temple had since become the domain of the Queen of Sweetness, which made it one corner of the new Temple, the one which currently existed.

Talla had learned that this was the standard way for Temples to expand, quadrupling in size as controlled population growth required it.

Orella stood before them, hands on her hips. The orange scarf-like sheets of fabric that hung from her elbows draped elegantly toward the ground without actually touching the cobblestones. She let the moment sink in for them.

"That ends today's lesson," she said. "We will return to the central triangle. Follow me."

While they quietly followed her out of the Division of Sweetness, Talla sidled up to Yua, the quietest member of their group.

"That was something, eh?" Talla said.

Yua nodded.

"Scary stuff," she agreed.

They passed through Sweetness's great bronze doors and Orella dismissed them with a wave. She seemed to have urgent business to which to attend.

"I'm heading off for a quick bath before the next class. You wanna come?"

Yua's face visibly brightened.

"Sure," she said eagerly.

Nadine looked back at Talla with a glare that bordered on hatred. Talla ignored it. There was a problem there that Talla hadn't been able to breach. She'd tried being friendly, hoping to find a kindred soul in her dissatisfaction with the Temple, but Nadine seemed principally dissatisfied with Talla.

Shrugging it off, Talla turned her attention back to Yua, who seemed much friendlier. Both had something in common with, which was that they had both been upgraded by a young man named Zhair'lo -- a young man for whom Talla carried a particular affinity. 

That was why Yua wore the same tiny skirt that Talla did -- by virtue of Zhair'lo's overly enthusiastic upgrading skills, she'd skipped the rank of Virgin and the year it normally took to reach Initiate. It meant that, like Talla but to a lesser degree, she sported a pair of breasts that were the envy of her age mates.

"How was last night?" she asked Yua. It was considered polite, in female circles, to enquire about sexual exploits.

"Great," Yua said in that quietly excited voice she always used. "I wish they could send me out more than five times a week. After being stuck in that -"

She inhaled deeply through her nose.

"Well, I get another tonight at least. You?"

Talla was actually at the same pace. They only required women to meet a quota of one or two sexual encounters -- what they called "Service" - per week. Most purposely asked for higher pacing either out of raw sexual desire or to make themselves appear more loyal to the Temple.

"Good," she whispered back. "Did you try it from behind yet?"

Yua looked down with a grin.

"The second time," she admitted shyly. "It's so weird like that, but he can definitely get deeper."

"Come on," Talla urged. "This way."

They were entering Endowment's Triangle -- their collective home -- and heading towards the pool and the baths. Endowment hosted a very healthy sized building for this purpose. The central feature was a large pool in which women could swim laps or simply wade around to cool themselves off. Around the large pool were several sunken baths.

Talla and Yua stripped off their clothing, skirts and underwear first, tops last. Talla made a casual attempt to turn her chest away from Yua for the latter.

"You don't need to hide them from me," Yua remarked as Talla kicked a lever that released a shower of water on them.

It wouldn't do to rub the fact of Talla's luck when it came to upgrades in Yua's face. Yua had needed three tries to break her Seal and become a proper member of the Temple. Talla had walked in and received a nearly fatal quadruple upgrade on her first try. Her thinking had been that it might make Yua jealous, and Talla needed friends more than anything right now.

"Oh?" she asked.

"We both got lucky," Yua smiled shyly. "Zhair'lo gave you four and he gave me two. Good for both of us, right?"

"I suppose," Talla replied as she lathered herself up with soap.

She turned to face Yua now, letting the other girl watch as she raised one arm and rubbed soap down the length of that arm and under her heavy breasts.

"It just seems rude, given how easily it came for me and how long you had to wait."

Yua shrugged it off.

"It was unfair," she said. "But that's not your fault."

Talla smiled in relief.

Clean and naked, the two girls let the falling water rinse the soap off their bodies.

"Hey, Talla!" someone called out.

She turned and waved, calling out, "Tina!"

It was no accident that Tina was here. They met here almost every day. With the way that the Temple seemed determined to make sure Talla didn't have a moment to go getting herself into more trouble, this was the only real free time she had. Given what they were up to, they took every chance they could to get together.

Tina had found an otherwise unoccupied bath in which to wait and, as was her style, sat with her arms draped around the the tiled edge so the water would gently lap at her exposed nipples. The protrusion it created would never confuse anyone who knew enough into thinking that Tina was a Disciple of Point, but the effect was still pleasant.

"This is Yua," Talla introduced her companion as they slid into the tub. "We're doing the Virgin classes together."

Yua grimaced, Talla noted.

"Oh," Tina said. "I'm Tina. You're one of the lucky double upgrades? You must have just joined the Temple."

Tina knew very well that Yua had not just joined the Temple. It was polite, however, to pretend otherwise.

"No," Yua replied, looking sideways. "Sealed Virgin."

She took a breath.

"That's all done, though," she said firmly. "Zhair'lo took care of that for me. I'm one of you now and -"

She paused a moment, seeming to choke up. Her head ducked under water and she came up sweeping her short, dark hair to the back of her head.

Talla kept her breasts politely below the water line while Tina, who held the same number of upgrades as Yua, kept hers on display.

"That's not easy," Tina pointed out to Talla.

"Being a Sealed Virgin?" Talla asked. "I really don't understand -- what was it like?"

Yua pursed her lips.

"It's like you don't really count," she said. "You get to live inside the Temple, but that's it. No sex. No lessons. Just one crack at the Seal every month."

"Oh," Talla said.

Yua went on, not making eye contact with either of them.

"The worst thing is that everyone can tell. As long as we don't get to have sex, we don't get to cut our skirts either. Everywhere I went for over three months, people would recognize me and see me in my long skirt. They knew -- they all knew -- that I was Sealed."

A shudder went through her.

"You have no idea how nice it is to wear that tiny skirt," she went on with a nod at the rack where her clothing hung, her voice still shaken. "Whenever I can get away with it, I don't even wear underwear -"

"Be careful," Talla interrupted, "Jin ree ..."

Talla vividly remembered what happened when two of her colleagues were caught exposing themselves in public. It was a crime that the Temple, with its adherence to the ancient tongue in matters legal, called "jin ree". The "free look", as it were. The punishment was distinctly unpleasant and painful.

"I know. But, oh, just to be free of that skirt..."

She let out a sigh as she trailed off.

"I hope I can get duty in the Queen's chambers someday soon."

The Queen of Endowment had a specific rule in her chambers. Women in skirts were not permitted to wear underwear. It created quite the conundrum for women of the white and yellow ranks as they had to follow both that rule and the one against exposing themselves.

"It is tough," Tina pointed out to Talla. "Everyone tries to be nice to the Sealed Virgins."

"Ugh," Yua grunted. "That's the worst. All that pity."

Tina, unable to come with anything, shrugged in what she hoped was a sympathetic way.

"On the other hand," Yua said, cheering up slightly, "I've had nothing but sex for the past two weeks. Ten guys since Zhair'lo. I took the highest pacing I could."

Tina smiled at this.

"Kinda built up?"

Yua nodded.

"Yeah," she said. "Three months of ... um ..."

Talla had a good chunk of Zhair'lo's memories stuck in her brain. The last time they had met, just over two weeks ago, she had received a mental image of every girl he had ever seen, touched, had sex with or ejaculated on. Yua fell into all of those categories.

There was also a very fuzzy image of Yua and Nadine, passionately embracing, kissing and caressing each other. Talla was pretty sure that this image was a fiction of Zhair'lo's mind. For one thing, how could he have been present in the Sealed Virgins dormitory? For another, the Sealed Virgins dormitory didn't look like that.

The importance of the image, however, was not its accuracy. What mattered was that Talla knew that the Sealed Virgins, trapped in that pitiable state, used each other when sexual frustration overwhelmed them. Specifically, Talla knew that Yua had confessed to Zhair'lo that she and Nadine had been together.

Thus the rather absurd image in Zhair'lo's mind.

"It's okay," Tina confided. "We've done it, too."

Yua perked up at this and gave a quick look around the room to make sure no one was in earshot.

"You two?" she asked. "With -- with each other."

Talla shrugged.

"When we, sort of, needed it."

Yua nodded. "I know that feeling."

Heads turned aside and there was an awkward pause in the conversation.

"Have you made any sisters since you got out?" Tina changed the subject.

"No," Yua shook her head. "But I'm sisters with almost all the girls who were Sealed."

"Would you like another sister?" she asked.

Yua brightened, the offer washing the misery off her face. She lifted herself out of the water until her breasts, glistening with beaded water, were exposed.

Tina ducked under the water, and came up against Yua's belly. What she might have touched while she was down there, Talla couldn't say for sure.

Giggling nervously, Yua held her chest out with a degree of pride. She'd had to go through hell for that pair. Gently, and with an unnecessary amount of tongue, Tina planted a kiss on each of Yua's perky nipples.

To complete the ritual, Tina offered her breasts to Tina, one at a time, to receive her kisses in return. Yua was not quite so salacious and kept her tongue to herself.

"Me, too?" Talla asked.

Yua nodded.

"Who goes first?" she asked.

"We're the same rank," Talla pointed out. "I don't think it matters."

"Yours are bigger than mine," Yua argued. "Four to my two. Shouldn't you go first?"

Talla pursed her lips. Talla actually had five upgrades, if you counted the medically invoked Strength upgrade. That probably wasn't worth pointing out.

"No," she said instead. "You've been in the Temple longer than I have."

With that statement, she presented her wet breasts to Yua and the girls exchanged kisses.

Sisters was the term for this relationship. It meant a bond closer than the normal level of loyalty between women of the Temple. In time, if they were lucky, they might find an ally in Yua.

In time.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo had done a lot of things in the six years of what they called young adulthood. Since the age of twelve, he'd built roofs -- both thatched and tiled. He'd learn to bake and even cook a little. Throw in the farming and the handful of other tasks that the Temple left for men to do and he'd come out a lot more well rounded than almost anyone he knew.

The Temple had a habit of fastening men to a single vocation fairly early in their lives. Find something that you're good at, which will hopefully be something you like, and spend your life learning to be as good as you can be at it.

But not Zhair'lo. He had a range of experience that would be the envy of any man his age -- if any such man ever thought there was anything to envy about being moved around from one place to another at the whim of the Temple.

There were, however, things left untaught; things for the real men, not the twelve to eighteen year olds like him. Martial things. Bows and arrows. Swords and shields. The Temple women, in that eternal, ineffable game they played, kept their tiles close to their chests and their weapons closer.


Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 01



This all led him to thinking about his most recent assignment, this duty at Lyric's camp that he'd been doing for two weeks already.

Two weeks since that gods damned day when they'd forced him to -

He shuddered, trying to block out the memory.

Instead, he turned to the carcass in front of him. Lyric's men had brought in a deer for him to dress and carve up. He could do that as well as any butcher at this point. Seeing his task as a gateway to them actually teaching him how to use a bow, he'd attacked it with relish.

"It's vital," Lyric had explained to him. "Sometimes we're out there for days. You get lost, you wander off, then you have to live off the land. If you can't feed yourself, you're as good as dead."

At one point his goal had been to do just that: wander off. He could build a shelter and make simple foods. Learning how to skin a deer and smoke its meat for preservation would have been a useful skill when that had been his plan. Once he could have made things safe, he would have called for Talla and -

That plan was gone.

He wasn't going to run away now. Not after that.

The new plan was different.

That was an exaggeration. The new goal was different. He didn't exactly have a plan.

There was a fair degree of certainty, in the general desire for vengeance that had soaked into his soul, that learning how to use a bow would be useful. And if gutting the free roaming beasts that the hunters brought home was between him and a bow, then he would dissect the beasts with enthusiasm.

The other problem was that, the Temple being as large as it was, he wasn't going to be able to do anything to it all by himself. In theory, yes, he could try something crazy like assassinating the Goddess. If there were men anywhere in the city with the skills to sneak into the Temple and pull off something like that, they were most certainly the quick-footed types in Lyric's camp.

But really, what were the odds on that sort of thing? He didn't have a way of calculating it, but without any martial skills beyond what he could do to a dead deer, the thought of going up against even one of those awful women from Form in their full body leathers sent chills through his body.

What was the other option? A mass assault? That could certainly work. Enough people would eventually smash through those gates and conquer the Temple in some fashion.

Ignoring his lack of access to such a quantity of people with the will to attack the Temple, to what end would such an assault lead? Lots of dead women and men.

That wasn't the goal. So what was he supposed to be doing with his time, besides biding it?

"Zhair'lo M'han?"

Blood soaked knife still in hand, he turned to face the speaker. The contrast couldn't have been more distinct.

Two Temple girls, young ones in perfectly clean, white clothing were standing in the doorway. The one who had called his name wore the tiniest of white tops over her thin body. Along with that, she wore a skirt that barely hid her underwear. Always assuming she wore underwear. Once a messenger had, quite notably, failed to do so. Zhair'lo, his arms spattered with blood halfway up to his elbows, stood with his hands well away from the dirty apron that protected his clothing.

"Yes?"

The one with the satchel paused a moment to survey him.

"I have a summons to deliver," she frowned. "Deliver to your hand."

They had a rule about that. Scrolls like the one she held out to him, with it's green -- no, black -- ribbons and fancy seal, had to be handed directly to the recipient. They couldn't be left with his comrades, in his bedroom or any other place.

And yet this young woman with the lithe, muscular thighs of a runner eyed his hands with distaste. Under no circumstances would she see her Temple's message scrolls defiled by the grasp of one in his foul state.

"Give it here," the other girl said.

She was superior in rank. Zhair'lo knew how to tell now. The two sashes that crossed over her tiny breasts and the nearly knee length skirt meant she was of the third rank; Neophyte, one step above the Initiate next to her.

The Neophyte took the cylinder from her junior's hand and walked over to Zhair'lo, who stayed quite still. She tapped it very gently on his shoulder, the only clean spot she could probably find. She then set it down in a small nook near the doorway.

"It is a Summons for tonight," she said. "You should read it as soon as you're - " she wrinkled her nose -- "done here."

He acknowledged this with a slight tilt of his head and the girls departed in a twirl of skirts that told him that at least one of them was wearing underwear.

There hadn't been a single messenger for him since he had come to Lyric's camp. It was possible that this had to do with his new assignment, but he doubted it. There was nothing geographically difficult or physically strenuous about his current duties. After the schedule of frequent Summonses that he'd been burning through, it was much more likely that this hiatus was due to that awful mess with Talla.

He cringed, seeing the lash ... the blood.

The Temple had still sent him girls at night. Sonja, that terrible woman with the iron crown, had made it clear to him that no blame had been assigned to him. Every bit of punishment had literally fallen on Talla. He had only been warned to stay away from her henceforth.

Sonja.

Zhair'lo didn't want to assassinate any Goddess. It was Sonja who was responsible for what Talla and -- by mental extension -- Zhair'lo had been through. He'd mentally paced himself through the fantasy often enough that he had long since realized that killing Sonja would not accomplish anything useful. Surely another would take her place. He still wanted her dead, though. Or at least hurt. Maybe he could arrange it so Sonja was incapacitated and Talla could make the killing stroke. He could offer the woman's death to Talla by way of apology.

Dark thoughts. Was Talla even likely to accept such a gruesome offer? He didn't see her that way, but his opinion of her had been formed before the Temple had broken them apart. If she was as bitter now as he was, perhaps ...

He had no way of knowing. They had once shared a very special version of the mental bond created by sexual pairing. For most people, a crude sense of their partner's emotions and level of arousal was echoed from one mind to the other. For Zhair'lo and Talla, the bond had stayed intact, allowing them to communicate feelings over great distances even days after having met.

So they'd tried to get together, secretly, again and again.

That had proven to be a mistake.

Zhair'lo began cleaning himself up. He was done carving up the beast. The hide was neatly laid aside and the cuts of meat were stacked as he'd been instructed. He scrubbed hard with the soap, hoping to get not just the deer's blood off his hands, but Talla's too.

But the latter would never come off.

Cleaned up, at least in the physical sense, he looked sideways at the scroll. It was probably time to see what the Temple wanted. Would he start doing upgrades again? They'd dropped him off their schedule after the incident with Talla. There were four Sealed Virgins still to be dealt with. At least, there had been four girls. Zo'kar was a Seal Breaker, too. He hadn't been involved in a screw up like Zhair'lo had. Given that two weeks had passed and that Zo'kar, like Zhair'lo, could do an upgrade every other night, it was likely that the dorm of Sealed Virgins was indeed empty at this point.

Picking the scroll up with a bit of disdain, he noticed that this wasn't like any of the scrolls he'd been given before. The wax seal, for one thing, was black instead of green. If he took the meaning correctly, that meant it had something to do with the Goddess herself, rather than emanating from the office of one of her nine Sorceresses. Did that make it something other than a normal upgrade?

He searched through what he had of Talla's memories, scanning for scrolls that looked like this one. There was something about an all-black scroll -- wrapped completely in black paper. That image came with a tinge of anxiety in it; an admonishing eyebrow from a woman with large -- and for some reason bare -- breasts. But this wasn't one of those scrolls. This was the normal beige paper with a black wax seal and ribbons.

Zhair'lo cracked it open and unrolled the paper.

Well, this was different.

Aside from the incoherent Temple Script, the first thing he noticed was the gate marking. Every Summons he'd ever received had been labelled with the circle shape of Endowment's small gate. He'd always assumed that, at some point, he might be called to visit some other gate, to handle upgrades for the Sealed Virgins of other Divisions.

Not tonight.

The symbol was that of the Temple's main gate: a square within a circle within an equilateral triangle pointed down.

That was chilling.

As for the rest: the date, which was today's; the time, seventh bell; and a lot of Temple gibberish. There was a notable difference, but it was one that he was unable to interpret. He'd seen enough of these scrolls addressed to him that some of the scrawls, though unintelligible, were familiar. The thing he remembered was the one large word that had been exactly the same on every Summons he'd ever received.

This time, however, a different word appeared there.

Gibberish as far as he was concerned.

But, as Master Harzen had once insisted, you don't refuse a Summons from the Temple.

He stalked out of the kitchen, intent on finding his current Master. He found one of his new colleagues first, a man carrying supplies for a hunt soon to start.

"Ho, Kenji," he called out.

"Zhai," the thin, dark-haired man replied as he stopped in the hallway.

If there was an archetypical Hunter, Kenji was it's personification. Light on his feet and and quick as a cat, he had the Hunter's habit of making no unnecessary motion even when not on a hunt. Not a word, not a muscle movement, nor a breath was ever wasted.

"Where is Master Lyric?"

"Range, last I saw," Kenji replied in that crisp and terse cadence he always used. "Some Temple women were in to see him. So check the office, first."

"Messengers?"

It was contagious, Kenji's way of speaking. Once you started a conversation, you just got roped into his style.

"No," Kenji said with a twitch. "Higher ups."

Something important, then.

"Thanks," he said with a nod.

The Hunter's common room, a large space with a grey stone floor and a central fire place, always smelled of freshly cooked meat. Lyric said that a diet with a solid amount of meat in it would keep the men leaner and quicker than the average, as well as more eager for the kill. Zhair'lo, thin as he was, hadn't noticed a difference since his arrival. He felt as eager to kill as he had been the day he arrived.

Most of the men were out preparing for a hunt, leaving the room empty. As he crossed the floor to Lyric's office, he had only a moment to wonder who might be in there with him. The door clicked open and he stepped back. Two incredibly tall women stepped through the doorway and Zhair'lo found himself temporarily without breath.

Absolutely, stunningly beautiful, from the finely muscles calves all the way up to the sparkling blue eyes and shimmering hair -- one in jet black, the other in strawberry blonde.

He gulped, coming back to his senses.

"Mistresses," he said with a polite nod.

They nodded back and walked past him.

Lyric stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame in a way that was anything but casual. He hadn't taken his eye from the backs of the departing women. His glare was, surprisingly, not sexual. In fact, he looked quite wary.

Without shifting his gaze, he moved his thumb to stroke the dark fringe of beard he maintained around the edge of his jaw and spoke.

"You took care of that deer?"

"Yes, Master Lyric."

"Something else on your mind?"

"I've been summoned to the Temple."

Zhair'lo handed over the scroll.

The women having passed out of sight, Lyric finally turned his gaze to Zhair'lo. Without shifting his weight, he took the scroll from Zhair'lo and unrolled it with a snap of his wrist. His eyes scanned it quickly and locked on the word in Temple Script at the bottom.

"About damned time," he said, his tone light.

He handed the scroll back to Zhair'lo and stood up straight.

"You'd best get some early dinner and then head in," Lyric said. He looked away from Zhair'lo a moment before adding, "I'll find someone to handle the rest of your work for tonight."

"I can finish up when I get back."

"Not likely," Lyric said, a faint tinge of humour in his voice.

Something about that was amusing. A faint tinge was the most humour Lyric ever displayed.

"Off with you. Find some food."

"Yes, sir."

Zhair'lo had a little time to think as he marched to the kitchen.

What were they going to do to him this time? It obviously wasn't an upgrade. He'd done enough of those to know what the word looked like on a scroll. He also knew what the scrolls looked like. This was unquestionably different. Even Master Lyric though so.

Besides, they hadn't let him do an upgrade since he'd been caught with Talla, breaking their rules. Lyric seemed to think it would be exhausting -- or at least time consuming.

"Zhai, my boy. What's up?"

"Is'ka," Zhair'lo answered as he waved the scroll at the old cook. "Can you make something for me quick?"

"Summons?"

"Yup," he replied. "Seventh bell."

Is'ka was not a Hunter. He served as the camp's chief cook and met daily with the camp's assigned physician to make sure each of the Hunters was fit and well fortified with food.

In this company, the man looked clumsy just standing still, but he was a genius with a knife and a cabinet of spices, fresh or dried.

"No trouble," Is'ka smiled. "The fire's already burning."

A copper pan found its way to the grill over the fire. A jug of oil was tilted over it. From an already plucked chicken hanging overhead, slices of breast and leg meat found their way into the oil. A plethora of vegetables were tossed in.

"Easy, Is'ka," Zhair'lo warned. "I'm just one guy."

"A growing boy," Is'ka admonished.

He gave a nod down at the scroll in Zhair'lo's hand before meeting him eye to eye. Is'ka's eyebrows twitched upward.

"What?"

"You'll need your energy."

"For what, exactly?"

Is'ka mumbled.

"Cumin, isn't it?"

"What?"

"You're big into cumin, if I remember correctly," Is'ka said, adding a bit of powder to the frying pan.

"Yeah ... but about tonight."

"It'll be ready in a minute," Is'ka interrupted. "Go have a seat and get yourself some water."

-----------===================-------------

Illya lay on her stomach, holding her head up with her hands, and stared at the wall of her room.

She'd discarded her long, white skirt and left it hanging over the edge of her bed. Maybe if one of the other girls came back to the bedroom and found her lying like this, not even underwear to cover her skinny butt, they might do something together.

There was an aching between her legs, though, of a kind which no woman could satisfy. But the Temple wouldn't give her men, so what was she to do?

'Why won't you give me men?' she pouted at the wall in front of her.

She knew there were two very special boys. She even knew their names: Zhair'lo and Zo'kar. The other girls, the ones who'd escaped this dorm, had come back and told her about them. Every two days, two Sealed Virgins had departed. They would come back, just to be polite, and show off their enhanced muscles, their delicately sensitive nipples or their enlarged breasts.

Yes, indeed, these two boys were capable. The girls grew more excited with each successful upgrade. They were going to get out. They were all going to get out. Finally.

It was supposed to be Illya's turn next. She and Arda were waiting for the scrolls.

And nothing.

Two weeks of absolutely nothing. Not even an explanation for the delay.

They were Sealed Virgins after all. Why would anyone feel the need to keep such as them informed?

She could have taken the opportunity to walk around the Temple. All of Endowment and the central triangle were open to her. Wander at will.

Go where you like, but wear your long skirt. Let everyone know that you're a failure; a girl-child; not quite worthy of true womanhood. Let the sad, lamenting looks fall on your body. Or go for a swim. Take off the long skirt. Be naked in a place where every woman could take a single glance at your body and tell you'd never had an upgrade.

At least in Sweetness, there were upgrades that weren't obvious on the outside. You could pretend to yourself that you were a Disciple of Within.

Not so here. Your rank was written across your naked chest for all to see.

There was nothing to do but wait. And brood. She could do a lot of brooding, lying here half naked, wishing for a man.

There was a knock at the door, the familiar double rap that the other three girls used before they came in. This was the sleeping chamber for the last four Sealed Virgins. Technically, no woman should have to knock before entering her own bedroom, but the girls had adopted this courtesy so as not to walk in on each other.

"Come in," she called out.

Maybe it was Arda. Arda could be counted on to see her skinny cheeks and her pose and know what was needed. Illya turned her head away from the door and, after laying her cheek against her hands, spread her legs a little to punctuate the suggestion. Arda would sometimes finger her from behind when she lay like this. It worked for both of them.

"Illya Ch'lai?" a female voice called out crisply as the door creaked open.

Illya sat up suddenly, realizing that it wasn't one of her sisters after all.

"Sorry," the intruder said, averting her eyes from Illya's body. "I thought I heard you say 'Come in'."

"It's alright," Illya said, flustered, and grabbed her skirt. It was a wrap, really, and she tied it on quickly. "Just napping."

There was no rule, after all, about being naked in one's own bed.

"A Summons," the girl said, flattening her voice as best she could as she handed a scroll to Illya.

Illya inhaled sharply and snatched it out the messenger's hand. 

Could it be? The ribbons were the right colour, at least.

She ripped off the seal and unrolled the parchment.

Upgrade.

Two days hence.

Finally.

She exhaled.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo gazed up at the Temple's main gate. He'd been through here before: twice to enter; twice to exit. The first time was when he'd initiated Talla. The last occasion had been after...

He tried not to think about it but the memory bubbled up regardless of his desires.

... after he'd been forced to whip Talla.

Searing agony in her flesh, transmitted into his own mind.

He shook it off.

"What the fuck you suppose this is about?" Zo'kar asked, standing beside him.

"Damned if I know."

"Maybe we'll get to do upgrades again?"

"Took you off the schedule, too?"

Zo'kar nodded.

"Yup. Can't get any long skirts out at that farm either."

Zhair'lo noticed the derision in Zo'kar's voice. One of the fonder memories most older men had of their youth was participation in the Temple's Initiation ritual for women. Only men of the age of 18 or 19 could participate. The girls in long skirts would come running out, fetching men and dragging them back to the Temple for a bizarre sexual ritual.

The farm to which Zo'kar was assigned, which was also Zhair'lo's previous assignment, was far out of reach of such long skirted girls.

"Not liking the farm?"

"I hate horses," Zo'kar muttered.

"Shouldn't you be done?" Zhair'lo asked, trying to keep an insulting amount of surprise out of his voice. "I was only there two weeks."




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 01



"No one tells me anything," Zo'kar complained. "I think I'm there until I learn how to ride those beasts. The thing is-"

"You there!" a woman called out.

They slowly turned to look at her and silently regarded the heavily leathered woman for a moment.

"Mistress," Zhair'lo acknowledged with an all-too-ironic bow.

"You have an appointment?"

The two boys held their scrolls up to her.

"Good," she said. "Come with me."

They passed through the giant gateway to the Temple on the tail of the abrupt woman and soon found themselves bracketed by two more armoured guards as they marched directly into the centre of the triangular fortress.

Zhair'lo tried to get his bearings, hoping to learn as much as he could of the Temple's layout.

Endowment, where he had done all of his upgrades to date, was off to his right. Form, where he had been forced to punish Talla, was off to his left. From Talla's memories, he knew that this central area was the domain of the Goddess. 

What went on here he couldn't say. He had only gone short distances into this section of the Temple. Twice he had been here to do Initiations. There was a cylindrical building around here somewhere for that purpose. Twice more he had been dumped here to sleep off one thing or another.

Now what will you do with me?

The guards were the stoic sort that didn't invite questions. If there was one thing in which he could be confident, it was that the Temple would let him know what he needed to know and only that much.

They found themselves marching in dim moonlight down a narrow, cobblestone alley which ended at a door. The guard thumped at the door with her fist.

The door was pulled open from the inside, brightening the alley with the crackling warmth of firelight.

"Your pair for the night," the guard said, handing the scrolls over to a woman in yellow who wore a small top and a single sash over her shoulder.

Zhair'lo found it telling that the guard hadn't even opened the scrolls to read them.

"Come in," the woman said, her voice distinctly soft as she ignored the manner of the women in leather.

The guards turned and marched away, leaving Zhair'lo to give a once over to the woman in yellow. Her breasts were too small for her to be from Endowment. Her muscles weren't strong enough to be from Form. Sweetness then. Her upgrades were in places he couldn't see, underneath the strips of her yellow skirt.

Zhair'lo and Zo'kar entered, one after the other. They found themselves in a what appeared to be some kind of a physician's office with two doors on the back wall. The room had plain white walls as most hospitals did and the place certainly had the smell of having been recently cleaned. There were only two beds off to the right side and, oddly enough, a warm, crackling fire off to the left.

"Remove your shirts," the woman ordered as she directed them to the beds. "And have a seat. The doctor will be here in a moment."

The two boys shared a glance, exchanged shrugs, and scooted up on top of the beds. They laid their work shirts aside and waited.

"Which one of you is Zhair'lo?"

"Me."

She turned to face him.

"Are you feeling well today?"

"Yes."

"Any trouble breathing?"

"No."

"Indigestion of any kind?"

"No."

"Last time you had sex?"

"Two nights ago."

"Do you remember her name?"

"Lana."

"Would you count backwards from 90 by sevens."

Arithmetic. Really? If they wanted someone who could do numbers, why not go find a woman?

"90," he said. "83, uh, 76 ..."

He went on, counting down to 34 before she stopped him.

"Good enough," she said and turned to the other bed. "You are Zo'kar."

"Yes, Mistress."

She ran through the exact same set of questions with Zo'kar and, upon receiving the same responses, asked him to count backwards from 110 by nines.

Satisfied that they were feeling well and could subtract, she had them lie down on their beds.

She knocked on the door nearest their beds and pushed the door open a crack.

"Mistress Tia?" she called.

Zhair'lo heard footsteps as another woman entered the room. This one was dressed like a doctor. She wore the white smock, unfastened at the front to reveal her blue blouse and skirt.

Zhair'lo recognized her immediately. This was the same woman who had examined him following Talla's first upgrade. She'd interrupted Renia and Ella's eager ministrations in order to survey his body.

"Feeling well?" she asked as she laid her ear against Zhair'lo's chest.

"Yes, Mistress."

"Take a deep breath, please," she said.

He inhaled and exhaled.

"From the diaphragm," she admonished, patting his stomach.

Extending his abdomen, he took another breath as she listened dispassionately and focused her eyes on the wall behind him.

"Have you masturbated today?"

Zhair'lo almost choked.

"No, Mistress."

She nodded and stood up.

"He's good. Send him through."

"Come with me," the woman in yellow said and waved him through the second door which she had already opened. "There's a shower at the end of the hall. Rinse yourself quickly and put on the white shorts from the rack. Then go through to the other side of the shower."

Zhair'lo nodded. What in the nine hells were they up to? He half expected a pair of girls in white skirts to be waiting in the showers, but no, it was just him. He tossed his shorts aside and kicked the floor lever that he knew would start the shower running. Men never had this kind of luxury. Running water existed only inside the Temple where an aqueduct from up in the mountains fed highly placed cisterns. He had a map of that network, courtesy of Talla, planted in his brain.

Was he going to be having sex with someone? It seemed possible, even likely. He cleaned himself thoroughly, just in case.

There was a white towel for drying and, as promised, a very thin pair of white shorts that, with a drawstring in the waist, would fit almost any man. Feeling a bit odd in the altogether too-clean clothing -- not to mention bare chest and back - he passed through the showers into the room beyond.

Well, that gave him pause. He was in a room with a great many doors to his left and right. In the middle of that room, sitting on a pair of benches, were six girls in various styles of white clothing. They all looked up -- with considerable enthusiasm -- when he entered.

"Here," a woman off to his side said as she thrust a wooden cup into his hand. "Drink this. You'll need the energy."

He was leery of the cup and its contents. The last time the Temple had made such an offer, it had done so in the person of Sonja, the Adjudicator in Form. After the ordeal with whatever mysterious brain poison had been in that glass, he'd woken up with a gap in his memory, the physical signs of having had sex and a barely subdued desire to vomit.

At least this liquid didn't smell like the last. And it came in a wooden cup instead of fine glassware. The woman who had passed it to him was dressed as a doctor, not a judge. That helped, too.

With a twitch of an eyebrow, he gulped it down. It tasted like plain, lukewarm water. If there was anything else in it, it wasn't that he could detect it.

"Good," this second doctor said, checking off something on the slate in her hands. She turned to the girls. "Rh'ris, you're up."

One of the six girls -- an Initiate in the shortest possible legal skirt she could wear -- stood up and held her hand out to Zhair'lo.

"C'mon," she said and, taking his hand, led him out through the single door in the back wall of the room.

Zhair'lo found himself staring at another wall just a few paces in front of him. He was in an open air alleyway, about wide enough for three or four to to walk abreast, that ran to his left and right.

"Let's go," Rh'ris said.

She started running down the alleyway to his right. He started after her.

"What are we doing?" he asked as he tried to match her pace.

"Running," she mocked. "Obviously."

She turned around and ran backwards in front of him, kicking her knees up high. He followed her and observed that the alleyway was curving to the left.

"Why are we running?"

"Not mine to ask," she replied with a smile.

He looked at her legs as they pounded at the ground. Muscular. Her calves shook with each impact. The lines of her hamstrings and quadriceps were cleanly visible with each flexing. She was probably an Initiate of Tight, which meant that she would be able to outrun him with ease. The look of her clearly visible midriff told him that an Iron upgrade would keep her from getting winded or cramped.

Seeing his gaze, she kicked her legs a little higher, so her knees came above her waist, and spread her thighs just slightly as she did so.

Clean, smooth, genitals. That's what Zhair'lo saw. He inhaled sharply.

"Oh," she said, false innocence bubbling up. "Did you see that? We'll just have to fuck later, then, won't we?"

She winked at him.

"If you can keep up with me, that is."

Rh'ris turned her back and bolted.

Gods damn it. He ran after her as the alleyway continued to curve to the left. They seemed to be making a circuit.

He kept his eyes on her, knowing the game for what it was. She wouldn't just run out of his sight. Her purpose was to test his stamina or, possibly, to wear him out. She would stay at exactly the distance that kept him trying his hardest.

So he ran, not knowing what else to do except obey what the Temple had set before him. Besides, there was sex in it for him ... probably ... and he'd grown rather attached to sex.

It was a monotonous course. There were occasional exits from the alleyway, none of which they took. There were torches in wall brackets at intervals so regular that no part of the route they were taking was particularly distinguishable from another. At what he guessed was about halfway around a full circuit, the path widened into a what might be called an atrium. They rushed past the space with its pillars holding up a small stone roof.

It wasn't long before they'd come full circle. It was about two hundred metres to return to the doorway where they'd entered the alleyway.

Was it really an alley? It was more like a track. He felt like a horse being taken out for a run.

They didn't stop. How long was this going to take?

Rh'ris wasn't sprinting. Zhair'lo could run faster than this, at least for a short while. Hell, when he'd gone to meet Talla, he'd had to run faster than this. This test was about endurance.

Fine, is that your game? I can play that, too.

She kept ahead of him until a little ways after they'd finish their second lap. At that point, she slowed down a bit, allowing him to pull up alongside her.

"We're going to stop for a minute up here," she told him.

Following her lead, he slowed down to the pace of a brisk walk and marched into the atrium.

"On the carpet," she said. "You should be able to outdo me on this one."

She went down into a push-up position, her palms and toes against the surface of the carpet. Breathing with much more labour than she was, Zhair'lo got down beside her.

"Twenty push-ups," she told him. "Like this -- keep your back straight."

The reason he could do twenty push-ups more quickly than she could was that she had no Strength upgrades. He probably wasn't supposed to know things like that. He was at ten push-ups while she was still struggling with five.

Footsteps approached. Fast. Two people running. There was flash of white cloth and pinkish brown skin. Zo'kar, presumably, was doing the same thing he was.

He rattled off his full set of twenty before Rh'ris got to ten.

Rh'ris didn't bother finishing. She just got back up and started running again.

Zhair'lo pursued.

It wasn't just the running. He'd run this hard, and at least this long, in his quest to meet Talla in the middle of a forest. The terrain had actually been harder than this rather well maintained track. It was the bit where, every lap or two, Rh'ris would make him stop and do push ups. After the first time, she made sure that he did his right behind her, so he could see up her skirt. She would alternate that with sit-ups which, given that they did those facing each other with their ankles locked together, gave him a similar view.

Zhair'lo had done a lot of running, for one reason or another. He wondered, light headed as he was, if Zo'kar was having a harder time with hit. Occasionally, he would run past Zo'kar and his girl as they exercised on the carpet, or the two of them would run by Zhair'lo and Rh'ris.

He wasn't tracking time all that well. He'd lost count of how many times they'd gone around. The best he could was figure that he'd done five sets of push-ups and four of sit-ups. The only thing that propelled him forward was the sight of Rh'ris's legs. He kept his eyes fixed there, trying to ignore the pain building up in his legs.

They came around to the start of the track. Rh'ris slowed yet again. Was it possible they were done? There was no room here for calisthenics here; no carpet or even space. This was where they'd entered the track.

Panting -- he was glad to see that she was at least breathing hard - she grabbed his hand and pulled him back through the doorway. Past the four waiting girls they went into a much smaller room.

"You want me?" she asked, her eyes gleaming.

"Oh, yeah," he breathed back to her.

"Good."

There was no bed in the room. It was empty except for a small chair, a towel draped over said chair, and a torch in a bracket on the wall. The chair was apparently there for her to lean on, which she promptly turned around and did.

The torch was there so he could see well enough to-

"Stick it in," she begged. "Come on."

Standing up? Nine hells. All that running and he'd have to do her standing up?

But there she was, her hips bent over, poised and waiting. The angle of her contortion was enough to take her skirt entirely out of the equation. At least if he could get inside her, the mesh ought to take him away. Already, his erection was taking much needed blood away from his brain. He leaned on her, grabbing her hips, and tried to retrieve his balance.

"What are you waiting for?" she pleaded. "C'mon, c'mon!"

The white shorts dropped to the floor. At least access was easy. He placed the head of his shaft against her lips, feeling the wetness. It was satisfying to know that this whole ridiculous ordeal was affecting her as much as it affected him. She lifted her hips to make the angle right.

He pushed, filling her tunnel in one smooth, well lubricated stroke.

Then he stopped.

With his shaft completely buried in her, his testicles bumping against her, he felt no mesh.

Nothing.

Not even a tingle.

"It's okay," she said, her voice drenched in desperation. "Just keep going."

The first sex he'd ever had was with Talla. They'd gotten right inside one another's heads. She'd literally glowed when they reached simultaneous orgasm. That was the promise of the mesh: that the arousal of one partner became the arousal of both; that the first to reach orgasm reached it for both.

Since then, every sexual episode except the ones with Talla had been disappointing in its lack of mental stimulation. But even then, sex had always brought with it the mesh, the thing which combined the primal sexuality of two into one.

Here, with Rh'ris, there was no such thing.

He could squeeze her hips in his hands. He could see the finely muscled cheeks. He could feel the long, moist tunnel that surrounded and clenched at his erection.

But nothing more. It was a strange experience, halfway between masturbation and sex.

Zhair'lo spared it only a thought. Whatever it was that was going on, he was cranked well past his limit of endurance. His understanding of sexuality was pretty simple. A woman showed up, called a man's name, and the two of them had sex. It was a rare thing for a man to be aroused and not have it immediately followed by penetration.

So he started pumping.

"Yeah, harder," Rh'ris egged him on. "We've only got a few minutes. Faster, faster."

Easy for her to say. She just had to bend over. Plus, she had a chair to lean on.

What was going to happen here anyway? What if he just came really quickly? Would she have an orgasm, too? Maybe she could feel him even while he couldn't feel her. That was possible, if a bit odd.

Owing to his exhaustion, he determined to come as quickly as he could and so starting pounding at her, yanking back on her hips to punctuate each thrust.

"Oh, that's it!" she cried out. "Yes!"

Rh'ris was holding on to the chair for dear life. He thought it might have been wiser of her to just use the wall. The chair didn't look up to the challenge. How embarrassing would it be if the thing got pushed over and sent the two of them forward in a heap?

"Don't slow down," she said. "Keep going. Just one more minute."

One more minute? How long had they been at this now? And where in the nine hells was his orgasm anyway? He'd meant to come inside her quickly, but he couldn't quite seem to reach -

Someone knocked at the door.

"Gotta stop," she ordered.

"What?" he asked, freezing up.

She slid herself forward, releasing his erection from her body, and turned so she could collapse on the chair.

"Here," she said, tossing him a towel as she tried to catch her breath.

The towel was soaked with cold water. The index finger of her right hand waved in the general direction of his manhood.

"Wipe ... yourself off," she said between breaths. "It'll ... make the rest ... easier for you."

"The rest ... of what?" he panted back.

Her eyes met his.

"You're not done yet," she said. She closed her eyes, anguish visible in her features, before adding, "Although I am. Madra Zen, I hate this."

She moaned, squeezing her thighs together.

The cold water had the desired effect on Zhair'lo. He felt his erection dwindling.

"Now what?"

"Out you go," she said, waving him towards the door.

Confused and light headed, he pulled his shorts back on and went for to the door. He turned to give one last look at the exhausted girl. The last thing he saw was her hand sliding up under her skirt.

Well, then ...

"Zhair'lo?"

A bright eyed girl appeared in front of him. She had shoulder length hair just going blonde and a beautifully shaped face wrapped around the most sparkling pair of blue eyes he'd ever seen.

"Yeah?"

"Come on," she said, a killer smile curving her delicate lips upward. "No time to rest."

"What? You're kidding."

She shook her head and dragged him back out onto the track. He went along, not quite willingly.

"Look," she said, her eyes no less bright for the drop in the tone of her voice, "if you want to come, you keep up with me. We can go all night otherwise."

He took a deep breath.

Well. Nine hells, then. What choice did he really have?

At the very least, she couldn't set the pace Rh'ris had taken. She was obviously a Disciple of Facial. He imagined doing her upgrade for a moment. In his nearly exhausted state, the image of himself ejaculating into that gorgeous visage was the kind of motivation he needed. He started jogging after her.

True enough, her primary Discipline had to be Facial, but she also had an upgrade in Tight. He could see that from the excellent muscular condition of her legs and her ass. The skirt she wore, basically identical to Rh'ris's, did little to hide the muscles that propelled her body forward.

He tried to block it all out, just like before; tried to ignore the pain and just let his body do what had to be done without thinking about it. It wasn't working very well. That screwed up sexual encounter was really messing with him. Was he going to have sex with -- um -

"What's your name?" he called out.

"What?" she turned around to face him, continuing to run backwards with just as much skill as Rh'ris had.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 01



"Your name," he repeated.

"Oh!" she exclaimed brightly, apparently surprised. "I'm Erin."

Her bouncy energy was bordering on irritating, but he didn't have the energy to be annoyed. Everything he owned was dedicated into driving his body forward in pursuit of the flesh under the fluttering white skirt ahead of him.

Looking closely as she galloped along the cobblestone, he tried to tell if she was wearing anything underneath that skirt. He couldn't be sure. Twice now his bed had been graced by girls from Form. One of them actually wore underwear of a type that was reduced in the rear to barely a thread, buried between her cheeks. Erin was either naked under that skirt or wearing that kind of underwear.

"Alright," she said, slowing her pace. "Time for some sit-ups. You first."

It was easier this time, perhaps allowing for the limits of his endurance. She sat on his feet while he did ten sit-ups.

"My turn," she announced.

That was a relief. He would get a break while she did something. Deciding that it was best to put that time to good use, he inhaled as deeply as he could.

As Erin lay on her back and he took his place sitting on her feet, he got a good look up her skirt. Seeing the line of his gaze, she smirked.

"Don't worry," she chided him patronizingly. "You'll get to do me, too."

She started doing her sit-ups, having a much harder time of it than he had had. When she got to five, she pulled her feet out from under him.

"Ten more for you," she ordered, taking her position.

Hell.

He pumped out ten more, feeling a burning in his stomach as he reached the end.

"Excellent," she praised him.

There was no rest after that. She pulled on his arms and got him upright so they could start running again.

Zhair'lo was sure that the pace was slower, but there was nothing otherwise to distinguish this from the the run with Rh'ris. All he understood was that, frustrating as it was, he had to follow Erin. Something inside him was driving his legs, pumping his arms, motivating his brain to heed her instructions.

So around and around they went. Sit-ups and push-ups every other lap, with Zhair'lo acquiescing to every exercise demanded of him.

He was trying to count the number of circuits he had made, hoping that he had counted them correctly with Rh'ris and that Erin would stop at the same point. Five times with the push-ups and four with the sit-ups, right?

When they stopped at what he thought ought to be the ninth and therefore last set of exercises, Erin had him doing sit-ups again.

'Ten and five and ten,' he told himself, counting off her exercises alternating with his. It was a song in his head, those three numbers. Over and over again, tapped out inside his skull until his brain went entirely numb.

When he finished his last set, he watched in dumbfounded amazement as she unlaced her skirt and left it lying on the cobblestones. He top went next. He found himself staring at a very beautiful, entirely naked, skinny girl.

Her eyes met his, some sharp analysis burrowing into his skull. What was she looking for? What was any of this for?

Reaching some point of mental satisfaction, she nodded at him sagely and stood up.

"Almost done," she said. "Let's go."

She was going to run wearing nothing but her sandals?

Apparently.

He was now pursuing a naked girl, for reasons unclear, around a cobblestone alleyway deep inside the Temple. He was going to have sex with her, just like that last girl he'd chased. And maybe then, if he was lucky, he could come inside her and then pass out. Or drop dead. Either one would be fine.

A couple weeks and few days before, he had considered the advent of a girl named Atani accidentally exposing herself to him. She had then been forced, by her superior, to suck on his penis, been whipped with a thorned branch and then jerked him out all over her breasts.

He had decided then, as that girl had dashed away to her next assignment with her semen filled top, that adulthood was outright fucking weird.

Zhair'lo acknowledged, as she chased Erin, that it was still getting weirder.

Time passed more quickly, it seemed. Whether it was due to his state of incapacity being generally increased or the distraction of the spectacularly displayed specimen of femininity pumping her legs in front of him, he couldn't say.

Gods, those muscles ...

Erin grabbed his hand to slow him down and pulled him back through the entrance to the track. Wiping away the sweat that stung his eyebrows, he was barely able to note that there were only two girls in little white skirts left in the room through which Erin dragged him. The new room into which she took him had a very small bed at a curious height.

Curious, but not mysterious.

Zhair'lo rolled his eyes in bitter realization.

Erin, already bereft of clothing, sprightly hopped up on bed and spread her legs in welcome.

He paused, looking carefully into her eyes.

She smiled and nodded as if that was exactly what she expected him to do.

"Come on," she begged. One of her hands went between her legs, her fingers parting her lips. "I'm waiting for you."

Fair enough. He undid his shorts and dropped them on the ground. His penis sprang joyfully free. When had he managed to get an erection? He was pretty sure he hadn't had one while he'd been running.

She was wet. He could see that before he even touched her. She would be just like Rh'ris except that she was facing him.

Penis to vagina. Push. Moist tunnel. All the way in.

It was a bit of a relief, just to stop moving even if he still had to remain on his feet. And there was the thrill of knowing in advance that there would be no mesh. He was feeling the inside of her body without feeling the inside of her head at the same time. It was just him, Zhair'lo, disconnectedly penetrating her without having any idea how it felt from her side. He had only her moans to go by, which he knew weren't as clear cut as they should be. The most pained expression could often indicate the greatest pleasure. He'd had enough partners to realize that simple fact.

On the other hand, he considered himself far too tired, and Erin far too eager, to worry about the possibility of hurting her.

Erin locked her legs around his back.

"You wanna come?" she whispered into his ear.

"Yeah," he gasped back.

Accentuating each word with a thrust, she replied. "Then. You. Gotta. Go. Hard."

Was this really the end? If he could just release himself inside her, would he be done? That made it worth trying a little harder. And since she'd literally asked for it, he felt no particular regard for being gentle with her body. Risking a collapse into unconsciousness, he started pounding at her as hard as his beleaguered thighs and burning calves could manage.

He should have been able to come. He ran the head of his penis back and forth across the tight ring of muscle at her entrance, a move that always brought him and his partner to the greatest peak of pleasure. All it did was harden his erection and bring appreciative moans from Erin.

"Mm, such a big boy," she muttered into his ear as she hung on to him. "Keep going."

But try as he might, he couldn't make himself come. Anything to get out of this, to end this thing to which they were subjecting him. But no, they had him trapped here. He had to obey; to follow where they led; to serve their unknown cause.

Delirious, he continued to pump away at Erin, ploughing past her lips and up inside her over and over again, because that's what she'd asked for.

"Alright, alright," she said to him, panting. "Take a breath or two."

Thankful, he leaned himself into her, pushing his manhood as far up into her body as it could go. She let out a muffled cry at this, perhaps not expecting it. He paid it no mind and concentrated on catching his breath.

"Can't," he said.

"Can't what?" she asked, a touch of worry in her voice. She lifted his head so her still sparkling blue eyes could look directly into his brown ones.

"Can't come," he told her.

There was a knock at the door.

"It's okay," she said, still holding his face in her hands. "You're doing fine. Just fine, alright?"

He nodded and let her push him away, sliding his thoroughly coated penis out of her body. She moaned at this. The features of her face that had always been bright, cheerful and gorgeous now transmuted to agony, the same as he had last seen on Rh'ris's face.

Erin tossed a cold towel at him. He already knew what to do, but first first wiped down his face and his bare back. He wasn't the least bit surprised when its application to his genitals diminished his erection until it was able to fit inside the sweaty pair of shorts he'd left on the floor.

Not bothering to wait for Erin to wave him out, nor looking back to see her masturbating as he knew she would be, he went back into the main room.

There were two girls. He sighed. Of course there were. There had been six when he entered at the beginning of this ... thing he was doing. Three were for him and, quite obviously, three were for Zo'kar. Was this it, then? Was this the end?

"Zhair'lo?" one of the girls said, rising.

It was the same eager smile. She wasn't as pretty as Erin. Her hair was streaked with reds and blondes, though, and the muscles rippling across her stomach told her he was dealing with an Iron girl. His chief concern was her legs. Nothing there. Skinny as any girl he'd ever seen.

Not from Tight.

Not a fast runner.

He was relieved, even as she dragged him back out onto the track. He leaned over, bracing his hands on his knees.

"And you are?" he asked, stalling as best he could.

"Pardon?"

"Your name."

Was there something weird about wanting to know their names? Why did they seem so surprised? Was he just supposed to shout "Hey, you!" whenever he wanted to get her attention?

"En'tha," she said, looking him over carefully.

He took every second she was willing to give, using it to try to calm his body down.

"You can take a minute here," she said. "Catch your breath."

"Thanks," he said.

She took a couple of steps backwards away from him and watched him carefully. With what seemed to him a very odd sense of anxiety, she undid the tie on her little skirt and let it slide to the ground.

That was not helping to calm his breath. She stood there, thighs close together, knees bent inward and her skirt around her ankles, and watched him. His gaze wondered from her hairless slit up to her chest and then to her eyes.

What was she expecting from him? The look in her eyes was analytical and the way she was biting her lip told him that she was tense.

He was still crouched over, leaning on his knees. That seemed wrong. He straightened up, looking over her body as he did so. She took a step back, as if ready to run. When he moved no closer to her, she relaxed a little and immediately pulled her little white top off over her head.

Alright, then.

So unlike Erin, En'tha was going to be running naked right from the start. He doubted that this would lead to any less work for him. In fact, it would only make things more difficult.

"Ready to run?" she asked, utterly deadpan.

He nodded, then reconsidered, saying, "Not particularly."

"Come on."

Hell, then.

They hadn't let him off his feet since this began, unless you counted the excruciating sets of push-ups and sit-ups. The moment he started running the ache in legs returned. The little break En'tha had just given him became a faint memory.

This time, however, was different. This skinny girl was completely naked, her flesh bare except for what coverage was given by a pair of sandals and the shortish hair that, in its blonde and red streaks, reflected the flickering light from torches mounted along the alley.

So he ran, keeping his eyes on En'tha's back. He could see the muscles that traced their way from her waist up her spine to her shoulders. Fine. Supple. Her little butt wasn't so bad either. Nothing like Rh'ris, but still ... he was possessed of a mind that had gone numb with arousal.

He followed, blindly obedient. Sweat built up, ran down his face. If he'd had a shirt on, he'd have used it to clear the sweat away. But they'd given nothing, leaving him to use the back of his hand to clear his burning eyes.

They stopped. Had it been a lap and a half already?

Push-ups again. They did them facing each other, eyes meeting. En'tha did hers much more slowly than he did his. It let him look over the back of her body when she was down while he was up.

So pretty. He'd get to have sex with her, right? Had to.

Had to be the last one, too, didn't it? There weren't any girls left. The other one left in the room must be for Zo'kar.

They were running again.

What was the point of all this?

"Come on, Zhair'lo," she prodded him when he appeared to flag. "Only a few more laps and you can have me."

Some promise. He was sure he'd have an erection for her. He was quite certain he would jam it into her body from whatever position she wanted. But he wouldn't be able to come. He'd already tried so hard with Erin and gotten nothing but insane levels of frustration.

Yet still, he ran.

En'tha wanted him to follow and he was going to follow. He wasn't going to give up and he was going to prove he wasn't the kind to give up. Whatever in the nine hells else went on, that much would be clear to everyone.

He clenched his teeth. They were stopping again.

Sit-ups this time. No trouble for her. She did twenty as least as fast as he could, and she was counting out loud while she did.

She stood up.

"Here," she said, handing him a wooden cup filled with -- apparently -- water.

Where had this come from? There was a small wooden table beside the carpet on which they'd done all their exercising. Had that always been there? He was sure he would have noticed. Probably.

"Drink up," she said. "You need it."

She didn't take a drink herself. At least Sonja had done him that courtesy. It had been a lie, of course. It didn't really count unless the drink was poured from the same carafe.

But it didn't smell funny. It didn't smell at all. It went straight down like water and felt delicious in his belly, reinvigorating his entire body.

She laid the cup aside and starting running again. Around and around they went. They didn't stop at the appointed times. No more sit-ups. No more push-ups. Just Zhair'lo in his white shorts and En'tha in her sandals.

'When this is done,' he told himself, 'I'm going to fuck her like crazy.'

"Almost there, boy," she said. "One more lap and I'm all yours."

He clenched his teeth as she started to sprint. She might not have any Tight upgrades, but he'd been doing this three times longer than she had and he had a gut full of gods-knew-what that had been hidden in those cups of water.

A lightness in his head began to develop as he sprinted harder and harder to keep up with his quarry. Euphoria overtook his senses as his legs seemed to go numb with the delight of it all. What was going on now? He was so happy that he ran the last lap as if his feet weren't even touching the ground. For a moment, the numbness was frightening. He thought the lack of sensation in his legs might lead him to fall on the cobblestones. The thought of his body skidding along the ground, smearing his blood all over the alley made him distinctly queasy.

Finally, they came to the doorway.

The end, at last. His legs feeling like jelly, he came to a clumsy stop and leaned against the nearest wall.

"Come on, come on," she said, eager now.

She faced him and pulled him backwards through the doorway into the now empty waiting room.

"You want me now?" she asked, pausing to bite her lower lip. "You wanna come? Let's go."

They went through to yet another room. This one had, blessings of all nine gods, a very short, thin bed. En'tha sat down on the edge of the bed and laid on her back. She spread her legs to him, exaggerating the whole thing by actually opening her lips with her fingers.

He moved toward her, dropping his sweat-soaked shorts to the floor. It wasn't just the shorts, but his entire body -- both of their bodies -- that were glistening in the torch light.

"Wait," she said.

"Whuh?"

He froze, the end of his erection less than a handspan from her delicately splayed orifice.

Their eyes met. She seemed curious, piercing into his skull with her gaze. He was pretty sure he looked completely dumbfounded. What was this about, now?

"I'm sorry you can't fuck me," she said, as if she had known that to be the case all along. She took the ever present towel and used it wipe down herself down from crotch to neck. "But I do want your come."

Her heels dug into his the muscles of his thighs and ass, all off which were beaten into soreness from the running, and pulled him in so his erection lay across her bald mound and over her ripped stomach.

"All over me, okay?" she asked, her voice gone light and subservient.

She took him in hand, her sweat mixing with his as she stroked him.

"Anywhere you want," she coaxed gently.

"Won't work," he grunted. "Tried before."

He could barely manage to make any words at all. There just wasn't enough blood, or energy, or whatever. Why couldn't they lie down and do this? Why did he have to stand?

She stroked him quickly, expertly. Did she do this sort of thing often?

"It'll work now," she stated confidently. "The drink will have cleared you up."

He hoped he would be able to remember that later, that she had confessed to him the Temple's ownership of a drink that could stop a man from coming and another that could release him again.

"But I need it now," she reminded him. "Let it loose all over me."

Her other hand starting fiddling with his testicles, tickling the short hairs underneath. Her stroking accelerated.

"Getting bigger, getting bigger," she encouraged. "Gimme, gimme. Everywhere, everywhere."

Zhair'lo let out a loud, anguished roar when his muscles finally spasmed out the first volley of his orgasm. A line of semen launched out of him, tracing a dotted line from her navel up just aside of her nipple and over her shoulder.

"Oh!" she shouted in surprise, turning her head as his ejaculate flashed by.

He turned his body, determined that at least one -- there! -- straight up between her pert little breasts and up onto her chin.

She played him like a musical instrument. Her grasp was perfect, her motion flawless. Bead after bead of white fluid launched forth from him, streaking across her stomach and chest, occasioning to reach one side of her face or the other.

When it was done, he collapsed forward, leaning with both hands on the bed, placed either side of her hips. He looked her over. There must have been a dozen strips of semen laid across her body from her forehead down to her stomach.

"Good work," she said, milking the last drops out into her navel.

He felt completely empty. Whatever they had put into those drinks, it had done things to his body he couldn't explain.

"It's okay," she told him. "You're done now."

She slipped out from underneath him.

"There you go. Lie down and rest."

He landed with a thump on bed, not caring for his nudity.

-----------===================-------------

The Sorceress of Within, wearing her simplest green skirt, shirt and sash, joined the table where six doctors, including her Second, Tia, sat. Away from the public, they had discarded their long, white coats and reverted to blues, oranges, yellows and -- for the Sorceress herself -- green.

"How do the numbers look for tonight?" Within asked.

"Quite well, Mistress," Tia replied.

"Our young heroes, the Seal Breakers, performed well, then?"

Tia nodded to one of her subordinates in orange, who referred to a sheet of parchment.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 01



"Zhair'lo M'han," she read off. "Coercion score: zero. Intimidation score: zero. Dedication: complete. Stamina: complete."

"Zo'kar Ch'lai," she continued. "Same scores, slightly lower for Stamina and Dedication. Nothing to be concerned about. It's likely Zhair'lo simply gets more exercise in his current assignment, Mistress."

"And?" Within asked, gesturing to the pair of small brass tubes on the stand in the centre of the table.

Tia's lips twisted just slightly.

"We were waiting for you, Mistress," she said.

"Very well," Within said. "Set it up."

The youngest doctor, a woman wearing the yellow skirt and double sashes of an Adept II took a stack of flat glass plates and spread them out on the table as if she were dealing tiles for some board game.

"First sample," she said, lifting up the tube with the numeral '1' on it.

She turned the tube on its side and let the thick, white liquid inside it slide out to leave a small white puddle on each of seven pieces of glassware. She pushed these in front of her compatriots, keeping one for herself.

"Let us see what we have," Within said.

She lifted her plate to her mouth and reached out with the tip of her tongue to take a light taste. When the tip of her tongue made contact, she felt a slight tingle. With a quick motion, she upended the plate and deposited the entirety of her portion on the flat of her tongue. Around her, six other women did the same.

"The citrus taste is undoubtedly present," Tia observed. "About average, in my experience."

"Is there consensus?" Within asked, meeting each woman's eyes one pair at a time. "Any danger of Catatonia or Rage?"

There was no such concern.

"Mark him Heroic."

The doctor nodded.

"Sample two."

Seven new plates were used for next test, so as to avoid contamination. From the second tube, a considerable amount of semen was poured out on to each plate.

"That's quite a bit," Within noted, eyeing the volume on her plate incredulously.

"There's more in the tube," the doctor pointed out.

"Zhair'lo, then," she said. "Well, here we are."

The doctor in yellow frowned. This was supposed to be done double blind. On the other hand, it was blatantly obvious.

As before, she tilted the plate to her lips to take a taste before dumping the contents into her mouth.

"Hah!" she cried out, slapping the glass plate down on the table.

She could feel sweat forming on her brow and tears forming in her eyes as the sharp, acidic taste struck her tongue and lit down her throat. She swallowed involuntarily and it made her spine tingle.

All around her, her Disciples were having similar experiences. Forewarned by her reaction, they at least kept themselves from crying out or threatening the glassware.

"The test procedure is designed to intensify -", she paused, recollecting her breath and her thoughts, "intensify the taste."

"Yes," Tia agreed, trying to remain clinically detached. "But really. Have you ever -?"

"No," Within said. "Never a Hero like this."

There was a pause as seven women stopped to consider the ramifications. The purpose of the test was clear.

"If I'd ever tasted him," Within said, her eyes gone distant. "I would have said to skip all the other testing. That's -"

She managed to gather her dignity, but it took some effort.

"Mark him Heroic," she said. "Inform his current Master that his training may begin."

The women of Sweetness, after all, had a specific responsibility in this regard.

They tested the men and determined who should be taught the handling of weapons and who should not. They separated the loyal Heroes from the rest: the Catatonics who would merely become useless when it all went to hell; and the Enraged who would never, as long as it could be prevented, be allowed near weaponry of any sort.

"There is extra?" Within asked.

"Yes, Mistress," the doctor in yellow replied, looking down into the tube. "Quite a bit."

"Give here," the Sorceress ordered. "I'll see if her Highness has ever tasted anything like it."

The doctor handed the tube over.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 02



"The whole thing was really infantile."

It was late at night, even for women who were normally night owls. The Goddess was clearly at the end of her energy, not evening bothering to stand to welcome one of her most highly ranked underlings to her chambers.

As it was, the chambers were lit by the fewest number of torches that could possibly be used without making navigation hazardous.

"Imminence," the Queen of Endowment nodded in a fashion that was not quite indicative of agreement.

It wouldn't do to disagree with her Goddess. Of course not. But she did have to stand up for her subordinates as well.

"Form had already imposed a moratorium on Zhair'lo doing upgrades," the Queen explained. "Since the Test required a similar period of time without upgrades, it only made sense to do both at once. It was within Abundance's authority to order that test, given that her Discipline had found Zhair'lo."

In the faint light, she could see the Goddess smirking.

"And Zo'kar?" her Imminence asked. "Why take both Seal Breakers out of commission?"

"To make the Test easier, of course," the Queen cocked her head to reply. "Agemates are the best for the procedure. They run and otherwise perform at similar speeds. The whole thing goes more smoothly that way -- or so the physicians tell us."

"It had nothing to do, then, with wanting to get revenge on Form for punishing your little quadruple girl?"

It took some effort for the Goddess to pretend that Talla was a minor issue; a matter too trifling to come to the attention of one of her rank.

"While it is true," the Queen said, "that Form's declaration of a moratorium on Zhair'lo would have exhausted our time of privileged access to him -"

"And declaring a Test would simply suspend his last few days for later use," the Goddess interrupted.

"Yes," the Queen replied. "While that is true, as I said, I would hardly attribute such base motives to a Sorceress-"

The Goddess waved a weary hand at her underling.

"Enough, enough," she sighed. "Sit down, please."

Every moment the Queen spent standing was a moment she might see over the edge of the Goddess's fine obsidian desk and notice her slightly distended belly. Even distracted as she was by this pointless infighting, the woman would eventually have to clue in and the Goddess didn't need anyone outside her inner circle of genealogists figuring out what she was up to.

The Queen shifted her layered red skirts and politely sat in one of the chairs opposite her Goddess.

"There was some other reason you summoned me, Imminence?"

"The test results, obviously," the Goddess said.

She slid two pieces of parchment across the desk. Endowment examined them.

"Zhair'lo is off the chart, as you can imagine," she pointed out. "I tried him myself -- there was enough left over after your fellow Queen in Sweetness had a taste. I've never experienced anything like it."

The Queen of Endowment raised her eyebrows.

"You tasted his seed?"

"With the advice of the Sorceress of Within, who insisted that we get the widest relative observation possible," the Goddess explained. "No one who tried a sample could remember anything comparable."

"And only eighteen. Amazing."

"Yes. They're both taking today off, mind you. They may be Heroes, but their youth left them unprepared for the physical demands of the Test."

The Queen of Endowment nodded.

"They'll be ready for tomorrow, though?" she asked, sliding the sheets back across the desk. "We have them scheduled for upgrades. Just four Seals left to break."

"Within assures me they will be ready."

"Excellent. Is there anything else, Imminence?"

"No."

The Queen of Endowment rose and gave a polite bow to her superior.

"I wish to make it clear, however," the Goddess said, just as the Queen was turning away, "that I don't want any further -- situations like this."

"I understand, Imminence."

"Good," she said with a nod. "You are dismissed."

When she had left the room, a woman in green stepped out from a curtain behind the Goddess.

"You get all that, Pussy?" the Goddess asked.

"Yes, Imminence," the Sorceress replied. "Not as bad as you'd feared."

"True enough," she agreed, taking the opportunity to stand up.

Her belly was noticeable, even covered in black clothing and the relative darkness of her innermost chamber.

"It was extremely unlikely that there could be a real incident over something like this," Pussy pointed out. "Talla clearly violated the Monogamy Protocol as well as a number of other rules. Abundance couldn't possibly deny it."

"Oh, of course," the Goddess agreed, hands on her hips. "But what about that idiot from the Adjudicate's office actually going so far as to place a temporary ban on Zhair'lo? She might as well have ripped the toggles right off Abundance's blouse."

Not that anyone actually put toggles on blouses anymore.

"Well, Abundance certainly replied in kind," Pussy said. "I get the feeling Endowment wasn't entirely in agreement."

The Goddess mumbled hesitantly. "Are you sure? I couldn't detect it."

"Possibly the effects of your pregnancy," Pussy pointed out. "Endowment was clearly uncomfortable with her Disciple's action."

"As long as they don't start killing each other," the Goddess said. "This will blow over in a few years when there are new Queens and Sorceresses."

"Killing each other?" Pussy asked. "I would have thought it would be fairly one-sided if it came to that. Surely Form would win that battle."

The Goddess let out a dark laugh.

"Have you ever done battle with Engineers?" she asked. "The warriors of Form can stab you. The women of Endowment can arrange for your building to suddenly collapse on you in the middle of the night."

Pussy's eyes widened.

"Really? That wasn't in any history book I recall."

"Yes," the Goddess replied, rubbing her belly absentmindedly. "I doubt this will get that far here, but there are records of such things getting out of control."

-----------===================-------------

"Illya!" a whisper came to her in the night.

"Arda?" she asked the darkness.

She twitched as someone sat on her bed.

"Did you get your scroll?" Arda asked, her voice a little too loud with excitement.

"Yes," she confirmed, sharing her friend's excitement. "You too?"

"Two days," Arda said. "Two days and we can get out of here."

"Cocks for everyone," Illya said. "I'm sure it'll work."

"We were trying to sleep," someone complained from across the room.

"Sorry, Gerta," Arda said.

"They weren't sleeping," Illya accused with a giggle. She reached for her night table, found a match, and used it to light a candle.

Gerta and Malin were lying in the same bed. Sure, they were under a blanket, but it was pretty obvious what was going on.

"We both got scrolls," Illya told them. "They're doing upgrades again. It must be the Seal Breakers. They're back!"

Sitting up with her blanket down at her waist, Illya looked down at her bare chest.

"That means I'll be getting a real pair of boobs soon," she told Gerta. "And so will you."

"So we're going to be alone in here?" Malin asked. She sat up now, too, quite casually allowing the blanket to fall off her upper body, revealing her own nudity.

"For two days," Arda replied. "Two days and I'm sure they'll let Zhair'lo and Zo'kar take a hack at you guys."

Malin inhaled and looked down at her body.

"Third time," she said. "Third time to get my Point upgrade."

"It will work," Gerta said as she stood up.

The girls had swapped beds so often that they had no shyness with each other's bodies. The fact that Gerta now paced the room completely naked was nothing to any of them.

"They'll upgrade you two, then the two of us," she declared firmly. They were all used to these pep talks, pacing and all. Gerta's normally inscrutable face would tighten up, her eyes going deeper than even their normal extreme depth as she attempted to rally her colleagues and maintain their optimism.

They had learned to ride out these lectures.

"Then we get out of here and get a real room, and real short skirts and everything," Gerta said. "We've thought we were getting out before, but this time is the real thing. It's really going to work, I'm sure of it. You've got to have confidence that -"

Gerta had been so focused on delivering her speech that she had failed to notice Malin crawling to the edge of the bed they'd been sharing. A high pitched snap filled the room as Gerta took a palm off her nearest cheek.

"What was that for?" Gerta asked Malin sternly as she rubbed her rear.

Wide eyed innocence on display and still on all fours, Malin asked, "Aren't you going to miss me?"

Gerta occasioned to take herself too seriously, to the point where her young roommates feared for her heart. It was Malin, light and playful, the polar opposite, who could shake her up and bring her back down.

Pomposity cut back and now being replaced with fury, she turned on Malin with her fists on her hips.

"That's no reason to spank me."

"Isn't it?" Malin asked as she sat up and backed away. She opened her mouth and licked her lower lip. "What are you going to do about it?"

Gerta stared at Malin a moment before speaking.

"Get her!"

Illya and Arda -- who was the only one still clothed -- leapt across from Illya's bed and pounced on Malin.

"Hey!" Malin protested halfheartedly.

Illya and Arda soon had Malin flipped over on her stomach. They were aided by the utterly ineffective way in which Malin tried to fight them off. There was a snap as Gerta took her vengeance at Malin's exposed rear.

"Oh!" Malin moaned.

A moment later and a completely different moan escaped her lips. Her body went limp and Illya suddenly noticed the scent. Gerta and Malin really had been in the middle of something, hadn't they? No wonder Malin was so playful.

Illya looked down Malin's body, watching in rapt fascination as Gerta slowly penetrated her sister with first one finger, then two, then three. In all the time they'd been locked up here with each other, they had always been discreet. A little eye contact before the torches were put out told you who was horny and would come to your bed. If you heard something late at night, you just pretended it wasn't happening.

And, last of all but utterly consistent throughout every encounter, you always did it in the dark. Why? Because it was wrong, of course. They were supposed to be saving all of their energy for the boys.

'But you won't give us boys, will you?' Illya asked the Temple.

Now she watched as one of her sisters lifted her hips so her vagina could be penetrated more easily with the fingers of another sister.

Malin regained enough control of herself to pat the space in front of her face with her hand.

"Here, Illya," she said blearily. "Here."

She wasn't sure why Malin had picked her, except that she was naked and Arda was still dressed. Illya spread her legs on either side of the bed but there wasn't enough room for her to lie down and give Malin an angle. Realizing the problem, Malin curled her knees up under her stomach and slid her body down the narrow bed. Gerta had to kneel on the floor to continue pumping her fingers into Malin.

Illya, moving into position, spread her lips in invitation. Malin had done this for her before. It was Illya's understanding that this was what Malin preferred to do for any girl who -- as they said -- needed some help. Consequently, she was quite good at it, and she always appreciated it when the receiver of her skills opened herself in this way.

Having light introduced a whole new dimension to this exercise. This sort of thing had always been done in pairs, in pretended secrecy and in darkness. Illya was amazed at how arousing it was to see Malin sprawled out in front of her, her hips gyrating against Gerta's fingers.

"Imagine if that were a man behind you," she whispered to Malin, "shoving his cock all the way up into you."

Malin's groan was muffled by the mound in which her face was buried. Illya felt her clitoris harden in response to the gentle, rapid tickling that Malin was battering it with. Her brain started to feel cloudy as she relaxed into the soft, candle-lit mood of the room and she turned to look at Arda.

Arda, still clutching her scroll in her hand, watched the three of them with a look of shock on her face. It wasn't like this was anything new to her. She'd been here long enough to have shared a bed with each of them in turn.

"Come on," Illya whispered to her. "We can fit you in somewhere."

Arda shook her head and sat down on the bed.

"It's okay," she said, surveyed the tableau. "I'll just watch."

She sat back on the nearest bed, which would normally be Gerta's if Gerta hadn't been in Malin's bed with Malin. It had the benefit of being the bed closest to the door, which meant that Arda could slouch against the wall. Slowly and carefully, she pressed one of her hands into her skirt, parting her thighs just enough to let her fingers reach where they needed to reach.

"Oh, Arda," Illya said with a sigh. "We're all naked ..."

Arda shrugged, not meeting Illya's eyes. Instead, her gaze was fastened on Malin's rear and Gerta's thrusting fingers. Illya turned and watched, too. Gerta was really being quite forceful with Malin. It was very pleasant, feeling that push from Gerta being turned into the pressure that Illya felt from Malin's face in her crotch.

Each thrust of those fingers came right up Malin's spine and into Illya's genitals. Illya turned to look at Arda again. She realized than that Arda was participating in her own way, pushing the fabric of her skirt between her lips in time with Gerta's thrusts. Perhaps she, too, was imagining an erect penis thumping away at Malin.

Whatever was going through Arda's mind, it was she who had the first orgasm. Her hand jammed down between her legs; her thighs clamped around it. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. Instead, she froze in that position and began shaking uncontrollably. It was fortunate that she was leaning against a wall, as she lost control of herself and fell over sideways on the bed, her body curling up in a fetal position with her hand still trapped between her thighs.

Watching that happen was enough to send Illya over the edge. She'd never seen anyone have an orgasm. Sure, she'd felt it, but always in the dark. Watching that pleasure overwhelm Arda -- all while Malin was doing such a good job down below -- had her feeling a tingling between her legs. It was only a moment or two after Arda collapsed that Illya's orgasm lit up her spine like a very gentle bolt of lightning.

Malin, distracted by Gerta's work, didn't know that it was time to stop licking Illya. She just kept going and going, stimulating Illya's clitoris well beyond her breaking point. The worst of it was that Illya didn't have the motor control to say or do anything about it. Her body was entirely limp, on fire, and unable to do anything other than accept the battering it was receiving.

The only thing that saved Illya from immediate unconsciousness was Malin's orgasm. She really did like being penetrated like this. It might cause her problems later, when her Point upgrade would be inaccessible to a boy who was standing behind her. As it was, Gerta saw what was coming and forced all three of her fingers as far inside Malin as they would go.

Malin ducked her head down in ecstasy and drove her hips back into Gerta, who held fast. Malin let out a scream, drowned by the mattress in which her face was buried, as the muscles inside her vagina repeatedly clamped and released the fingers that had invaded them.

Her head came up a few moments later as Gerta slowly withdrew her glistening fingers.

"Madra Zen," Malin whispered as she rolled over, panting. "That was the best ever. Thank you both."

Illya wasn't sure what she had to do with making Malin come, but she was glad to have taken part.

"What about Arda?" Malin asked, turning her head.

Arda was still lying on her side with her hand tucked into her skirt.

"I'm fine," she moaned, her eyes unopened.

"And what about you?" Malin asked, looking down her body at Gerta. "I know what you want. Come here."

With an uncharacteristically shy look at Illya, Gerta climbed up on the bed and straddled Malin's chest.

"Open up for me," Malin said, narrowing her eyes.

With a shiver, Gerta used both of her hands to spread her lips. What with Malin's skilled tongue ready to offer, Illya expected Gerta to move herself to Malin's face. Instead, Malin turned her body to lift one side of her chest up. With her hands, she squeezed one of her barely evident breasts to present her little pink nipple.

Gerta had to squat -- and it looked very awkward -- to take Malin's nipple between her lips. She managed, however, and Malin stroked her nipples in circles around Gerta's little nub. Illya watched in amazement. Had they done this before? Illya had never known that Gerta liked this sort of thing. It wasn't as if any of them had real breasts or particularly sensitive or interesting nipples. Gerta must have been running on pure imagination.

"Oh, gods," Gerta mumbled.

"Yes, the gods will give me beautiful nipples very soon," Malin promised with glee.

Gerta moaned.

"Will you rub me with them?" she pleaded to Malin.

"Oh, yes," Malin breathed. "You can suck on them until they're hard as rocks and rub them on your clit to your heart's content."

Gerta moaned again and her arousal began to threaten her balance. She took one hand away from lips so she could lean forward on it while using the other to keep her lips splayed. It put her face very close to Illya's. Her eyes opened, a shocked look of near orgasm tightening her features.

Illya did the only thing that she could think of doing, which was to turn her head slightly and press her lips to Gerta's. Gerta's eyes closed as her lips gave way to let their tongues meet, soft as cotton and wet as the slit that presently rubbed at Malin's nipple.

It wasn't like this was the first time Illya had kissed anyone, but Gerta was the exception in this group. She preferred Malin, for reasons that had just become obvious, and never kissed Illya or probably anyone else. So it was a very strange feeling, to see Gerta the leader; the optimist; the lecturer; melting and turning soft like this.

Illya felt Gerta's teeth closing on her lower lip as she crooned out a delicate and dangerously poised orgasm. She slid over on to her side, clinging limply to Malin at an odd angle. Malin, her head turned to accept Gerta's embrace, tolerated this odd hug, as well as the wet genitals beings rubbed against her side, until Gerta's orgasm abated.

"Well," Illya remarked, examining the disarranged scene before her. "That was certainly something."

No one had anything else to say, so she surrendered Malin's bed to Gerta and Malin and walked across the room to blow out the single flickering candle that had completely changed their way of relating to each other.

Naked and in complete darkness, she wasn't sure what to do except that she had laundry to handle in the morning and needed to get to sleep.

As she laid down, she heard Arda walking softly across the room to slip in next to her. She put her arm around her shivering friend and curled up with her for the night.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo had some vague memories playing around inside his head.

He'd been moved at least twice, maybe three times. He'd been sat up and fed something at least once. Some kind of soup. Probably.

Blue sky was visible through an open window. No sign of the sun, though. That meant it was evening? No, wait. This wasn't the little stone room he'd had at Harzen's farm. Right. That room had faced east. He was at Lyric's camp now. Wooden walls. Been there for a while.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 02



If he was seeing blue sky and no sunlight in his room at Lyric's camp, then it would have to be early morning.

Scrubbing at his eyes with one hand, he propped himself up on his elbow. A mildly unpleasant feeling of lightheadedness overcame him.

"Easy, kid," someone said very softly.

He identified the voice before his eyes could focus on the face.

"Kenji," he croaked as the older man braced him.

"Ho," the other acknowledged. "Sit up really slowly."

"What in the nine hells happened?"

"You were tested," Kenji replied, terse as always. "You passed, if it matters."

"Passed what?" he asked.

He leaned over to hug his knees so his chin could rest between them. At least this way, he didn't need Kenji holding him up. He tried closing his eyes to steady himself but immediately realized what a mistake that was and instead kept his gaze locked on the wooden wall in front of him.

"The Test," Kenji repeated. "That's what it's called."

"That weird torture thing I did last night, chasing those girls, was a test?"

"The night before last," Kenji corrected.

Zhair'lo turned his head, which treated him to sensations that made him regret moving.

"What?"

"You spent yesterday in bed," he explained. "Even Master Lyric's never seen it hit someone so hard and he's been doing this a while."

Zhair'lo inhaled as deeply as he could to suppress a wave of nausea. The dispassionate words, 'from the diaphragm' echoed in his head, the very tone with which they'd been spoken helping to toughen his resolve.

"So I'm weaker than most of you."

"You're younger than anyone we've known to be tested," Kenji said, a faint tinge of sympathy in his voice. "We don't take blue ribbons."

Zhair'lo's blue ribbon was hanging over the square post at the foot of his bleached white bed frame. He was supposed to wear it from when he turned eighteen until he turned twenty, a sign that he was acceptable fodder for the Virgin girls on their Initiation nights.

"I really didn't need this," he told Kenji. "I thought it might just be some kind of fancy upgrade or something."

"We do our duty," Kenji pointed out in what was probably meant to be a helpful tone.

"Of course we do," Zhair'lo said. "Just some of us get duties worse than others."

A sudden breath escaped Kenji's lips in what seemed to be an involuntary manner. Had that been a laugh? He risked turning his head just a bit to examine the other man. Kenji was leaning back in his chair with his thumbs tucked into his belt.

"Aren't you a bit young to talk like that?" Kenji asked.

Zhair'lo frowned and glared at the floor beside Kenji's chair.

"I've seen enough."

"Enough what?" Kenji continued his mocking interrogation.

Their eyes met, finally.

"Have you ever seen a woman caught at Monogamy?"

If there had a been trace of humour in Kenji's expression, it vanished with that last word.

"What do you know of that?" he asked coldly.

Zhair'lo turned his gaze away, letting his chin rest on his knees once more.

"There was a girl I met," he explained. "More than once."

He choked on the rest of the words he wanted to say. If Kenji knew enough to flinch at the word 'Monogamy', then he was perfectly capable of filling in the rest.

"A brutal experience for her," Kenji remarked, back to his classic deadpan form.

"For us both," Zhair'lo corrected sharply.

"Really?" Kenji asked. "It hurt you to wield the whip as much as it hurt her to feel it land?"

The tone of his voice might have been flat, but his words were heavy with sarcasm.

"Yes," Zhair'lo told him, admitting a thing he had only ever mentioned to a single other human being. "When I struck her, my own skin burned."

There was a long pause at this statement. Out of the corner of his eye, Zhair'lo could see Kenji frowning at him. Some time passed before Kenji shook his head repeatedly as if trying to knock loose the idea Zhair'lo had planted inside.

"If you care about her at all," he told Zhair'lo, "then you'll stay away from her."

Zhair'lo let out a rude grunt at this.

"I'll get Is'ka to make you some porridge or something," Kenji said. "If you decide to faint, try to land your head on something soft."

This was acknowledged with a thankful wave of his hand.

Food would be a good idea. Maybe it would get his brain working.

So. He'd been tested, had he? And he'd passed. Did that mean that bow training would begin? Was that why Master Lyric had been waiting to train him? He needed permission from the Temple to begin.

That had to be it.

He tried to think back to the Test itself. What was it that they had wanted to know?

They had given him a drink which had prevented him from having an orgasm. They'd put him through a series of exercises, both sexual and not. He'd had sex with two girls before they'd given him another drink so he could finally come.

That had been the most difficult night in his life thus far. Well, not quite. There was the night he'd upgraded Talla. He'd really thought he was going to die right in the middle of the ritual. There was also that occasion, just two weeks ago, when that awful bitch in Form had forced him to whip Talla. Terrible, but in a completely different way.

This Test, however, was a marvel.

What was it they had wanted to know? He remembered a couple of different moments in which the girls had glared at him, their eyes piercing into his skull the way that rays of sunshine used to slip past his curtains in the morning -- back when he lived at Harzen's farm.

The last girl, what was her name? En'tha, that was it. She had stripped off her clothes, right in front of him, and just watched him. She'd been a little bit afraid, too. He remembered the little bit of fear in her eyes and the way she had flinched when he had stood up to face her.

What had she been worried about?

Her behaviour had been so strange. It was as if she had expected that he might -- what? - attack her? Did that make sense? When did men ever attack women? The formula was that women came to men and offered sex. In his experience, there was just no other way for it to work. Even that awful woman Sonja had been clear on that part: the blame for his encounter with Talla fell on Talla because she had made the offer. His duty was to accept that offer, even if she wasn't supposed to be making it.

He had a few images in his head, things he'd gleaned from Talla's memories. At some point in history, centuries ago, there had been men who led armies and waged wars against the Temple. Did the Temple have some concern that he was that kind of man?

There was a sinking feeling in his stomach. He was, after all, considering that sort of thing.

But Kenji had said that he'd passed the Test.

So whatever danger it was they were looking for, they hadn't found it in him.

"You were lucky," Kenji said as he pushed the door open. "Is'ka's been waiting for you to wake up."

He planted a bowl of some kind of porridge in Zhair'lo's lap. Zhair'lo was about to say that he didn't feel hungry, but he caught the scent of the bowl's contents. The odour of ginger and jasmine wafting up from it banished his concerns almost instantly, removing the blanket of nausea that had been covering a deep-seated hunger.

"Hunger is normal," Kenji remarked doubtfully, one eyebrow raised, while Zhair'lo demolished his meal. "I'll fetch you a second bowl."

Zhair'lo wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. That had been invigorating.

"It's alright," Zhair'lo told him.

He took a deep breath and turned to plant his feet on the floor.

"I'll go get it myself," he declared as he stood up.

Both of Kenji's eyebrows raised.

"Well, then," he instructed Zhair'lo. "When you've eaten enough, report to the range."

Zhair'lo smiled.

The archery range, that meant.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 03



Beshenna

Sunlight beamed down on wide cobblestone streets, burning away the puddles left by several days of rains. It was humid, but the heat of the sun promised that it would dry up soon. A long train of horse drawn carriages exited the forest and crawled morosely through the streets, the surly guardians who walked alongside it not quite able to meet the eyes of any of city's inhabitants.

A woman in bright and clean orange clothing jogged out to meet the man at the head of the column.

"Master Gerrick," she called out with a welcoming smile. "Welcome to Beshenna."

He was a big man, even when he stood next to a woman of Form. The leathery look of his skin and the seediness of his clothing did nothing to take the edge off his manner.

"Glad to be here," Gerrick replied with a frown, giving her a once over. "My orders are to see this delivered to Binyata, Second of Iron."

Gerrick might or might not have met Binyata, but even a man would know that a woman who had attained the rank of second would be wearing clothing of blue.

"My name is Elya," the woman replied with a formal lightness. "I'm an Officer of Iron. Binyata had been waiting but was called away by an urgent matter -"

"More important than this stuff?" he asked with a jerk towards the curtained carriage at the head of the long column.

"Keep moving!" he shouted to the man guiding the carriage. "Let's get this delivered."

Gerrick continued walking alongside the caravan, forcing Elya to run to catch up to him.

"You people certainly do like your towers, don't you?" he asked, surveying the city scape.

Elya's lips firmed up. This wasn't really behaviour that was appropriate for a man to use when speaking to a woman, even if Gerrick was a Master Merchant. But then ...

"How was the journey from Turiksa?"

"Long," Gerrick sighed, darkness taking his features. "Muddy."

The caravan was over a day late. They had sent runners ahead to warn the people in Beshenna. An unexpectedly wet summer was likely to blame.

"Any injuries to report?" Elya asked.

This was her business now, collecting the most important pieces of data and taking care of such matters.

"Three men exhausted," Gerrick told her. "Otherwise we are all well."

It should have been a six day journey from Turiksa, but the weather had stretched it to over seven. Even the best of men, spending so long away from a Temple, could have difficulties.

"And your Temple contingent?"

Gerrick stretched, rotating his head to get rid of a likely fictitious crick in his neck, and sighed heavily.

"The H'rem are fine," Gerrick said. "A bit worn out. Not too unusual under the circumstances. They could use a few days rest, just like the rest of us."

That part of the report was perfunctory. During transit, the Master Merchant was responsible for all of the women and men in his retinue. It was polite therefore, to give him the impression that his report on the condition of the women -- as well as the men - was taken to heart. 

"And the cargo?"

Always last. Never put things, no matter how valuable, before people.

"The wagons are secure, their cargo undamaged," he stated. "The carriage's contents were undisturbed, whatever's in there."

It was polite to pretend that he hadn't heard the clearly identifiable noises that periodically issued from that carriage.

"Excellent," Elya replied. "We'll follow a route past Sweetness gate to -"

"The cargo should go immediately to Form," Gerrick interrupted her.

Elya winced, compressing her lips. There was only so much latitude she would grant the man, no matter how difficult his journey or how long his H'rem had been out of contact with a Temple.

"Master Gerrick," she said. "I assure you, the shortest route through Beshenna to Form's gate will take us past Sweetness. It will be the briefest stop to offload your wounded."

Gerrick grimaced and closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were looking at Elya's feet. With another blink, he met her eyes.

"Sorry," he said, his tired gaze unwavering. "You're right. The wounded come first."

People, even men, came before things.

They learned that one before they even knew what all the words meant.

-----------===================-------------

Gern

Mathematics was an irritating subject.

As women were natural mathematicians, Talla had enjoyed the study of numbers since childhood. 

So, sitting in this engineering class, studying tensile strengths and applying the numbers to the construction of roofs, walls and towers, ought to have been enjoyable.

It wasn't.

Why even bother studying when she could just look at the design, see the size of the timbers and the stones and tell whether it would stand or fall? Why should she bother measuring the angles, looking up a table of sines and calculating the force on each member?

Despite having this innate ability, she was still required to do the math longhand.

Irritating.

But at least it ended.

Their teacher, satisfied that they were doing the math correctly, dismissed them for the afternoon. There would be enough time to find dinner and Talla had plans to meet up with Tina for one of those rare evenings in which neither of them was due to Serve.

It made her happy to see that Yua was tagging along.

"Hey, Talla."

"What's up, Yua? Hungry?"

"Yeah, sure," Yua answered distantly. "You Serving tonight?"

"No, you?"

"Nope," Yua replied. "Must be an Initiation or something."

It was widely understood that, given the hungry manner in which Initiation rituals chewed through young men, young women were not sent out to Serve on such nights. That way there was more fodder for the girls in their long skirts.

Talla shrugged.

"Tina's supposed to be waiting for me around here somewhere," Talla said, looking around.

"You guys get together a lot?"

"Every day, if we can," Talla said, still searching the throngs of women in their many colours of clothing.

"No, I mean ... like ... 'get together', y'know?"

"Oh," Talla exhaled in realization. "Not that often. I'm Serving a lot, so ... um ... no. That really only happened after we Primed one night."

"You got to Prime?"

"Yeah. You'll probably get a chance, too. I think everybody does."

Talla watched Yua mull this over for a moment before she felt a poke in the ribs.

"Hey!" she said to Tina.

Tina tilted her head toward an unoccupied alleyway and indicated they should walk that way.

"What's up?" Talla asked casually.

Tina gave a brief glance at Yua before speaking.

"You know how Y'ris is working in the Offices?" she asked.

"Who's Y'ris?" Yua asked.

"My roommate," Tina told Yua as she turned to walk backwards in front of them.

"Go on," Talla said.

Making sure no one was within earshot, Tina continued leading them down the alley.

"That means that she gets to see the roster for tonight."

"Anyone can see that," Yua pointed out, her tone indicating that she had a degree of expertise where it came to that list.

"Nuh-uh," Tina disagreed. "Anyone can see who's getting an upgrade."

"Okay-ay," Yua agreed.

"Y'ris, however, can see who the Sources are and -" she looked directly at Talla "- who the Conduits are."

Talla's eyes widened.

"You mean ...?"

"I mean," Tina interrupted her. "that we're going to watch some upgrades tonight."

"I can come with you?" Yua asked.

"Of course," Tina said. "Let's get some dinner."

-----------===================-------------

Illya was trying to contain her anxiety. It wasn't as if she hadn't been here before. This would be her fourth try. She held her hands together in her lap and bit her lips in an attempt to prevent herself from fidgeting too much. It wouldn't do to look like a complete novice in front of the older women waiting for their turns.

Arda faced Illya from a bench opposite, their knees almost touching. She winked nervously at Illya. It was a comfort to have Arda here, given the level of intimacy between them.

Gerta had been right. This was going to work. It had to.

Illya looked down at her long skirt where it nearly touched Arda's.

'Getting rid of you,' she told the offending piece of clothing. 'Getting rid of you as soon as I can.'

She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply, the acrid taste of anger hitting the back of her tongue. She felt Arda's hand coming to rest on her thigh.

"Easy," Arda whispered.

Illya nodded gratitude back to her sister. No point going in to this with the wrong attitude. There was always a nagging thought in the back of her brain that the upgrades had failed because she'd done something wrong. Maybe she had eaten the wrong kind of breakfast that day. Or it could have been that she wasn't happy or eager enough. Maybe she wasn't attractive enough to the Conduit, or she hadn't handled him properly.

She knew these things didn't matter. They told her so. But deep inside, there was a suspicion she couldn't name that some nefarious, trivial detail was the real reason she'd failed so miserably, so repeatedly.

'Positive attitude,' she told herself. 'I need a positive attitude.'

It might help. She couldn't prove it wouldn't.

She risked a glance at the older, more experienced women around her.

'Try to be like them.'

They were calm and relaxed, eager even. They betrayed no anxiety. They -- above all -- knew it was going to work for them.

'I know it's going to work, too,' she told herself resolutely.

"I wonder which one we'll get," Arda said, her voice betraying only the slightest lilt of anxiety.

"They're both perfect," Illya said. Thinking better of using the word 'perfect' to describe a man, she amended, "Perfect records at least."

"Shouldn't matter, I guess," Arda replied with a gulp.

They'd had this conversation several times already. Arda was just trying to calm her own nerves.

"You'll be fine," one of the older women said. She fixed her yellow sash before turning to face Illya. "The Temple has chosen the right Conduit for you and he will make everything all right."

Illya held back a frown.

"Yes, Mistress," she replied.

The respect she'd been taught to show her superiors kept her emotions from showing in either her face or her voice, but she deeply resented the woman's condescension. What did that woman know? Had she been stuck in a long skirt for months on end? No.

What did the Temple know, after all? How to cram its unwanted Virgins in a room apart from everyone else and treat them like outcasts? The Temple had already chosen two others to attempt to break her Seal and those had failed. The Temple, she had long since realized, didn't know what to do with its Sealed Virgins until boys like Zhair'lo and Zo'kar came along.

She inhaled sharply again, feeling Arda's still present hand pressing down more firmly on her flesh.

The door of the little waiting room swung open.

"Illya Ch'lai," the woman with the spear called out.

Arda withdrew her hand and gave her the sort of confidence-building nod that always accompanied Gerta's lectures on optimism.

"Go get 'em," Arda whispered.

Illya stood up and followed the spear-carrier into the Augmentation Chamber. She couldn't bring herself to look around the room. Instead, she locked her eyes on the muscular back of the woman in front of her, bracing herself for what was to come.

When the Officer stopped walking and turned to face the assembly of women, Illya turned at the same moment. Three times the Officer cracked the butt of her spear on the marble floor. There was silence in the Chamber.

"Whom do you present to Us?" the Queen asked..

"Highness," the Officer replied crisply, "I present Illya Ch'lai."

They were only using the creche name, leaving out the names of her parents. That was new.

"Illya Ch'lai" the Queen addressed her. "What do you seek?"

I seek a way out of this hole you've left me in. I seek membership in our society. I seek freedom from this long skirt. I seek to have this stain removed from my body. There were so many things she sought; so many things she wanted to say.

"Abundance, Highness," were the only words to come from her mouth. They came out smoothly, with the expertise of practice and the casual air only a certain amount of cynicism could give them. "My first upgrade."

The formulaic phrases went on: the Queen approving; the Sorceress of Abundance agreeing. Who would stand as the Source for Illya's fourth attempt at this upgrade? Her second and third tries had involve Officers. Who would it be this time?

"I will stand, Highness," the Sorceress of Abundance said.

Well, that was really pulling out all the stops, wasn't it?

The blonde woman stood up from her throne and walked down through several tiers to meet Illya between the pair of white marble altars.

She was beautiful and tall and, even though her breasts were covered by layers of jeweled, translucent silks, they made Illya want to die of jealousy.

The Sorceress smiled and leaned in close to Illya, the green silk of her scarf just touching Illya's shoulders.

'I can see the flecks of glitter in your hair,' Illya thought, 'and smell your fancy perfume.'

"We're going to get this right tonight," the Sorceress promised.

"Mistress," she acknowledged after a wary gulp.

Abundance nodded smartly and began removing her blouse -- a rather complicated procedure given all its layers. When she was done, Illya was awestruck. So perfect and so large ... she was breathless.

'Oh, Arda,' she thought helplessly. 'You should see her. Someday mine could look like these and you could do whatever you like with them.'

Arda loved to whisper dirty things in her ears when they were together; about how big her breasts would be; what she wanted to do to Illya; what the boys would do to Illya. Arda could really go on.

The layers of fabulous silk were handed off to an attendant -- a girl in white whose little skirt and small breasts evoked slightly less jealousy in Illya. The topless Sorceress gave a smart, parting nod to Illya and walked off to Illya's left. In the periphery of her vision, Illya noted that the Sorceress was climbing the flat marble altar on that side of the Chamber and lying on her back.

'My turn, huh?'

Her top was tied around her back. Facing the assembled women -- a Queen, two Sorceresses and an unusually large horde of variously attired women in the background, she reached behind her body and began untying the laces there. She meanwhile scanned the audience. The front rows, where women in orange were sitting, were not her concern. Back past several rows of yellow-clad women, she looked for girls in white.

There! Her friends, sisters previously Sealed in Virginity, Nadine and Anzha were here to watch. That was reassuring. Where was Yua? There, at the opposite end of the same tier ... between two other girls that Illya didn't know.

With all three ties undone, she let the fabric fall away from her chest. Holding the little top by its strings, as if it were a piece of garbage or a dead animal held by its tail, she handed it to the attendant.

'There, I'm naked,' she thought at the Officers in front of her. 'Do you see me? Me and my flat chest? This is how you left me, rotting in that room for weeks on end. No longer a child but not quite an adult despite my age. Are you happy to see me naked; to look down on me? Are you ashamed of me?'

She inhaled.

'I'm not ashamed.'

Something was nagging for Illya's attention. She let her gaze wonder through the crowd, trying to figure out what in that gallery was waving flags in her subconscious. It only took a moment before she seized on the face, and then the eyes, of one of Yua's companions. She was either a Virgin or an Initiate -- only the skirt could tell the difference and the girl's lower body was covered by the person in front of her. Whoever she was, she was covering her mouth in nervous surprise while her widened eyes were locked on Illya in a way that burned through the bridge of Illya's nose.

'She knows,' Illya thought. 'She knows how I feel.'

It sent a screaming thrill of panic through Illya, that someone could see through her facade and sense the bitterness and sedition inside. She straightened her spine, trying to look as respectful and proper as she could, and turned to her right to mount her own marble altar.

It was a bit different from the Sorceress's. While the Sorceress would lie flat on her back, Illya's altar had an angled back so she could sit in a reclined position facing the Sorceress.

All well and good. She was ready. The stage was set. Torches were being snuffed, placing a veil of anonymity over all the spectators and leaving only the altars lit. The drums began beating as they always had.

Illya risked a sideways glance up into the gallery. There was nothing to see. Who was that girl? She was so distracted that she missed the call for the Conduit. He was already in the Chamber, entering from a door behind her and walking across the room to the prone Sorceress. Which one was he? She wouldn't have been able to tell one from the other even if she had seen his face.

He was handing off the lower part of his robe to an attendant who quickly retreated into the darkness from which she had come. Muscular guy, at least, if she was to estimate from his legs and butt. He probably did a lot of lifting, or maybe running. Did she know anything about the two Seal Breakers that would help her guess which one this muscular one might be? No. She only knew their names.

It was a sin that she couldn't see what was happening. The Conduit had climbed atop the altar opposite and was straddling the chest of the topless Sorceress. The cloth of his robe obscured all of his body but his feet. She could see his body moving back and forth as, presumably, he thrust his erection through the tunnel the Sorceress was making of her cleavage.

Everyone in the gallery could see. The guards and attendants could see -- except perhaps for the few standing in the darkness behind Illya. But not Illya. She could see the Conduit's feet and the Source's legs and that was it.

It didn't go on for nearly as long as it had on her previous attempts. Was that a good sign or a bad one? Some motion or word from the Sorceress signalled the boy to get off and be on his way.

Anxiety and eagerness welled up inside her. She wanted to beat down those emotions that rose up as she watched the Conduit turn to her. She wanted to deny that her heart was so set on the gifts that only the Temple could bring her.

'Desire makes you weak,' she told herself to no effect.

She wanted a woman's body. She wanted a woman's clothes. She wanted to be part of a woman's society, no matter what they'd done to her.

What if she just stood up and walked out of the Chamber? What would they do to her then? Could they even stop her? She tried to picture it: the guards holding her down; the Conduit looming over her; some other woman taking a hand to his penis -- or maybe he would do it himself.

But it was a ridiculous dream. She wasn't going anywhere. She saw that erection, pointing up into the folds of his robe, and knew that it contained the magical energy that she had dreamed of having for months now.

This was the way forward. If she could just climb out of this stupid hole she'd somehow gotten herself stuck in, she could be happy. Normal, even.

She managed a weak smile for the Conduit as he climbed aboard her altar and straddled her legs. Handing him the chalice full of white syrup, she risked a quick word.

"What's your name?" she whispered.

He cocked his head and twisted his lips in joy as though he was laughing at some secret joke or making some realization. Was it odd to be asking him his name?

"Zhair'lo," he said. "You?"

Not wanting to make it too obvious that they were speaking, she followed the procedure of the ritual, dipping her fingers into the chalice and spreading the Synergist in a thick layer over the entirety of her flat chest.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 03



"Illya," she answered, quietly as she could manage.

"Try to relax, Illya," he told her, his concern covering a great many layers of confidence. "It'll work. I'll get you out of there."

Get her out of there? Did he mean -? How did he know?

Her surprise must have shown on her face because he gave her a reassuring wink when she retrieved the chalice and set it aside.

He did know, then.

A flash lit into Illya's brain. She saw Nadine and Anzha up in audience. She saw Yua and her two new friends. Of course. They weren't here just to see her, but also to take a look at Zhair'lo, the one who had freed them from their long skirts. Zhair'lo must have learned of the plights of the Sealed Virgins from them.

She seized his erection with both hands, surprising him with her swiftness.

At that moment when she took hold of his penis, the thing that struck her the most about his expression was his humanity. She'd done this with twelve boys already: nine for her Initiation and three tries at her first upgrade. If there was one thing that she clearly remembered of the majority, it was the utter beastliness of their behaviour. Like rutting bulls, they had grunted their careless ways to orgasm, spraying their semen all over her. A few, true enough, had been clumsy and less brazen, but none had looked at her like this boy did.

She looked into his eyes.

Boy?

There was the honest concern in his expression. Underneath that were the layers of cool confidence that could come only from true expertise and never from arrogance. Beneath that, deep inside those black pupils that were widened by the darkness of the Chamber, there was something else.

Darkness. He'd seen things. Illya knew that she was looking at someone who had seen worse things than she had. Suddenly, she felt like a child, impudent and infantile for whining about her short stay in the Dormitory when here stood, not a boy, but a man, who had seen so much worse.

Man.

She felt it in her hands as she stroked him.

"That's good," he commented, almost idly, neither patronizing nor surprised. "Not long now."

She presumed the 'long' referred to time and not size, the latter being an area in which he was clearly no slouch.

His testicles were tightening up. That was one of the signs of impending orgasm the teachers had taught her in her first week. She switched to a single hand grip, leaving her left hand free to catch what was coming.

Illya glanced up to meet his eyes, watching as his facial features pinched together even though his gaze never left her. She gave another look down at his penis and the tiny slit at its tip, ready to expel the magic-laced fluid that would set her free and make her a woman in everyone's eyes.

Another look up into his eyes. Vacant. The beast had taken over. His eyes squeezed shut and she felt his erection twitching in her hand. She turned her attention downward, watching that first pulse stream out to form a puddle in the Synergist -- dead centre on her breastbone and just above an imaginary line drawn from one of her little pink nipples to the other.

Her left hand, mindlessly deployed on the mission it had executed thrice before, began mashing his semen into the clear syrup all about her chest.

He wasn't anywhere near finished ejaculating.

Streak after streak came out of him. She played it out, continuing to jerk him in the same gentle manner for which he'd complimented her. She tried to see how long she could make each streak, trying to get it to stretch from one nipple across to the other.

Each stream, laid in the syrup, was immediately smeared into her flesh.

Even as he began to draw flaccid, she softly milked out the last drops. She looked up through her eyelashes to see that his senses had returned with all of their layers and a new, palpable aura of relief percolating through all of it. Their eyes met, briefly, before he nodded at her chest and sat back on his heels.

She looked back down and started using both of her hands to massage her flat chest.

Warmth.

Not just warmth.

Heat. Real Heat.

A bit of pain came with it. Her flesh hurt.

Something else, too.

There was a faint blue glow coming from ... coming from her breasts. They were growing right before her eyes.

She inhaled excitedly and began massaging herself with greater enthusiasm.

It was working. Freedom at last. Womanhood and everything that went with it.

Heaving with his exertion, Zhair'lo sat back and watched her carefully.

"It worked," she reassured him.

Couldn't he see that? Why the worry in his expression?

"As promised," he said, a light smile covering his concern.

"Nine gods," she said, looking at her breasts as they reached handful-size.

"You're okay?" he asked.

She nodded. What was he worried about?

"Fine," she told him. "Just a little heat and stretching."

"Good," he said, relaxing finally. "Good."

Attendants arrived with wet towels. A few of the torches near the exit doors were lit as a safety precaution. The incessant drumming had ceased. Even the generally enforced rules about silence were relaxed as whispers could be heard up in the seats.

Zhair'lo took his brown kilt from an Initiate and refastened it round his waist. With a wink and what must have been his second or third sigh of relief, he followed the rules of the the ritual and departed.

Illya sat on her altar, waiting a few moments for the sound of Zhair'lo's exit, before she dismounted. An attendant, a Virgin in a knee-length skirt, handed Illya her top back. She didn't bother putting it on. There was no rule that said she had to.

Besides, it wouldn't fit anymore, would it?

She looked at the girl in front of her again.

'You're Abundance,' she made a silent and stunned realization, 'and mine are bigger than yours.'

Illya looked up into the darkness where hundreds of women watched from safe anonymity. She wanted to scream at them. She wanted to yell, "Look! Breasts! Look at me! I'm not ashamed! Send your pity elsewhere!"

Instead she settled for one deep inhalation, heaving her chest at them, before she departed and went through the door to the examination room. She knew what to do here, same as before: find a bed; sit on the end of it; wait for a doctor.

The difference was that her three previous visits had been preceded by failure. The first had been confusing. She hadn't even known that she'd failed. How was she to know her breasts could grow so quickly? Had anyone told her how big she should expect them to get? Then came the disappointing news, the pity in the doctor's eyes -- that shameful look that had followed her all the days since.

Not anymore. Not one week more, not one day more, not one damned bell more.

She sat on the edge of that bed, her arms folded under her proudly displayed breasts. It wasn't quite a smile on her face -- she knew that -- it was something else that a casual onlooker would take for a smile.

The physician arrived.

"Well," she said, "it looks like our hero has done it again."

Illya twitched at this.

"Congratulations," the woman said with a nod. "Let me see."

Putting her hands behind her back, Illya surrendered herself to her medical ministrations. She inhaled sharply when foreign fingers first touched her enlarged flesh.

"Heightened sensitivity is normal," the doctor noted in that dispassionate voice typical of the medical profession. "Especially after a double upgrade."

"Double?" Illya asked. "I got a double, too?"

"Undoubtedly," the physician remarked as she continued to gently knead and squeeze Illya's breasts. "Our young Conduit is very tricky to control, as I understand it."

So it hadn't been an illusion, that her breasts were larger than those of the girl who'd handed back her clothing.

Illya endured the rest of the examination in stunned silence. She couldn't understand her own feelings. She'd been so angry and bitter -- and that hadn't gone away -- but something had changed and it wasn't just in her body. Something inside her had changed, too. She concentrated on catching her breath and trying to keep the happy tingle in her spine from showing on her face.

Maybe she just hadn't believed that it would really work. Or maybe she'd just kept herself from believing too hard, to save herself from the crushing disappointment of her previous attempts.

Zhair'lo.

He was the key.

She'd always planned on signing up for Service the day after her upgrade and immediately throwing herself to the maximum pacing, fully random from the beginning. Let them pass her out to whomever came up on the list. It would go that way after the first one anyway, so why kid yourself? Just go with it. Throw yourself at it. Live it. Take all of the erections, any of them. That was the way to go.

But a new thing had struck her with Zhair'lo when she'd taken him in her hands.

Here was one who knew what he was doing. Age of a boy, but years in his eyes that spoke of a man's wisdom.

He would do it right and, since the Temple gave her the option, she would have him do it to her.

The physician departed to copy notes down somewhere. Since she hadn't dismissed Illya yet, Illya waited contentedly on the edge of her bed.

A small, brown-haired head poked out from around her curtain.

"Hi," the girl said, timidly.

Illya recognized her at once, this sudden arrival sending a chill of excitement through her body again. This was the one she'd seen high up in the gallery; the one who'd seen right through her fake humility and obedience.

"Hi," Illya said, vaguely welcoming.

The girl stepped out from behind the curtain, revealing herself to be an Initiate with breasts even larger than Illya's. That didn't seem right, but it was a secondary concern.

"I'm Talla," the girl said. "I think we should talk when you get out of here."

Words wouldn't come out, so Illya simply nodded in agreement.

Talla gave a slight nod of her head and slipped back out of sight.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 04



"Gods damn it," the Queen of Form shouted in frustration. "Harder."

In the mirror she'd placed on the far side of her four post bed, she could see the dark-haired hulk of a man standing behind her. He thrust himself forward with all the power he could muster, driving her body forward into the rumpled grey bedsheets.

She looked back at him over her shoulder, tossing her head to flip her silver-flecked red hair aside so she could glare at him clearly. He was strong enough, that was certain, but he wasn't the brightest torch in the room. Some men just needed really explicit instructions, especially when all of their blood flow was diverted to their erections.

"Not your cock," she told him. "Your hand."

Bent over the nearest sturdy piece of furniture was the favourite position of most women with Tight upgrades. Not only did it provide an excellent depth of penetration, there was also the thunderous sensation of feeling a man pounding his body against her cheeks and thighs.

Sure, as a Queen, she also had breasts that would be the envy of almost any member of the Division of Endowment. As well, the muscles that currently squeezed at the penis inside her were both powerful and capable of delicate control. But the Queen of Form had come up through Tight, and one's first upgrade was always one's favourite.

That was why she'd chosen this lumberjack tonight. There was one other thing that the women of Tight liked, one other thing for which this position was just perfect..

And still, he stared at her in confusion.

"Madra Zen! Spank me, already!" she demanded.

Maybe it was the fact of her rank that made him afraid to strike her. Or maybe men were taught to defer to women in general and he didn't want to cross that line without explicit permission. It could also have been the two orgasms he'd already had tonight.

Maybe he was just a bit slow on the uptake.

Finally -- finally! - that big, heavily callused hand came crashing down on her cheek. He was right handed. That was fine. Whatever worked best for him was good enough for her, but he wasn't doing it right.

"Harder!" she screeched desperately, thrusting her hips back into him.

Again he struck her. There was the satisfying crack. There was the rumble that radiated through her entire body. She pulsed her muscles around his shaft, turning her toes inward to part her cheeks and let him in deeper.

"Keep going," she panted at him.

He seemed to understand now that this meant both the thrusting and the spanking, as he began to pound repeatedly at her cheek with his open palm.

That's what she wanted. Clarity of desire at last.

In her mind's eye, she pictured her much younger self, bent over the wooden table in the Justice Hall, being lashed for some offence or other. What had it been, the first time? Jin ree? Or something else?

If she could have a table like that in her room, it would make this all the more delicious. She stretched her arms out, pretending that her bed was that table, pretending that her wrists were belted in to it. She imagined that what crashed against her rear was not a man's hand but a whip. What crime might she have committed to deserve this? Her mind could construct a scenario where she had earned this punishment, even if the responsibility that went with her rank would never let her step out of bounds.

She crooned aloud, preparing to release both of them to their shared orgasm.

If only she could sneak him down to the Hall, and they could mesh right there among the belts and whips and splintered wooden surfaces. Gods how she loved the texture of wood, the look of it, the feel of it. She had stripped her bedroom of every red curtain and drape she could, just so the grain of lumber would be visible everywhere about her.

Her fantasy took her away. Ten Within upgrades gave her a great deal of power to control a mesh, to withhold the mutual orgasm that was the promise of every sexual encounter. Yet even with all of that going for her, her willpower collapsed before the strength of her imagination. Her fetishizing of her own punishment and the hundreds of such punishments she'd dealt out in her time as an Adjudicate was simply too much to bear.

With a roar of triumph, the lumberjack struck her flesh one last time and released a jet of semen into her. She pushed her hips back hard as she could, grinding the tingling flesh of her rear into his pelvis as her orgasm set her body on fire from the entrance of her vagina up through to her fingertips. Where his ejaculations came in pulses, her ecstasy was a burning sensation lighting up every bit of skin on her body

She wasn't sure how long it lasted. He stopped spanking her once the orgasm began. Eventually the fire in her spine cooled. He withdrew, flaccid and spent at last, and threw himself somewhat deliriously on the bed.

The Queen of Form smirked at the naked man who was slowly passing in to unconsciousness. She could easily go once more, but she'd already put to use her considerable oral talents to get this third episode out of him. A fourth was extremely unlikely. There just weren't men in existence with the stamina that the gods had given her.

Lifting her upper body off the bed just a bit, she eyed herself in the mirror. It had been placed there for their pleasure. Standing up, she ignored her voluminous breasts and their wide smooth aureolae and perky, dark nipples. Those weren't her favourite attributes, though the gods knew that men loved to frolic in that playground.

No, her fascination was held by the power in her thighs and calves, the muscles in her belly that could stop the strongest punch cold. It was in the lungs that provided the air to let her outlast any man in bed. For the nine hundredth time, she lamented the fact that Temple Protocols forbade the taking of more than one man per night to her bed. How long could she go if she wasn't limited by the stamina of her partners?

A smirk crossed her lips. Rules were to be followed. She couldn't be the Queen of Form and not respect that. Still, she had her fantasies.

Another thing the Queen of Form couldn't do was be late for an appointment. She had an example to set, after all. If she started missing bells, the Temple of Beshenna would likely fall into chaos within days.

She slipped quietly out of her bedroom into the small anteroom outside it. An attendant was waiting there; a Virgin girl in a white skirt and top. Seeing her Queen naked, the girl stripped off her clothes immediately.

A Disciple of Facial, that one. It was the odd Discipline in the triumvirate owned by Form. Tight and Iron were all about rules and obedience. Jammed in sideways were the women of Facial; the artists of song and dance; the painters; the sculptors. The pretty ones.

This one wasn't that pretty, what with only having the one upgrade.

"Highness," she said with a bow.

"A quick shower, Yidi," she told the girl. "I'm meeting Endowment shortly."

"I'll ready the work outfit, Highness?"

"Yes, please."

The anteroom had a shower whose cistern was always full and reasonably warm. Rank had its privileges, and if a Queen was to be confined to a Temple, she ought to at least have some luxury for her sacrifice.

This evening, however, afforded her little time for luxury. She'd been pushing her time a bit with that third round of Service and had to rush herself through the shower. One kick of a lever sent warm water coursing down through her hair. The flecks of glitter that she'd decorated herself with washed out quickly but left a bit of silver behind. Not all of it was artificial, after all. No telling how much time she had left before the Weakness took her. Years, probably.

With her body wet, she turned off the water. Women of Form believed more strongly in conservation than others. She could soap her body up just fine without the unnecessary stream of water continuing to spray. Arms and legs; under and around the cumbersome breasts; down the legs -- taking great care to clean out between her thighs; to the buttocks -- there was actually a sore spot where he'd slapped her hard enough to leave marks that might outlast the night.

Scrubbed and clean, she let the spigot douse her again until the soap was gone.

Yidi was there immediately with several red towels. One was placed on a wooden chair so the Queen could seat herself. The second was handed to the Queen so she could dry her body while Yidi used a third to squeeze dry her hair.

Sometimes the Queen really wished that everything she owned didn't have to be red. As much as she regarded Facial as the tag-along child of her Division, she did hold eleven upgrades in the Discipline which had given her -- among other things -- a deep red shade of hair with natural amber highlights. Try as they might, even the best clothiers in her Division could not quite manage to find a legally appropriate fabric dye that didn't clash with her hair.

She preferred, quite frankly, nudity, just as she preferred the bare, unupholstered wooden furniture in her room.

As it was, they pushed her clothing as far towards orange as the rules would allow, and perhaps into burgundy if the dyes were available. Never quite as far as purple though. That certainly wouldn't do.

The only colour of clothing to which she could aspire was black, and that was unlikely to come her way. It was rare for the Queen of Form to ascend any further.

The Goddess of Beshenna, older even than the Queen of Form and with a much greater weight of Perfection pressing on her health, was growing weak. It wasn't often that a Goddess reached forty and this one probably wouldn't. This had little bearing however, on the prospects of the Queen of Form. There was just no reason to call a Goddess up from this corner of the triangle.

"In stability: Sweetness. In expansion: Endowment."

She was fairly certain that this was the reason for the visit from the Queen of Endowment. It was Form's place to act as the arbiter when the decision had to be made. Sweetness would argue that this was a time of stability. Endowment would argue that the Temple should be expanded. There was some validity to the latter: it had been decades since Beshenna had undergone any major growth.

The Queen of Form didn't see that as a decent argument. What mattered was the health of the city and its continuance over the centuries. Inappropriate growth -- growth for its own sake or because it was "due" -- was a hazard against which generations of her foremothers had protected.

Endowment would get its call some day, some year, but not this time around.

Still, it was the Queen of Endowment's obligation to make her case and it was the Queen of Form's place to hear her out.

With her body sufficiently dry, she tied her hair back in her most no-nonsense, formal style which also had the benefit of preventing it from clashing with her clothing. The fact that her hair was still a bit wet helped to darken it, which had a pleasant effect when mixed with her read clothing.

Her 'work' clothing was a three quarter length skirt, a straight black bra that no one would be able to see, and a blouse that fit tightly around her torso but was loose in the arms. She had always liked that feeling of freedom; the proper attire of a former warrior still prepared to strike.

She waved off the underwear. The meeting was in her own Domain. If she wanted to go without, that was her prerogative. As it was, she felt the need to let her body cool down.

"Let's go, Yidi."

"Highness," the attendant acknowledged as she slipped into her own clothing, including underwear.

To each her own, the Queen supposed.

Outside the ante room, four Officers were waiting. They bowed in unison.

"Status, Kallidi?" the Queen asked.

"Endowment is already here, Highness," the tallest woman answered. "Cursory examination in progress."

Checking her for weapons that meant. Old rules, ancient traditions. Once upon a time, assassinations had been attempted. History recorded that some had even succeeded.

"She will likely desire private conversation - "

Whatever else she meant to tell her underlings, she was interrupted by the entrance of the Queen of Endowment. If there was one thing of which Form was jealous, it was the fortune of Endowment's colouration. Pale skin, jet black hair and eyes of a blue so light that her pupils were nearly white. It was like looking into a deep, clear ocean.

Form frowned. Dressing in red suited Endowment very well.

There was no time for admiring clothing. The visiting Queen had already waved off her entourage, a group of women who stood quietly at the entrance to the large office that was called Principia Form, the domain of the Queen.

"A moment in privacy," Endowment said to her host and walked past the Officers of Form, each of whom bowed politely despite the brusqueness.

"Sister," the Queen of Form acknowledged, following closely.

They walked past several rows of lesser workstations to the largest, most ornate desk at the rear of the room. The Queen of Endowment, skipping all possible pretence of decorum and nicety, simply perched one cheek up on the edge of that desk and faced the Queen of Form.

Form, not willing to be quite that crude, stood a polite conversational distance away and folded her arms.

"Welcome," she said.

"Thank you," Endowment said, her eyes sharp and her manner hot.

Form waited. It really was Endowment's place to make her play and begin the discussion.

"We have a concern."

That wasn't right. This wasn't about the impeding succession contest? The use of the plural was noteworthy. That had no place in the discussion Form was expecting to have. That conversation should have been about the Queens and their plans, not their domains.

"A matter of law?" Form asked.

"We are not certain," Endowment replied. "It has come to our attention that the Disciples of Pussy are up to something."

Pussy. The genealogists. Historical issues of distrust there.

Sure, there were doctors and their assistants in Pussy. Childminders, too, and even teachers. But when Pussy was 'up to something', it meant genealogy. If the genealogists were stepping outside their bounds of preventing inbreeding, it was a problem for everyone.

One of the foundational principles of the Temples were the stone-etched rules that allowed equality of opportunity for every woman. Nepotism was eliminated ruthlessly. Childbirth was delayed so that women would rarely see their own children reach adulthood. Creche names had been introduced so that, some day, a child would not even need to know her mother's name.

There was a long simmering suspicion between the Disciples of Pussy with their libraries full of genealogies and the Disciples of Form with their desire for equality and justice.

"You have evidence?"

That would be important, if anything were to go forward.

Endowment's lips formed a flat line for a moment before she shook her head.

"Nothing strong enough," she said. "I can't even be certain anything is really happening."

"What make you suspicious?"

"Babies," Endowment said. "They're moving babies around."

"This is well known," Form pointed out. "The easiest time to move a child is after weaning, when the emotional bonds to the mother are being broken anyway. Pussy tells us that migration is necessary to prevent inbreeding -- especially in the smaller settlements."

"Something isn't adding up," the black haired Queen explained. "The babies that leave here aren't accounted for. For every emigration, there must be a local creche that's short a child, but there isn't. Not always. You'd have to see the numbers to understand. When we look for records of the babies who have left, we see that the counts are sometimes off by one."

"I suppose," Form replied doubtfully. "But what you're saying makes very little sense. You count babies leaving and see one missing. You look at creches and see that baby isn't recorded as having left. It sounds as if the records line up perfectly. The baby wasn't born, didn't emigrate, and it isn't missing from a creche. What's the problem?"

"The problem is that the baby that wasn't born and isn't missing ... well ... that baby is on a outbound carriage."

Form raised an eyebrow.

"If this is some kind of weird ploy to gain my favour-"

"No," Endowment interrupted. "It isn't. I've come here under that guise because you need to know of my suspicions. We both know that there's no real case for Expansion right now. I yield that decision for the sake of this."

That wasn't evidence of any kind, but it certainly spoke to the weight that Endowment placed on the issue.

"I will investigate this migration, then," Form said. "At your behest."

"It must be done quietly," Endowment warned darkly. "The Goddess herself ascended via Pussy."

"One is aware," Form replied, keeping all emotion out of her voice.

There was a formal exchange of bows and the Endowment departed, her retinue in tow.

-----------===================-------------

Gern

Illya hadn't had a chance to sort out her emotions. Even though she'd wanted to talk to Talla, her friends - her sisters -- were waiting for her outside the examination room when she and Arda came out.

Nadine was there with Anzha and Yua. Gerta and Malin had come to watch, too. It was a bit of a reunion, but it left Talla and her friend Tina to tag along uncomfortably.

"How ya feeling?" Yua asked eagerly.

They were in the Tranquil Courtyard, sitting in a circle on the grass -- a circle to which the two newcomers were grudgingly admitted. It was dark where they were. The only part of the courtyard lit at night was the path going from Endowment Hall to the Offices. The rest of the place was pitch black, making it a perfect place to hang out and speak in whispers.

"Good," Illya said.

There wasn't a word that could cover how she felt. Part of her was overjoyed now that the realization of the upgrade's success had sunk in. She would be an adult in everyone's eyes. She would start doing her duty as a Temple woman by Serving the men, instead of being a leech on society.

Another part of her said that her happiness was a betrayal of her anger and her true feelings towards the Temple. Why should she serve the Temple, after all it had done to her? Shouldn't she be hating it right now?

But everyone was so happy for her ...

"Well, come on," Malin said. "Let's see, both of you."

Illya looked over at Arda. She couldn't help herself but to smile and blush. They were both so proud of themselves. She knew it was the wrong thing to do. Not that it was illegal. Nudity was perfectly acceptable in this courtyard. It was the place where women went to tan themselves. The feeling of wrongness came from her willing exhibition of the Temple's gifts. She hated what the Temple had done to her and yet here she was, stripping off her top, like a child squealing with delight over a piece of sugar candy.

The "ooh"s and "ah"s were everything she could have wanted, if only she could make up her mind about what exactly she wanted to be feeling right now.

"Same size as mine," Yua remarked. "You got doubled."

"And so did you," Nadine said to Arda. "Congratulations."

Illya noticed Talla, sitting opposite her in the circle, saying nothing. Talla's breasts were unquestionably bigger than any other pair in this circle and yet she wore the same Initiate clothing as all three of the girls who had been doubled.

"Told you it would work," Gerta said, full of confidence. "And, wow, was I right."

"Those two have never failed," Nadine said. "They'll get to you and Malin next. I don't know what the delay was all about and it doesn't matter."

Where Gerta had the cheerful optimism and bluster, Nadine had a cooler, more mature authority. Her much longer stay in the Sealed Dormitory gave her a certain amount of stature that made even Gerta defer. She not only knew the way things worked but she had been there to comfort every one of them when they'd been dumped off in one of those rooms. There was a certain attitude about Nadine, a strangely calm, resigned but positive air she projected. It seemed as if almost anything could happen and it would just wash over her.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 04



The other girls gave her credit because she continued to take her failures with such aplomb. No matter what happened to them, they knew that Nadine had been through worse. Her example was what kept them from freaking out.

"They will do it," Illya said distantly, not really talking to anyone in particular. "You wouldn't believe it ... it's so hard to explain. This guy, Zhair'lo. He's, I don't know, different somehow."

Talla was now staring in rapt fascination at Illya.

Nadine put in softly, "Yes, he seemed a bit odd."

"Will you take him for your Virgin's Choice?" Talla asked.

It was the first thing she had said since they'd all sat down. The sound of her voice attracted the attention of everyone but Nadine. It was the strangest thing Illya had ever seen. There was Nadine, the calm Mistress of her own emotions, gone suddenly past cool to dark and outright cold, refusing to turn her gaze towards Talla.

In a moment, it passed and everyone was looking back to Illya, who was still stunned by the raw edge of Nadine's -- what had it been -- hatred?

"Oh, definitely," Illya stammered, 

Had she really meant to say that? Yes, she had. Whatever her feelings were about the Temple and how they'd judged her, her feelings about the man who had delivered her from the pit of Sealed Virginity were unalloyed. The first erection to plunge past her lips would be his.

"What about you?" she asked Arda.

"Zo'kar for sure," Arda replied. "I'd always planned it that way. Whoever broke my Seal gets first dibs, period. Part of me wants to take Zhair'lo, just because I've heard so much about him, like that story that he quadrupled that girl and -"

That was when the whole conversation really stopped.

The story of Zhair'lo and how he'd been discovered was a series of crazy rumours that floated around. The Sealed Virgins, cut away from the rest of society as they were, received only the faintest table scraps of information. They knew that Zhair'lo was a recent find, knew that the discovery of a Seal Breaker was a spectacular and unusual event, knew that someone must have been the first accidental victim of a multiple upgrade.

The idea of a quadruple upgrade, however, was the wildest of the possibilities that they had heard.

Once again, all eyes turned to Talla.

"That one's true," Talla said meekly.

"You're Talla," Arda said. It wasn't -- quite -- an accusation. "I've heard about you."

She was really uncomfortable. Illya could see that, and it was obvious why.

"You shouldn't be embarrassed," Yua put in. "If you hadn't gone through that, Zhair'lo would never have been discovered."

"Yeah, really," Nadine put in, her voice unusually flat. "We should all be grateful. If not for your gigantic sacrifice, where would we be?"

Illya glanced furtively at Nadine, who was staring at the grass in the centre of the circle of girls.

"I've got duty in the morning," Nadine said to no one in particular.

She quickly stood up, turned away from them and walked off into the darkness.

Talla was actually cringing.

In the stunned silence that followed Nadine's sudden departure, the rest of Illya's sisters let out a few exaggerated sighs and vague murmurs indicating that they were getting ready to go to sleep, too. Gerta, Malin and Arda left in a group. Anzha, abandoned by Nadine, decided to tag along with Yua.

It left Tina, Talla and Illya sitting in the courtyard. Illya stalled a bit, pretending to have trouble refastening her top around her recently enlarged breasts. In the corner of her eye, she saw some gesture pass between the two others. Shortly thereafter, Tina waved to them both and trotted off into the darkness.

Illya looked up to see Talla staring straight back at her with those all-seeing eyes.

Very slowly, Talla crawled over to Illya and sat down in front of her so their knees were almost touching. She then reached around her back and undid the ties on her top, letting it fall off to reveal her breasts. Illya, hoping that she was taking Talla's intention, stopped trying to do up her own top.

"It's been hell for you," Talla opened, keeping her voice flat and guarded.

"Yeah," Illya replied, on the same level. "You?"

Talla nodded.

"I was caught with a man I hadn't been assigned to Serve," Talla said. "Twice."

Illya bit her lips, holding back the curse word implied by that simple declaration.

"I've been an outcast for three months," Illya said.

"It isn't right," Talla said. "What they've done to either of us."

Illya gulped, feeling the bracing chill of sedition in the air.

"No," she agreed.

It was just one word, that sledgehammer of honesty, but it was the first time she had ever spoken against the Temple in any way. It was the first time she'd let her traitorous thoughts leave her skull.

"It isn't right," Illya affirmed.

Talla took a breath.

"They made him whip me," Talla said. "And while I bled, I had to watch him being Served by someone else."

Illya felt her stomach drop. She hadn't been punished for anything since the lessons before her Initiation ritual. For that sort of thing, they just smacked your ass with a little stick. She'd never been whipped. And why the cruelty of that last bit? 

"That's awful," Illya said. "My misery was longer than yours, but ..."

She trailed off.

"I'll help you any way I can," Talla said. "Whatever it is that you need help with. Whatever you want to do. But I desperately need a favour."

Illya raised her eyebrows, waiting. There was a certain economy of words implied in the way they were speaking to each other. A gesture, in this context, was an appropriate substitution for words.

"They'll never let me see him again," Talla explained. "I'm sure there's a note somewhere on his file or mine making sure I never get assigned to Serve him."

Illya only nodded, letting Talla know that this was a safe assumption. Talla, meanwhile, stared down at the grass between their knees and went on.

"I want to get a message to him, to ask him why he did what he did. And I want to know what he's planning to do now. I can't use scrolls. Even if I could send one to him, I'm sure anything coming back to me will be checked."

"Of course I'll help," Illya promised instantly. "If his name comes up, I'll carry your message."

Talla smiled weakly and looked up at Illya.

"I don't think you understand," Talla said. "You're going to see him tomorrow night."

Illya's eyes widened in realization.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 05



Zhair'lo had never realized that the Hunters actually practised standing still. It seemed stupid until you actually tried to do it. Then you realized how difficult it was and the necessity of practising it.

He stood in the middle of a vast grassy field, youngest of the new recruits to Lyric's camp, keeping as still as possible.

As Lyric walked among the two rows of young men, they stood stiffly at attention, their eyes fixed on the horizon, blinking only rarely.

Zhair'lo realized that he had nothing to think about except every blink, every gulp, and every itch on every part of his body. The sun beat down, boiling away sweat as fast he could produce it. The odours of the recruits soaked into the air around him. 

"When you are in the forest, hunting your prey," Lyric called out as he prowled between them. "You may sit in a blind for several bells."

He stood directly in front of one of the older men, examining that man's face for a betraying tick.

"A branch broken by a single false step can scare that prey off," Lyric went on, moving to the next man. "Flightier prey will run at the slightest rustle of leather."

Lyric came to stand in front of Zhair'lo, looking down on him. He didn't have the sheer frightening bulk of Harzen or Kurran, but Zhair'lo had seen Lyric move when he was in a hurry. If Lyric, whip thin and a head taller than Zhair'lo, wanted to take him down, he knew he wouldn't see it coming.

There was a pause as Lyric continued to stare at Zhair'lo and Zhair'lo pretended to stare straight through the Master Hunter's chest.

Was he sensing disapproval? Lyric's face seemed as emotionally dead as ever, but he was lingering on Zhair'lo much longer than he had on anyone else.

'Am I the inappropriate child, as I was at Harzen's Farm?'

Was he a burden to be trained? An undersized man, unable to do the work of the others?

Or was it jealousy? He knew he'd done better on the Test than many others. Did Lyric hate him for that? That seemed petty for such an important man.

Lyric let out a breath that wasn't quite a sigh before turning on his heel and walking to a position in front of the two groups. Slowly, he turned back to face them.

In a quiet voice, which was all the more effective for their stillness, he spoke.

"Notch your arrows," he said.

There weren't any targets in sight, just eight men with bows and quivers standing in the middle of an open field. The order to notch their arrows was, he concluded, not about shooting.

Zhair'lo pulled an arrow from his quiver and set the notch on the string of his bow. The arrow was pointed at the ground. In the periphery of his vision, he noticed that the rest of the men -- all more experienced that he -- were doing the same. That meant he'd interpreted the order correctly.

Lyric walked through the two lines and took a place standing behind them.

"Stand and draw," he ordered, quietly as before.

Numerous feet moved and bows rose with the strings pulled back. The two lines were staggered, so Zhair'lo and the other men in the back row weren't pointing their arrows at the backs of the men in front.

Lyric walked behind them, correcting their stances, adjusting their grips and offering sharp criticism.

"Xalish," he said with the slightest touch of disappointment. "Your vanes are backwards again."

Zhair'lo checked his arrow. He'd gotten that much right at least.

"Da'ren," Lyric said. "How will you possibly shoot true with your arrow on the wrong side of your bow?"

Zhair'lo's arm was starting to ache. Holding a bow and arrow in the drawn position couldn't possibly be harder than all the shovelling he'd been doing at Harzen's Farm. It was just a very specific group of muscles that were being worked here.

Lyric worked his way across the two lines, alternating between those in the front and the back while never passing in front of a notched arrow.

He came to Zhair'lo last, at the end of the back row.

"Decent stance," he remarked. "Widen the legs a bit ... good."

Zhair'lo's arm was beginning to shake.

"Steady," Lyric said, continuing his examination. "Correctly notched."

He stepped back to a place behind both rows.

"And relax," he ordered, calm as ever. "Stow your bows."

On their backs, orthogonal to their quivers, was a sheathe for holding their bows. It was into these sheathes that they slid their bows.

"Six laps around the field," Lyric ordered. "Last one back does seven. Go!"

This last was shouted, spurring them into action.

'I don't care how big you all are', Zhair'lo thought. 'I won't be last.'

-----------===================-------------

Sunlight, filtered by the steamy glass, slanted in from the highest west facing windows of the gigantic pool house. In the main pool, dozens of nude women quietly swam from one side to the other, stretching sore muscles or just relaxing. In a small, sunken bath off to the side, a young girl watched the surface of the water in front of her as sunlight reflected off the nearly still water into her eyes.

Tina broke the surface of the water with her face to the ceiling so her hair would set itself back. She waded over to Talla.

"Was that really wise?" she asked doubtfully.

"Trust to courage," Talla quoted haughtily.

"That's for sex," Tina said of the axiom. "They tell us that for when he lose our virginities, so we'll be brave and take the lead."

"It's for women," Talla replied firmly. "It can apply in any part of life."

Tina tilted her head back and forth thoughtfully.

"Fair enough. But can you trust Illya to carry our messages?"

"It's all we have," Talla pointed out, her voice still calm. "Would you prefer scrolls?"

"No," Tina said with wide-eyed honesty. "Why do you trust Illya?"

"Because she hates them, too," Talla said. "I saw that look in her eyes. I saw the way she stuck her chest out at them."

"So?"

"So?", Talla echoed, adding a layer of interrogation to Tina's question. "Didn't you feel it?"

"No."

"Well I did," Talla declared, leaning in until their noses were almost touching. "Illya can be trusted."

Tina's eyebrows twitched in resignation.

"Your ass on the table," she said.

Talla nodded.

"Yes, it is."

"But how can this work long term? You can't go around at seventh bell shouting out to see who's Serving Zhair'lo," Tina pointed out.

"We'll have to be more clever," Talla said. "We'll need more allies. We'll need someone in the Offices who can actually see the assignments being filed. Then we can pass messages back and forth."

Tina looked down and away from Talla.

"What?"

"There's one thing you're forgetting," she whispered.

Talla raised her eyebrows, waiting.

"Right after he whipped you, he f-"

"I know," Talla interrupted sharply, surprised at the pain that image still brought her.

She inhaled, soothing the emotional part of her mind that was angry at Zhair'lo. How could he be aroused after that? Didn't her pain and sacrifice mean anything to him?

"That's the first question -- the first message -- I'm sending. If we don't get a good answer -"

She paused as Tina's eyes met hers.

"Well," Talla said, weakly, "then there's no need to worry about future messages, is there?"

"I suppose not," Tina agreed.

-----------===================-------------

Two weeks had gone by without a Virgin girl showing up at his door. With no upgrades to do, Zhair'lo had hosted girls from all over the Temple, though there had been a distinct leaning towards those of Form.

The first night time visitor from Tight had been the creepiest. She had kept asking to be spanked. Because he had already penetrated her, he had been attempting to satisfy this needs of hers while inside the mesh. He had felt her raw, sexual pleasure with each slap against her well-muscled cheek even as echoes of moderate pain had come through that link. It had been so much like being forced to whip Talla that he had started hyperventilating, which had at least slowed the girl down.

The mesh had never felt like such a curse as it had that night.

The rest he could deal with. The women from Sweetness? They liked to be licked. The Iron Disciples had their pure, grinding strength and stamina. There was the Facial girl who could suck like crazy.

But the three Tight girls ... he shivered. Maybe he would get over that some day. Other men didn't complain, did they?

So here he sat, in the quiet game room of Lyric's lodge, contemplating the arrangement of his wooden pieces. His Sorceress stood on her wall. Unable to leave her Temple, she waited there for one of Kenji's pieces to come into range so she could pick it off. Knowing this, Kenji had to move his soldiers around the Sorceress's cone of fire.

The atmosphere was completely different from Harzen's. There was very little ale going around, for one thing. The Hunters always seemed ready to hunt, as if there might be a call in the middle of the night to take down a stag or something. Consequent to the lack of inebriation was the subdued nature of those in the room. It was an entirely different way of relaxing. Calm, quiet, soft spoken. If he were the type to drink, Zhair'lo supposed that he could quietly have a drink, sip at it occasionally and just drift off to sleep in one of the many soft chairs around the room.

Still, even with all of that in its favour, he knew that there was an underlying current of readiness, of preparation for action. It just wasn't in the nature of a Hunter to be standing on anything other than the balls of his feet - even when he was lying down. How they all managed to be completely relaxed and perfectly prepared for any emergency was beyond Zhair'lo's understanding. It did seem to him an excellent way to live, however, and he therefore intended to emulate them.

It was into this aura of reserved tension that the night's contingent of Temple visitors arrived. Many of them must have experienced the Hunter's lodge at least once before. Zhair'lo saw the soft expressions on their faces as the firelight, reflected off the wooden panels, warmed their many colours of skin. Only women who had been here before could absorb the atmosphere of the place so quickly.

He was not surprised when he saw Illya standing on tiptoe to get her head above the shoulders of the women around her, eager to spot him out. That bouncing enthusiasm stood in stark contrast to the patient reserve of everyone else in the room.

Zhair'lo waited, as he had learned to do from weeks of practice, sitting comfortably in his chair, confident in how the evening was going to go. Much like Harzen's farm, there just weren't any other boys in the place that were of the age to have a Virgin visitor in a long skirt.

One sat, attentively. One waited. One did not appear too eager. That's how the real men handled it. It wasn't polite to appear either insistent or indifferent.

The crowd at the door dwindled as the Hunters quietly led their women off to places more private and eventually there was no one but Illya, the suddenly well endowed girl in the long white skirt and a top that might have been fine when her chest was flat but was now woefully inadequate for its purpose.

"Zhair'lo," she said quietly.

He was already walking towards her, holding out his hand with the palm up so she could gently lay her fingers in his grasp.

"This way," he said, as quietly and patiently as he had said to -- how many girls was it now? - as he led them away.

Nervously, almost skittishly, she put her arm around his waist and leaned in to him as they mounted the stairs. She inhaled deeply, contentedly.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Mm-hm," she mumbled with a blissful smile. "I knew I was right to pick you."

Concern crossed his face.

"When did you decide?"

"When I saw you," she said. "When you came to do my upgrade and I saw the look in your eyes."

"Ah," he replied, satisfied with that answer.

They were walking down a long hallway towards his room.

"When else would I have picked you?" Illya wondered aloud. "At the last minute?"

"Or before you met me," Zhair'lo explained.

Illya thought about that.

"What? Just based on your name?"

"Basically," Zhair'lo said with a shrug. "But you picked me because of me. Not because of something you'd heard."

He stopped outside an open bedroom door and faced her.

"Never mind," he said, a shade of embarrassment on his face. "Just being stupid."

She stared back at him in frank examination. Her mouth was moving as realizations clicked into place.

"It isn't stupid," Illya said slowly. "You would rather be a decent person than a famous hero."

"Sort of," Zhair'lo replied with a smile and a diversion of his eyes. "I don't mind being famous. I just don't want to be a statue up on some wall."

Illya glided half-dazed into his bedroom, barely hearing the heavy wooden door slide closed. She backed up against the window, silhouetting herself with the sunset sky, and looked back at Zhair'lo.

Zhair'lo, for his part, knew what to do. Whenever a girl appeared uncertain or unready, the thing to do was wait. It had come to him, either instinctively or by the way he'd been raised, to be patient and it had never yet failed him. Illya was either frightened or getting ready to pounce. He couldn't be sure at this point.

"You've been with a lot of my friends," Illya remarked, looking at the floor.

Zhair'lo nodded. Maybe she was frightened by the difference in their levels of experience?

"Yes," he said. "Does that bother you?"

There was something she wanted to say, and she was working her way around to it. He just had to let her get there, prod her a little bit now and then. Whatever it was, she wouldn't be happy with the evening unless this got out first.

"Do you remember them?"

Zhair'lo nodded again.

"Nadine," he said. "Yua, Anzha."

Illya confirmed those names with a gulp. She then took a deep breath.

"And Talla," she said with a sudden exhalation.

Weakly, her eyes sought out his, which had turned to impassive shields of ice.

"Talla?" he whispered.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I wanted to bring it up later. After. But I have to know."

Zhair'lo gulped, feeling the space between them widen into a canyon as his gut turned to stone.

"Know what?" he asked, steadying his breathing.

Illya wanted to bridge the gap she had opened, but she couldn't bring herself to move. How could she Serve him now, when she'd made the whole room so cold?

"She wants to know why," Illya explained. "And so do I. Why -- how -- could you be Served by some other girl right after -- after that."

"After being forced to bring Talla so much pain?" Zhair'lo filled in the blanks. "There's no use dodging around what happened."

It seemed a bit like Zhair'lo was staring at her navel, but his eyes were focused far, far past her. He wasn't even in the room with her anymore. The red light of the setting sun, blazing into his face, didn't really seem to be touching the person underneath.

"They have a lot of potions," he explained, a darkness taking his voice into a rasp far beyond his years.

"Potions?"

He nodded, meeting her eyes in a vague sort of way as he slid over to his bed and sat on the side with his hands folded in his lap.

"A few days ago they gave me one that made it so I couldn't come," he said, all emotion gone from his voice "Another that made it so I couldn't mesh with a girl, even while I was inside her."

Illya sat beside him, pulling a leg up on the bed so she could turn her body to face him even while he faced the empty room. She was seeing once again that person she had seen the night of her upgrade.

"That afternoon, just before I saw Talla, they gave me something," he went on. Then his voice went bitter. "Sonja gave me something."

His hands were clenched in his lap, the knuckles turning white. Whoever Sonja was, Illya was fervently happy not to be her.

"I fought that girl," Zhair'lo said. "I pushed her away. For me. For Talla. I pushed her away. But the potion was too strong. I was too weak."

Illya watched with concern as Zhair'lo's chest fluttered with breathing that was far too rapid.

"Do you know what it's like to feel your body responding when you don't want it to?" he whispered. "I blacked out. I think it was from fighting so hard. I blacked out ... but I knew what was happening ... knew I was enjoying it."

She did the only thing she could think of doing, which was to place her hands on top of his clenched fists. Did he relax a little, at that touch? She thought so. His breathing seemed to slow down. It had probably been the right thing to do.

"When I came to, I was in the room where they let men sleep in emergencies," he said. "They sent me home."

The room was dark now, the sun having abandoned them to the flickering light of a very small torch on the wall.

Illya slid her hand up over his abdomen, his chest, his neck and up to his cheek. Gently, she turned his face towards her.

"They're very powerful," she said. "I know it, too. Not like you and Talla know it, but I know it all the same."

He looked into her eyes, the expression in his face so deep that she could spend years examining the internal reflections of it's jewel-like complexities. Maybe she saw hope there. She couldn't be sure.

"You didn't have a choice, then," she told him firmly before her voice went soft again. "But you have a choice now."

Was it the right time? Was it too soon? Where was he right now, after she had forced him to immerse himself in that awful tale? Trust to courage. Wasn't that what they said? Did it apply here? She thought so, and made a decision.

Leaning in, she tilted her head and kissed him. First on the cheek, then just on the corner of his lips, where an affectionate peck became a romantic offer.

Warmth came to his eyes. She saw it for just a moment before he closed them and she closed hers, too.

Kissing a boy was nothing like kissing a girl. Gentle as he was, his lips could never be as soft. But he was a man, the first she had touched since her Initiation. The first she had ever kissed. The first who would ever be allowed to penetrate her.

She'd been intimidated by him, before she'd ever met him. His confidence and concern had reassured her and made her eager. Then she'd heard Talla's story, and she'd been scared again. Now she knew what had really happened, who he really was, and her enthusiasm had returned. He was, it turned out, a human being after all.

There was a cost though, for that appraisal. She'd dragged him through a terrible memory, possibly the worst of his life. What was it to not want to have sex? What was it to be made to have sex in spite of that opposition?

So she offered, as gently as she could, and he accepted -- she hoped freely. The darkness that she had so easily detected in his eyes was nowhere present in the feel of his body. His texture, his being, had changed -- for her? Because of her?

Illya held his face in her hands calmly waiting for his response. She felt his body shift, felt his hands sliding around her waist. There was a rough spot, a callus maybe, on the underside of two of the fingers of his right hand. She felt the friction as he traced his way from her side to her spine. Arda's hands had traced those very curves so many times, but it had never brought her a thrill like this. His hands were sliding up, slowly following the waves of her spine until he bumped up against the ties that held her top in place.

She inhaled, pushing her lips more deeply into his, opening her mouth so their tongues could meet, letting him know that he should keep going. How had he ended up taking the lead anyway?

The ties came undone, releasing her breasts.

Her breasts.

How good it was to have them, in this room with her first man. So many weeks wandering around the Temple in a long skirt, waiting for attempt after attempt, had soaked her in negative emotions where it came to her body. Somewhere between shame and hatred, Illya had absorbed an image of herself that couldn't bear a look in the mirror. It was the reason that the girls always played with each other in the dark. None of them were proud of their bodies.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 05



Until now.

Their lips parted and she looked down at herself as the little white top fell away from her body. When she saw him looking, too, she inhaled deeply, forcing her breasts to jut outward.

"Hello," he whispered, maybe to her, maybe to them.

"You do good work," she said, stifling a giggle.

"Whenever I can."

The left hand, the smoother one, slid around the front of her body, up over her ribs, to cup the nearest mound of flesh. A tingle rushed through her body, building up into a shock that forced her head back. She hadn't let any of the girls touch her since the upgrade, complaining that she was too sensitive. True, even now the skin was a little on the touchy side, but the real reason for her reticence was this moment. She had been saving herself for this, that he could be the first to touch her in this way.

His mouth was upon her nipple. When had he moved? She'd been so lost that she hadn't even noticed.

She was working on his shirt, pulling it off over his head and forcing him to detach from her breast. Their mouths met again, more insistently, more urgently. She pushed him on his back, allowing her to stretch out her legs. Their lips never unsealed. Not for a moment.

A spare part of Illya's mind noted that kissing him wasn't like it was with girls. She was sure he was being gentle -- for a man -- but girls were just softer, smaller somehow. His mouth, his muscles, his whole body, were all just larger than what she was used to.

That was okay.

Her thigh was between his legs, brushing up against something else that was larger than what she was used to. Arda would tease her sometimes, whispering about how many fingers she was slipping into Illya's vagina. Three was her limit. This beast that pushed out from inside Zhair'lo's beige work pants was wider than three of Arda's fingers.

And it was going inside her. She resolved that then and there, as if she hadn't made that decision when she chose him, when she started walking to this lodge, when she came into this bedroom and when she kissed him.

She pulled at the laces on his pants, loosening them. It meant coming unglued from his lips so she could slide off the bed and yank his pants down.

Nine gods!

Not counting the upgrades, it had been months since she'd seen a penis, and somehow the knowledge this one was going inside her made it seem a little more real than any of the others. There was a point, when you were failing upgrades so many times, that you just refused to get too caught up in the belief that you might make it through, might get to this point. A girl just learned to harden herself to the failures.

A breath rushed through her in the instant she saw that erection and realized it was really happening.

"You okay?" Zhair'lo asked.

She looked up to see a quirky smile on his lips. She exhaled a stuttering breath.

"Yeah," she said. "It's just -"

Illya trailed off as she took his erection in hand. It felt hard and unyielding. Well, it wasn't like she hadn't known what she was getting into when she'd picked him.

"Underwear," she said suddenly and stood up.

The skirt unlaced, the underwear slid off. Zhair'lo gave her another funny look as he saw the underwear laid aside. She knew what that look was for, but she didn't care right then.

Calling up her courage, she crawled on top of him and put her hands on his shoulders.

"Carefully, now," she said, somewhere between demanding and pleading.

Zhair'lo's expression went very calm as he took a long, deep breath.

"Take your time," he said with a coy grin. "I'm here all night."

It was natural for him, even easy. While she'd been waiting for him and Zo'kar to come back around to doing upgrades, he'd probably being have sex as often as he wanted. Plus he'd come all over her chest the night before. His thirst for such things was well slaked, wasn't it? She supposed that that was good. The more sex he'd had, the more patient he could be. Wasn't that how men were?

She and Arda had practised even this part. Arda would lie on her back and hold her fingers near her pussy, allowing Illya to slide down on them: imagining what it would be like when it was a man underneath her; making sure she could do the angle just right.

The head of his penis bumped up against, sliding against her lips. Was that her wetness, lubricating him? Yes, it was. She twisted her hips side to side, letting the swollen head part her lips a little at a time, letting the juices that flowed from her insides coat his manhood.

The very tip of him, as she brushed back and forth, touched something just far enough inside her.

She felt it then.

The mesh.

Illya had never been in a mesh before, and here it was. Her hips locked, the muscles frozen in place in a way that was almost painful. She'd known that meshes were unbreakable, but she had never realized how literally the mesh enforced its existence. Now that the two bodies, the two minds, were meshed, her body just refused to do anything to loosen that combination.

A sweat broke out on her brow, even as she felt all of Zhair'lo's emotions rushing into her body.

The only direction her muscles would let her go?

Down.

She relaxed herself as best she could and, with a slight whimper escaping, let her body go the only place it would.

In the moment that she eased herself onto him, she felt every centimetre sliding up inside her, filling her with width that fingers never had; to depths fingers could never reach. There were places in there that no one had touched until now.

Give him credit: Zhair'lo was a patient and thoughtful man. She hoped everyone she went to Serve would be like him. He merely waited, letting her adjust. He didn't thrust, twist or even twitch while she acclimated herself to the sensation of being fully penetrated. There was no sense in him, in body motion, facial expression or even emotion spilling through the mesh, that gave her any sense of insistence on his part.

Illya felt the muscles in her back complain from being arched at this odd angle for so long. She relaxed her hips just the slightest bit, to take the pressure off, and felt him moving inside her. Her eyes became slits as she revelled in that sensation, that swollen head pushing her insides around.

Delicious.

She arched her back and relaxed it, starting a very slow rocking motion.

A stifled cry escaped from her lips as he enlarged inside her. His fingers, resting lightly on her hips, became just a tiny bit tense.

"So soon?" she asked, frozen in place.

"One of us," he muttered, straining to hold them both back, "was really ready to go."

There was no avoiding it. Illya let herself rock back on his shaft, pushing it up against that perfect spot inside her, and she felt a surge of energy launch itself from the base of her spine, up her back and into her brain.

She felt, painfully, that erection twitching inside her, releasing its white load one voluminous shot at a time. Remembering the night before, Illya knew how much came out of him. She could only imagine what it had to be doing inside her as the pressure forced semen into every crevice available.

It was a relief when he began to shrink, releasing the feeling of tightness that had consumed her.

Gently, remembering at least that particular warning from months ago, she slid off him. Oh, how she felt empty. She fell on her stomach beside him, panting heavily. Laying her chin in the crook of his arm, she looked up into his eyes. He was watching her with a curious half grin.

She couldn't help it, at that point, she just started giggling uncontrollably.

"Sorry," she tried to stammer out.

"It's okay," Zhair'lo assured her with a wry grin. "Laughing is normal."

"I just -- I just," she stammered, unable to complete her thought.

Her head rested on his shoulder as she tried to get a hold of herself. After what seemed like several minutes, the giggling went away. She gulped in embarrassment and looked up into his eyes again.

"I was just so afraid," she said.

He jerked his chin towards his nightstand and she followed his gaze to the little white pair of underwear that lay there.

"I always wanted to come out to my first Service without wearing it," she said. "But after I talked to Talla -"

He jerked his head at this.

"Talla?"

"When she told me what you had done after whipping her," Illya said. 

"Oh, that," Zhair'lo said, somewhat relieved.

Illya looked at him.

"What did you think I meant?"

Zhair'lo shook his head.

"Never mind. It's not important."

Illya shrugged, looking back at her underwear.

"I was going over it in my head when I was getting dressed and I just -- I just put them on," she explained. She pursed her lips and added, "Like some kind of shield, I guess."

"Against me?"

"Yeah. Weird, huh?"

"But you chose me anyway?"

"I hadn't had time to think through Talla's story," Illya said. "They have this set up, now, just for you and Zo'kar. There's like, one Officer sitting in the Offices, who asks us on our way out if we want you for our Virgin's Choice. We have to tell her right then, right after the upgrade, or we miss our chance."

Zhair'lo squinted, adding words to his vocabulary.

"I hadn't even thought through Talla's story," Illya went on. "But I said, 'Yeah. Of course I'll take him'. And then all night long I'm thinking and thinking if that was the right thing to do."

He inhaled. No girl, no woman, had ever come to his bed admitting that she was afraid he might intentionally hurt her.

"But it was the right call," Illya said suddenly. "I kept remembering the look I saw in your eyes last night. I kept telling myself that the person who gave me that look -- that he knew what pain was and that he wouldn't hurt anyone he didn't have to."

How odd that Illya and Talla hadn't seemed to hold the actual whipping part against Zhair'lo. The only controversy for either of them was the part where he went on immediately thereafter to have sex with someone else. Logical, sure, but Zhair'lo wasn't entirely confident that he would feel the same way in their positions.

"Talla's not upset that I got her into that mess?" he asked.

Illya looked at him oddly.

"Of course not," she said. "It was her choice to come to you the second time."

"Still -"

"We," she interrupted, lifting her chest off the bed in an unmistakeable gesture of pride, "take responsibility for our actions."

"No one punished me," Zhair'lo pointed out. "Does Talla think that's fair? Do you?"

"First of all," Illya admonished. "Yes, it is fair. You're a man. Men aren't responsible for -"

"Why in nine hells not?" he interrupted.

Illya was flabbergasted, blinking her eyes in confusion.

"Because you're not," she said, unable to find anything else to say. "Men just aren't. That's our problem, not yours."

Zhair'lo opened his mouth to argue, but couldn't come up with anything to say, so Illya went on.

"Second, Talla told me that you did feel her pain."

Another deep breath from him.

"Yeah," he said. "But I haven't felt a thing from her since."

"Neither has she," Illya said. "That's why she had to send me here."

"To find out why."

Illya nodded.

"And, knowing why, to find out what you're doing now."

Zhair'lo's mouth twisted as he let out a breath of air.

"Learning how to fire an arrow," he said, narrowing his eyes suggestively. "And trying to find people who feel like I do."

Illya's eyes widened in alarm.

"Don't worry," he assured her. "I'm not about to do anything stupid. I wouldn't last a second assaulting the Temple."

"Then what are you planning?"

He thought about that. What was he really planning?

"I'm assigned here, for now," he said. "I can't leave this assignment for a while, but I want to join the Fighters as soon as I can figure out how. Then I can try to find whoever it is they're fighting. There must be somebody out there who can help us, even if it's just to escape for a while."

"That's what Talla was hoping," Illya said. "She's making friends, too. The girls who were Sealed Virgins are a good start. We, of all people, have got a good idea of how unfair this place is."

"We agree on that," Zhair'lo stated firmly. "But how do we change it?"

"Temples can fall," Illya said, looking directly into his eyes. "I've had time to read a lot of history. When the Goddess dies, a new one must be chosen quickly. Failing that, without a single woman holding all nine Perfections, the whole thing falls apart in short order."

Zhair'lo remembered his dream of offering Sonja's head to Talla. He remembered wondering then, as he did now, if Talla had changed so much that she would accept such a gift. Would his feelings for her change if she had become that sort of person?

"We're contemplating murder?" he asked worriedly.

"No," Illya said firmly. "But Goddesses don't live very long. The trick would be to prevent any of the Queens from ascending."

"Ascending?"

"That's what they call it."

Indeed, this was a lot for Zhair'lo to take on. He vaguely recalled that the Temple would have a little party or something whenever a new Goddess was named, but pre-adult Zhair'lo had never really cared except as the festivities included a few days in which there was some fairly fantastic cake available.

If Illya was right, the thick walled, well guarded Temple was a fragile thing after all, but only for a short period of time. The whole enterprise, it turned out, was a machine pivoting on a single point.

"And then what do we do?" Zhair'lo asked.

"I don't know," Illya said and her voice went bitter as she continued. "The Temple historians promise all kinds of horrible chaos and misery, but I don't trust them. The authority of the Temple is what they care about, so they're willing to tell all kinds of lies about what would happen without a Goddess in control of everyone."

"So that's our goal?" Zhair'lo asked, his voice coated with disbelief at the enormity of the task. "To somehow orchestrate the fall of the Temple?"

Illya nodded.

Zhair'lo's eyes widened and wandered the room.

"Tall order."

"Yeah."

There was a long silence as various thoughts went through their heads. Zhair'lo was trying to imagine how he could do anything -- from outside the Temple - to prevent any of the three Queens from becoming a Goddess. Illya was wondering if any of the stories about the plight of women in the pre-Temple days were true, or just fabrications to keep women in line.

Illya's eyes fell on her underwear again.

"What did you think I was going to say?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"About my underwear. And Talla."

"Oh, that," he said, covering himself with an embarrassed laugh. "When Talla came to me on her first night. Her, uh, Virgin's Choice, I guess. She left her underwear with me, more or less by accident. I still have it."

"Weren't you assigned somewhere else?"

"Yeah. Harzen's Farm."

Illya laughed.

"And you brought it here with you?"

Zhair'lo shrugged.

"Yeah. I thought maybe she sent you to get it back."

"She sent me to talk about the downfall of the Temple," Illya said drily. "Underwear didn't come up."

"I suppose it wouldn't," Zhair'lo had to laugh, too.

Illya cocked her head.

"You can keep mine, too," she offered impishly. "Since you're collecting."

"What?"

"I don't need a shield," she said, turning her eyes upon him. "Not from you."



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 06



Amid the tall, torch-lit pillars and flickering fire pits of Endowment Hall, Illya was hoisted up on to a waist high table as the women around her cheered and laughed.

Watching from a distance, Talla noted that Illya didn't look nearly as surprised as Talla had the night she'd lost her virginity; the night they'd done this to her.

"Ren hana," someone shouted, as if reminders were needed these days with all the double upgrades going around.

The shears were handed forward so one of the older women could cut Illya's long skirt down not just to knee length but all the way to the skimpiest of mini-skirts. It was a quick thing, done by a woman with enthusiasm if not any particular skill in the matter.

Illya somehow managed to blush and sneer at the discarded remnants of her clothes at the same time, before she hopped down off the table and grabbed her drink, disappearing into the crowd.

"Now what?" Tina asked.

"Wait for her to come to us," Talla said. "It's her first night. We shouldn't take that away from her if she doesn't want to talk."

Tina nodded agreeably, sipping her own drink. She and Talla had arranged that they would hammer their assignments for the night into the ground as quickly as possible. That guaranteed that they would be back in Endowment Hall long before Illya could be done with Zhair'lo.

So here they stood having waited by the side of one of the many crackling fires throughout the giant hall. And here they would continue to wait

"You trusted her with a lot," Tina remarked quietly, her eyes trying to track Illya's movements.

"I'm sure I'm right."

"Can you be sure we'll be right with everyone we take in?" Tina asked. "We're going to need a lot on our side."

Talla gulped nervously.

"We'll have to be careful," she admitted. "But it's a long, long game we're playing here."

"It's years between chances," Tina reminded her.

Goddesses tended to last about five years or so. That gave them about two years before the current leader died of natural causes. It was, they felt, to their credit that they did not contemplate speeding along the demise of the Goddess in any way – never mind the sheer impracticality of getting anywhere near a Goddess with a weapon.

Their plan was to wait for the natural weakening of old age to take the life of their glorious leader. At that point, all they had to do was prevent another from taking her place.

There were probably a lot of ways to prevent the ascension of a new Goddess and only three of them were murder. Or rather: one of the ways involved three murders.

Time was in good supply. Ideas weren't.

Tina hadn't been inside the Temple the last time a new Goddess had been made, but she knew people who had. The amount of security around the Queens for those scant couple of days was nothing short of insane. No amount of fortune would get through that many of Form's determined enforcers, especially considering the pool of women they would be working with.

Whom would they be recruiting?

Sealed Virgins, for starters. They were the most likely to be bitter. Not all of them had it as bad as Illya did, but they were still the best shot. After that, it was a matter of finding all of the other women who had been punished for Monogamy and seeing if they still felt the same way.

"Whatever we do," Tina said, "we have to be ready. Between the first signs of weakening and – y'know – can be months or days. And sometimes Goddesses can burn out real fast."

"You two should be more careful," Illya said, popping up next to them with a grin. "You shouldn't talk without having a look around."

Talla smiled.

"Could you really understand us with all this noise?"

"A little, since I knew what your were talking about anyway."

Illya embraced first Talla, then Tina.

"How was it?" Talla asked, observing courtesy.

"Brilliant, really," Illya said. "You have no idea how good a cock feels after using fingers for months on end."

She inhaled, heaving her new breasts at them.

"Love the skirt," Tina remarked of her unevenly cut garment.

"Could you see, uh, me from down here?"

"Not much," Talla said. "Well, kind of."

There was no 'kind of'. Illya hadn't been wearing underwear and, after the crude snip job on her long skirt, everyone in the place knew that now.

The new Initiate looked around the room to make sure no one was in earshot.

"You have nothing to fear in him," she told Talla very quietly, continuing to scan the crowd. "We shouldn't talk here, though."

"No one's nearby," Talla insisted.

Tina looked nervous.

"We can talk in the baths, tomorrow," Tina said.

"That's no better than here," Talla said. "Just keep an eye out."

Tina twisted her lips, but took a position so the three girls formed a circle and could watch over each others' shoulders.

"Now spill it," Talla told Illya.

Illya shrugged and went on.

"He barely remembers fucking whoever that girl was. He says they gave him a potion of some kind – and I can tell you that they do have potions like that – that aroused him against his will."

Talla inhaled, fresh cold air clearing a great, dark burden away from her heart.

So Zhair'lo hadn't betrayed her.

She didn't trust herself to speak, so Tina spoke for her.

"What is he doing now?"

"Gathering friends," she said. "From what he tells me, there are other men who have been through that, uh - " she looked around the room - "Monogamy thing. Some of them are pretty upset, too."

"I don't know how much good they'll be out there," Tina said, jerking her head in the general direction of the Temple's main gate.

"We don't even know what we're going to do," Illya pointed out. "Allies can't be bad."

Talla regained control of her voice. She had to be sure ...

"How do you know?" she asked Illya. "How do you know he was telling you the truth about – about fucking that girl."

"I meshed with him," Illya said. "Right after he told me. Can you imagine being forced to have sex when you don't want to? I can't. But believe me, it was a horrible experience for him. I could feel it."

"The mesh told you?"

"Yeah."

Talla missed the meshes she'd had with Zhair'lo, the ones that went on even after orgasm, even over great distances. Now she only got the little meshes that came with her nightly assignments, boys whose names she couldn't remember thrusting their penises into her and depositing their seed. It was good, but it wasn't the same.

A nearby fire hissed and spat ashes on the floor next to them.

"All right," Talla said. "We'll figure out how many of the other Sealed Virgins feel like you do and we'll try to bring them in. Then we have to somehow find the ones in Form and Sweetness. They must have some locked up, too."

"I don't think you'll have any luck with Gerta or Malin," Illya said. "Malin just doesn't take anything seriously and Gerta is so eternally optimistic ..."

Illya trailed off with a shake of her head.

Tina nodded sadly and took another glance around the room.

"Then we look for other Monogamists," Tina added. "I think I can get us a lead on that."

"Time for bed, then?" Talla asked, downing her drink in one swift motion.

"Hard work requires rest," Tina put in.

-----------===================-------------

Training with the Hunters wasn't anything like working at the Farm. At Harzen's Farm, you had duties to attend to. You got those duties done, then you went and did whatever you wanted. At a Camp, at least at Lyric's Camp, you had a schedule. You observed that schedule and showed up on time for each part of your training.

So it came to pass that there was a gap in Zhair'lo's schedule in the early afternoon. It was meant for the recruits to rest up for their late afternoon activities, but Zhair'lo had other things on his mind. There was one person he really trusted; a friend he had had since early childhood. No matter how many times Zhair'lo had been reassigned and moved across the city, he could always find Plin back at the bakery, prepared to lend an ear. And as he couldn't talk to anyone else, he knew that he could trust Plin.

The advantage of Lyric's Camp was that it was actually on the border of the town instead of out at the end of a bunch of farmland. It put him much closer to Plin's bakery, even if he had to circumnavigate the Temple to get there. He was there in minutes. Plin always said that he could find his way home completely drunk. All he had to do was follow his nose.

Zhair'lo stuck his head in the deliciously scented, sweltering heat of the bakery.

"Master O'nosh," Zhair'lo called to the head baker. "Plin around?"

"Sorry, Zhai," the old man said, never taking a pause in the kneading of the dough before him. "I sent your buddy out on a delivery circuit with the carters. He'll be back in a bell or so."

"Thanks," Zhair'lo said, turning in chagrin.

Now what? He couldn't afford to wait an entire bell – not with his schedule. The only thing he could say about the trip was that it hadn't been a large waste of time, just a small one.

Well, as long as he was in town, there was always Marek. A short jog brought him a few blocks away to the water mill that was powered off the same aqueduct that fed many of the cisterns around town.

Marek probably had the least interesting duty of anyone Zhair'lo knew. Zhair'lo had even done flour milling in his rotation through all duties masculine. He could say from first hand experience that grinding grains into flour, or rather "watching grains being ground into flour" was the most boring task to which a man could ever be assigned.

When water was scarce, the mill was designed to be operated by men, oxen or horses.

At that point, the miller's job became both excruciating and boring.

Marek never seemed to mind. He merely leaned on his shovel and stared at the mill, as he was doing when Zhair'lo came through the arched stone entrance.

"Hey, Zhai, what's up?" he asked, sparing only a glance toward his friend.

"Not much, you?"

"Milling," he said, indicating the large rock wheel that rolled through the circular trough where the grain was mashed.

"I had some free time," Zhair'lo said. "Thought I'd drop by."

"Yeah," Marek said somewhat dimly, apparently hypnotized by the monotonous treading of the stone wheel.

"Hey," he jerked awake suddenly. "Have you played Kuntala lately? I won a tournament last night. It should get me master ranking."

Zhair'lo remembered the game. He'd been a clever player, once, collecting the gems in the right proportions and delivering them to the Temple gates for his reward. It was a complicated exercise in timing and combinations. He had once cared about things like city-wide rankings, tournaments and the like. Then he'd gotten his blue ribbon, met Talla and ...

Zhair'lo eyed Marek carefully.

"Seen any nice girls around here?" he asked.

Marek shrugged.

"You shoulda seen it," he went on. "Imagine this. Zigra - you remember him? The guy with the scar from that time he tried to jump over the creek? - Zigra's got six amethysts, figuring to zone them all out and win by Goddess's Pride. But at the last minute, I -"

Marek went on, describing in detail how he had outwitted his opponent in the final round of the board game tournament.

Zhair'lo interrupted him.

"I met this really great girl," he said, peering directly into Marek's eyes. "Tits like you wouldn't believe."

It was as if he hadn't spoken. Marek paused long enough to let Zhair'lo finish his sentence and went right back to his play by play description of his game.

"So I moved my cart – the empty one – in behind his and grabbed off one of his amethysts. Some said it was luck, but no, I planned it that way. I saw what he was doing. Next ..."

Zhair'lo shook his head in amazement. Having been warned about this by Plin, he wasn't the least bit upset by Marek's refusal to acknowledge the existence of women. But he was still shocked to see it up close and personal.

'This is what they do,' he realized. 'They have potions to make us have sex. Potions to make us forget. Potions to make us want them or not want them. To stop us from coming. To stop the mesh. What else can they do?'

He let Marek finish his glowing tribute to himself. Admittedly, it had been a brilliant victory. Kuntala wasn't a complicated game, rules-wise, but the strategy got very deep very quickly.

"Best of luck on that master ranking," Zhair'lo wished his friend. "I gotta get back to work."

"Where are you now?" Marek asked. "Last time I saw Plin, he said you were out farming."

"I'm with the Hunters now," Zhair'lo said. "Lyric's Camp."

"Nice!" Marek admired. "Bow and arrows?"

When Zhair'lo nodded, he went on.

"I gotta try that some day, if they'll let me."

"Milling getting too boring?"

"No," Marek squinted his eyes as if the question was ridiculous. "Why?"

"Nothing," Zhair'lo said with a bewildered shake of his head. "See ya later."

"Yep."

Marek returned his blank gaze to the wheel, preparing to shovel off the milled flour as soon it was suitably crushed.

Zhair'lo made off with a light jog back towards the Camp. He didn't really think of Marek as useful if it ever came to some kind of revolt against the Temple. Marek was simply a reliable, decent friend – and it didn't hurt that the guy was clever when it came to board games. There was no point playing against people who were easy to beat. What fun was that?

Plin, on the other hand, was wise. He had a way of looking at things that took confusing situations and made them simple. After a short talk with Plin, Zhair'lo usually came away with a different way of looking at this problems.

Actually, as he thought about it, Plin hadn't always been that way. He'd only developed the habit after turning eighteen. Zhair'lo had found him distant and odd only in the last few months, as if he'd moved on to better things than board games and running around in fields at play time. He recognized it now as adulthood and the sudden awareness of women, sex and the mesh.

Looked at that way, Plin only had a few months head start on Zhair'lo, as far as that kind of wisdom went, and Zhair'lo's experiences – good and bad - clearly brought him up to par.

What he really ought to be doing with his time was talking to Kenji and making friends with the other Hunters. It was tricky with that stoic lot, but he could get an inkling as to which ones were tinged with bitterness. The short chats he'd had with some of them hinted at others who'd been caught at Monogamy. At least they had that dark look of recognition in their eyes when Zhair'lo mentioned visiting the halls in Form.

Those were the ones he was after, potential allies in his fight against the Temple. Were there others, like him, who had been forced to hurt the women they liked best? He was betting so. Kenji vaguely hinted that he knew about such things, so either he'd been through it or he knew people who had. Either way, he was the guy to talk to.

-----------===================-------------

Aside from physicians and their assistants, women didn't often travel into one another's Divisions. Maksa always felt as if she were visiting a foreign land whenever she did it. There were subtleties of architecture and decor, differences in the way people walked and talked, and hundreds of other things that were a tiny bit off.

Form always gave her the creeps. She'd never been a victim of the lash; never been tied down to that wooden table. Others had, though, and she'd been witness to that. Once she entered Form, the smell of that polished wood was in the air. That was always good for at least half of the icicles in her blood.

On top of that, there was the way that those muscular, intimidating Form women looked at her when she visited their triangle, as if they were all constantly judging her. There was an endless litany going through her head: 'Am I walking properly? Is my back straight? Do I look like I have a right to be here? Am I on the shortest path to my destination? Will someone stop and interrogate me?'

She didn't like coming here, even back when it was for the official business of signing off her Virgins to their new homes.

Maksa was glad that the path to the Offices of Form was so straight and simple. But then, so was every other path in Form. These women liked their roads perfectly aligned and their corners square. There were no curtains flapping in the breeze. What banners there were did not hang, but were tightly strung.

Aside from the strip search room used for rare audiences or assignments to the Goddess's chamber, Form had to be the most oppressive place in the entire city. Even the balconies and window ledges seemed to overhang in a menacing way.

Form didn't put their socializing Hall in front of their Offices like Endowment and Sweetness did. Did Form women even socialize? Maksa got the feeling that there was a strong disapproval attached to socializing. And smiling.

Keeping a stern look on her face, Maksa let her eyes adjust to the darkness of Form's Offices. They might not be located like the other Offices, but the layout was identical; clearly designed for optimal efficiency. She considered, not for the first time, the perfect, methodical way in which work flowed through any of the Offices. It wouldn't surprise her to learn that Form had led the way in mapping out the ideal Office and everyone else had followed suit.

She passed the guards, women who had seen her here enough times that they didn't feel the need to question her. It was presumed that she knew where she was going.

Up the stairs on the left and straight past another pair of stoic, hyper alert guards. When she stepped through the double doors to Principia Facial, she breathed a sigh of relief.

This place was the antithesis of everything else in Form. Desks curved. Fabric draped. One workspace flowed into another. Fruit scented perfumes, absent elsewhere in the Division, floated through the air. Women in beautifully tailored clothing moved about with intentional, exaggerated grace. Many of them, Nine Gods, even smiled occasionally.

A young girl in a knee length skirt stood up as she entered. The Virgin had light brown hair streaked with red.

"Hello, Adept," she said very softly. "How can I help you?"

"Maksa Ayella," she told the girl, perhaps too abruptly. "I'm here to see H'reena."

The girl titled her head very warmly.

"Just one moment," she said and bowed before turning away to fetch H'reena.

She walked further into the large room and disappeared behind a curtain. A moment passed before a strikingly beautiful woman with wavy auburn hair strutted into view.

It wasn't just the hair, though it glistened in the sunlight that shone through a window behind her. It was also the cheekbones, sharp and refined, and the eyes gone some strange topaz shade of brown with long eyelashes - and never forget the elegant yet sharp nose.

She looked over at Maksa, alone in the entrance foyer.

"Adept Maksa Ayella?" she asked, her voice sweet, calm and welcoming.

"Yes, Mistress," Maksa said.

The woman waved her off.

"Please just call me H'reena," the woman said. Maksa felt the last of her tension melt away. "I am an Officer of Facial."

Her rank was obvious from her mode of dress, though Maksa had never seen an Officer's blouse as well tailored as this one. It was a simple cut: open to the navel with a small tie across her ample cleavage. Metal rings joined the two sides of the blouse below that point, keeping it tight around the woman's small waist while not actually covering the skin down the centre of her torso. At the shoulders, there were – instead of sleeves – bands of fabric with gaps between them that allowed Maksa to see the fine details of muscle underneath.

She'd always felt much more welcome here than elsewhere in Form. The Domain of the Sorceress of a Discipline set the standard for all her Disciples. Here were the finest paintings and portraits, the most beautiful statues, the most intricately carved desks and the finest clothes. Each woman seemed to have a slightly different shade of clothing that suited her hair and complexion. The overall aesthetic was soothing, avoiding the short tempered judgemental attitude of the rest of the Division.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 06



H'reena waved Maksa around a curtain to a small desk with two chairs in front of it and indicated that they would sit.

"I understand you're considering a Facial Upgrade?" H'reena asked.

"Yes, Mis -, ah, H'reena."

"How long have you been an Adept?"

"Just two weeks now."

H'reena nodded, taking notes.

"You are owed two upgrades outside your Division," H'reena pointed out. "Any idea what else you'd be interested in?"

"I already have one in Point," Maksa said. "Possibly I'll try for Abundance again, see if I can make it this time."

Abundance upgrades were almost as popular as Within upgrades. The competition for them had been – and continued to be - quite fierce. Maksa had been pleased to get a Point upgrade as her second choice.

"An Adept at your age?" H'reena said with a tone of admiration that was unmistakeably honest. "You're Officer bound, I think, so you're very likely to get what you want."

Maksa had reached the rank of Keeper just before her twenty first birthday, a mildly impressive feat that put her a little above average as far as passing exams and meeting quotas went. Her scores, however, hadn't been impressive enough to get her the Abundance upgraded she'd wanted. She'd never heard that age could be a factor.

"What does my age have to do with it?" she asked.

Maksa had seen the same charts every other woman had. It was rare to reach the rank of Adept before turning twenty two. The vast majority of women didn't get that far until age twenty five.

"Dear," H'reena admonished lightly, "even women on the Officer Track don't usually get to Adept this soon."

"Officer Track? What about the exams?"

H'reena rolled her eyes.

"Can you imagine if we made Officers take all of the exams for all of the upgrades they're entitled to?"

That was a thought. A Queen would need to take almost a hundred exams, wouldn't she?

"But those exams are mandatory," Maksa protested, getting over her shock.

H'reena's delicate lips cast themselves into a vision of cynical delight.

"That lot make a lot of rules," she said with a jerk of her head towards those next door. "And they break them when it really matters."

"So I won't have to write the exam?"

H'reena shook her head.

"I just have to ink you in," she told Maksa. "Do you want to do the Facial upgrade first, or do you want to go see Abundance?"

"Yours first," she replied instantly.

"I'll set it up in two weeks, then," H'reena said sweetly. Tilting her head forward in a gentle, conspiratorial voice, she added, "We still have to observe the rule about the one month hiatus since your last upgrade."

"Oh, wait," Maksa said, a flash of worry passing over her face. "I still have more Pussy upgrades to go. I'm not up to par there either."

H'reena squinted, her eyebrows making a delicate expression of confusion.

"Ah," she said in realization. "You've switched Disciplines."

Not a difficult conclusion there. The only reason Maksa could need more than one upgrade in her home Discipline was if she'd either switched Disciplines or been catapulted several ranks at once. As far as she knew, no one got to skip ranks.

"You'll find it's best to alternate upgrades," H'reena said. "Better for your health. I'll set you up for two weeks from today. Then you go finish up your Pussy upgrades or go see Abundance, all right?"

"That'd be great," Maksa said sincerely.

The sooner she got her upgrades, the sooner she could continue on this 'Officer Track'.

Well, not too soon.

There was that one other requirement for reaching Adept II, after all. Every woman had that duty.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo would have described the setting as "trackless woods". Kenji would have pointed to the deer tracks that were quite obvious to an experienced hunter and downgraded the assessment to merely "woods".

It was a pleasant afternoon, as long as you were in the shade of a nice big, leafy green tree and the foliage wasn't so thick that it prevented breezes from coming through. The forest around their current perch reminded Zhair'lo of the times he had run along the river, eager to meet Talla, to mesh with her ...

The two Hunters had found this tree to climb, found it so quickly that Zhair'lo had guessed Kenji had used it before. Bows on their back, they had shimmied up and taken positions several body lengths up, on either side of the wide, brown trunk.

The key, Kenji had told him, was to get comfortable.

And what did Hunters do, while they waited? They talked in whispers, so as not to scare away potential prey.

"You don't have to worry too much about deer," Kenji explained in that quiet voice he used when dispensing indispensable wisdom. "There are beasts which require dead silence. For deer, it's enough to whisper – and wait."

"I can only stay out here until sixth bell," Zhair'lo said.

"Another upgrade?"

"I'm a Seal Breaker."

"One had heard," Kenji's voice floated back, neither derisive nor impressed.

Pause.

"Must be exciting for you," Kenji volunteered.

"More excitement than I need," Zhair'lo answered. "Do you know any others who were Seal Breakers?"

"Master Lyric was," Kenji pointed out. "So was I. A few others."

Zhair'lo leaned around the trunk to try to look at Kenji, but the tree was too large to allow eye contact without him risking the loss of his balance and a long plunge.

"You were?"

Kenji didn't answer. Hunters just tended to ignore questions like this. Kenji hadn't reported this fact to impress Zhair'lo, after all, so he didn't care to bask in the younger man's surprise or admiration.

"How many seals did you break?"

"Dozen or so," Kenji said. "I wasn't the only one around at the time, so it wasn't such a big deal."

"How did they find you?"

"Find me?"

"Find out you could break seals?"

Silence for a moment. Kenji was thinking how to respond. It was quite a while before words started flowing again.

"There was a girl," he began. "Special, in a way. The mesh -"

Kenji stopped speaking and Zhair'lo knew better than to prod him. Sometimes it was best to just wait. That's what adults did – especially Hunters.

"It was very strange," Kenji went on. "She noticed the strangeness and she told her superiors. They tested me against a Sealed Virgin."

"And you succeeded."

It wasn't necessary to answer that, either.

When Kenji didn't continue the conversation, Zhair'lo decided to push on.

"They found me because I quadrupled a girl at an upgrade."

"Quadruple?" Kenji's voice actually lilted with surprise.

"The meshes with her were spectacular, too."

"She the one you got in trouble with?"

"Yeah."

Another long silence as each man considered his own life, his own thoughts and distracted himself by looking down into the forest for some sign of quarry.

"Didn't seem fair, that bit," Zhair'lo spat out suddenly.

"No, it wouldn't," Kenji replied. "Not until you've thought long and hard about it."

"You have?"

"I've had a decade," Kenji pointed out, the first real admission that he had been through the same thing Zhair'lo had.

"The rawness of it wears off. So does the anger. You move on to other girls – other women. You realize there's a whole city out there that needs us, up in this tree, doing our jobs. You realize that a strange feeling you once got about one girl isn't that important. You realize that there are a lot of people in this city and that you have no right to ruin what works for everyone else."

Clearly, Kenji had thought a lot about this.

"We have a choice, Zhai," he said, his voice softening into something almost completely unrecognizably Kenji. "Once we accept that we are part of an entire society where everyone lives a pretty good life, where no one starves, where no one suffers unnecessary pain. We can choose to contribute to that society, build it up and make it better for those who come next. Or we can choose to tear it down and leave a horrible mess for someone else to clean up."

Zhair'lo didn't think too long about his response.

"Couldn't we choose to make it better?" he asked. "For everyone else and for us, too?"

"That's not what you're thinking, Zhai," Kenji said.

"How you do know what I'm thinking," Zhair'lo protested indignantly.

"I told you, Zhai," Kenji said, almost lazy and nearly condescending, "I've been there. It's been a decade, but I know how you're feeling."

"So you just forgot about her, then?" Zhair'lo said, his voice dripping with accusation. "You whipped a girl and just decided to the nine hells with her?"

There was a long pause that Zhair'lo found impossible to read. Was Kenji smarting with the pain of his declaration? Had he won the point? Was he better than Kenji because he was standing by Talla where he had deserted his woman?

No. This silence didn't taste like victory. There must have been some subtle sigh from invisible Kenji, hiding round the other side of this vast tree trunk, some clue that made Zhair'lo realize he hadn't quite put the arrow through the bull's eye. Kenji had had ten years to think his position through. Could Zhair'lo possibly come up with something earth shattering in just the first few weeks?

"You're not thinking about protecting her," Kenji's words came flatly around the trunk of the tree. "You're thinking about tearing everything down."

Zhair'lo froze, unable to breathe as the accusation he had uttered against Kenji became a poison on his tongue.

"You've really been through this?"

He imagined that Kenji would have nodded.

"Yes," the other replied. "The whipping. That potion they give you. The warning to stay away from her. They did give you a warning?"

"Yeah."

"Then, like I said," Kenji admonished. "You care about her. You stay away from her."

Zhair'lo's nostrils flared as he drew in an angry breath.

"And let them think they're right?" he asked in a harsh whisper. "If no one does anything, this will go on forever."

"It's been going on quite well for centuries," Kenji pointed out. "For most people, it's been quite good -"

"So they tell us," Zhair'lo interrupted.

"So they tell us," Kenji conceded the point in a way that dismissed it. "Everything I see around me tells me they're right. It seems there's a part of our nature that makes most of us quite happy with multiple sexual partners."

"So you're okay being unhappy as long as everybody else is happy?" Zhair'lo asked.

"Yes."

Zhair'lo snorted.

"And what if everyone else is just pretending to be happy, too?"

Kenji let out a breath of air that might have been a laugh.

"You think that's terribly likely, Zhai?"

-----------===================-------------

"What do you think?" Yua asked.

"Gorgeous," Tina said.

They had skipped the baths this afternoon in favour of taking a trip to Tina's room. Talla and Tina were taking it in turns to throw pieces from Tina's copious wardrobe at Yua.

"It must be nice to have real clothes," Yua said, surveying the long rack of clothing at the end of the room.

She frowned and turned her back on the little mirror so she could look over her shoulder to see where the lines of the skimpy top crossed her spine.

"You'll have your own soon," Tina said encouragingly. "We might even be able to trade between each other."

There was no guarantee there. Being of different ranks, there were some things they simply weren't allowed to wear.

"Think how much I'd have already if my first upgrade attempt had worked," Yua said.

It was almost a pout, but she squeezed her lips together and drove the self pity away from her expression. Talla and Tina shared a knowing glance while Yua was looking the other way.

With a resolute twist of her body, Yua turned back to face the mirror.

"Can I borrow this top?" she asked.

"Sure," Tina said. "I lent it to Talla once before."

"With your boobs?" Yua asked. "You must have been falling out of it!"

"Try the skirt, too," Talla said. "That was my favourite."

That bit was true. She liked that skirt more than anything she had ever worn. It was the short one that Tina had kept from when she was still an Initiate. As a Neophyte, Tina was supposed to wear knee length skirts, not crotch-height ones like this.

At one hip, the skirt was nothing but a string of lace to be tied. At the other hip it was knee length. It crossed the crotch, diagonally, at exactly the level it had to in order not to violate the Temple's rules.

Yua stepped out of her work skirt and tossed it on the bed. There was no underwear to be seen, just a pair of bare, lightly tanned cheeks. Yua had a thing against underwear, based on the extremely long period of time she'd spent trapped in the confines of an ankle length skirt.

She slid into the fancy skirt and tied it at her right hip.

"Wow," Yua commented, cupping her bare right cheek in her hand. "Leaves a lot hanging out, doesn't it?"

"Looks nice," Tina said.

She twirled to check her back out in the mirror and flexed her legs.

"Makes me wish I had a Tight upgrade," she said.

"You wouldn't go for Within?" Talla asked.

Yua raised her eyebrows and looked at Talla.

"Hello? Sealed Virgin?" Yua pointed out.

She turned her eyes back to the mirror and turned her body to see how visible her genitals were.

"There's this belief," Tina explained, layering her words with dubiousness, "that the Temple holds it against women that they were once Sealed Virgins. So Yua thinks she doesn't have much of a chance at the best upgrades."

Talla nodded.

"Within's all hype anyway," Yua said, still admiring herself in the mirror. "I don't want to administrate. I wanna be able to run."

Talla and Tina shared another look.

"I'm going to get a pitcher of water," Tina said. "I'll be back in a bit."

She slipped out the door very quietly and closed it behind her.

"Any particular place you're looking to run?" Talla asked.

"Anywhere," Yua said, her voice going wistful. "Away."

Yua bowed her head and turned away from Talla, holding back a sob.

There weren't going to be a lot of chances like this, were there? Talla approached her and put a hand on her shoulder.

"It's all right," she said.

"No, it isn't," Yua protested squeakily. She turned to face Talla, her eyes brimming with tears, and added, "What they did to us wasn't all right."

She collapsed against Talla's chest and gratefully let herself be enfolded in an embrace. Talla was acutely aware of the way Yua's skirt had been brushed aside; how Talla's thigh was pressed into the very soft flesh between Yua's legs.

"No," Talla said. "It wasn't right. But we can make it better."

"How?" Yua asked, pleading to Talla with her wide, wet eyes.

"Things can change, even Temples," Talla said. "We can make the rules more fair next time."

"That won't help me."

"It will help the next Sealed Virgin to come along," Talla said. "And who knows what we can make better with the rest of our lives."

Yua was panting now, and pressing herself against Talla's thigh.

"You mean it?" she asked. "You think we can change -" she jerked her head at the walls around them "- all of this?"

"If we have enough people we can trust," Talla said.

Yua's eyes narrowed before she spoke.

"You can trust me."

Talla looked carefully into the others' eyes.

"I have to be sure," she told Yua.

There was a damp feeling against the bare flesh of her leg where Yua's crotch was rubbing against her. Talla slid her hand down between their bodies. Yua inhaled, pulling her stomach out of the way; tacit permission to proceed. Talla's hand moved farther down and she pushed a finger between Yua's lips, eliciting a gentle sigh.

"I haven't been with a woman since ..."

Yua trailed off as Talla's finger began making circles around her clitoris.

"Let's lie down," Talla said softly.

They picked Tina's bed, as it was closest. Talla kept her finger in light contact with Yua's genitals as she backed the smaller girl up on to the bed. It left her other hand free to untie her top. Seeing Talla's breasts set free, Yua couldn't resist: she quickly unlaced the top Tina had lent her and bared her chest as well.

"Abundance," Talla said admiringly of her sister's breasts.

"Double to your quadruple," Yua said, nodding at Talla's much larger pair.

Talla starting rubbing gently between Yua's lips again, feeling her clitoris engorge with blood. She leaned over, face to face with Yua, until their nipples were just touching.

Yua shivered and started giggling. It seemed the sensation was too much for her, for she wrapped her arms around Talla and pulled her down, compressing their breasts together. Yua's sigh told Talla that this took the edge off.

"I want you by my side," Talla said.

"Always," Yua breathed. "Whatever I can do."

"There's something you must see," Talla told her.

She slid her finger down past Yua's lips and started running rings around her vagina. In her ears, there was music playing, a gentle melody with great, powerful drums in the background.

"Beautiful," Yua said, perhaps hearing what Talla heard.

Talla slid a finger past Yua's entrance, drawing a moan from her sister's lips.

"Oh ... yes," Yua murmured.

"Now you," Talla said, hoping to all nine hells that this was going to work.

"Me?"

"Your finger," Talla explained patiently. "Inside me."

Her wet and desperate eyes showing comprehension, Yua reached down between their bodies. If she was surprised that Talla had no underwear in evidence, she didn't show it. She found, however, that Talla's lips were dry. This was a minor inconvenience. Yua put her fingers in her mouth, coating them liberally with saliva.

"Ready?" she asked Talla, showing concern that Talla wasn't showing the usual sign of arousal.

"Go ahead."

She set her wet middle finger against Talla's lips and pushed, sliding inwards with lubricated ease -

...

Anger.

Sadness.

Bitterness.

Arousal.

All of the emotions flooded over the mesh from Yua. Talla, who was expecting it, had better control of herself.

Now Yua's surprise came through.

"Mesh? With a woman?" the voice in Talla's head asked.

"Yes."

"Not like this with men."

Where their breasts met, crushed between their bodies, there was a powerful – almost burning – feeling. It was stronger even than the feeling of being penetrated.

Yua, unbidden, began pushing deeper inside Talla. Talla felt her juices beginning to flow, the inevitable side effect of absorbing Yua's sexual arousal. It was easy and painless now for Yua to plunge in and out of her.

"Would you bring down the Temple?" Talla asked her.

"Bring it down?"

"So we could be free of it, for all time?"

There was no hesitation in the mesh, only honesty.

"Yes," the seething reply came back, laced with all of the power her misery could afford it.

Talla could trust this, above anything else. No one could lie to her in here.

Suddenly ferocious, Yua tilted her body to put Talla on her side. Twisting herself, she brought her mouth to Talla's breasts, nibbling and biting all over the soft flesh, even as she worked her finger into Talla's wet tunnel.

Yua was in a hurry. There was an aura of tenseness and anxiety about her. It was, after all, the middle of the afternoon. Sunlight, filtered by light curtains, shone over their mostly naked bodies. They could be discovered at any moment. A certain amount of hustle seemed appropriate.

But Talla calmed her down, letting her own relaxation wash over the mesh. Talla knew that Tina had not gone for a pitcher of water, but rather was standing guard outside; far enough not to hear them but close enough that the planned signal – an exaggerated coughing fit – would be heard from inside.

Once that patient assurance saturated Yua's mind, she ceased her determined penetration of Talla and became gentle once more, teasing shyly where her panic had elicited a more ferocious and urgent passion.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 06



It was the slowest build up to orgasm Talla had experienced in some time. She took those precious moments to feel Yua from the inside, to feel her pride in her hard won body – especially when Talla began nibbling on her breasts. These little bites, teeth to bare flesh, teeth to nipples, were sheer ecstasy for Yua. Talla realized that Yua had the hardest time asking her male partners to do this for her.

Fingers trapped inside each other, they felt their orgasms approaching. Their free hands were wrapped around each others' backs, crushing their ribs and driving air out of their lungs. This last was done on purpose, so that – when the orgasm finally came – neither had the breath to let out the scream it deserved. Instead, both were locked in wide mouthed, voiceless rictuses of sheer pleasure.

...

Panting, they fell on their backs beside each other.

"That," Yua said between breaths, "was weird."

Both girls lay staring at the ceiling.

"Your meshes are never like that?" Talla asked.

"Yours are?"

"With other girls, yes."

A short pause.

"And with him," Yua said.

Enough had come over the mesh that there was no need to say who 'him' was. Zhair'lo featured prominently in Talla's visions of the demise of the Temple.

"Yeah."

"What happened with him?" Yua asked, turning on her side to face Talla.

"The meshes were like this," Talla said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. The breathlessness was nice because it hid her emotions. "But even better. When the sex was over, we could still sense each other, almost like talking."

"You went to him," Yua said. It was a statement, not a question. Yua had seen much from inside the mesh.

"More than once," Talla said. Now she was glad for the sweat on her brow that masked the tears in her eyes. "They caught us. Forced him to whip me. Gave him some potion that made him have sex with another girl while I watched."

"Madra Zen," Yua cursed softly and laid a hand over Talla's heart. "The bitches."

Talla turned to face Yua, letting her tears slide down her cheek to the bed.

"So you know my story," Talla said. "And I know I can trust you."

Yua nodded and Talla watched the muscles of her face tense.

"What do you need?" Yua said through gritted teeth.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 07



Of all the courses the Temple was speeding Talla through, History was the most interesting. Here were the battles, the Fighters, the deaths. Here were listed the weaknesses of the Temple, and the ways in which those who opposed the Temple had failed to bring it down.

Laced into all of this, quite naturally, was Talla's scepticism. Were these true stories Had the Temples really existed for over nine centuries And before that time, had it really been as bad for women as the teachers said

Today, however, with their little wooden desks in a semi circle around a large desk at the front of the room, they were learning about the Temple. The chalk board was blank; the curtains billowed inward occasionally as a gentle breeze washed over and passed through hallways to the back rooms of the school.

"As you may already know," Orella was saying as she stood in front of them, her arms folded. "We have very strict rules about the treatment of those younger than we are. Today, you are on the lowest rung of that ladder, where every other adult you see is charged with your safety."

"Your only obligation is to those who have not yet reached adulthood."

Orella's eyes traced over the entire class, the recently Unsealed Gerta and Malin included.

"As you grow older," she said carefully, "we will expect more from you. Even as the gods expect more from us."

"It was a terrible time, before the first Temples."

'Here we go,' Talla thought. 'Bring on the fear.'

"Girls were the property of their fathers, traded away for sacks of flour or treaties of peace, or even as tribute to avoid plunder and pillaging."

'We've heard this before,' Talla thought, trying not to let her feelings show on her face.

"The gods would not have it," Orella said. "So they imposed rules upon us. In agreeing to those rules, we sealed a treaty with them. We had to be better than the men who had used us. We had to treat our children better, raise them more wisely, more humanely and -- above all -- protect them from sexual exploitation before they were ready."

'And what do you do with us' Talla thought. 'You send us out there. You use my vagina to keep the peace. How is that any different'

"You all remember menstruating the first time" she asked.

There were nods all around. Talla hadn't heard the word before her first History lesson with Shanata, but it seemed that all of the Sealed Virgins had come across it at least once.

"From that day forward, every girl - for her protection -- is kept on a diet containing two ingredients," Orella explained. "One we called Aloysia Divinus, the other Aloysia Castus. The first, which is still in almost every food served in the Temple, ensures that a girl can not conceive children. The second, which is fed to girls until they turn eighteen, prevents sexual maturation both emotionally and physically. In this way, neither your thoughts nor your body will get you in any sort of trouble."

Talla stared open mouthed, trying to take on all of the repercussions of what she'd just heard.

"What do you mean by 'sexual maturation'" she asked.

"All of the gifts you receive during an upgrade, of course," Orella replied.

This wasn't natural They were intentionally stunting her growth So if she hadn't been fed a steady six year diet of of this herb, she'd have grown breasts and pubic hair and the whole bit

"Why" she called out without thinking. "Why would you do that"

Orella took this in stride.

"It makes things simpler," the teacher explained, her voice patient and soft. "Any man who makes any sexual advance towards you is clearly and unmistakeably in the wrong. Without seeing how things were in the time before the Temples, it is hard to understand how important it was to the gods and the founders of the first Temple that all doubt be removed about who was corrupting whom. Aloysia Castus assures us, from a judicial point of view, that the girl in question is without blame and that only the man deserves punishment."

Talla and Orella stared at each other for a moment. Talla started to feel anger boiling inside her. Orella looked confused, as if not quite understanding that Talla could be upset.

It was Illya who stepped in to save Talla from saying something truly stupid.

"Why eighteen, Mistress" Illya asked innocently.

Orella tilted her head and leaned back to perch her behind on her desk.

"It is somewhat arbitrary," she admitted. "Are there girls at fourteen who could handle being sent out like you, to Serve men Possible, but doubtful. Are there girls who might be better off waiting until twenty Fewer of those, but also possible."

"I wasn't there when that decision was made, so many centuries ago," she said. "But we needed to draw a line somewhere, to say that these ones over here were old enough and these ones weren't."

"Certainly, part of that decision was made for us," Orella pointed out, raising a finger. "Aloysia Castus just stops working on boys around the age of eighteen, no matter how high a dose they're given."

"If we let girls out sooner, they'd be much younger than any boys who were ready. If we held the girls longer, the boys would be out of place. And the longer we can wait, the safer it is."

Talla was barely listening. She was staring at Illya and risking occasional glances at Yua. These were not happy women.

"What would happen," Yua began to say slowly, "if girls weren't given Aloysia Castus after their first menstruation"

Orella raised her eyebrows and answered Yua as if it were merely a technical question -- an amusing tangent.

"They would grow breasts and pubic hair," Orella said, looking at the ceiling and scratching her head. "Muscles would develop, inside and out. Sexual desire would grow, landing them in all sorts of awkward situations. Sexual energy needs to be controlled and channelled, of course."

'Channelled,' Talla thought. 'Like a river. Controlled, like an aqueduct. By you. For your purposes. I'm your waterwheel. That's why I was whipped. I was using my vagina in a way that didn't make you stronger. That's why you made me watch him with someone else. So we would stop wanting each other. So we would stop wanting sex in a way that didn't serve you. So I could return to being the waterwheel and he could go back to his life as your ox.'

"A girl at the age of twelve is far too young to take on such responsibility," Orella said, turning her palms up in a rare shrug. "No telling where she'd end up."

It was a simple, academic matter for their teacher, apparently.

-----------===================-------------

The Form upgrade was going to be different. Zhair'lo had understood that from the outset.

By his count, and it had been confirmed by Malin when she'd come to his room, he and Zo'kar had emptied Endowment of Sealed Virgins. So here they were, standing outside Form's small gate.

The armoured guard waved her hand to indicate he should pass through the gate and follow her. 

With a shudder, he followed the guard in, discovering as he did so that he had developed a general distaste for passing through any doorway with a square over it.

It might have been wise, all things considered, to have taken down a half pint or so of ale on his way in. Just to take the edge off. There was something troublesome about the buildings in this section of the Temple, with their excess of dark, grainy wooden surfaces displacing much of the light and relatively cheerful sandstone that dominated other parts of the Temple.

He listened carefully to the briefing that explained to him, as if he hadn't done this many times before, how a Conduit was to behave. The lecture differed only by word choice and tone from those he had heard before.

He was ushered through the waiting area into Form's Priming Room. Even that was awkward. Where the women of Endowment had trusted that the Primers would do their jobs correctly, Form designed its Priming Room a bit differently. It was the same three door layout as Endowment had one door for the Conduit to enter; one door for him to leave; the last door for women to come and go.

The difference That third door had a small, screen-covered portal in it. Zhair'lo, like any Conduit, like the women who were Priming him, had to wonder if the woman who had escorted him was perhaps standing on the other side of that door, listening for violations of Protocol.

All things considered, it didn't really matter. He knew better than to attempt to foment rebellion in this Division. There were still, however, things that he could have learned.

On the other hand, the unnamed girls seemed unconcerned. They applied both soap and their tongues to his body like any other Primers, guaranteeing his readiness for what was to come. At the appointed time, after the standard set of knocks, the guard opened the door to the Augmentation Chamber and ushered him through.

The drums were already pounding. He stepped through the doorway.

This was different.

The first thing he noticed was that he really felt, from the moment he came through the door, as if he was outside. Sure, Endowment's high walls eventually gave way to sky, but the towering, inward curving nature of those walls had always given him a feeling of protection from the elements. Here, even though it was pitch black, he knew by the lack of echo that the place was open.

Given the way everything else was done, he had assumed that he would be walking into a room identical to the one in which he had done all his upgrades thus far.

But no. Form had its own idea of how an Augmentation Chamber should look.

He found himself walking down a narrow passageway, tiled with barely visible rocks. What he thought were high wooden walls on either side of him turned out to be tiered, wooden seating. It was dark enough that he couldn't make out more than the vague shapes of the women seated closest to the path he walked.

The only light source, just out of sight because it was blocked by the seats to his right, was a brilliant fire from which he could hear violent crackling. In front of him, basically a silhouette against the fiery background, a girl -- facing away from him with her head bowed - was kneeling on a dais raised just one step from the level on which he walked.

As he came around the left side of the dais -- for that was the only direction the stone path afforded him -- he came to see that the second woman, the Source for the Upgrade, formed an equilateral triangle with the smaller girl and the violent pit of fire.

The Source, a tall woman in the emerald green robes of a Sorceress, kept her head bowed until he stepped up on to the dais. When she raised her chin just a tick and flashed her blue eyes at him, he froze on the spot. Nine gods, she was beautiful. He caught his breath. Did she wink at him through those long, dark eyelashes, knowing what she'd done with that casual look

What had be been expecting This was a Facial upgrade, wasn't it He should have known from the moment he saw the green robes what he was dealing with.

Shaking himself, he recalled his purpose and continued his walk towards her as she brushed her jet black hair back away from her face.

The thing that threw him just a bit was the absence of altars. In Endowment, there were marble altars carefully designed to position women for the ritual. There were no altars here, just a blanket for each woman to kneel on. Did the darkness hide, besides all those invisible women, some apparatus for Tight and Iron upgrades

The Sorceress reached for him, pulling him along by the beige wrap they had given him to cover his lower body. She made quick work of untying it, releasing his erection from its confines and deftly folding the fabric so it could be handed off to an attendant.

Somewhere in the darkness, women began to sing. They were up high in the concealment of the stands, at least a dozen of them chanting away their haunting rhythm in what Zhair'lo guessed was the Temple's private language. He had heard music before, at festivals and even in the dorms of the children, but never voices and rhythms that chilled him like this song did. It reminded him, ever so faintly, of the song that echoed in his head whenever he meshed with Talla.

So close, as if they meant to sing that song, as if they were trying with all their hearts, but couldn't quite get there. He could hear, in the plaintive cries interspersed with words, that they knew they were missing it, too. Perhaps they even meant to say that it was impossible to find that particular melody with such crude tools as mouths and ears.

In his distraction, he hadn't noticed that his clothing had already been handed off. The Sorceress pulled him closer, the tip of his penis brushing gently against her nose. She turned her head, the soft blue eyes examining his manhood from all angles. He watched as the firelight played with her features the long thing nose; the high, fine cheek bones; the small but sharp chin.

A moment later, her lips parted just slightly and she slid her mouth down on his shaft.

All the way down.

He gasped, restraining himself from ejaculating as he found the back of her throat.

She withdrew, dancing her tongue across him as she did so, and smirked while looking downwards and to her side. She didn't need to meet his eyes to know what she'd just done to him.

Another attendant appeared from the darkness and held out a wooden chalice to the Sorceress. With one delicate hand stroking him, she took the chalice with the other hand and passed it to Zhair'lo. There was no question of her dexterity. Without missing a beat in her graceful handling of his penis, she dipped two fingers into the pool of Synergist and began applying it to her face.

She started at the bridge of her nose, tracing thick, wet lines of the syrup across her cheekbones to the corner of her jaw. One line on one side, one on the other. Another streak was smoothly laid across her forehead.

Lastly, four fingers were dipped in to the chalice and run through her scalp -- not once but twice. It seemed almost a shame to ruin that luxurious, wavy hair with the Temple's magical syrup, but it only seemed to add to effect the flickering glow of the fire was already having.

"There we are," she whispered. "All ready"

It was a question Did it really need asking Zhair'lo was pretty confident that his readiness was obvious.

He nodded anyway.

"Of course you are," she said, a bit more loudly than before.

There was some disgruntled shifting of booted feet from somewhere behind her in the darkness.

"Don't mind them," she added. "This is our place right now."

Zhair'lo was surprised by the careless, sing-song air of her voice.

Which place did she mean The blanket on which she knelt The dais The whole chamber And who was included in that "our" Zhair'lo All three of them Perhaps she meant the Discipline of Facial, for her faint sneer seemed to be directly excluding the women of Tight and Iron.

There was something in her demeanour that told him, with complete confidence, that he was safe from those armoured enforcers of protocol. They couldn't lay a hand on her here, and he was under her protection. He let out a sigh of relief, safe in the bubble she had created inside this most disturbing of places.

She gave him one last, deep plunge into her mouth, pulled herself off him and began rubbing the tip of his erection against the spot where the bridge of her nose met her forehead. That queasy feeling started to build in his stomach as he went through the process of Hunting.

It was, fortunately, a very short period of time before he felt his body Seize to the desired upgrade. Facial was easy compared to the delicate dance needed to get himself aligned to a Point upgrade. The nausea passed.

His senses heightened. Not just his eyes this time, but his ears, too. He could make out the individual voices in the song being sung. There were nine singers, not twelve. He understood the song as he hadn't been able to understand it before.

He knew then that it was a lament, a song filled with sadness because they could find neither words nor melodies to express the beauty of the mesh. So he sympathized with that song in a way that they couldn't. Probably. It certainly seemed like they understood his misery.

There was little time to dote on the song. Having assured herself that Zhair'lo had Seized, the Sorceress was busy cradling his penis against the side of her face, sliding it from her temple down to her jaw line, across her lips and up the other side her face. She ran him lightly across her hair, making a circuit that coated the entire surface of his erection with the clear syrup she had spread over her face.

The charge was beginning to build up. His eyes could make out women in the audience. Breathtakingly gorgeous women, tall as towers. Muscle bound women, looking out of place without their armour. All of them were sitting peacefully, eagerly watching him and the Sorceress. A quick glance around the periphery of his vision told him that the place was packed, at least for the arc of seating that he could see without craning his neck around.

"There we go," the Sorceress announced in her soft voice. "Go take care of Zoe."

Zoe

Form, from the briefing to the Priming Room, had been very deliberate about anonymity -- at least for the women. Every woman he ran into seemed to know his name, but not one of them gave hers. He knew their ranks from their clothing, and that was it.

Zoe, then.

He muttered a polite, "Mistress" to the curious Sorceress and turned away from her.

As he did so, he scanned the crowd behind the fire. It was packed there, too, with four large thrones in the front row. Three were occupied, one was empty, since the Sorceress of Facial was still kneeling on a blanket.

Behind those thrones ... he shuddered.

Even without the iron circlet and the ankle length robes, he would recognize Sonja. He imagined he would know her even if all but her eyes was covered in armour, or her face was streaked with blood. The latter was how he always pictured her anyway, even if in reality she'd kept her skin and her very fine robes out of range of Talla's blood spatter.

Focus, he told himself.

Zoe.

"Zoe," he whispered to the kneeling girl.

She smiled and looked up at him nervously, gave him a courteous nod, and reached for the chalice on the ground.

"Another go round," she said, a taste of resigned hopelessness in her voice.

More coughing and foot shuffling from those in the darkness. Zoe rolled her eyes.

"This is our place," she repeated the Sorceress's words as if it was one of their childhood axioms, speaking not so much to him as to the complainers behind her. "Our way."

Not sure what precisely was going on, Zhair'lo decided to strike a middle ground by keeping his voice low.

"It's worked for me every time," he assured her.

"Good," she said, her brown eyes lighting up. "That's what I'd heard."

She paused thoughtfully for a moment before placing the chalice on the ground at her feet and then reached around her back to undo the ties on her little white top.

"I end up doing my own laundry," she explained petulantly and laid her top aside. She waved an explanatory finger at her chin and neck. "It always drips, y'know"

Zhair'lo looked down. It was his turn to pause.

Zoe had breasts. She was supposed to be a Sealed Virgin. She wasn't supposed to have any upgrades at all. Zhair'lo, with his lengthy experience doing upgrades and initiations, knew what women were supposed to look like when they didn't have any Abundance upgrades. They all had flat chests.

There was no question, however, of Zoe's state. No sign of Point or Strength, not to his eyes, but she appeared to have, at a guess, about half of an Abundance upgrade. Of course, he had seen mostly the breasts of those to whom he had given double upgrades, so it was hard to be precise -- especially in the light of the blazing fire.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 07



He looked around the chamber worriedly. Didn't anyone else notice that this girl had breasts Were they all so grown up and thoroughly modified that they couldn't see the difference between half an upgrade and none at all

What in the nine hells had gone on here

Zoe was pressing the chalice into his hands.

"You okay" she asked

"Yeah, yeah," he assured her.

She raised a quizzical eyebrow at him, amused at what she took for nervousness on his part. As the Sorceress at his back had done, she coated her round, gentle face with the clear syrup, following that up with a thorough soaking for her short, dark hair.

"Ready for you," she said, and took him in hand.

The women had changed their song. Zhair'lo hadn't noticed when. They had chosen something much more upbeat. There was a chorus of six deep voices singing a heartening refrain of a few words, over and over again. Laid on that were three more voices, higher pitched, and if they were singing words, Zhair'lo didn't recognize even the syllables. It was a song of joy, of breaking free, of blue skies and running through the forest. It was exhilarating and as refreshing as diving into a cold river on a steaming hot day. He felt his body surge in response.

"Oh!" Zoe admired the stiffening twitch of his erection. "You're ready, too."

"All yours," he told her.

"Good. Let's get this done."

Everything else was put out of his mind. Zoe needed his help and, whatever his quarrel with the Temple, he had no trouble recognizing his obligation to the girl in front of him. Her hands, coated with Synergist, easily slid over his glistened shaft. One made quick, light motions over the widest part of his swollen tip. The other slid down under his testicles.

Orgasm came when two fingers pushed resolutely at the hardened flesh down at the base of his erection. Zoe had already closed her eyes in preparation. He watched his first volley splash wetly across the bridge of her nose, from eye to eye.

She knew the drill, certainly. In a flash, she had switched to grip him midway along his length, leaving one hand free to smear semen and syrup together over her face. She ducked her head to let him spray a shot into her short, brown hair. Lathering her scalp as if the combination of fluids were a kind of liquid soap, she turned her chin back to the sky.

If she was surprised by the way he kept ejaculating over her upturned face, she gave no sign of it. It made a kind of sense, really. If she was the first in line to be upgraded by Zhair'lo, she was probably the one who'd been waiting the longest. Had she been waiting as long as Nadine had Could this be her fourth or even fifth attempt at having her seal broken If so, then no wonder the advent of semen spraying into her face had become second nature.

When he'd run dry, the syrup in her face and hair had mixed thoroughly into a translucent, pearl coloured paste which had begun to glow from the inside.

"Hah!", she whispered, spitting a bit to clear to her mouth. "Working."

Zhair'lo took a deep breath to calm his heart.

Of course it was working. It always worked. Maybe she didn't know that.

"Probably a double," she said with a wince and a bow of her head.

He bit his lip, watching the pain of the heat in her skin contort her face. It would pass, wouldn't it

"You all right"

"Peaking now," she replied, eyes still closed.

He waited.

Relief began to cross her features and she took a breath.

"There," she said, regaining her composure. "It's okay, now. It's done."

Indeed, the blue glow had vanished. The magic had finished its work.

She reached out blindly with her right hand and was quickly handed a wet towel by a waiting attendant.

He lost sight of her face as she cleaned herself up with the over sized towel. He did likewise for his genitals, removing sweat, Synergist and the traces of semen that had clung clung tothe end of his now dwindling erection.

When Zoe handed the towel off, she looked up at him. He stared in shock. He could barely recognize her. Her dirty brown hair was streaked with vibrant red. Her cheekbones and her chin had sharpened, taking away the round face and replacing it with something far more triangular. And her eyes -- her eyes swirled with blues and greys -- the magic had not finished its work. Not yet.

She seemed to be flashing her suddenly lengthened eyelashes at him, but he realized that she was blinking because her eyes were having trouble focusing.

"That was a double," she said, looking around with a gaze strangely confident and narrow given that she also seemed to be half blind. "Definitely."

"That's my thing, apparently," he told her.

Zoe nodded and stood up while torches were lit around the Chamber. Nonchalantly, she took her top from another attendant and replaced it over her breasts. She squinted in his general direction.

"I'll see you soon," she promised before being led away by someone with better vision.

With her departure, the increasing torchlight had darkened the place considerably as he was reminded once more that he was still in the Division of Form with its rigidity and Discipline.

There was no marble here, not in the floors, the stairs up into the stands nor on the dais. He walked upon large pieces of amorphous grey stone tiles, fitted precisely together with a minimum of mortar. And everything other than the floor and the dais Everything else was that detestable wood with its heavy grain, carrying the scent of that dark oily paint that reminded him of terrible times.

He suppressed a shudder as he put his robe back on and allowed himself to be led away.

-----------===================-------------

"How was that" Zo'kar asked.

They were standing outside Form's small gate, having just been dumped off by a guard.

"Good, I guess," Zhair'lo answered. "Yours work"

"Naturally," Zo'kar replied in mock offence. "Not that I get a big kick out of Iron upgrades. What did you get"

"Facial."

"Lucky bastard. Coming on a chick's stomach is kinda boring."

Zhair'lo could only nod agreement.

"The Iron girls are pretty solid in bed, though."

"Assuming she comes to me," Zo'kar pointed out.

"Zoe said she would."

"Zoe" Zo'kar asked. "You got her name"

A lengthy discussion ensued. Zo'kar's experience had not been Zhair'lo's. Iron, it turned out, did its upgrades by the book. No talking; no fuss. You rub, you come, you get out. Had there been singing No. Drums, even No. Zo'kar didn't even know the name of the recipient of his efforts.

"Creepy."

"Eh, it wasn't that bad," Zo'kar said. "She does get completely naked after all, and rubs it all over ..."

He trailed off.

"Though I guess I can't wait to do a Facial," he admitted after a moment.

"Seem to be two different worlds, don't they"

"Yeah," Zo'kar agreed.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 08



Hello everyone. I've included a couple of Appendices at the end of this chapter. I'd prefer to make them a separate file, but they're too short for Literotica's standard. There's enough there, as a reference, to keep track of the ranks, the clothing and the Disciplines and Divisions. 

Cheers, 
Xavier.




	Endowment Hall was just starting to fill up with women returning from an evening of Service.  Girls in white were quietly doing their rounds, stoking fire pits and preparing drink bars.  The echoing voices of the first to arrive were being drowned out into the more comfortable background rumbling of conversation and laughter.

	Far out of the way of the commotion, Talla was sitting with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, staring at the empty drink glass in front of her.  Having recently returned from a night of Service, she wasn't wearing any underwear.  With her legs spread as they were, anyone passing by would quickly become aware of that fact.

	But this particular Initiate didn't care.  

	"Did you know about that?" she asked her friend, her voice a bit slurred.

	Tina was sitting on the low table, next to Talla's drink.

	"Hittin' the alcohol a little hard tonight?" she asked.

	"Did you know?"

	"Of course," Tina said.  "It's one of the first things they told us.  I guess I haven't thought about it since."

	"So you don't realize," Talla exhaled, "how ridiculous it is?"

	"Ridiculous?"

	"Stunting our growth."

	As much as she wanted to console Talla, Tina clearly didn't agree.

	"It's for your protection," Tina explained patiently.  "It keeps us away from sexuality until we're old enough for it.  I was eleven the first time I menstruated.  Look -"

	She lifted Talla's chin in her hand, forcing their eyes to meet.

	"Look at the eleven year old girls in those dormitories," Tina commanded.  "Imagine them being sent out to do what we do."

	"Who says they'd have to?" Talla asked defensively.  "They could go or not go as they please, or masturbate until they're eighteen."

	"Really?" Tina asked.  "I'm two ranks above you when it comes to education.  I'm telling you that you're not thinking through the consequences."

	"Consequences?"  Talla said, twisting her chin out of Tina's grip.  "Of course I am.  The consequence is that I have to beg the Temple for the scraps of my own natural body."

	"Natural?" Tina asked.  "What does that means?"

	"Natural," Talla repeated.  "The way things happen in Nature."

	"I've already seen Nature," Tina pointed out.  "Cows in little groups around the bull.  Weeds overrunning crops.  Horses going untamed and useless.  Water going where we don't need it.  Everything we've done is to break Nature down and make it work for us."

	"Which lecture are you repeating to me now?" Talla asked, her voice full of accusation.  "Is that Initiate History or Neophyte?  First section or second?"

	Tina's lips firmed up as if to protest, but she stopped.  Talla watched as calculation crossed her friend's face.  Finally, Tina's shoulders sank.

	"Neophyte, first section," she admitted.

	Talla returned to contemplating her empty drink.  She'd drunk it far too quickly while waiting for Tina to show up.  The lightheaded feeling was coming on pretty hard.

	"The question is," Talla said thoughtfully, "what can we do now?"

	"Now?"

	"What if I stopped taking Aloysia Castus?"

	"It wouldn't matter," Tina said.  "You've been on it for, what, six years?  By that point, they don't even have to give it to us anymore.  If I remember right, it's not even in the food of adult women."

	"It isn't," Talla confirmed.  "Orella told us so."

	"Look," Tina said.  "I hate how they do things here.  So do you.  It's just that they've gone too far.  They have too much control.  But this part, protecting us from sexual predation – that's a good thing, Talla."

	"How do you know?  Have you seen men attacking us?  What makes you think that ever actually happened?"

	Tina pursed her lips.

	"I haven't seen it," she admitted.  "But think of how they raised us."

	Talla raised her eyebrows.

	"The games, remember?" Tina asked.  "When we were little?"

	"There were a lot of games," Talla folded her arms impatiently.

	She mostly remembered the resource based ones, where players were required to collect tokens representing various food staples or construction materials in order to achieve certain goals.

	"Sister-Says," Tina said.

	Talla remembered that game mostly for how boring it was.  It was one of the games they played in the youngest dormitories outside the Temple, when the boys and girls were still mixed together.  One girl would stand at the front of the room, facing the wall.  She would call out, "Go!" and the boys at the other end of the room would start walking across the floor.  Whenever she felt like it, she would shout, 

"Stop!" and quickly turn around to see if she could catch any boys still moving.

	If the boys were caught, they would have to go back to the start.  The first one to cross a certain line on the floor without being caught would win something, usually a special dessert or a wooden toy.

	"You've worked in the dorms, haven't you?" Tina asked.  "Do you see how hard it is to get the boys to listen to a girl?"

	Talla thought about that.

	"So what?"  Talla shrugged.  "They're kids.  Nobody likes being told what to do.  That doesn't mean they'd grow up to beat us and turn us into 'wives'."

	Tina didn't reply.  She merely stared at Talla, her lips pressed together in a sympathetic smile.

-----------===================-------------

	"You'd make a great Primer," Zhair'lo said.

	Zoe slid his erection out of her mouth with a long, tongue-fluttering lick.

	"You're just saying that because you've spent all your time with those Endowment girls," she reminded him, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

	"I've had two Primers from Form," he protested.  "Honestly.  You're really good at that."

	Zoe considered this.

	"It must be enthusiasm."

	"Enthusiasm?"

	"Well it's certainly not practice.  I've had access to, like, one cock a month since I turned eighteen – and I wasn't supposed to put my mouth on any of those."

	"We can have sex again, you know?"

	"I know," she said, licking him from balls to tip.  "But I like this.  It's fun to do what I want.  And right now, I want to do this to you."

	Conversation was placed on a back burner as she entertained him with her mouth once more.  Lying as she was, across his lap, he was able to reach over and cup her small breasts, one at a time.  She smiled in appreciation.

	"How is it you have breasts?" he asked.

	Comically, she paused with his erection still in her mouth and a confused look came over her face.  She slid off him again.

	"What?"

	"How is it that you have breasts?"

	She looked down at her body.

	"What?  These?" she asked.  "They don't count."

	"Yeah, they do," Zhair'lo said.

	"It's my body," Zoe pointed out, somewhat haughty.  "I'm pretty sure I know better than you."

	Zhair'lo snickered.

	"I'm pretty sure I've been doing nothing but weeks of Endowment upgrades," he pointed out.  "With the Priming and the Serving, I've seen girls with zero, one, two – and in one case, four – Abundance upgrades."

	Zoe eyed him curiously, as if suddenly becoming aware of him as a human being.

	"Well," he said, jogging his head from side to side.  "And some Sorceresses and stuff."

	"So you're a boob expert, now?"

	Zhair'lo cupped one of her breasts in his hand.

	"I can tell you that you are carrying around about half an upgrade," he told her with a note of finality.

	She rolled over so the back of her head was nestled between the lower part of his thighs and took her breasts in her own hands.

	"I'd never noticed," she said, astonished.

	"Grew slowly, then?"

	"Must have."

	In stunned amazement, she squeezed and lifted her breasts for a moment before turning her attention to her nipples, turning them between her thumbs and forefingers.

	"You see any Point?"

	He shook his head.

	"No, just the Abundance."

	She let out a breath.

	"I hadn't noticed," she repeated.  "I guess I just thought I was, I dunno, getting bigger everywhere.  Y'know?  Growing up?"

	"But you don't 'grow up' without upgrades, right?"

	Zoe bit one side of her lower lip and stared at the wall of his bedroom.  One hand ran searchingly through her red-streaked hair, as if grinding her scalp with her fingertips would stir up her memories.

	"No, we don't," she said, still staring at the wall.

	"When was the last time you remember, for sure, not having breasts?"

	She was still staring at the wall.

	"For absolute certain?" she said, nodding her head.

	She ran her fingers through her hair, plumbing the depths of her memory to try to find a black and white divide for something she knew was all about shades of grey.

	Then she seized upon it.

	"For absolute certain?  The day I entered the Temple."

	"What's so special about that day?"

	Zoe's face reddened.

	"There this thing we do, when we enter the Temple," she explained.  "A teacher sits with us and we compare our bodies – we're naked, right?  And so she shows us what upgrades she has and shows us how we have none.  We cover each Discipline."

	"Lips and Pussy and ... everything?"  Zhair'lo goggled.

	Zoe finally rolled over to face him.

	"Yep," she confirmed.  "Can't show Within, mind you."

	Zhair'lo was busy imagining two women doing that with each other.

	"So I was definitely completely flat, that day," she said, her voice having found a note of confidence.  "That was almost six months ago, though."

	"Six months?" he replied.  "That was really gradual then."

	"Yeah," she said, looking back at her recently acknowledged breasts.  "But why just Abundance?  Why not Point, or Strength or ... wait ... what about Lips or Pussy?"

	"What about them?"

	"You've seen Sweetness women, right?"

	"Um, yeah."

	"Up close?"

	Zhair'lo nodded.

	"They do like to be licked," he pointed out.

	Her curiosity now overwhelming any other concern, she swivelled her body so she could sit on the bed and spread her legs in his direction.

	"Check me out, then," she insisted.

	Zhair'lo's eyebrows twitched and he tilted his head in acquiescence.

	"Alright, then," he said.  "Lie on your back."

	Watching him eagerly, Zoe propped herself up on her elbows and tilted her hips.

	Zhair'lo moved down to the floor and looked at her carefully.  Her lips were already pretty soft, given that they'd already had sex once.

	"I don't see any hair at all," he remarked.  "Not even stubble."

	"So no Pussy, then," she grimaced.  "What about Lips?"

	He pushed her lips apart gently and looked at the pink skin behind.  Experimentally, he wiggled his tongue against her clitoris and felt it harden instantly.

	"I don't think so," he said.  "It looks just like this Endowment girl I licked once.  The girl from Lips I had, well, I could see the difference."

	Zoe wasn't listening anymore.  Her eyes had gone bleary.

	"Could you do that again?" she whispered.

	"If you say 'please'."

	"Please," she begged, but he was already applying his tongue, ever so gently, to the thin folds of skin he had exposed.

	"Oh, yes," she muttered.  "Zhair'lo ... Zhair'lo ... I ..."

	It seemed as if she were trying to say something important, but couldn't get it out.  He pulled away from her genitals for a moment so she could catch her breath.

	"Are you sure -" she asked, after moment, "are you sure I don't have any Lips upgrades in there?"

	He looked her over again and shook his head.

	"Very sure," he said firmly.  "Their clits look different."

	There was a pause as Zoe took another deep breath.  She looked down at her crotch, glistening now with his saliva, and looked back up at Zhair'lo.

	"Could you?  Please?" she asked with a squeak.

	"Least I could do," he said with a shrug, taking this for a request to take her to orgasm.  "I came all over your face, didn't I?"

	She nodded as he dove back in.  She let out another squeak of pleasure as his tongue touched the edge of her vagina.

	"And you can again if you want," she promised.  "Come on my face, I mean.  You did ... you did such a good job."

	That was certainly true.  He had barely recognized her when she had entered the lodge.  Her features had sharpened even further: the nose becoming more delicate; the cheekbones more refined.  Even the streaks of red in her hair seemed to have become more alive, more vibrant.  When her head had first bobbed up and down on his cock, the shimmering of her hair in the light of the candles had given him the impression of flames.

	"Fantastic," Zoe murmured breathlessly.

	She was lifting her hips, begging with her body for him to go at her harder.  No matter how he pushed, nor how quickly he flitted his tongue, it wasn't enough.  She reached a point where she could take no more.  Her hands found the back of his head, pushing him into her crotch.  Her hips bucked, jamming her genitals against his mouth.

	Zhair'lo could only call out his muffled approval as he felt the entrance to her tunnel seize up and begin twitching.  Juices from her insides leaked out around his chin, dripping down his neck.

	"Nine gods," she declared to the ceiling, when her breath returned.  "My first upgrade when I hit Keeper is going to be Lips."

	She looked at him.

	"That was so good."

	Zhair'lo stood up, wiping his chin with the back of his arm.

	"Nine gods," she repeated, her tone changing from divine summoning to sheer surprise.  "Was I that wet?"

	He nodded.

	Her eyes, then, fell to his erection.  Her body followed to the floor.

	"What do you want?" she asked earnestly.  "You can come anywhere you want."

	She began stroking and licking him.

	"My face again?  Like at the upgrade?"

	Her voice was so honest, he nearly exploded in her hand.

	"Suck a bit?" he asked, to bide his time.

	Zoe nodded eagerly, taking him into her mouth.

	"I'm the only one you've done this to?" he asked, more for the hell of it than because he really needed an answer.

	"Of course," she said.  She gave one long bob on his shaft before adding, "in my mouth or my pussy."

	He murmured approval.

	She continued stroking and whispering to him, even as she spaced her words out with long, wet licks.

	"Now where do you want to come?" she simpered.  "My face is prettier now, isn't it?"

	He shivered, trying to reply.

	"Did that last night," he stammered out.

	"Oh, that's true," she said thoughtfully.  "I wouldn't want you getting bored, but this pretty face is all I have."

	She paused a moment.

	"Unless you mean these little breasts?" she asked, taking a break from her tongue work to look down at her chest.  "No one's come on them in six months, and they weren't even here back then."

	"Is that what you want?" she asked, blinking at him through her recently lengthened eyelashes.

	She put her lips, pressed together, to the tip of his erection.  Opening them only enough to let his manhood into her mouth, she pushed forward.

	Zhair'lo exhaled sharply, twitching inside her mouth.  When she moved to back away, he slid a hand through her glittering hair.  He didn't use enough force to hold her in place, just enough to let her know that he didn't want her backing away.

	Zoe let out a muffled protest, understanding that for which he was asking, and slid clear once more.  Zhair'lo did nothing to hinder her.

	"That," she said, trying to look as indignant as she could, kneeling there on the floor, "is for very special occasions."

	Zhair'lo looked upwards and bobbed his head from side to side.  Zoe paused a moment in thought.

	"Which, I suppose," she admitted.  "This is."

	She pursed her lips a moment.

	"Well, it is your second time tonight," she said, speaking practically with barely a hint of apprehension.  "So let's hope you don't come too much."

	Zhair'lo couldn't believe she was going to do it just for the asking.  Her mouth went to his cock, subsuming only the swollen head, and her hands went to stroke him.  He felt himself swelling inside her mouth.

	Warily, she looked up at him, eyes wide with concern, and gave him a go-ahead nod.

	That moment of permission was all that he needed.  The feeling welled up from deep inside his stomach as muscles tensed.  He tried to hold off, to savour the moment when she accepted his request, the moment of anticipation, but sheer incredulity overwhelmed his willpower.

	Besides, her hands and her tongue were so quick.

	Without any memory of having decided to release himself, he felt his body go, a spasm that hit his abdominal muscles so hard his shoulders convulsed as he doubled over.  The first load of semen fired into Zoe's mouth.  He managed to open his eyes so he could see both the surprised expression on her face and the movement in her throat as she quickly swallowed – narrowly in advance of the second shot.

	She took that down, too, though with considerably more effort.

	When the third volley came, she couldn't take any more.  She pulled him out of her mouth and continued to jerk him out over her neck and her slim breasts.

	After forcing down the bit of semen left in her mouth, she spoke.

	"Sorry," she muttered.  "Couldn't ... take it all."

	"It's alright," Zhair'lo smiled.  He smirked then, and added, "The part you did was still amazing."

	She smiled shyly, using her skirt to wipe off her chest.

	"Thanks," she said.  "A little rest and I want to go again, okay?"

	Zhair'lo nodded.

-----------===================-------------

	"Eight hundred years ago," Pussy explained, "we thought we could do better with what the gods had given us."

	Maksa watched her Mistress's lips twisting.

	"Thought we could do better than the gods," the Sorceress corrected herself.  "The gods had told us they had only given us enough to get along with and the rest was up to us.  Maybe they didn't know what we'd do.  Maybe they didn't think we'd do what we did.  We know they've given us gifts since then..."

	She shook her head as if to remind herself to stay on topic.

	"We wanted to make our world a better place and a hundred years of expanding our frontiers had given us the resources to try.  So we developed a way to tell the men apart.  You see, when pacified by the magic of the Goddess, the Enraged, Catatonic and Heroic were scarcely distinguishable.  It wasn't until a Temple fell that we knew who was who and what the ratios were."

	"The ratios," she said firmly, "were disturbing."

	"We were so frightened by the large percentage of Enraged that we sought to breed them out.  We tested men by taking them away from the city and seeing what became of them before bringing them back.  It was dangerous work, but we found – after testing a great many things - that the taste of their semen was a reliable way to tell them apart.  Much later, we developed a potion to push their loyalty, intensify their emotions, and test them more accurately, though the semen test is still considered valid."

	"With that in hand, so to speak, our ancestors proceeded."

	Pussy glanced to the ground, as if a slight shame overcame her on behalf of her eight centuries dead predecessors.

	"They were wrong, then.  Too naive.  Their genetic analysis was so trivial ... it's not worth going into now.  The important thing to know is that there are more factors involved in determining a man's disposition than we can count and breeding out the Enraged while keeping the Heroic was nearly impossible.  We're still trying of course, but the whole thing is more tangled than you can imagine."

	The Sorceress paused, straightening her olive drab work skirt, and twitched an eyebrow.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 08



"Although with your instincts for genealogies, maybe you can imagine."

	Maksa smiled at this compliment.

	"Nevertheless, our grip is weakening."

	"Weakening?" Maksa stammered.  "What do you mean?"

	"Whether it is some natural occurrence or yet another byproduct of our machinations, we do not know," Pussy explained.  "The Enraged are breaking free of our control more quickly with each passing century.  Nine hundred years ago, we could trust any man to make a seven day journey without faltering.  Now the Enraged will become violent in four.  The Catatonic will hibernate in the same time."

	"The only way to make the journeys between towns is to include women – the H'rem – infused with the magic of Goddess.  As long as they Serve the men during the journey, most men can last eight or nine days, though the odd Catatonics do pass out before the end."

	"How long have we needed the H'rem?" Maksa asked.

	"For the last five hundred years."

	"And it's getting worse?"

	Didn't miss a beat, this one.  Count on that.

	"Yes," Pussy confirmed.  "In another two hundred years, without our intervention, we would have to limit merchant caravans to only the Heroic."

	"Without our intervention?"

	"That's why we're breeding the Goddesses," Pussy said.  "Trying to make the next generation more potent.  It is working."

	Maksa heard the hesitation in her Mistress's voice.

	"But not well enough," Maksa said.

	It wasn't a question.

	Pussy pursed her lips and shook her head.

	"We've bought ourselves time.  That's all."

-----------===================-------------

	"You're up to something," Zoe said.  "I can tell."

	Lying on his back, he eyed her suspiciously as she knelt straddling his stomach.  They'd had sex twice more since he'd come in her mouth.  She was becoming delirious from the orgasms.

	"Comes with the upgrade," she added.

	"What does?"

	"I can tell when people are lying.  When they're hiding something," she explained.  "Why do you think they stick us with those uptight bitches in Iron and Tight?  It's not to lighten them up – nine gods know they could use it.  It's to help them keep the peace without having to beat the crap out of people."

	Zhair'lo didn't know what to say.

	"Whatever you're up to," she said, "I'm with you."

	He was wary.  Did he want to trust a girl who was in league with the 'uptight bitches' in Form?

	"Why do you think I'm up to something?"

	It wasn't easy to fool Zoe.  She knew something was going on, but not what.  On the other hand, she had no lever with which to force him.

	After a thoughtful pause, Zoe cleared her throat.

	"We're not like the rest of them," she explained.

	"The rest of whom?"

	"The Temple," she said.  "Facial is different.  Separate.  Go back through the records hundreds of years in all the Temples.  There are tonnes of Goddesses from the Sweetness Disciplines.  Lots from Endowment and even a few from Form, when they're really needed."

	"When would -" Zhair'lo started to ask.

	"But you know how many come from Facial?" Zoe asked, poking at his chest with her right index finger.  "You know how many?"

	Zhair'lo shrugged under her sudden aggression.

	Zoe held up the fingers of her left hand to make an 'o'.

	"None," she punctuated her gesture.  "Ever.  Anywhere."

	Stunned disbelief overcame Zhair'lo.  Zoe withdrew her poking finger and leaned over, holding herself up on her elbows and putting her nose to his.  She lowered her voice.

	"They've been educating me, the Facial women, even though they aren't supposed to.  It's stupid to waste a person's time the way the Temple would have it.  So they've been teaching me.  I've learned as much as any Virgin my age.  They'll even skip me through to Initiate as fast as they can, making up stuff about how I deserve a fast track."

	"You're telling me all this?"

	"Because I've been talking to you for several hours," Zoe said.  "And you know way, way too much about the Temple.  Way more than you should have learned by now.  And you ask questions that only make sense if you're up to something.  I can take a good guess, but I want to hear you say it."

	Zhair'lo felt a cold chill in his stomach.  None of the other girls had noticed the way he'd pried information from them.  He cursed himself for an idiot.  None of the other girls had been from Facial.  None of them had had Zoe's abilities.

	But how could he have known that?  He couldn't remember anything in Talla's memories that would have clued him in.

	"And now I've told you something I shouldn't have told you," she added lightly.  "So that you'll trust me.  I even let you come in my mouth, and it'll be a long time before anybody else gets to do that."

	Zoe looked up at the ceiling.

	"A very long time," she emphasized.

	Relief warmed him, then.  She wasn't trying to get him in trouble.

	"So spill it," she demanded.  "What are you up to and how can I help?"

-----------===================-------------

Appendices

A Temple is a high-walled equilateral triangle large enough to house, feed and provide working space for a city's entire population of women.  It is the centre of administration for the city or town around it and is under the control of its Goddess.

The Temple is divided internally into four equilateral triangles.

The centre triangle is reserved for the Goddess and her needs.  Each of the other triangles is the responsibility of one of the three Divisions, each of which is run by a Queen.  Inside those Divisions are three Disciplines run by a Sorceress , but the triangles are not divided up any further.

Appendix 1:  Divisions and Disciplines

The divisions are:  Sweetness, Endowment, Form

Disciplines
Sweetness: Within, Lips, Pussy
Endowment: Abundance, Point, Strength
Form: Iron, Tight, Facial

Within (Administration, Medical, Teaching)
Internal muscular control of the genitals

Lips (Medical Research)
Tightness and control of the entrance to the vagina and vaginal lips

Pussy (Genealogy, Medical, Nursery)
Exterior appearance (pubic hair and so forth).

Abundance (Engineering/Admin)
Total volume of breasts.

Point (Engineering)
Appearance and dimensions of the nipple and surrounding tissue.

Strength (Test Engineering, Regulation)
Strength of chest muscles, firmness of breasts and the texture of the skin

Iron (Protocol and Law, Admin, Military)
Abdominal and upper body muscles, lung capacity

Tight (Enforcement, Miltary)
Firmness and strength of legs

Facial (Art, Music, Dance, Clothing)
Hair colour, facial structure

Appendix 2:  Ranks and Clothing

When a woman is inducted into the Temple, she chooses her primary Discipline and receives her first upgrade.
In the list below, the number on each line is the number of upgrades (in that primary Discipline) required to reach each rank.
Starting at the rank of Initiate, a woman begins to receive upgrades in other Disciplines, but may never have as many upgrades in her other Disciplines as she has in her primary.
The maximum number of upgrades in one Discipline is 11, the point which is called "Perfection".  A Sorceress holds one Perfection, a Queen three and a Goddess all nine.

1. Virgin:  White bikini top, Ankle/knee length skirt
2. Initiate: White bikini top, mini skirt
3. Neophyte:  White double sash, knee length skirt
4. Keeper:  Yellow Bikini top, grass/fabric strip skirt
5. Adept:  Yellow bikini top + single sash, grass/fabric strip skirt
6. Adept II:  Yellow double sash, grass/fabric strip skirt
7. Acolyte:   Orange bikini top, small bottom
8. Acolyte II:  Orange double sash, small bottom
9. Officer:  Orange shirt, small bottom
10. Second:  Blue shirt/blouse, knee length skirt
11. Sorceress: Green bikini top + single sash, knee length skirt
11 * 3. Queen:  Red shirt/blouse, ankle length skirt
11 * 9. Goddess: Black shirt/blouse, ankle length skirt

Notes:
a) the Virgin's skirt length shortens immediately after her first night of Service.
b) "bikini top" is used here to mean any of a range of styles that cover the breasts while leaving the mid riff and generally the shoulders bare.  We could as easily say "crop top".
c) "small bottom" is any of the basic styles of underwear.

That's all the info I can really give without spoiling the plot, so I hope it's enough to help everyone keep track of Talla's World.  I really don't want to write in a way that's confusing or impenetrable.

Cheers,
Xavier.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 09



Talla was kneeling on the floor, releasing a drain plug from the bottom of a laundry bin. She wasn't supposed to be doing laundry. That was a job for Virgins, not Initiates. But her assignment with the children had ended and the new card had said to go here.

"You're Talla?"

She looked under the table she used for folding dry clothes and saw a pair of thin legs leading up to the short white skirt of an Initiate. They weren't particularly muscular legs, so when she lifted her head above the level of the table she was expecting to see the upper body of one of her sisters of Endowment.

Instead she came eye to eye with a sharp-faced girl who sported red streaks in her hair. Even without the strap of a Messenger's satchel cutting across her cleavage, Talla would have known the girl for a Disciple of Form instantly -- and specifically Facial.

She was beautiful.

"Yes?"

"You are Talla?"

"Yes."

The girl eyed her carefully, guardedly holding a message scroll.

"A message", she said, walking around the laundry table.

Form were such sticklers. She could have just slid it across the wide surface of the table, but no, it had to be placed right in Talla's hand.

Talla took the scroll and laid it on the table.

"Aren't you going to read it?"

"What?"

When had that ever mattered? It was a normal, beige scroll with a brownish wax seal and no ribbons. It couldn't be anything important or urgent.

"Should I read it?" Talla asked.

The messenger hesitated, gave a quick glance around the room and then lowered her voice well below the volume of the laundry bins and their continuous, mill-driven agitation.

"Yes," she said. "And destroy it."

Talla's eyes went wide. What in the nine hells could ...?

"Pardon?"

"It's from Zhair'lo."

Talla felt her heart stop, and then leap. Hope rushed in, with terror closely on its heels. She felt the whip searing into her flesh. She felt the mesh that she could only have with Zhair'lo.

But just the speaking of the name could get her in so much trouble. Who was this girl that spoke it? Whoever she was, she knew the power it would bring.

"Zhair'lo?" she croaked, feeling her body shake.

"He wrote it last night," she said.

"Who are you?" Talla asked, stalling.

"My name is Zoe."

"And you were with him last night?"

"Look at me," Zoe said.

So Talla did. Zoe was a Disciple of Facial. You could see it in the structure of the bones of her face; in the fine nose and cheekbones; the eyelashes; even the red streaks in her hair. But there was something else.

Her skin.

Zoe's skin was pink and taut. It reminded Talla of the way the skin of her breasts had looked after her upgrade. Stretched and sensitive. Zoe's face looked the same.

Next she looked over the rest of her body. The skirt.

"Cut your skirt last night, did you?"

Zoe nodded.

"Sealed Virgin?"

Another nod.

Talla twisted her lips in thought. This was exactly the sort of person she needed to induct into the ... thing she was building. A Sealed Virgin; one whose Seal had been broken by Zhair'lo to boot. Obviously the recipient of a double upgrade, if the colour of her complexion was any indication.

But Talla held back. The whip had hurt. Watching Zhair'lo with that other girl had been worse. Her fingers flexed involuntarily.

"Do you know what happens to me if I take that scroll and it turns out you're out to get me?" Talla asked, flattening her voice.

Zoe winced, averting her eyes.

"They'll take you to Form and whip you again," she admitted.

Again, was it?

So she knew about that. Her knowing it meant nothing. She would have that knowledge whether she had gained it from Zhair'lo or from someone sent to trap her.

"I've taken a great risk to bring that to you," Zoe said. "Please believe me and don't waste it."

"I would be taking a much greater risk in opening it," Talla said, pretending that she wasn't dying to tear the scroll from its cylinder. "You could find a way to wiggle out of what you've done. I couldn't. Your enforcers could be hiding behind any of these laundry bins, waiting to pounce."

The bins were packed in together like a honey comb. There were a thousand enforcers hidden in the blind spots and there were none at all. It depended on which part of the imagination she let run wild.

Zoe put her arms up defensively.

"I waited until no one else was in here," she said.

Talla shrugged.

Part of her burned to open that letter. Part of her really believed there were women in leather armour just out of sight.

Zoe appeared thoughtful for a moment, then reached a moment of resignation.

"Very well," she said, and stepped sideways so the giant laundry bin was between her and the entryway.

She slipped the satchel off her shoulder and let it slide to the ground. With that out of way, she lifted the underwire of her top so it cleared her breasts and snugly wrapped itself under her arms.

Talla blinked.

"You want me to drop my skirt, too?" Zoe asked with her lips pursed in a sarcastic expression. "So we'll both be in trouble?"

"You really saw Zhair'lo?" Talla asked, nervous now not just for herself but for Zoe as well.

"Yeah," Zoe replied. "He told me my breasts have half an upgrade's worth of Abundance."

Talla looked more closely. That might be true. She was starting to feel real anxiety. If Zoe really was on her side, there was an awful risk of losing her if someone walked in.

"Did you know he carries your underwear around with him?"

Talla blinked again and shook her head.

Zoe smiled. She knew, now, that Talla believed her.

"Can I cover up now?" she asked.

"No, wait," Talla said.

She gave a quick glance toward the entryway and its long hallway before she too shifted position behind cover.

With a deep breath and a penetrating glare into Zoe's eyes, she undid the ties at the back of her neck, allowing the top to fall under her breasts. Once bared, she cupped both of her breasts in her hands and lifted them.

"Quickly," she told a wide-eyed Zoe.

The girl from Facial didn't miss a beat. She lowered her head and quickly pecked each of Talla's nipples before offering hers in turn.

Quicker than lightning, the girls covered their breasts. They were on the same side now, each worried not just for her own safety but that of her sister as well.

"Those are bigger than they should be," Zoe said of Talla's breasts. "Zhair'lo warned me, but ..."

"What did Zhair'lo say?"

"Read," Zoe insisted. "And burn it."

Talla tore open the scroll, leaving the cylinder aside. It was written in the men's language, and quite poorly at that. The Temple knew that making men literate was as much a waste of time as teaching them any math beyond simple arithmetic. If they could count up bushels of apples and read a Summons, it was enough to be getting on with.

Nonetheless, there was no mistaking the words scrawled upon the page, nor the masculinity of the hand that had scrawled them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Talla

I will find the ones you need.

I will test them and send them to you.

I will find as many men as I can.

We will wait for your messaj.

Zhai.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"You didn't correct his spelling?"

"Seemed more authentic this way," Zoe shrugged.

Talla watched that shrug, remembering how harshly they disciplined girls who made that gesture. Zoe did it so naturally and guiltlessly, however, that Talla knew her new sister must have been taught differently.

"You won't find allies in Iron or Tight," Zoe explained. "But you'll get lots from Facial, maybe even some who weren't Sealed like me."

"What about Sweetness?" Talla asked.

Another shrug.

"How should I know?"

Talla bit her lip.

"He's expecting a message back," Zoe pointed out. "I'll try to stay assigned to Messenger duty as long as I can. It's a weird thing for a Facial girl to request, so I can't stay on it too long, but nobody likes doing it so they always take volunteers." 

"I should write something back?"

Zoe nodded.

There was a commotion down the hall. In one smooth motion, Zoe grabbed the parchment from Talla's hand and whisked it down a chute that she knew led to the fires under the giant washing tubs.

"We have to get together," Talla said, knowing what test Tina would demand be conducted.

"You can give me the message -"

"No, not that," Talla said quickly. "We'll need privacy -- real privacy."

Zoe's eyebrows raised.

"Look," Talla admonished. "There's more than just me in this. I'll be risking other people taking you in. I have to test you, for their sakes."

The footsteps were coming down the hallway, getting closer.

"No time now," Zoe said. 

Her eyebrows went low and her face became dark as she contemplated Talla's request for such a private meeting. How in the names of the nine gods could two girls from different Divisions accomplish such a thing?

Something struck Zoe suddenly.

"There's a Bazaar starting tomorrow. Which night aren't you Serving?"

"The night after."

"Good," Zoe said. "Come to the bazaar then. Eighth bell, so it'll be dark. Bring a friend you can trust."

She thought for a moment, then gave Talla a once over.

"Wear something that covers your chest. Completely. I'll be waiting."

She turned to leave, going around the back of the laundry bin so as to elude whoever was coming in.

Over her shoulder she gave one last whisper.

"And have your message ready."

-----------===================-------------

Beshenna

If there was one thing Binyata liked about running with the Fighters, on the rare occasions that a Second like her got the chance, it was the opportunity to have sex in the middle of the day. The vast majority of women were never assigned to Serve in such a capacity.

Fighters were an odd lot. They were trusted with weapons because of their unswerving loyalty, and so were sent on long trips far from town and Goddess. When they were in town they worked such odd shifts of guard duty and even then they were located at the most far flung outposts. So when they got Served, they found themselves taking their women one after the other in between dry spells that could last many days. The Temple, regardless, favoured these with more Service than any other men.

Favoured them greatly, indeed, for hers was not the first tunnel this particular warrior had plunged his sword into this day.

Binyata was odd among women of Form. Most of her kind, whether of Iron like she or of the other Disciplines, preferred their penetrations from behind. The thumping of a man's pelvis against her hard, tense thighs and tightly bent over rear was considered the best way to stimulate her upgraded flesh.

And if the thumping couldn't do it, there was always the spanking. That never failed to bring the thrill into it.

But not Binyata.

Oh, she liked a good palm across the ass on some days, like any proper woman of Form. Hell, most of her partners just expected it of her, given her Division. But she preferred her men on top and in front of her where she could see them.

So here was Xerren, a rock of a man even among his kind, plunging past the lips she spread with her fingers. She wasn't much for that exhibitionist, self-exposure sort of thing, but she had sensed that spreading herself open this way did wonders for him. For her own pleasure, she sat on the edge of a high bed with her legs spread and pulled far back in the way that only Tight upgrades could allow. That made sure that she still got to be on the receiving end of a good hard thumping to the places that mattered.

The big deal for her, however, aided and abetted as it was on the this occasion by the need to show off her inner pinkness, was the tension in her stomach required to hold her upper body in place. She was, after all, of Iron.

She was panting now, using one hand to push Xerren away with all the power in her arm and chest, just so she would have to work her core even harder. Her upper body strength, however, was nothing to his sheer mass, as he pushed through her mock protest and pounded relentlessly against her cheeks.

Looking down, she saw his reddened shaft ploughing past her fingers and her lips, never stopping, always in and out, his pelvis thundering at her flesh, setting her muscles to ripple up and down her body. Her face contorted with the strain of holding her body this way.

He was getting large inside her, his head swelling and stretching at the opening she held as tightly as she could. It wasn't for nothing, after all, that she held so many Sweetness upgrades.

When she could take no more -- when the swollen member stretching at her vagina crossed her threshold of pain and her abdominal muscles were begging her to stop -- she released herself and let their mutual orgasm flood through her.

If flooding was the right word.

One would have to be using the word "flood" in the sense of a massive dam breaking open, letting a tidal wave of water crash over the unsuspecting town at its foot.

Binyata and Xerren drowned in that flood, all other thoughts and feelings crushed under its onslaught.

It lasted quite a while, that mindless orgasm.

'The Sweetness women,' Binyata thought, 'really have a thing going. The way they can ... the way I can hold off an orgasm and let it build up ..."

In short order Xerren withdrew from her and her legs fell limply to the ground, muscles having forgotten their function for a moment.

"Fuck, that was good," Xerren said, which counted, probably, as a high compliment. It wasn't worth the effort to expect great manners from a Fighter.

"Cleared you out," Binyata murmured, shaking some sensation back into her thighs.

Xerren arranged himself comfortably on the bed, not looking anywhere near exhausted.

"Pretty close," he smirked.

The man had just returned from a rather far flung patrol, or so she imagined by his appetite.

"Well, I have duties to attend to," she said, finding enough coordination to stand and tie on her short, blue skirt. "But I'm sure they've provided for you."

"Damn right," he said.

He shook himself, as if remembering his manners.

"Well Served," he threw in, his tone that of an afterthought.

"Indeed," she replied, casting her own smirk.

She pulled her blouse on over her head, gave a quick nod of her head and left the room. It was a short jaunt to find the exit of the tiny building and step out into the blinding sunlight where someone coughed for her attention.

"Oh, Trisha," Binyata said lightly, noting the well endowed woman who stood outside the watch tower.

Judging by her expression, Trisha had been waiting quite a while outside that door.

"Finished up, are you?"

"I am," Binyata admitted. She jerked her head towards the room behind her. "Can't say the same for him."

Trisha looked down the length of Binyata's muscular and sweat covered body before rolling her eyes.

"Binyata," she admonished. "There's semen running down your legs."

"Need to find a cistern, then, huh?" Binyata asked, a touch of red in her cheeks. "Walk with me."

Trisha was an Officer, placing her just one rank below Binyata. That meant, among other things, that she followed where Binyata led, in spite of the fact that they were from different Divisions entirely.

If Binyata could say one thing about the Temple and city of Beshenna, and her travels before she had settled down had given her experience of many Temples and cities, it was that Beshenna had water. It had aqueducts and canals, streams and rivers. This was the place where the scientists and engineers were developing pumps that might some day be used the world over. Binyata was only vaguely aware that such things were going on. Her job was defending the city and maintaining order.

For all of that, it wasn't a long walk to find a well appointed cistern with reasonably warm water and a small unoccupied building for people to wash themselves down.

It was into one such structure, a building made particularly for women, that this pair ducked.

Binyata shucked off her blue skirt and simple work shirt -- there was no underwear -- and revealed her lithe, muscular body. She stretched, ostensibly to stretch the kinks out of her body, but it mostly looked like preening.

Trisha leaned casually against the wall of the small shower room, rolling her eyes to demonstrate how unimpressed she was.

For her part, the naked woman's eyes darkened as she looked back at the Officer.

"What?" Trisha asked.

Binyata nodded at the Endowment woman's body.

"Oh, please."

"Rules exist for a reason," Binyata intoned, though it wasn't the fear-inspiring line it might have been elsewhere. "Shall I report you?"

Trisha warily eyed her superior, noting the way sweat was beading and dripping along her muscular form. She rolled her eyes in resignation.

Stripping in front of another woman, in a room guarded by a red star no less, shouldn't have been any problem. It was especially true for women of Abundance, who carried their obvious signs of rank on the fronts of their bodies. The size of Trisha's breasts attested to her seniority and should have left her full of confidence in any meeting involving this sort of nudity.

But Trisha and Binyata had known each other a very long time.

All the same, there were rules. And Binyata was completely naked and a full rank above Trisha.

Trisha undid the laces on her little pair of underwear and hung them on a hook, revealing the thick mat of glossy pubic hair that her rank had brought her. Her top, a scant number considering that her rank afforded her the right to wear a full shirt, came off next. Underneath was a bra charged with supporting nine Abundance upgrades' worth of breasts. A pair of hooks were needed to keep that all in order. These were undone from the back.

Trisha, her breasts hanging like deliciously ripe melons, returned to leaning against the wall.

Binyata leered briefly at the other woman's body before kicking the lever that released a gentle stream of water over her head.

"Fancy a shower?"

There wasn't really room for two. Trisha didn't even answer.

"You know why I'm here," she said instead.

"It wasn't to gaze lustfully at my naked Form?"

Something flickered across Trisha's face. It might have been anger.

"My Mistress expects a report."

Binyata took her time, having left the water flow at a low setting, to soap up her body, comparing it step by step with the woman frowning at her.

'I don't have your breasts,' she thought, 'but I'm catching up and you know it.'

Most Form women, if one didn't count Facial, left the Abundance upgrades to the very last. Breasts got in the way of most of the martially styled duties that Form women wanted. Starting with messenger duties at the lowest ranks, continuing on through guard duty and finally running with the Fighters and the H'rem, there weren't any Form assignments in which a giant pair of tits came in particularly handy.

Unless you counted those types that worked the real Frontier ...

Binyata shook her head clear.

"My Mistress has little to report."

"Give us what little you have," Trisha demanded drily.

"Your missing babies do not appear to have ever existed," Binyata said. "All of the women who were known to be pregnant gave birth to either live babies who are kicking and fussing in nurseries right now, or had stillbirths with cremations appropriately witnessed and accounted for."

"That's it?"

"No," Binyata said.

This was where it would get dicey.

Trisha merely waited.

"You sure you don't want to splash a little in the -"

"No," Trisha said, her voice gone icy. "For a woman of Iron, you're awfully mindless of the rules."

Binyata turned her back to let the spray wash down her aching back muscles. Xerren had really pounded her into that bed.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 09



"Our investigation also discovered that something odd had happened for the few days before your mystery baby apparently disappeared."

"And?"

"It seems that breast milk rations were divided into more shares than were necessary for the reported number of babies in the local nursery."

Women didn't always nurse their own children. For one thing, they needed their rest. For another, it didn't do to build too much emotional attachment between mothers and their children. That led to all sorts of trouble.

Besides, there were so many Endowment women who kept their milk up for various reasons other than its nutritional properties that human breast milk wasn't hard to come by. That being the case, the milk that was donated was stored in the nursery and divided into equal portions for the babies therein. Since there was always too much, some of it always ended up being discarded.

"So you were able to see specific records indicating how many babies were in the nursery?" Trisha asked. "And you were able to tell how the milk was divided?"

Binyata scrubbed at her pubic hair, trying to get out all of the sweat and dried lubricants.

"The women in the nursery," Binyata explained, "keep careful records of the number of bottles they go through and, more specifically, the number they clean. It's regarded as a sign of diligence."

"Since we know how many bottles they store per child in the nursery, we can tell how many children they were cleaning bottles for."

Trisha raised her eyebrows.

"And the number of bottles tells you ...?" she trailed off.

Binyata stood straight up with her arms folded, letting water cascade over her breasts, and looked directly into Trisha's eyes.

"That they were keeping enough milk for more children than they were recorded as having."

Trisha's eyes widened.

"How many more children?"

Binyata's lips twisted.

"One."

-----------===================-------------

Gern

"This is your first Bazaar?" Yua asked.

"Yep," Talla answered nervously.

"Don't look so shaky," Tina urged. "We're just going into Form to spend some of our hard earned coins."

Talla inhaled deeply as they walked through the central triangle. The soft sandstone walls would soon give way to hard, dark, wooden surfaces. Just thinking about it made knots in her stomach. She couldn't push her most horrific memories out of her head.

"You know what happened the last time I was here -"

"Try not to think about that now," Tina told her. "You're here to look at clothes."

"Shiny, beautiful, fabulous clothes!" Yua called out joyfully.

At least she could play her part.

Talla couldn't. There was a queasiness in her stomach that told her she might vomit at any moment. She'd barely eaten any dinner.

"So what's our plan?" Tina asked in a lower voice. "Our real plan."

Talla squinted her eyes, imagining all those dark wooden beams and long oak panels. If their path at any point came near a wooden table, she might just lose it.

She swallowed hard.

This was the way forward, the way back to Zhair'lo.

"We enter Form at half past seventh bell," Talla said evenly. "Make our way through to the Bazaar and hang around until eighth bell."

"Just wait for this Zoe?" Tina asked.

"Yep, it's up to her at that point."

Yua looked around to make sure no one was nearby.

"And you're going to mesh with her, like you did with me?"

Talla nodded.

"You don't look ... um ... ready for that."

Talla's eyes bulged. This part was true. How was she supposed to mesh with someone when she wasn't aroused? How does one get aroused when one feels like vomiting?

"This is a lot of faith you're showing, you know?" Tina asked.

"You said it yourself," Talla replied. "This is the only way to know. And I don't want to pass up Zoe. She's a messenger -- the only one we might ever get on our side if Iron and Tight are barred to us."

Tina acknowledged this with a nod.

They rounded a bend and joined a chattering throng of women flowing through Form's gate. Sentries stood at the gate, but it was hard to say that they were really guarding it. They simply ignored all of the traffic passing them, exhibiting the stoicism typical of their kind. It was as if they wanted to pretend that the whole Bazaar simply wasn't happening.

Talla, Tina and Yua placed themselves in the middle of the crowd for anonymity and made for the gate with the giant stone square embossed into its crosspiece.

Trying to quell her rebellious stomach, Talla passed through through the wide portal with her eyes on the ground. She felt her knees go weak as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff and taking her first look down the long drop.

Then she heard music and she looked up.

"This is different," she said, involuntarily speaking her thoughts.

There were colourful banners and blankets everywhere. Women in entirely unusual -- and quite non regulation -- clothing were dancing, singing and playing music. Gone or covered up were the hard wooden panels, the sharp edges, the icy cold iron.

"What?" Yua asked.

"It's different," she repeated.

"Looks the same as it always does," Yua denied.

Talla's voice having been lost, Tina answered for her.

"No, it doesn't," Tina said. "When there's no Bazaar on, it looks very different from this."

"How so?"

"No colours. No singing. No dancing. No music."

"Oh," Yua said. After a moment, she added, "Maybe this is easier for you, then."

Talla didn't answer. She was listening to the music.

"That song," she murmured. "I know that song."

She'd heard it somewhere before, but when? She'd never seen real performances before. Women had come to the dorms of the children to play funny little songs for the kids, but nothing that sounded like this.

It was, if she had known how to categorize music, a kind of ballad. It struck her as sad and almost desperate, but hopeful at the same time.

She was just on the verge of remembering it when the tune changed. Twisting her lips in annoyance, she turned to look at Tina and Yua, only to find them staring at her. She'd stopped moving for a moment and they clearly didn't understand why.

She inhaled, sucking cool, refreshing air into her lungs. Her gag reflex dissipated. The song had settled her like a warm blanket and a cool drink at the same time.

'Like a drink from a little well under a tree,' she thought, 'pulling me in with happiness and sadness.'

Out loud, she said, "Let's go."

And off she went.

After a quick glance at each other, Tina and Yua followed.

"That's my girl," Tina said, a hint of pride in her voice.

-----------===================-------------

"You're going to do Facial first?" Pussy asked.

Maksa nodded. The two of them were down in the cool, candlelit basement once more, spending a night with a couple of Officers and tables full of genealogy diagrams.

"It's almost a month away, Mistress," she replied dismissively.

"Odd choice, that's all."

"How so?"

"I know you," the Sorceress explained. "That night when I changed in front of you, you weren't jealous of my pubic hair or my face."

"Pardon?"

"Your eyes tell me much," Pussy went on wisely. "I can see how you look at other women. You're not jealous of legs, arms, faces -- any of that. But if you see a woman of Endowment ..."

She trailed off suggestively.

Maksa looked up, staring off at the farthest wall in dismay.

"I didn't know I was so obvious."

Her mistress tapped her Temple.

"I see things, you know."

Maksa turned to look at her.

"That comes with the Facial upgrades, doesn't it?"

The Sorceress nodded, then waited a beat before speaking.

"So why not take Endowment first?"

Maksa inhaled and her eyes shifted to the floor in uncertainty.

"There's something odd about those Facial women," she replied. "I want to know what they know."

"Indeed," the Sorceress agreed with a tilt of her head.

There was silence for a time, as sheets of parchment were unrolled, moved about, examined and shuffled, as candles burnt down their wicks and wax pooled at their bases.

"The Problem," Maksa said suddenly, for there was only one 'Problem' when it was spoken this way.

"Yes?"

"When you discuss it, you sound almost guilty."

The Sorceress.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?" Maksa asked. "If it was something that was caused by the old breeding program, you can hardly be responsible. That programme was started hundreds of years ago."

Pussy pursed her lips thoughtfully and the three Officers gathered round the large table paused in their work.

"I suppose," she replied, "that I view it as a collective responsibility. They were of my Discipline who forged that programme. In the administrative sense, I am their descendant and the responsibility of cleaning up their mistakes is mine."

Maksa looked at her Mistress. Without the aid of those mysterious Facial powers, she couldn't read anything in the other woman's emotions, so she had to go on the logic of the thing alone.

"That's not enough," Maksa said. "I know what it's like to clean up someone else's mess. I cleaned up after those Virgin girls in more ways than you can imagine. I know what that feels like. It involves eye rolling. Your eyes don't roll when we talk about this. You look at the ground."

A Facial woman, Maksa supposed, might have picked up more subtle clues. But something as obvious as guilty eyes tilted to the ground? Even Maksa could catch that.

"Indeed," Pussy sighed.

There was another pause; almost pregnant, one might call it, if the word weren't so loaded with meaning in this particular room.

The Sorceress's eyes met Maksa's.

"What it comes down to is that I would have done the same thing in their position," she explained. "I would have chosen the same programme, likely the exact same breeding matches. I would have ignorantly played the game they played, with too little testing and far too little information. I would have created the same mess with which we now find ourselves saddled."

Saddled. Like a horse, or an ox. Burdened. Assigned involuntarily.

"How can I claim to have any less responsibility than they if, given the opportunity, I would have done the same as they did?"

She waved her hand over the table full of parchment before them.

"In that sense: this is my mess, your mess, and our mess."

Deep breath. Firm nod.

"Now let's be about cleaning it up."

-----------===================-------------

The Bazaar was the oddest thing Talla had ever seen. The event took place in a square that seemed even larger than the one in front of Endowment Hall.

"They use this place for military training," Tina had whispered at one point. "You'll see when it's your turn."

It was hard for Talla to imagine, despite the size, that this place could be the stage for one of those immense historical battles she'd been taught about. There was nothing violent or militaristic about it at this moment.

The centre of the square was filled with row after row of little booths, displaying all manner of clothing and jewelry. Poles had been erected and lines had been strung from them. From these lines hung all the colours of clothing. There were pure whites and whites tinted with the lightest of blue and even pink. It was hard to imagine that these colours were allowed, but Tina had sworn that anything you bought here was okay to wear. The yellows could lean into green, but not much toward orange. The oranges, meanwhile, pressed on into peach and other shades of lightly tinted red.

The tables seemed to be arranged randomly.

"Wouldn't it make more sense to put all the white stuff at one end?" Talla asked. "Everything is all over."

"Not really," Tina said. "It's sorted by who makes it. So if you find one piece you like, the other pieces will be nearby, right?"

"Plus," Yua pointed out. "The women who make the stuff want to be near their own clothing, and take credit for it."

Talla wondered, but only briefly, what the women of Form did with the coins their wares brought them.

"When are you supposed to meet your friend?" Tina asked.

"My sister," Talla corrected instantly. "Around eighth bell."

They were walking through a long row of jewelry stalls. While the rules about clothing colours seemed to be quite flexible, the rules about jewelry appeared to be nonexistent. In fact, Talla couldn't remember a single lesson that mentioned such things in any way.

"Don't bother asking about the crowns and circlets," Yua advised, hooking one of Talla's arms. "The women will just ignore you unless you're at least an Acolyte."

"Check out the earrings," Tina put in. "You don't have anything yet, do you?"

"Uh, no."

Her two companions, distracted by all the shiny things around them, seemed to have entirely forgotten about their mission. It was just as well, Talla supposed, that two out of three of them looked natural.

Besides, what else was there to do? The token, as the saying went, had been passed around the table. The next move was Zoe's, not Talla's. She could do nought but wait. And as long as she was waiting, she might as well see what all the excitement was about.

A jumble of white clothing on a hanger caught her attention.

"What is that?" she asked, pointing.

There was a woman watching over the stall. She wore a thin, twisted band of yellow fabric around her chest and a transparent yellow sash draped over one shoulder and down to cover her midsection. From this, Talla took her to be an Adept. Gracefully, if a bit possessively, the woman flowed around her small counter and took the hanger from its perch.

"Only the most daring and courageous could wear such a thing, young lady," she said, her silken voice smooth as the wind. "But alas that you are an Initiate and this is the clothing of a Neophyte."

Neophyte. That meant a double sash on the top and a half length skirt on the bottom, all in white.

"Do you mean to tell me," Talla asked, "that those little -- um -- ribbons, are meant to be sashes?"

She was astonished. The cloth strips that made up the supposed 'sashes' were no more than two or three of her fingers wide.

"Just wide enough to cover the nipples," the vendor reminded her. "This is all that is required."

"But still," Talla protested. "I'd feel pretty naked."

The vendor smiled.

"And there is something wrong with being naked?" she asked suggestively. "Something wrong with the female body? Especially a body bent on Serving for the night?"

"No -- no," Talla stammered. "It's just -- I -"

She shook her head and refused to finish her sentence.

"Perhaps when you are -", the vendor started.

"How much is it?" Talla asked suddenly.

It was the older woman's turn to be startled. Even Tina and Yua looked at Talla in surprise.

"Twenty seven coins." 

"I don't have that much," Talla replied, though it wasn't clear from her tone if she was disappointed or relieved.

"Another time, perhaps," the vendor said.

With a sudden exhalation of air through her nose, Talla turned and led her sisters away. After a few paces, just of ear shot of the vendor, Talla turned back to face them.

"What if it's not there when I come back?" Talla lamented. "What if someone else takes it?"

"It happens," Tina consoled her. "But there will be other clothes. Don't worry. There's always something daring you can find somewhere."

Talla twitched.

"I wanted to have it for the next time I see him," she said.

No need to say who 'him' was.

"Keep looking around," Yua said encouragingly. "You'll see how many nice things there are."

So Talla looked, but there was nothing as nice and as utterly, gloriously ridiculous as the first thing she had seen.

Quite suddenly, she found her arm hooked at the elbow. At first, she thought it was Yua, based solely on the height of whoever had grabbed her. But she knew the feel of Yua's touch and this wasn't it. Instead, she found herself being led away by a short, blonde girl.

"You just have to see this," the girl was saying excitedly. "It's perfect for you."

Talla turned back to Yua and Tina, who were tagging along as best they could in the crowd. The blonde girl seemed to know her way through a mob and wasn't shy about using her strength to pull Talla with her.

"Who are you?" Talla asked, flustered.

"Rika," the girl whispered under her breath, a deathly contrast to the smile pasted on her face. "Zoe's sister."

Her voice immediately turned back to immature giddiness.

"This will be the perfect thing for you," Rika went on. "With those boobs, you just have to try it."

So this was, quite literally, the hook they'd been waiting for. Rika led Talla over to the most crowded corner of the Bazaar. It was a shoving match just to reach one of the two tables that were set up with a couple of small curtained off closets jammed between them.

"This one, this one," Rika chattered, snatching a large top off a hangar.

She then shouted to the vendor, a woman in a bright orange dress stitched heavily in jewels, "Can she try it on, Mistress? Thank you."

That last bit was done without actually waiting for a reply. Rika prodded Talla gently into the nearer of the two curtained cubicles - fortunately unoccupied - just as Yua and Tina arrived breathlessly out of the crowd.

"We just have to see how she looked in this," Rika announced with a giggle and hurled Tina and Yua unceremoniously through the gap in the curtain. She followed immediately after them.

Talla looked at her two sisters, both of whom were panic stricken and gasping for breath. Rika stepped through the curtain and closed it behind her. For the moment, the four of them were isolated in this little square cubicle, protected from the sight of others by a thin white curtain.

Rika looked at Tina and Yua before turning to Talla.

"You trust these two?" she asked, her voice gone deadly serious.

Talla gulped and nodded.

"There was only supposed to be one," Rika admonished, all sense of giddiness gone. "But I suppose it's fine -- maybe even better this way."

"What's fine?"

Rika rolled her eyes. Everything had happened so quickly that it was only as Rika parted her white sashes to reveal her tiny breasts that Talla noticed the girl was a Neophyte, like Tina. She looked at Talla and nodded at her chest.

"Quickly, if you please, Initiate," she said.

There was something in the way she made the motion and the way she spoke that made Talla obey immediately. She lowered her head and kissed each of Rika's tiny pink nipples. Then, as she had done many times before, she lifted her own simple top above her breasts, letting them fall over her ribs.

Rika was taken a back.

"Quite the pair for an Initiate," she said before lowering her mouth to place her kisses.

With a last glare into Talla's eyes, she let out a low chirping whistle and waited. Tina and Yua looked around, wondering what was going to happen next. There was an answering whistle from just the other side of the curtain. Through the back of the cubicle, another girl stepped in. She was dark haired and had unusually strong legs.

"This is Etta," Rika explained. "She's going to be Talla for the next bell. Etta this is Talla and ..."

"Tina," Tina put in quickly.

"Yua," the other added, dumbfounded.

"The boobs never were going to match," Etta said, chagrined, "but at least my top does. And I can pad it."

Talla`s jaw dropped. Zoe had planned this all out, right down to the clothing Talla should wear, in the few seconds it had taken her to realize what it was that Talla wanted to do. Zoe even knew whom she could trust and managed to get the whole thing sorted in a day. It made everything Talla had done thus far look trivial.

"Alright," Rika said, looking pointedly at Talla. "You have exactly one bell. Then you get your skinny ass to the back of this closet and you wait until you hear me whistle, got it?"




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 09



Talla nodded nervously.

"Where do I go?"

Rika parted the curtain in the back of the cubicle to reveal a narrow alleyway

"Go down to the door on the left, the one with a single candle burning on a table," she said. "Then up the stairs to the third floor. Zoe's in the room at the top."

Talla gave one last look back at her two -- no, three -- sisters, and ducked through the back of the curtain.

"Sorry, Mistress," she heard Rika calling out, all giddy and mindless once more, "Wasn't as nice as I thought."

Talla heard the girls' voices fade in the general hubbub that echoed between the narrow walls of the dark alley in which she stood. There was a cold feeling in her stomach and the hollow quality of those hundreds of voices didn't help; it reminded her of lying on a sick bed in hospital with physicians speaking over top of her.

One bell, though. That was it.

She took a deep breath to firm up her resolve and turned to face the long alley.

'I'm back in Form,' she thought.

The dark wooden beams and heavily stained panels were in evidence once more, even in the general darkness of the place. Gone were the colourful fabrics of the Facial women. Here was the true, stone cold, heart of Form.

There was indeed one doorway, some twenty paces along, and it appeared to be lit. At least she wouldn't have far to go. The thought of being caught here by some enforcer ...

With a mental heave, she forced those thoughts from her head. There was a mission here, a purpose. Tina and Yua -- and apparently Rika and Etta -- had made some pretty serious sacrifices to make this happen. Keeping that in mind, Talla moved as quickly along the passage as she could and ducked through the doorway into a small room -- more of a landing than anything. There was a doorway that led further into whatever building this was and a wooden, spiral stairway that would take her up or down.

Taking the stairs down was out of the question. It was bad enough knowing what Form kept on the ground floor of its buildings. Nine gods only knew what horrors awaited her in the basement. She didn't want to think about it.

Up one flight to another landing with a doorway. No candle here. Just that awful oak wood everywhere, stained as dark as could be. Had Rika and her friends kept the place dark on purpose, for the sake of Talla's concealment? She wouldn't be surprised.

But Zoe was supposed to be on the third floor. Up another spiral of wood.

This was the top, then. The stairway went no further and there was only one exit; an arched portal that opened onto a wood panelled hallway. Talla crept through the dark entrance as quietly as she could, following a flickering light that reflected off the gloss of the thickly varnished walls. A single candle, mounted in a bracket on the right hand wall, sputtered away.

Talla approached cautiously and noticed the reason for the sputtering; the candle had been jammed at an awkward angle in to a bracket meant for a torch. Wax dripped down to the floor as the candle flickered.

There was a door, slightly ajar, in the wall opposite to the candle.

After checking both directions along the darkened passages, Talla gently pushed the door open and slipped into the dark room beyond as soon as she could squeeze through.

A soft, warm voice whispered at her from the darkness.

"Best close the door."

Talla obeyed, waiting for her eyes to adjust to a room darker yet than the hallway. The only source of light was the faint glow of distant firelight coming through a tall, thin window. Silhouetted in its frame, Talla could make out the upper body of a woman; her arms folded and held tightly against her chest.

There was no point being noisy. Talla slipped out of her sandals and tiptoed across the room to lean against the opposite side of the window frame, facing Zoe.

Standing there silently, she could hear the sounds of the crowd in the square below. They weren't quite overlooking the Bazaar -- there was a bit of rooftop between their current location and that throng - but the fires that lit it gave them some faint light and Talla began to hear the voices of the singers and the instruments of the musicians.

She turned to look at Zoe, who was looking out into the sky. She let her eyes slide down the red-haired girl's body and discovered that she was naked.

Zoe chose that moment to turn and look at Talla. Catching where her eyes had gone, she spoke.

"Thought it would save time," she explained, her soft voice unusually flat. "That is why you're here, isn't it?"

Talla nodded, but realized the gesture might be missed in the darkness.

"Yes," she replied.

"Odd," Zoe remarked, looking back out into the sky. "My sisters and I never required this as a gesture of trust."

Talla inhaled.

"My sisters expect me to do this," she said.

"If they are so insistent," Zoe asked, "why not have them do it?"

"They can't."

Zoe twitched, her arms lowering to expose her breasts as she put her hands on her hips.

"Can't? Or won't?" she asked. "They leave you to do the hard part."

"You don't understand," Talla sighed. "Hopefully you will. I'm different."

"Different?" came the dubious response.

"Yes."

"Show me."

Skeptical, that last bit. Very skeptical.

But the command was to show, wasn't it?

Talla undid the laces on her skirt and laid the rectangle of cloth aside -- on a desk or dresser, she couldn't say which in the darkness -- and moved on to her top.

"You really got hit with a quadruple?" Zoe asked, rather light in tone all things considered.

"Yes," Talla said. "Knocked me out."

Zoe reached out across the breadth of the window frame and touched the inside of one of Talla's breasts with the back of her hand. She brushed along the underside and turned her hand over so just the fingertips were touching. There was a gentle push, shifting the mass of Talla's breast upwards, before she withdrew her hand and brought it to caress her own face.

"My skin still aches," Zoe said. "I have to be careful smiling."

"It'll go away after a day or two," Talla promised. Then she added, in a hopeful voice, "You're very pretty."

"I know," Zoe replied, a faint sadness backing up her words. "I hardly recognized myself in a mirror. It's like it's not even me. As if I've been replaced."

Another long pause as the two girls took turns staring out into the dark sky.

"This place scares me," Talla volunteered suddenly.

"Which part?"

"All of Form," she said. "Everywhere I look, it's that wood. Same as that table."

"Ah," Zoe agreed. "That table."

"Have you ever - "

"No," Zoe interrupted. "They don't really bother us Sealed Virgins with that."

"Oh."

"Stupid, though," Zoe offered. "There's no reason for women to do that to each other."

Talla blinked in surprise.

"But you're from Form -"

"But I'm from Facial," Zoe interrupted again. "I don't see why you can't see the distinction. Look down there."

She pointed at the Bazaar, at least the part of it they could see. So Talla looked out over the nearby roof.

"More colours," she observed. "Music. Warmth. Dancing. You covered up the wood. That was nice."

"We get stuck in Form because there was nowhere else for us nine centuries ago," Zoe said. "But we don't belong here ... or anywhere. Unless we belong with people like you."

"Like me?"

"It remains to be seen what you are like."

"Oh," Talla said. "Let's hope I can show you."

"Hope?" Zoe asked. "You seem a bit -- cool -- at the moment."

That probably wasn't a reference to the shape of her nipples.

"Yeah," Talla agreed. "Like I said, this place creeps me out."

Down below them, the raucous dancing music ceased and drums started pounding. The general hubbub of female voices faded away into an expectant hush. A lone voice, impertinent, shouted out a last protest against the falling silence.

Then the voices began to sing.

Talla's heart trembled.

"Zhair'lo's song," she said suddenly, in a whisper quiet voice.

"What?"

"It's the song I hear when -" Talla stopped suddenly.

She felt her heart racing and stepped across the small gap until her knees were touching Zoe's. Pushing a bit further, their thighs touched. Zoe made a little move but to spread her legs slightly, letting Talla interlace their knees.

"I can show you," she told Zoe. "I can only show you. There's no way to use words."

Talla first cupped Zoe's face in her hands, then brushed her red-streaked hair back over her ears.

"What is it Facial girls like?" she asked.

"I'm not the problem," Zoe said with a melodious laugh as she took Talla's hips in her hands. "I was a Sealed Virgin for quite a while, so I know how to masturbate. I've been getting ready for quite a while now."

"Oh," Talla said, abruptly embarrassed. "Then it's just me."

"And for you," Zoe whispered in Talla's ear, "it's just the squeezing."

With that, one of her hands slid up Talla's rib cage and took firm hold of her breast. Fingertips dug in mercilessly. Talla moaned as her nipples bulged against Zoe's much smaller breasts and she buried her face in Zoe's hair.

Outside, the voices of the chorus picked up their tempo, soaring higher and higher in both volume and tone. Talla was astounded. It was almost as if they knew the song that played when she and Zhair'lo meshed. She had tried to put thoughts of Zhair'lo out of her head, to keep the logic and planning separate from the emotions that had been driving her so hard.

But hearing this song, with him undoubtedly so far away, hurt her far worse than she had thought she was capable of feeling. She ached to be with him, to be in his bed, to feel him inside her. If she'd been alone, she would have masturbated -- desperately, repeatedly, even violently -- if only to still the demands of her heart, the crying inside her head.

She wasn't alone, though. There was Zoe.

Talla, her mouth slightly open in her passion, lifted her head so their noses were separated by but a hair's width.

With one hand still clenching Talla's breast, Zoe lifted the other to touch Talla's face. Somehow, even in the darkness, she sensed the pain there.

"I don't understand why he's so important to you," Zoe said. "How can one single man matter so much?"

Talla closed her mouth and bit her lower lip, taking a moment to inhale deeply through her nose.

"I can show you now," she said.

"Now?"

"Are you wet?"

Zoe, her face still in Talla's hands, nodded.

"But how will that -"

"You'll see."

She slid her right hand around the front of Zoe's face and placed the tip of her index finger in the gap between their lips, touching both of them. Zoe opened her mouth just enough to let the finger in and wet it lavishly with her tongue.

Outside, the drums were pounding and the voices of the singers were rising towards a crescendo.

Biting her cheek now, Talla slid her finger under their bodies and reached for Zoe's bare lips. She didn't want to be rough, but there was no telling how long all of this would take. She and Zhair'lo had once completely lost track of time while meshing -- and after. Firmly, if a bit slowly, she pushed past her sister's lips.

"You really were waiting," Talla breathed, feeling the wetness between those lips.

Zoe gasped and shivered as Talla made circles around her clitoris.

"I knew this was your test," Zoe managed to say.

"Not yet," Talla warned, and slid the tip of her finger past Zoe's entrance.

Zoe let out a squeak.

"I don't know if I like fingers inside," Zoe protested.

"It's smaller than a penis."

"But with fingernails."

"Whatever," Talla said, not removing her finger. "Now you."

"Inside you?"

"Yes."

Zoe inhaled, squirmed a little, and held her finger to Talla's mouth. Knowing that she wasn't nearly as aroused as Zoe, Talla made sure to coat that finger with a liberal dose of saliva. Zoe lowered it to Talla's mound and began pushing through her lips.

She stopped suddenly.

"After this," Zoe warned, "you'll tell me what you're up to?"

"After this," Talla promised, "you'll know what we're up to."

Even in the darkness, Talla sensed the frown. For a moment, she feared an ultimatum was coming. Instead, there was a shrug, and Zoe pushed.

Her finger touched Talla's vagina. The fingertip poked inside and quite suddenly their bodies moved. It was as if suction had been applied to both fingers, forcing them inside the others' genitals and dragging the rest of their bodies along in whatever contortion was necessary to complete the manoeuvre.

...

'What in the Nine Hells!'

'Easy. Relax.'

'Women do not Mesh at all! Men and women do not Mesh like this!'

'I do. Relax.'

It took a while, Zoe protesting all the way, before they could calm down. In that time, Talla could gain very little from Zoe's mind. She had none of the anger of Yua or the wonder of Tina. Neither was there the horror and dismay she'd known from Sila so long ago. What was Zoe?

When the mesh finally settled into something like a normal state of arousal, Talla was able to think more clearly. She separated herself from Zoe, able to tell who's body was who's only by which one had an aching, stretched feeling in its face. The darkness didn't help. When she looked out of Zoe's eyes, she saw almost the same as out of her own.

'Is it always like this? For you?'

'No. Not always.'

And so she relayed the story to Zoe, of the meshes with Zhair'lo and the meshes with other women, and how she and Zhair'lo could stay meshed even when far apart. When that was done, she showed Zoe the horror and savagery of the Monogamy Trial and the punishment which seemed to have permanently severed their link.

'That's awful. No wonder you want to -'

At which point Zoe came to realize what it was that Talla and her friends wanted to do and the strength of emotions that would drive them to do it.

'You think it's possible to bring down the Temple?'

'Yes. You didn't know?'

'He wouldn't tell me. Just sent me to you.'

And there came the images of Zhair'lo, of the many times she'd had sex with him, of the things she'd told him. Finally, at the end of all that despite it not being the last thing she did with Zhair'lo, there was the feeling of his erection in her mouth, ejaculating down her throat -- all of this relayed as Zoe's bid to make Zhair'lo trust her.

This triggered a memory from Talla. There came the image of her last attempt at a secret meeting with Zhair'lo, when they'd been locked together, his penis to her mouth, and she had been unable to escape any of what he'd expelled from his manhood.

So they shared that, too.

More ideas. More shapes of things.

'But you don't yet know how to bring the Temple down.'

'We need more people.'

'Or not,' Zoe pointed out. 'Maybe it only needs one person doing exactly the right thing.'

'Why do you want to help us?'

Now it was Zoe's mind that was laid open.

Nine Gods, Talla thought. Facial.

It had never occurred to her, and yet there it was. Here in Facial were the last to be chosen. The weakest Discipline with the long skirted Virgins no one else would take. The architects not of function, but of beauty and song, always confined to live with the writers of law and enforcers of orthodoxy. Here were the most obvious allies in her quest.

Zoe's education was not like Talla's. It was laced with sedition, with all that was wrong with the Temple, with all that could be changed and how it could be changed. Here in Facial, the women from the top down were the ones that questioned orthodoxy, that wrote their own rules and laughed at the staid and frightened masses. They knew, and they taught their Virgins to realize, that the Temple was a fluid thing that could be nudged and adjusted for the greater good of women and men.

On top of all that was Zoe, trapped in Sealed Virginity, more seditious than all the rest. Talla saw Zoe's allies laying this evening out with perfect planning, and not worrying because they knew their superiors wouldn't bat an eyelash at it -- assuming that no one from Iron or Tight caught wind.

'You think you can bring the whole thing down?' Zoe repeated.

'Yes.'

There were strange things in Zoe's head -- things Talla had never felt in anyone. Those Facial upgrades did things, things far more subtle than anything that Synergist and charged semen had done to Talla.

'Don't be so sure,' Zoe's thoughts leaked through. 'Things have been done to your head, too.'

Talla felt something click in Zoe's mind. An evaluation had taken place.

Talla remembered once, many days ago, walking through Endowment Hall and looking at drawings of a proposed tower. Something had clicked then, too. Something had made her look at that drawing and pronounce it ugly.

'It was ugly,' Zoe agreed, though for different reasons than Talla.

Zoe's click was something else. She had looked into Talla and decided that Talla was capable of doing what her heart was set on.

'But I don't even know how,' Talla protested, forced to be honest in the mesh.

'You will find out,' Zoe said and, as if to accentuate the certainty of her belief, pushed a second finger inside Talla.

Talla moaned aloud, feeling her eyelids flutter involuntarily as her eyes rolled. She tilted her head to the side, letting her lips fall upon Zoe's.

Facial. The lips so soft. The tongue so agile. She could only imagine what Zhair'lo had felt, with Zoe doing that to his penis while he came.

If there was a song for this mesh with Zoe, she couldn't hear it over the choral symphony outside. It grew to a climax and Talla knew that the same would soon happen to their mesh. There was no longer a way to guide the thoughts that passed between them. Free association brought up memories: of whips and meshes and men and women; of lessons; of coins and clothes; of sadness and happiness and pain without end.

It was mindless and it was far too full of thoughts. Talla found herself holding off the orgasm in the hope that she could sort out some of these images, gain more information, do something. But it was hopeless. They were being buried.

Lips locked together, with someone's tongue being sucked painfully into someone's mouth (they weren't sure who was doing which), they felt themselves tightening around each others' fingers.

As the drums pounded, the first spasm drilled through from their heads down to their genitals, squeezing at the intruding fingers. Talla tried to cry out, but her voice was muffled by Zoe's mouth. Another spasm tightened her vagina, squeezing too hard on the pair of fingers poking at her. Zoe only pushed upwards into her even harder, determined for some reason to get everything they could out of this.

Helplessly locked in, Talla could only endure wave after wave of their orgasm and Zoe's insistent prodding.

When it ended, the girls gently removed their fingers and found themselves dripping down to their wrists.

Both panting with exhaustion, it was Zoe who found her voice first.

"Meshes aren't supposed to be like that."

"I know."

"You didn't know, though. You thought every mesh would be like the one with Zhair'lo."

"And none of them have been," Talla said. "Except with other girls."

A long pause as they caught their collective breath.

"I have sisters," Zoe said. "They can relay messages for us."

"They will take the risk?"

"I will convince them."

"We don't even know what do yet."

It was the third time she'd admitted this.

"You will find out how," Zoe said, firmly and evenly. "I've met Zhair'lo. I've seen you. The two of you will find a way."

Talla was surprised by the force of Zoe's determination.

"I've got to get dressed and get the hell out of here," Talla said.

She found her clothes exactly where she'd left them. In the darkness, she could hear Zoe getting dressed.

"Your message?"




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 09



"Right," Talla replied. "Here."

It had been tucked into her skirt, folded up between the pleats.

"I hope he can read it."

"He can," Talla said. "I know he knows every word in it."

"Good. I'll be in touch as soon as I can."

One last touch, hand to hand, and Talla raced off. 



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 10



Zhair'lo was in pretty terrible shape by the time Talla's message actually reached him.

It had been a long week of waiting and worrying on his end.

He'd sent his message to Talla, trusting Zoe to carry it for him, and then he'd waited. The only thing he could say about the time was that his constant worry had focused his attention on his archery to the intensity of a burning afternoon sun. Any motionless target less than forty paces away from him might as well be dead. Even Lyric was pleased, if Zhair'lo was interpreting the man's barely perceptible eyebrow twitches correctly.

In the meantime, he'd received one other message, but it had come from a pair of girls he didn't know and it hadn't been from Talla. It had been a Summons for another Form upgrade.

He'd done that, too, wondering if he could find another ally.

But no. She'd been a girl of Iron and, Zo'kar had been right, coming on a girl's stomach wasn't much fun even if the women of Form didn't make the whole thing so dreadfully colourless and technical.

Besides which, the girl in question had not come to his bed the following night. Somewhere, out of memories that he was sure were not his, a soft voice echoed up from the deeps.

'Iron and Tight always go random', Zoe's smile came through with a flash of red hair. 'Just to be extra proper and boring.'

There were no allies to be made in those Disciplines anyway, so Zhair'lo supposed that his consolation prize -- an Initiate from Lips -- was just as well. He hadn't licked a girl in quite a while. It had made for a nice change and a distraction from his worry.

What had happened to his message? He was fairly certain Zoe hadn't been sent to betray him, but what if she'd been caught somehow? What if, even worse, Talla had been caught, message in hand? No one had come to get him to drag him back to Form to -- worst of all his nightmares - whip her again. Was Zoe holding on to the message? If so, at least none of this fell on Talla as her fault.

Why in the nine hells had he trusted Zoe anyway? Smooth talker, that was for sure.

Every night, his mind went through all the permutations as sleep eluded him bell after bell. He alternately reassured himself that nothing was wrong and cursed himself for endangering Talla yet again.

That was the state of his mind when the two messenger girls arrived once more in the butcher's kitchen where he was still required to spend much of his time cleaning up animal carcasses. The only good fortune was that, this time, they showed up just as he was laying out the knives.

"Zhair'lo M'han?"

It was a new voice, unusually soft and melodious. It felt as if she were singing his name instead of merely speaking it.

When he turned to look, he saw a girl with wavy, blonde hair that glinted orange and red at him in the light of the rising sun. Facial, no question. What was she doing delivering messages?

He noted the sashes that crossed her breasts. A Neophyte to boot? Zhair'lo remembered fondly most of the messengers that came to him -- remembered mostly how they looked walking away in their tiny skirts. But a Neophyte? When had one of them delivered a message?

"Yes?" he answered.

Behind the Neophyte, a Virgin in a knee length skirt piped up.

"Etta," she said. "I didn't see his name on the list."

"Scroll was in the other bag," Etta said quickly. "Didn't you see it?"

"Um -- no. I guess not."

Etta the Neophyte moved quickly to Zhair'lo and handed him the scroll. It didn't look anything like any scroll he had ever seen. Upgrade Summonses were decorated in green. They'd used black when they called him to be tested for loyalty to the Temple. Red was usually his least favourite colour -- it was the one they'd used when it was time to move, leave his newest friends behind and learn yet another vocation.

This was neither black, red nor green -- which meant it didn't come from the Office of the Goddess, or any Queen or Sorceress.

This one was a plain brown cylinder with paper wrapped around it. That was mysterious. The kind of thing that Is'ka used to order kitchen supplies, or Lyric to report the results of a Hunt, brown was for mundane, day-to-day business. Zhair'lo, in his multi-vocational, constantly changing life, had never been involved with a brown scroll.

Etta shrugged at him, casual as could be, but didn't let go of the scroll immediately. With her back to her junior companion, she locked her grey blue eyes on his.

"You can read it whenever," she said, keeping her voice light. "Nothing urgent, I'm sure."

Her eyes, however, said something different. For just a moment, without tilting her head even in the slightest, her eyes flicked towards the farthest corner of the room. Zhair'lo, realizing that she was trying to tell him something without alerting the Virgin, did not give the game up by following her quick glance.

There was only one thing in that corner of the room anyway and he already knew what it was.

"Thanks," Zhair'lo said, trying to make it so only his eyes conveyed his understanding.

Etta nodded.

"Let's go, Yvette," she said, and hurried the other girl out the door.

Glancing around quickly, Zhair'lo unrolled the scroll. Leaving it around and reading it later wasn't an option, obviously. It wasn't very long and had been written in the short, terse sentences women used when they wanted men to be able to understand them.

-----------

Zh,

We are working hard to find a way.

The more you can send us, the better.

I will test each one you send. I will make sure she is safe.

We may need your help, when the time comes.

Find all the friends you can, but be careful.

Trust Zoe, Tina, Illya and Yua.

I will find a way for us to meet.

T

-----------

Underneath, a last sentence had been added in different handwriting.

-----------

Trust Rika and Etta, too.

Zoe

-----------

Zhair'lo scanned the letter as quickly as he could.

'Gods damned dangerous', was his first thought. 'Listing those girls' names there.'

But what if it was a trap? An attempt to get him to send back the names of the men he'd been talking to? How could he trust this letter was actually from Talla?

Either way, it had to be destroyed. He already knew the names on it, except for Zoe's apparent additions of Rika and Etta. He wouldn't know Rika to see her, of course, but if she identified herself to him, he supposed that would help.

'Only ... what if someone lies and pretends to be "Rika"?' Zhair'lo thought with a shudder.

This could be a real attempt at contact from Talla, in which case he was endangering all of them by holding on to it. At any moment, someone could walk in and demand to see the letter.

But it could also be fake, designed to trick him into admitting that he had sent the first message. And what then?

He unravelled the scroll from the cylinder, spinning it off the central spindle and tearing it loose. Something fell to the ground; a tiny bundle that had been wrapped up close to the centre.

He snapped it up off the cold grey floor and looked at it. It was a tiny piece of white cloth, no longer than his thumb, cut in the shape of a triangle. Into it had been woven what he first took for a short piece of red thread. Upon closer inspection, he realized it was a long, red hair.

Authenticity, he realized, was the purpose.

The meaning of the triangle couldn't be more clear. Who besides Talla and Illya would know that Zhair'lo kept a similarly shaped piece of woman's clothing in his bedside table, buried amongst his own clothes?

The red hair? That was for Zoe's addition to the message.

So the message was from Talla. And Talla swore to Zoe's loyalty. And Zoe vouched for Etta and Rika, whoever Rika was. He wondered for a moment how all of these loyalties were assured. Talla seemed very certain, but he couldn't imagine the source of her certainty. It would have to be enough that Talla trusted this particular chain of women.

Zhair'lo grimaced as he jammed the little white triangle into his pocket and walked to the back corner of the room -- the corner to which Etta had directed her clandestine glance. There was only one thing in that corner, an iron stove, and only one reason Etta had directed his attention to it.

He opened the heavy door of the furnace just enough to admit the paper that he slipped in. It was incinerated in seconds.

-----------===================-------------

"It's the waiting that's getting to me," Yua said with a frown.

She, Talla, Tina, and Illya were sitting in their favourite spot, the little bath off to the side of the main pool; the one that no one else ever wanted to use.

"You spent as long as I did waiting," Illya pointed out.

"It wasn't like this," Yua said defensively.

Talla, however, was long inured to any of this. She'd been beaten and felt the pain of the whip not just upon her own flesh, but echoing back through the mesh. And why? Because she wanted to have the mesh with one particular man more than any other. Because it was better with him. Because that mesh was special.

But the Temple wouldn't let her have it.

Talla felt fury and hate boiling up inside her and let the roiling cauldron drive out any fear like a blast of steam. From that wrath, she decided she could trust Zoe's loyalty and would just have to hope the girl had the competence to match. The message would get through. It would find its way to Zhair'lo and be quite safe.

It had to.

"There's nothing we can do for now," Talla said, sighing inwardly, pushing her worries into a corner of her mind. "The messages have to be slow for now. All that matters is that we have a way to communicate. He knows we're working and we know he is."

It was Tina's turn to frown.

"But what good are men?" she asked.

"They have penises," Illya pointed out helpfully. "Which are nice."

Tina rolled her eyes.

"You know what I mean," Tina said. She took a glance around. "With what we're trying to do, what good are men? They're not going to come over the walls. He's taking a risk revealing himself at all."

"We don't know how we're going to do it," Talla replied. "It's like any board game you've ever played. You pile up your resources and try to find the fastest way to the end."

"That only makes sense if you know the rules," Tina said. "We don't. We don't know how to -" another glance around "-do what we're doing. We don't know what we need. For all we know, men are irrelevant and we'll finish the game in last place with, with-" she stammered, reaching for a metaphor from a familiar board game "-a giant pile of useless wool."

Talla sighed. She did have to listen to Tina. She couldn't let the anger-driven bravery turn her to foolishness.

"Zhair'lo will be careful," she said. "He's smart and he -- he cares about me. He won't endanger any of us."

"That's true," Illya confirmed, a faint taste of regret in her voice. "He feels terrible about -- about that."

No need, in this company, to clarify which 'that' she meant.

"Besides," Talla pointed out. "Men should be free, too. Just like women. That means he can do what he wants."

There was silence for a while.

"Is it time yet?" Yua asked.

"Pretty close," Tina said. "Wouldn't want to miss it."

Four naked girls climbed out of the hot bath and if the water streaming off their heat-softened skin parted to reveal breasts a little out of proportion to their age and the clothing towards which they moved, no one paid any mind. After all, this was Endowment's pool, where the breasts generally did run pretty large.

Towels and clothing were near the exit. Dry air spilling in through the open doorway evaporated much of the water that was left on skin. Goosebumps formed and nipples perked up.

They were in no hurry, towelling off in patient silence before donning their clothes. Tina wore the sashes and knee length skirt of a Neophyte. The rest wore the tiny tops and skirts of Initiates, just one rank lower.

A casual pace was set towards Endowment square and out the giant bronze gates into the Goddess's triangle. There was nothing peculiar about girls this age, their duties presumably complete, wandering about at will. They could even leave the Temple if they wished, so long as they didn't go far or break any rules about fraternizing with men.

They weren't going that far though. They only had to be somewhere near the main gates of the Temple sometime around the third bell. That had been the plan at least. If nothing happened, they would just come back.

So they milled around the plaza inside the main gate, pretending to read the plaques and admire the statues. They splashed their hands in the water and generally behaved like a bunch of silly, low-ranking girls were supposed to behave.

But always one of them was watching the gate for women coming in.

"Amazing," Talla said, looking up at the statue.

"Harissa," Yua read the plaque, "second Goddess of Gern. So?"

"Look at her body."

The statue was, naturally, a nude. What hue or colour the woman's skin had been, Talla had no idea, but she had full, heavy breasts, a gorgeously sculpted face and a thick mat of hair between her lean, muscular legs. The sculptor had made her pose with her feet together and her arms wide, palms and face turned up to the sky.

"That's what they stole from us," Talla said, her bitterness threatening to break her voice out past a whisper.

"Hit," Tina whispered back, urgency in her voice, as she nodded towards the gate.

As they had agreed, Tina turned her back so Talla could casually look towards the gate.

There was Etta, coming through the gate with an empty satchel around over her shoulder, scanning the crowd.

Her eyes found Talla's. A slight hiccup in her movement was all that betrayed the moment of recognition. Talla watched the Form girl carefully. To anyone else, Etta's movements would appear completely casual. Only she and Talla, as well as a precious few others, knew what to look for.

Etta's right hand reached across her body to touch her left shoulder, adjusting the strap of her satchel. She ran that hand down the length of the strap, between her breasts, to her right hip. Etta then turned and moved off towards the gates of Form.

Talla nodded in satisfaction.

"She made it," she whispered to the other girls. "And he knew it was dangerous so he probably burned it right away."

"A reply," Tina asked, pointing at the statue and pretending that she had asked a question about it.

Talla looked up, too, and answered.

"I guess not," she said. "We'll have to wait even longer."

"This seemed like such a good idea at first," Illya put in. "But it seems to mean a lot of frustration."

"We have time," Talla added. "Lots of time."

-----------===================-------------

"That's odd," Maksa said.

"Hm?" her Sorceress asked.

"The Sealed Virgins," Maksa explained.

"What about them?"

Maksa gathered a pile of genealogy parchments.

"We've gone through five years' worth of Initiations, right?"

"Indeed."

"This pile here is all of the girls whose Discipline choices didn't match with my calculations."

"Quite," Pussy agreed.

Maksa then pushed about a third of the stack aside and pointed at the remaining pile.

"And these," she said, "are all of the ones who were Sealed Virgins."

The Sorceress's eyes widened as other Officers of Pussy gathered around.

"That's quite remarkable," she said. "We'll have to run the numbers to be sure, but that can't be close to proportional to the general rate of Sealed Virgins."

"Definitely not, Mistress," an Officer put in. "I can't remember exactly but the general rate is less than five percent."

"What you are suggesting," the Sorceress said, "is that these women were Sealed Virgins because they chose the -"

She stopped suddenly as there was a collective inhalation of breath. Around the room, orange clad Officers paused in their work to stare at her.

Pussy pursed her lips, frozen for a moment, as everyone else in the room wondered if she would actually say it out loud.

"Because they chose the wrong Discipline," she finished.

Eyes were cast aside and all cringed.

"We can't be sure yet," Maksa said, bravely trying to recover the conversation. "We have to look at other Sealed Virgins. We have to look at the Sealed Virgins who did choose the right -- I mean -- who chose what I guessed they would choose. There a lot of -"

"Possibly," the Sorceress interrupted. "But if this is truly the case -- if we can convincingly demonstrate this to be the case -- we will raise nine hells when we announce it."

"Announce it, Mistress?" an Officer asked with a gasp.

"We have a duty," Pussy replied firmly. "For the good of the girls. If they have truly chosen incorrectly, then we ought to correct them and get them on the right path."

"Nine hells," Maksa intoned. "No one will want to hear this."

-----------===================-------------

As common rooms went, the one belonging to the Carters had to be one of the largest. Talla had never Served in a place so large, save the giant, grey cave-thing the Quarrymen called home. The Carters didn't really seem to have a particular theme going, at least nothing too obvious. The place was all wooden pillars with fires scattered about under sandstone chimneys. A lot of different colours of fabric were used to cover the tables and just as many hues were used for the drapes that screened off sections of the space to give the illusion that this wasn't just a single, immense room. Around the edges were nooks where the men played games and drank their ale.

Cozy enough, if you were into that sort of thing.

While Talla looked around, women were still filing in. The group from Endowment had arrived first and had sorted themselves out with the Oranges at the front and Whites to the back. Talla hung around next to the doorway as the muscular Form women filed past her and filled out the group. Coming through the door and taking a place next to Talla was an Initiate with golden hair and a skirt so short it probably revealed her genitals to those -- like the men seated in the room -- whose eyes were at the level of the hemline.

Golden Hair turned to look at Talla, first at her face, then her breasts. She was wearing one of Tina's tops, which left little to the imagination. The other girl's eyes widened a moment before making eye contact again.

"Talla, is it?" she asked in an idle conversational tone.

Talla paused. This wasn't anyone she could remember. She'd come in with the Form crowd and, by the glow of her hair, was clearly from Facial. Talla eyed the girl carefully. There wasn't anything suspicious about her either. In fact, she was quite casually peaking over the shoulders of the women in front of her.

"Am I that famous?" Talla replied drily.

The other girl stood up on her tiptoes, pretending to look past Talla so she could put a hand around Talla's shoulders and lean in close. She was wearing a strong, fruit-scented perfume.

"We've been looking for you," she whispered.

She came down off her toes and let her hand slide down Talla's bare back and over her skirt.

Talla shivered as the fingertips touched her cheeks under the hem of her skirt.

"Why?"

The hall grew quiet and the women in orange began calling for their men.

The Facial girl put her head on Talla's shoulder, leaving her hand still gripping Talla's rear.

"No time now," she said, the vapid smile on her face having nothing to do with the danger in her voice. "Snuggle up close."

Not really having a clue what was going on, Talla figured it was best to go along with this pretended friendship. She put her arm around the other girl's shoulder, just under the long, wavy curls of blonde hair.

"What's your name?" Talla whispered.

Though their heads were close together, the girl turned to look Talla in the eye -- and winked.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 10



"Lacy," the girl said. "But today I'm Elsa."

Talla felt her brain stop.

People didn't have two names. Well, they had a name and a creche name, in case names got reused. But people didn't go changing their names, or using different names in different circumstances. Her mind railed against the idea. How would anybody track anything?

"You see," Lacy -- or Elsa said, "we can make arrangements."

"Arrangements?"

"Like I arranged to meet you here."

Talla felt her body go stiff and cold. This was worse than merely locking up Talla's brain. What Lacy -- for that must be her real name -- was saying was either impossible or incredibly dangerous. Was this a trap? A trick? She'd trusted Zoe. Dare she trust this girl who couldn't get her own name straight?

"So who is Elsa?" Talla asked, whispering the first thought in her head as soon as her brain got going.

"Elsa was supposed to Serve D'ren here tonight," Lacy whispered back. "But we switched."

"Why? You like D'ren?"

"Never met him before," Lacy replied. "But I had to meet you."

Talla shivered.

"Why?"

"Things I heard," Lacy whispered, turning so she was nose to nose with Talla. "But we can't talk now."

Now Talla was intrigued. Facial was the Temple's weak spot. Her mesh with Zoe had taught her all that she needed to know on that subject. Was Lacy sent by Zoe or was this some separate subterfuge?

Or a trap?

She'd have to be careful.

"When?"

"Screw J'ree into the ground as quickly as you can," Lacy advised. "Then meet me out behind that shed by the second torch post. You saw it on the way in?"

Talla nodded, not the least bit surprised that Lacy somehow knew the name of the boy she was Serving tonight.

"Tenth bell," Lacy said. "No later."

And with a wink, all trace of Lacy the conspirator vanished from the golden-haired girl's expression. She became, Talla supposed, someone named Elsa, giddy and empty headed and not suspicious in any way at all.

"Oh," she added to Talla in a louder and completely different voice. "You've got J'ree tonight? I know what that guy really goes for."

Then she leaned in close, one last time, and whispered a last piece of advice to Talla.

-----------===================-------------

The trip up the stairs to J'ree's room was surreal. He was a fairly muscular guy -- had to be, to be a carter -- but he held her hand very gently, as if he didn't have the strength to just haul her over his shoulder and carry her up the stairs. It was strange to see that kind of muscle on someone she could actually Serve. The normal gamut of eighteen to twenty year old boys didn't come out this big. But he was a carter, and those giant sacks of flour didn't get themselves off the carts, did they? Nine hells, sometimes she'd seen guys like J'ree pulling smaller carts by themselves -- no horses at all.

But the dark colour of his hair and the shape of his body was nothing compared to the thoughts in her head.

If Lacy were telling the truth -- and that was a big 'if' -- then she had the ability to arrange assignments. Talla's heart was pounding in her ears. There was only one assignment she could imagine trying to arrange. There was only one reason, in point of fact, that Lacy would come to her.

Zhair'lo.

But first, J'ree.

He ushered her into his room, gently, and entered behind her. There was a tingle, then, as she turned her back on him, taking her eye off him in the privacy of his room.

"So what's it like?" she asked.

"What?" he asked, carefully lighting a small candle.

"Carting," she said. "I've never Served a Carter before."

As the candle flickered to life, Talla found herself in a small, garishly decorated room. The drapes and blankets, like all of the fabric in this building, were of many colours woven together. The wall hangings, absent in the rooms of most men, were of the same flavour. No two items seemed to go together if she didn't count the fact that the shutters on the window matched.

"It's important," J'ree said after a short pause. "Food and clothing have to be moved from one place to another. Can't even build a house without someone to bring the wood from the lumberjacks and the stone from the quarries."

He lit a second candle, which steadied the light in the room a bit. It seemed odd that someone would need two candles to light such a small room, especially as they weren't about to do anything that really needed a lot of lighting. But the more Talla looked around the room, the more dizzying the clash of colours became. At least, she supposed, the light of two candles would cut down on the flickering.

Absolute darkness would have been better, of course, but that wouldn't have worked for tonight. Not if she wanted to take Lily's advice.

"Everyone has a role to play," she said, approaching J'ree. "Yours is as important as any."

They had taught her to say things like that, to keep the men understanding what the unspoken concord was between them and the Temple.

J'ree took her face in his hands.

"Indeed," he said, his voice almost a growl.

Then he kissed her.

It wasn't as gentle as it could have been, but it wasn't unkind either. Not quite rough, but more along the lines of urgency. She responded in kind, pulling on the collars of his shirt to keep him close even as his tongue pushed into her mouth.

With his left hand holding the back of her neck, the right slid down between their chests, a thumb sliding between them to trace past the edge of her nipple. The hand found its way to her hip, and then under the hem of her skirt to grab a handful of cheek.

He squeezed. And again, Talla was struck by the plaintive urgency, as if he had far more strength than this, as if -- even more - he wanted to use more strength than this, but his desperation was held barely in check.

Talla felt something pass through her; a kind of thrill that she couldn't quite describe. There was something odd about J'ree, something she had never felt before. Was it the muscles? The garish colours everywhere in sight?

J'ree backed away a moment, raising his eyebrows. Had he sensed something from Talla.

Talla smiled. Whatever was going on, it was easy to figure out what to do next. She began unlacing his pants. Carters, it seemed to her, tended to where loose, light pants. With their legs constantly in motion, heaving things this way and that, it made sense to wear the most comfortable clothing possible.

They certainly came off quickly enough.

She knelt in front of him, admiring his already erect penis. It wasn't quite the largest she'd ever dealt with, but the vein riddled erection was no minor thing. She squeezed until a small drip of clear was forced from his tip.

"In a hurry?" he asked.

She looked him right in the eye and nodded.

"You have no idea."

Then, without taking her eyes from his, she took as much of his manhood in her mouth as she could, doling out her saliva generously. She couldn't count on herself to be wet enough quite yet, so she was going to make sure he was as slippery as possible.

He groaned.

"That's it, girl."

She slid his penis out of her mouth, noting the acrid, bitter flavour of his fluid, and tickled the tip of his erection with her tongue.

"My name's Talla," she corrected him, only mildly admonishing.

He smirked as she took him into her mouth again.

"Sure," he said. "Talla."

She swirled her tongue around him, eliciting another groan.

"You're gonna get it in your mouth," he said.

It didn't sound like a warning. More like a promise. She pulled away.

"Not yet," she said. "I want it in my pussy now."

She backed away to the bed, pulling him after her. Wasting no time, he pushed her on her back, keeping his feet on the floor.

"I hope to all nine hells you're ready," he said.

"Oh, yeah."

It was a ruse, but he needed no convincing in his state. She was only ready enough that penetration wouldn't damage her. Anxiously eyeing his throbbing erection, she spread her legs as widely as she could and relaxed her muscles as much as possible.

J'ree didn't even bother taking her skirt off. He simply set his saliva-soaked member against her slit and began pushing.

She was so grateful for the mesh. The moment that the exposed flesh of his glans touched her insides, his astonishing level of arousal seared up her spine and set her skull aflame. There had never been anything like this in any mesh she'd had before.

J'ree wasn't a man or a boy. He was a living, breathing ball of fire, long charred to deep, charcoal black, never mind the pale colour of his skin. Inside her, he pushed and thrust, and put all her insides to burning. She couldn't call it painful, or even unpleasant, given how powerfully aroused they both were.

But it wasn't anything she'd felt in her short career.

'If I could quench this fire,' she thought, but there was nothing with which to douse it. He was hotter than her ability to cool. With his feet firmly planted on the floor, he could burn into her as hard as he liked and she was helpless to avoid it, pinned as she was on the end of his erection.

Not that she wanted off, really. Not that the mesh would have let them separate.

It was just odd to even notice the inescapability of her position. It had never occurred to her before.

The room was darkening around her, a weird kind of tunnel vision born of the intensity of J'ree's desire. All she could see was the red aura around his body, backlit by the candles on his dresser.

J'ree was a ball of fire, so much was certain, but the brightest flames always burn out the most quickly and Talla had neither the ability nor the desire to hold him back.

'Imagine a fire burning out of control,' she thought. 'Now imagine a fool, meaning to douse it, but throwing a bucket of oil on it by mistake.'

That's what their orgasm was like. A sky torch lighting up the night, launching out the edge of his penis and exploding through her insides. She threw her head back, letting the energy burst skyward out of her chest. She didn't even have the sensation of his erection pulsing, her muscles twitching nor of any fluid firing into her. There was only the fire, and not fire, and fire again.

It waned, finally, and he withdrew.

She collapsed, exhausted, falling on her side so her head didn't hit the wall. They were back in his bedroom, out of the fires of nine hells.

-----------===================-------------

In a dark hall, deep in the Offices of Sweetness, an Initiate waited on a wooden bench outside a suite of offices, all but one of them darkened for the night.

"Julie?" a woman's voice called out from one of the doorways.

The Initiate stood up and walked into the single candlelit room.

"Yes, Mistress Tia."

Tia, wearing not her physician's coat but the blue of her rank, was looking at a sheet of parchment in front of her.

"You -- you filed a Note?"

A Noteworthy Report was a rare thing to fill out, especially for someone as lowly ranked as she. You were supposed to do that whenever a boy acted differently from how you expected, whether it was good or bad or just plain inexplicable. Julie had filled out a couple before, not really knowing what the threshold was for any of the three categories. As far as she knew, those notes were thrown in a folder or a shelf somewhere.

But not this time.

The moment she'd filed this one, the Officer downstairs had looked at her and sent her up here to Principia Within. The amazing thing was that the Note she'd written had beaten her here. How did they do that?

"Yes, Mistress."

"This Note was for Shen M'han, whom you Served this evening."

"Yes, Mistress."

"How is he?"

"Good," Julie replied, trying to put as much reassurance in her voice as possible. "He's really good."

She would have really preferred if this all just went away. Couldn't they handle it without having her speak to a Second?

"Good?" Tia asked, eyeing her suspiciously, "and yet you filed a Note?"

"It's not a big deal, Mistress."

"If that were true, you wouldn't have filed the Note," Tia pointed out, her voice tinged with frustration.

Julie shrank.

Tia, with a great sigh of effort, softened her voice and manner.

"You should understand that Shen is a concern," Tia explained. "He was -- let us say 'ill' a while ago. His record is flagged for that reason."

Julie nodded.

"Now what was Noteworthy with this boy?"

Julie gulped and sat up straight.

"Well, Mistress," she started. "You see, I've been with him before. He was really -- shaky - you know? Like clumsy or something. You're always worried he's just going to fall over, like you're teaching a baby to walk or something. I've never Served anyone and been so -- so -- worried for him, you know?"

"Indeed," Tia replied. "This is in his file. He was too unstable to do an upgrade. Yinay Ador."

Premature ejaculation, that unfortunate condition which disqualified men for duty as Conduits.

"Yeah, exactly!" Julie breathed out.

Tia raised her eyebrows.

"Exactly?"

"I mean," Julie went on, embarrassed for having shouted out. "That's how I remembered him. All shaky and stuff."

"And?"

Julie shook her head and her eyes went wide.

"He's not like that anymore."

Tia paused and looked at Julie. She wasn't a bright girl, that was obvious, but she wasn't making this to get attention. She clearly didn't want to be in Tia's office and it was patently obvious that she was bereft of the intelligence required to stick competently to a lie.

"How is he now?"

"Steady," she said, a firmness in her tone as her voice hardened. "Like a rock. Solid. He knows what he's doing. You wouldn't believe the confidence. It's like a completely different guy. He's like, all over me and doing exactly the right thing at the right time."

Julie took a deep breath, the memory of the multiple encounters obviously still fresh.

Tia thought for a moment, then she took out a sheet of parchment and started writing on it. When she was done, she folded it in thirds and handed it to Julie.

"Thank you, Julie," she said. "I trust that I don't need to seal this note? Good. Take it to desk nine on your way out, please."

Julie stood and bowed.

"Yes, Mistress. Good night."

"Good night."

-----------===================-------------

J'ree seemed to be napping for a bit, which was odd. Talla had never really known anyone to fall asleep after the first go. There had only been that time, after her first night with Zhair'lo, where the two of them had just lain there, staring at the night sky for hours. They hadn't really slept, mind.

Other than that timeless experience, no one had fallen asleep. Some guys liked to talk and others like to be quiet, or close their eyes and just sort of soak in the warm, fuzzy feeling.

But not J'ree. He seemed to have actually gone to sleep. That was fine by Talla, seeing as she needed some time to recuperate from the sensation of having one of the those flaming candles from an Ascendancy Festival go off inside her belly.

What had that all been about? Was she getting more sensitive to the emotions of those with whom she meshed? It was possible, but even then -- she'd never felt anything so turbulent.

Shen came to mind, as he often did, what with the whole "being responsible for nearly killing him" thing. He'd been unsteady, but not nearly as -

Her thoughts stopped for a moment.

There was only one word to describe what she'd felt form J'ree.

J'ree had felt dangerous.

Not dangerous like Shen. Not dangerous in the sense that he might accidentally ejaculate in her mouth and curl up in a ball and be ashamed of himself. J'ree was another kind of dangerous. There was something inside him, something almost unpleasant, waiting to burst out.

Talla grimaced thoughtfully as he stirred next to her.

He smiled at her, gently, his manner now drastically changed. She found herself being pulled towards him so he could lay his head at her breast, curled up like a baby.

"Wow," he whispered.

"You alright?"

"Yeah," he replied, his voice gone soft. "That was something though. What a relief."

She breathed out a worried laugh.

"Waiting a while to let that one out?"

"I guess so."

He let out a contented sigh.

Talla was stunned. There was no sign of the violent firecracker, no sign of the desperate embers or the fires of nine hells. Just a young man, snuggled up in her cleavage, breathing deeply to restore his stamina.

She rolled over a little on her side and looked down at him. Their eyes met. His were clear blue. An utterly innocent, pale blue, like looking lengthwise down the aqueduct that brought water into the Temple. Nothing but water and reflected sky. It was like looking into the eyes of a child, eyes that have never known the disturbance of any worry or responsibility.

Talla pushed her top up over her breasts to set them free. She shifted her weight, lowering one of her now bare breasts and letting her nipple trace across his lips. Her body tingled.

Slowly, gently, his tongue came out to tease the very tip, even as he exhaled cool air over her breast. The nipple sprouted, pushing into his mouth. She really would have to get a Point upgrade someday. For now, this would have to do.

It occurred to her to wonder how she would look if there had been no Temple. What if there had been no herb to stunt her growth? What might her breasts, her nipples, her whole body, look like then? How might it feel?

J'ree was working the whole nipple now, not just the tip. His lips brushed against the areola, the surface of her breast, sending the tingles back along her spine.

Was it time yet to take Lacy's advice? She'd sworn that J'ree could be taken care of in just two shots if she did it right. No time like the present.

She took his hand and pushed it under her skirt, against her mound.

"Feel how wet it is?"

He nodded, never taking his mouth from her breast.

"Make me come," she said very slowly. "And I'll do something -- amazing -- for you."

He smiled and she felt his finger slide along her slit. She shivered. Gone was her concern over the queer danger this boy represented. He was soft and kind and harmless now, only wishing to please her in the most gentle manner. It seemed to take him ages just to slide that one finger between her lips, to part them and actually touch her clitoris.

She shook and moaned, pushing her breast into his face. He read that cue, sucking nipple, areola and then some into his mouth, tickling the nipple with his tongue the whole time.

But even then, his finger scarcely touched the edge of her vagina. Where another man might already be eagerly penetrating her and probing her insides, he danced around the periphery as if too shy to enter.

Maybe she didn't need him to enter. Maybe he already knew that.

What she needed was that tickling of her clitoris, that ringing of his fingertip around her entrance.

Oh, yes, he understood perfectly what she wanted him to do. That realization drove her over the edge. She rolled over on him, a tiny part of her mind taking care not to actually suffocate him, as he tickled her to orgasm.

The first spasm came suddenly, unbidden, unheralded. Her body, from her chest to her vagina, gave one sudden jerk and then -- perfectly, smoothly -- he finally slid one finger inside her just before the second spasm took.

She hadn't expected him to do that, but it was just right. It gave her muscles something to seize on, something to squeeze and pull up inside her. She moaned. Maybe she even called out his name, or swore out the name of a god. She couldn't say what happened, except that her breasts felt wonderful and her vagina squeezed and squeezed at the intruding digit until her stamina waned and he withdrew, soaked to the palm of his hand.

"Oh, that was nice," she murmured, inhaling and exhaling calmly.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 10



For it hadn't been an athletic performance. She wasn't out of breath. It had been the most relaxed orgasm she'd ever had.

"Good," he said, quite satisfied with himself.

She looked down at him.

"Your turn, I think," she said.

"I hope I've got one more left in me," he said.

She knew he would. No one his age could possibly be done for the night in one shot. It was just a matter of knowing what to do. Men could be different. Some desperately wanted to do a thing that others would find pointless. It was always an adventure, guessing which was the right thing for each man she Served.

For J'ree, though, she had a cheat. Lacy had already told her exactly what to do and it would be one of the easiest things she'd ever done. She crawled over top of him and stood up out of bed. Pulling him by his arms, she forced him to sit up and then pulled her top off over her head.

Even though he'd just been suckling at her breast, he still looked amazed.

"Are these the biggest you've ever seen?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding shyly. "Well ... biggest that I've ever been Served with."

"Good."

She knelt, then, and took his penis in her hands. It wasn't erect, but had held onto to some of its swelling from their previous encounter. It was still wet when she put it in her mouth and she tasted some of her own juices as well as the faint taste of semen.

That was odd, too, the semen. Who knew, though, really, what made some men taste differently from others? The tang of her own fluids drowned it sufficiently that it didn't bother her as she slowly sucked him back to firmness.

His bed was low enough that she could guide his hands to her breasts. He cupped them gently, rolling her once again erect nipples with his palms. Occasionally, he squeezed, but always very tenderly.

Heavenly. She wished they could mesh again. She wished that was part of the plan.

He was long enough now that he couldn't fit in her mouth. Now that he was comfortably manipulating her breasts without guidance, she could use her hands more capably. One went to cup his testicles, as gently as he was squeezing her. The other wrapped around the base of his cock, the part that she couldn't fit in her mouth.

She let saliva run out of her before sliding her mouth off his erection. Stroking him so the wetness spread for his entire length. Then she met his eyes.

"Just start coming whenever you want," she said.

"O -- okay," he stammered nervously.

Her eyes were still locked on his and she lowered her voice to a whisper.

"Then I'll pull you out," she promised.

He gasped, trying to hold on while she stroked him.

"And you can come all over my tits."

"Uh-huh," he breathed, unable to form words.

Lacy hadn't been mistaken about that much at least: the boy really went for that.

What had she given him? About half a bell since the last run? Had to be more than that. He'd been asleep, hadn't he? Maybe an entire bell. Hopefully there'd be enough of an orgasm -- enough semen -- in him to make this worthwhile.

She'd scarcely put him back in her mouth when she felt the head of his shaft swelling up, felt his testicles tightening. In fact, his whole body was tensing up, holding back the moment. Had they been meshed, she could have helped to push him forward or hold him back. As it was, outside the mesh, she tempered her stroke, relaxed her tongue a little and just generally tried to let him savour the moment of anticipation.

He fought, though, against that orgasm, more strongly than she'd thought possible.

His body began to relax.

Talla was amazed, for he had actually brought himself back from the brink. That was some serious willpower, given what she'd promised and how badly he seemed to have wanted it.

"Getting all charged up?" she asked between mouthfuls.

He nodded.

"More come for me, then, huh?"

J'ree gave her another nod and an exhalation that might have said, "Yeah."

Now she went after him in earnest. If he'd taken himself back from the edge once, his endurance had to be incredibly high. She worked him from base to tip, slathering him luxuriously with her tongue, round and round. With her forearm, she pushed his hand against her breast, inviting him to squeeze ever harder.

There was no holding back the second time he approached that cliff. She felt him swell and there was no tightening, no tensing in any muscle. He let the orgasm come on at full gallop and without an iota of protest.

As she felt felt the first pulse at the base of his shaft, she yanked him out of her mouth. She was almost quick enough.

A stream of semen launched out of his tip, catching her open mouth and flicking as far up as her nose before she bent it downwards to finish tracing a line down her neck to her cleavage.

She blinked, an instinctive desire to protect her eyes overwhelming her immediate sense of duty. In that moment of blindness, her senses of taste and smell focused on the liquid in her mouth. That flavour was there again, but stronger. He tasted bitter, as food did that had been burned. The sense of charcoal and ash was so strong, she half expected to see his semen discoloured towards grey when she opened her eyes.

But no, it was as white as semen ever was.

Maintaining a degree of control over his body that surprised Talla, J'ree held her breasts gently but firmly together. Convenient, really, so she could keep using both of her hands to stroke and fondle him, drawing out stream after stream of his juice to play in strip after strip across her breasts and even over one of her nipples.

Finally, his grip relaxed and he released her breasts. Voluminous amounts of semen, having dripped into her cleavage, now strung across the gap between those generous orbs of flesh.

She milked him out, little drips which she wiped on the dry nipple -- the only clear spot she had left.

J'ree fell sideways on his bed and dragged his feet up.

"I -- uh," he murmured sleepily.

He blinked slowly, looking at her where she knelt on her floor. His eyes lazily, almost without any awareness left in them, traced from her face down to her spattered chest.

She tilted her head a bit to examine him and meanwhile left her body exposed to his eyes.

'Let him look,' she thought, and left a light and patient smile on her face.

His soft, blue eyes gazed fondly and she watched his eyelids close and slowly, wearily, open again.

She waited, her hands in her lap, with semen dripping off her breasts to her stomach.

He blinked again, opening his eyes with great effort this time.

Talla bit her lips as his eyes closed for a third time and, at last, did not open. She knew when a guy was done for the night, and J'ree was certainly done. She took a pair of his underwear and wiped herself clean from nose to navel and immediately put her clothes back on.

There was time for one last look back at J'ree before she blew out the two candles and left the colourful room for the night.

It was time to find Lacy.

-----------===================-------------

In a small, frequently used clearing, a set of tents were pitched around a sparkling bonfire. Most of the Hunters had gone to sleep, but two of them still sat mesmerized by the dancing flames.

"How long do we stay out here?" Zhair'lo asked.

"Usually a Hunt lasts about a week," Kenji answered.

It was only his first night out on his very first Hunt. He was too excited to sleep.

"A week?" he asked.

Kenji didn't reply. Like a proper Hunter, he never wasted energy by repeating himself. There was always that extra pause before he spoke, just to make sure Zhair'lo was done speaking. Then he would speak, carefully and clearly so there was no chance of miscommunication.

Zhair'lo hadn't quite got the knack of it.

"What about what we catch?"

Wouldn't the meat spoil in that time, even if it were dressed and cleaned?

"Fighters and Carters meet us at prearranged locations."

Zhair'lo nodded.

"And, uh," Zhair'lo hesitated. "Women?"

Did Kenji smirk?

"Them, too."

"Come out on carts, do they?"

"Not quite," Kenji said. "You did notice that every man has his own tent?"

Zhair'lo nodded.

"That's why," Kenji explained. "They know where we'll be on the fourth night. No worries, kid."

They sat for a while longer, watching the fire flicker and sputter sparks into the night air. People in the city didn't get to do this. There was something odd and mystical about sitting around a fire in the middle of an otherwise absolute darkness. Zhair'lo couldn't really put a name to how it felt, but it was certainly a unique and bold emotion that took hold of him.

For he could live like this. If he took care of his arrows and the few tools he needed to clean and cook an animal, he really could fend for himself. That was saying something that few other men could, who knew only one skill; one vocation.

He had other plans, of course, but boldness was as boldness did.

"What was her name?" he asked.

There was no need for further context to this question. Given how many women a man of Kenji's age must have bedded, any one of hundreds could have been 'her'. But between them, sitting by this fire, given every other conversation they'd had, there could be only one whose name Zhair'lo would want.

Kenji thought for a long time. About what, Zhair'lo couldn't say. He wasn't looking for information. Oh, theoretically, Talla might be able to find whoever Kenji's woman was and reach out to her. But if she and Kenji hadn't done anything about the Temple's tyranny in all these long years, what likelihood was there that they could be so motivated now?

No, he just wanted to draw Kenji out, discover what the guy was about. He had a goal, after all, and obviously Talla was doing a much better job finding allies than he was.

"No one you'd know, Zhai."

"I'm doing a lot of upgrades," Zhair'lo argued. "Maybe she'll be a Source. Tell me what she looks like."

Kenji laughed with some sincerity.

"Not in Gern, you won't."

"What?"

"We were harder to separate, you see," Kenji said. "Turiksa was -- and still is -- a pretty small place. When we kept running into each other ... well, I'm here in Gern now, aren't I?"

"And she's in Turiksa?"

"I'd imagine," he replied wistfully. "The Temple isn't obliged to keep me updated."

Kenji was silent for a while. Zhair'lo didn't know where to go from there. What more could he ask? He was deep in his own thoughts when Kenji broke the silence.

"Who was your girl?"

"Talla," Zhair'lo said and instantly bit his tongue, regretting his eagerness to feel her name on his lips.

"Nice?"

"Amazing."

"Why's that?"

Zhair'lo inhaled. All or nothing.

"When we meshed," he said. "It was my first time. I'd never felt a mesh before. I could feel her body from the inside, hear her thoughts. It was the most amazing thing I've ever felt. I thought every time I was Served it would be like that."

"But it isn't," Kenji put in, softly. "Only with her."

"Yeah."

So Kenji knew. Kenji had a girl just like he did.

"You miss her?" Zhair'lo asked. "Miss the mesh?"

Kenji nodded.

"There's never been another like it," he volunteered. "Not in the decade since."

"But you do your duty anyway?" Zhair'lo prodded.

"Of course."

It was too quick, that response. Too soon on the heels of Zhair'lo last syllable. It didn't have that pause-for-clarity with which a Hunter always prefixed his replies.

Kenji, it turned out, did have emotions. Years of them, possibly, all built up.

'You are my friend,' Zhair'lo thought. 'And we will be allies.'

-----------===================-------------

Talla slipped out of the Carter's house quietly, using a side door as women often did at night. The official reason was so as not to disturb those men who might still be up chatting. It wasn't considered polite to walk through the Common Room of any house of men when one was dishevelled from a night of Serving.

The real reason, of course, was that she didn't want to accidentally end up in a group of Endowment women who would chat her up and want to go back home as a group.

She picked her way over the dark and dew-moistened lawn, keeping a good distance from the torchlit laneway. There was indeed a shed by the second post. Talla kept well back of that and went around a stand of thick, green bushes behind it.

Sitting patiently on a dark blanket was a blonde girl wearing a tiny white top and a short white skirt. As Talla's eyes adjusted to the extreme darkness of the scene, she saw that Lacy was leaning back on her arms. The skirt she wore, short as it was, covered her not at all from this angle. That was nothing, at this point, giving the many-times-more-dangerous lawbreaking that Lacy was offering.

Talla sat on the blanket, legs crossed. If Lacy could see up her skirt, too, then at least they were even.

"So," Lacy began.

"So."

"There's a boy named Zhair'lo," Lacy said.

Talla gulped.

"Yes."

"We can get you to him, possibly."

"Who is we?"

Lacy smirked.

"I'd rather not give out names."

"Who sent you?"

"Sent me?" Lacy said. "No one sent me. Not really."

"You are from Facial?"

"Of course. Who else would do this for you?"

Talla sat silently, stunned for the moment. How many women in Facial were busily undermining the Temple?

"Why would you do this?"

Lacy's answer was quick.

"Because what they're doing is wrong," she explained. "And we try our best to make it right."

"And what do you expect to get from me?" Talla asked, becoming suspicious.

Lacy smiled.

"You don't understand, do you?"

"Understand what?"

Lacy shook her head, almost sadly. What was Talla missing?

"Come here," Lacy said, beckoning Talla closer.

"What?"

"It's what you do, isn't it?" Lacy asked. "I've heard it's so. That you can make meshes with women -- strange meshes even for that."

"Zoe told you."

"You shouldn't drop names that way," Lacy cautioned as she slid across the blanket to close with Talla. "I heard about you and Zoe, though, yes."

Sitting in front of Talla, Lacy spread her legs and followed that by pushing Talla's legs open so their bare genitals faced each other.

"Can I see them?"

"What?"

"Your tits."

Talla was numb at this point, and simply unlaced her top without thinking.

"Wow," Lacy said, reaching out to cup one of heavy breast. "Crazy for somebody your age. Is it really a quadruple?"

"Yeah."

"Lucky you."

"The upgrade nearly killed me," Talla pointed out. "Did that get through your mill of rumours?"

Lacy blinked once and took her hand away.

"No."

Talla pursed her lips.

There was a pause before Lacy spoke again.

"We should be sisters before we do this, yes?"

Talla nodded and so Lacy pushed her top, a mere band of fabric around her thin chest, down to her abdomen. She leaned forward and planted a wet, tongue-laden kiss on each of Talla's nipples before inviting Talla to do the same to her.

"Lots of tongue," Lacy reminded her. "I need to be turned on."

She tapped her tongue on her own mouth and made an odd expression.

"You did like I told you?" Lacy asked. "Sucked him and let him come on your tits?"

Talla nodded.

"I can taste him, just a little," Lacy admitted with a frown. "It's good, anyway. You'll be wet. I've been playing with myself for half a bell just to make sure I'm ready. What do we do now?"

"You're asking me?"

"You've done this before, Talla. I've never meshed with a woman -- lo, though I've tried."

Lacy giggled at this, in a brainless way that Talla wouldn't have thought to be within the blonde's repertoire.

With an inhalation, Talla reached out one hand and touched Lacy's skin, feeling for the wetness of her slit. She had indeed been preparing for this. It seemed like she was even looking forward to it.

The sensation was getting familiar to her now: the feeling of another woman's genitals; the texture of the little nub of a clitoris as her finger swept past; the lips parting; the sudden change in angle and texture as her finger found the entrance to the little tunnel.

"Now you."

"I just have to touch you?"

Talla nodded.

"When your finger touches my vagina," Talla said.

Lacy moved forward and placed a hand, palm up, over Talla's mound.

"Be ready," Talla reminded her. "Our fingers will move on their own."

The blonde girl froze for an instant, took a deep breath, and pushed her finger straight through the folds of Talla's lips and into her vagina.

It should have been difficult, taking something inside herself so suddenly. But Talla was well prepared. Not only her own juices, but a little of J'ree leaking out of her as she sat in this odd position, greased the finger that penetrated her.

...

'Oh, my!' Lacy shouted.

'See?'

'Yeah.'

And they felt each other for a while. On the outside, they both felt Lacy's spare hand move to one of Talla's breasts.

'So soft!'

Talla found that her unoccupied hand had moved to her other breast, probably at Lacy's bidding. The girl clearly had a thing for breasts.

'And yet you're in Facial?'

And so Lacy opened up to Talla. She'd never been a Sealed Virgin or anything like that, but she was never satisfied by the way the Temple did things, not even from the start. Why hold so much back? Why not give women what they needed to feel healthy and sexual? Why all the punishment? Why enforce such rigid relations between men and women?

So Lacy had found girls like herself, for many in Facial had already congregated, and sought to make things more fair. They didn't seek to change the Temple, for they viewed it as massive, impregnable and unchanging. But they could make things better for those who needed it.

That's what they did. They found the ones who were made most miserable by the arbitrary rules of the Temple and tried to make their lives better. Most of their power was in arranging for those, like Talla, who were denied their favourite men.

They had no embassy, no other purpose, no great machination or conspiracy.

But they were many. Talla saw faces, some more clearly than others. Some were colder and distant. Some were locked in passion and Talla realized that Lacy was no stranger to taking other women to bed, for many of her memories came with the taste and scent of one set of lips or the other.

'Now you understand?'

'Yes,' Talla replied. 'You have no goal.'

'Except happiness.'

Lacy now scanned through Talla's mind, seeing what Talla willed her to see, because Talla was better at this than Lacy.

She let the blonde girl see her meshes with Zhair'lo and all the pain and danger they'd been through. Lacy wasn't shocked to see whip crashing down on Talla's rear, nor the aftermath with the girl in Zhair'lo's lap as Talla was forced to watch.

'That's what they do,' Lacy explained. 'These are the people who need our help.'

'What do you want from me?'

'Happiness,' Lacy said. 'But you have other plans, don't you?'

Because Talla wasn't as good at hiding everything as she'd thought.

'I'm going to bring them down,' Talla said. 'I'm going to set us free to grow into the women we should be.'

'The men will rule us if you take away the Temple, as they did before,' Lacy answered.

But it was a rote answer and her heart wasn't in it. She didn't believe in the omniscience of the Temple any more than Talla did.

'What good is freeing us from the tyranny of men if we have to live under the tyranny of women?' Talla said.

The pressure on her breasts increased suddenly in tandem with a rush of emotion that spilled into the mesh from Lacy. The blonde was excited by the thought of sedition and it had become sexual for her, racing through the link between their minds.

Talla found both of her breasts being crushed. Somehow, Lacy's arousal was forcing Talla's hand to tighten its grip as well.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 10



'Did he come on you a lot?' Lacy asked.

Without willing it, Talla found herself showing Lacy an image of J'ree ejaculating on her breasts, tracing lines back and forth. And the aftermath, semen stretching from one side to the other. Driven forward by Lacy's need, she projected more images: the three boys who'd come on her chest at the Initiation; the Strength upgrade; Zhair'lo's upgrade; every guy she'd let slide an erection between her tits.

Lacy moaned out loud and quickly tried to stifle the noise.

Fingers probed deeply as arousal overcame inhibition. Vaginal muscles clamped down. Bodies spasmed and shivered in the cool dark of night.

When it was over, they withdrew from each other. Talla recovered her wits quickly and retied her top while Lacy was still in shock.

"Put your top back on," Talla whispered. "If our clothes are on, we won't be in any trouble."

Sweat dotting her brow, Lacy nodded and fixed her top.

"This is what you have with him?"

"Yeah. But better."

"No wonder you want to be with him."

"So now what?"

Lacy inhaled.

"Now, you wait," she explained. "You're on high pacing, right?"

"Five times a week."

"Good, because we can't track you very well in Endowment," Lacy went on. "It was hard to find you tonight, believe me."

For several minutes, Lacy detailed the protocol they used. It could only work on nights when a girl from their group in Facial happened to be assigned to Zhair'lo. That girl, if she was willing, would show up at a prearranged location wearing a specific piece of clothing so Talla could identify her. She would only wait a certain amount of time. There were all sorts of warnings and caveats.

"But in time, we will find a night for you, got it?"

Talla nodded.

"One more thing."

"Yeah?"

"It's possible you'll be caught," Lacy warned. "You know what the punishment is for this?"

Talla gulped.

"Yeah," she answered. The punishments had been drilled into them by Shanata in her first week in the Temple. "Six lashes -- or two with the heavy lash."

Lacy shook her head.

"That's for the girl who switches with you," Lacy explained. "For you, with the Monogamy thing already on your record, it'll be worse."

"Oh."

But there was no backing out now.

No way.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 11



Shen reclined with his arms spread across the back of the bench and breathed easily as he sat in the small waiting room.

He'd arrived at Sweetness's gate at half past the sixth bell, as ordered, and handed his Summons to the guard. She'd led him here.

Quiet place, empty except for him. Couple of benches, two chairs and the yellow-brown sandstone walls. Could have been any place in the Temple, really, if he hadn't been paying attention to geography on the way in.

'Ho-hum,' he thought. 'Why in the nine hells am I here?'

How long had it been since that last incident? What? Two months now since that weird episode where -- so they told him -- he'd almost died?

There had been Talla, then a fuzzy, timeless greyness, and suddenly Yinna riding him. Since then, he'd felt great. Yet here he was, back in the Temple -- somewhere near the hospital if he knew his directions at all.

But if he was here for a check up, why in the evening?

A door, opposite to the one through which he'd entered, cracked open. A woman in a plain, white skirt peeked through and, upon seeing him, opened the door the rest of the way.

"Shen M'han?" she asked.

"Yes, Mistress," he replied, not yet rising to greet her.

"Come in, please."

"Alright," he said with a heavy sigh.

He gathered himself up and sauntered through the doorway. The room behind was darker than that in which he'd been. Thick drapes were drawn against the setting sun and a scant few candles were all the light available.

As his eyes adjusted, he realized the room was empty of furniture save for a single bed. He took this in as he made out the shapes of two girls standing side by side at the other end of the room. The expressions on their faces were -- mystifying. They knew something that put those quirky smiles on their lips and they weren't going to tell him.

The woman in the yellow skirt closed the door behind him.

"We need to test you," she said, quite formally.

"Really," Shen replied, unimpressed.

"Yes," she said. "Do you remember your first attempt at performing an Upgrade?"

A faint twinge of shame came over Shen's face, but it washed away in less than a heart beat.

'That was a long time ago,' he thought. 'You're talking about someone else.'

"Yeah," he answered, letting his voice drawl a bit. "What about it?"

"We may give you another chance," she said. "Do you want it?"

His heart skipped a beat; he had to force it to relax.

Deep breath. That had been Talla's advice, hadn't it?

"Yes," he said, the casual aura he'd been projecting suddenly all but vanished.

"Good," she said. "My companions are Primers."

With a jerk of her head, she indicated the two brown haired girls in white skirts.

"Survive them until seventh bell, and we'll put another bolt in your quiver."

Another chance, that meant.

"Survive them?" Shen asked slowly, raising an eyebrow.

What was that supposed to mean?

The woman in yellow raised both her eyebrows and tilted her head with a downward glance at his shorts.

Oh, wait a second ...

"Didn't the sixth bell just ring?" he asked in amazement.

"Indeed," she replied, her voice dry. "I'm sure they'll be gentle."

With that, she turned on her heel and went out by a door different from the one through which he'd entered.

The two girls approached, smiling fully now.

"So, uh -,"

"Uh?" the slimmer of the two girls answered.

"You're going to spend the next bell -"

"Trying to make you come," the second girl, the one with the larger breasts, replied.

"And I have to, uh, not come?"

"That's right," the girl answered, smiling with an almost sadistic glee.

His mouth forming an 'o', Shen involuntarily stepped backwards.

"Ah," he muttered as he became aware of his situation. "So where you girls from?"

"Within," one said.

"Abundance," said the second. "Wanna see?"

He could already see, in fact. The little top she wore did little to hide the general shape and size of her breasts. She wasn't quite like Talla in that department, but she was still generously endowed.

"Well, Abundance," Shen said, with a breath. "I guess I would."

"Oh," she admonished playfully. "Don't call me that. That's what we call the Sorceress."

"Then just for tonight," he answered, "you two are my very own Sorceresses: Within and Abundance."

They giggled, both glancing at the closed door through which the woman in yellow had passed, making sure his seditious word play hadn't been overheard. From the way their cheeks had flushed, he'd have to take note of the effect of such appellations for future use.

"Okay," Within answered. "But just for tonight, and don't you tell anybody."

-----------===================-------------

"Do you think he'll last the whole bell, Mistress?"

"Of course not, Jora," Tia answered, not looking up from the documents in front of her. "No one lasts the whole bell."

The woman in yellow twisted her lips. She was new here and hadn't known that.

"So why do we -?"

"To get them to try their hardest," Tia cut her off without looking up. "Men require motivation, impossible goals and such."

Tia paused a moment and looked up thoughtfully, not at her underling but rather just over her head.

"Not my idea, mind you."

One side of her face twitched, the closest she would ever come to shrugging, and went back to her work.

"Why are we testing him, Mistress?" Jora asked.

"Have a look," Tia said, sliding several sheets of parchment across the desk. "What you'll see is that since his strange Catatonia incident, Shen here has been behaving very strangely. I interviewed several of those who have Served him since and they all indicate that his previous traces of nervousness and premature ejaculation have vanished."

Jora looked the sheets over.

"I don't know the boy personally," she said. "Are you certain these problems didn't go away gradually?"

Tia raised an eyebrow in a way that made Jora step back.

"Yes," Tia said slowly. "I did take care to interview several women who Served him before. They found him unsteady, as suspected."

"Of course, Mistress," Jora replied. "So we're testing him again to see if he can be used for upgrades?"

"Ostensibly," Tia admitted. "That's our rationalization."

"In reality?"

"I'd like to know what happened to him."

A long pause.

"Mistress?"

"Yes."

"What of the one who Served him the night he went Catatonic?"

"I met her, briefly," Tia said, almost dismissively. "When we Awakened Shen. She confirmed that he was very unsteady that night as well. He even ejaculated in her mouth, apparently by accident, I recall her saying."

"Indeed."

Tia bobbed her head from side to side.

"Still," she said thoughtfully. "Now that you mention it, it might be worth interviewing her in greater depth."

Jora nodded agreeably.

-----------===================-------------

The Within and Abundance girls had at least started slowly. He gave them that.

After laying him down on the bed, the former had begun kissing him very gently and the latter to rub her still clothed breasts against his groin.

"You should know," Abundance said. "That there are no rules here."

"Hm?" he asked around Within's enthusiastic kisses.

"None at all," she went on. "You can come while I'm rubbing you."

Even as she kissed him, Within reached down past her partner's breasts to grasp his erection through his shorts.

"Or even," she pulled away long enough to say, "while I'm squeezing you."

"But you'll last longer than that, won't you?" Abundance asked.

"I'm sure he will," Within whispered in his ear, nibbling all the while. "At least let us get it out of his pants and have a look ..."

Abundance murmured appreciatively.

"Then you can come anywhere you want," the girl said as she pushed her breasts into the base of his erection. "My tits."

"My pussy," Within whispered.

Shen moaned and wished it hadn't sounded so much like a whimper.

"Oh, you like that?"

Shen withheld any further sounds. This bordered on cruelty, this test of theirs.

"Would you like to see my pussy?" she asked. "And then make a big mess all over it?"

Her tongue traced the edge of his ear.

"Let's see, then," Within whispered.

While her partner worked the lower end, the slimmer of the two girls got up on the bed and threw a leg over Shen, straddling his face.

No panties. Of course there weren't any panties.

"See my pussy?" the girl simpered. "So nice and tight. You wouldn't believe what I could do with it."

Nine gods, he was not going to last a whole bell if this kept up. Not one tenth of a bell, the way this was going.

"And the hair," she murmured. "So soft. I have one of those upgrades, too ..."

Shen felt his erection swelling, uncontrollably. The girl working his cock knew how to use her breasts. No doubt. She was hitting just the right spot at the base of his erection to force a crude and quick orgasm from him. If he didn't do something quickly, he was going to fail this test.

And he couldn't have that.

He wanted a second chance at the Augmentation Chamber, and this was it.

What did he do, these days, to calm himself? Deep breaths? Not likely. Every time Abundance pushed one of her tits against him, his whole body shivered involuntarily. He couldn't take a deep breath, what with all the gasping.

What else? What else?

Think, damn you.

Focus.

Focus on what?

Well, that presented itself right before his eyes, didn't it? How else to take his focus off himself than to take charge of the situation.

His hands, which he had left limp in an attempt to ignore all about him, now firmly grasped the rear of the Within girl hovering over his face. He pulled her down, bringing the light brown curls of her genitals to his lips.

Wetly, he licked. And deeply.

"Oh, I think we got him, Abundance," Within called out triumphantly. "Push him!"

Then his tongue touched the rim of her vagina, tasting the juices that leaked from her tunnel, and she gave a start.

"Oh, hell," she breathed.

And his tongue pushed in.

She'd made a mistake - exposed a piece, a player of board games might say. Every piece on the board should be guarded, and she'd left one without any protection when she'd volunteered her Discipline.

'I know what you like,' Shen thought. 'And I can concentrate on pleasing you and ignore everything else because I know it's working.'

Even as Abundance unlaced his shorts, he knew he could beat them, at least for the moment.

"I don't think we can make him come in his pants," Abundance said, sliding the offending clothing out of the way.

Within only murmured back, lost in the techniques Shen had been perfecting for weeks now with one partner and another.

"Let's see what happens when he feels my nipples against his cock, hm?"

Shen wasn't paying attention and neither was the girl who rode his face. He knew he had her when she began rocking and grinding.

The moans weren't far behind. So even as he felt that nipple slide the length of his erection - Even as he knew the head was swelling and turning purple -- he knew that he could hold on.

Within tensed, driving her hips down and squeezing his head between her legs. He felt her cheeks turn rock solid with the tension in her muscles. Just for a moment, he felt her juices leaking over his chin -- and then she screamed.

In pulses her orgasm came, each one punctuated with the release of a spot of sweet tangy juice from her moist tunnel. Each one noted by a smaller and smaller squeak from her throat.

"What in the nine hells?" the other girl asked, almost laughing. "He made you come?"

Within slipped off his face and off the bed to kneel on the floor, a look of complete shock on her face. She glanced at her partner, nodded once in acknowledgement, and then stared at the far wall while she tried to recover.

Abundance twisted her lips.

"Fine, then," she declared. "You suck him. I'll work the top half."

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo's opportunities to meet Sealed Virgins had seemed to have dried up, and he couldn't be sure why. He was certain that he was doing things correctly, at least from a technical aspect, so that couldn't be it. Form had been using him to clear out its backlog, but at nowhere near the rate that Endowment had.

Was that because he was so often on foray with the Hunters? For now, the trips out in to the woods were never longer than four days, which gave him plenty of time to come into the Form's Triangle and ejaculate all over some poor Sealed Virgin's stomach or ass.

Thrilling as that was. Zo'kar, lucky bastard, had drawn the two remaining Facial girls.

But Zhair'lo did his duty and, true to their nature, the girls of Tight and Iron did not grace his bed.

This night, however, would be different. After six weeks of slowly going through Form girls, he was finally getting a chance at Sweetness. There was hope, here, of finding someone important who was also sympathetic to his cause. If Zoe had given them access to Form and the ability to send messages, what could a girl from Sweetness provide?

He thought that he might be able to count on Kenji, and maybe a few of the other Hunters who had had similar experiences, if it came to something insignificant like sneaking him off somewhere to meet Talla.

But overthrow the Temple? No one owed him that kind of loyalty. No one he had met seemed to have the drive to try anything like that. Every one of the men at Lyric's camp had been through the same test that Zhair'lo had taken. Every one of them had passed with full marks.

Consequently, every Hunter to whom he spoke was unfailingly loyal to the women and their Temple.

Every night, Zhair'lo wondered how he had passed the test. What had they measured in him which had resulted in permission for weapons training? No answers were forthcoming. They'd been testing what? His obedience? His stamina? When the girls had told him to stop, he had obeyed. What else was there to do? He had nothing against them -- no desire to hurt them. They were as much playing pieces as he was. Even exhausted and overloaded with sexual frustration, it had been clear to him that they'd had no more say in their actions than he did in his.

His anger was directed towards the Temple -- the Temple in front of which he now stood.

"Sweetness, tonight, huh?" Zo'kar asked as the two of them stared up at the small triangle above the little gate.

There was a twist in his lips that came through in his voice and it had nothing to do with what drove Zhair'lo's cynicism.

"What's with you?"

"I was just getting used to the horses," Zo'kar said. "Now I'm off to that Hunter's Camp. They're turning me into you."

Zo'kar sighed.

"Still, we get to fuck lots of women, wherever we are. Right?"

"Yeah," Zhair'lo confirmed, taking his turn to sigh.

There was no getting through to Zo'kar. He was the one that Kenji spoke of when Kenji said that most people were happy. Zo'kar didn't care about any particular woman and didn't see any reason Zhair'lo should care. Sure, he had a certain appreciation for Talla, given what she'd done for him, but it went no further than a faintly glossy look he got in his eyes when Zhair'lo mentioned her.

Nine hells, there was even a pretty good chance Zo'kar would be Served by Talla someday as they rotated the women around. An opportunity that would almost certainly be denied to Zhair'lo.

'What if I'd waited?' he thought. 'What if we hadn't been caught? We could have been together occasionally, me and Talla, once a year if we were lucky.'

"Zhair'lo and Zo'kar?" a gentle female voice called out.

The boys turned to look at her. The first thing they noticed was that she wasn't wearing armour. The woman who came to escort them through the Temple always wore armour.

'Always from Form,' Zoe's voice echoed in his head.

'Only Form wears armour,' Talla's voice added.

But this woman wore orange: a strange short and very transparent skirt he had never seen before and a pair of sashes across her breasts.

And not a stitch of armour. He tried not to stare as he searched for any sign of leather protection or weaponry -- the skirt really was see-through and the dark patch of pubic hair was clearly apparent even in the dim light of wall mounted torches.

'No armour. It means they trust you,' Zoe's memories advised.

The woman took their scrolls from them and indicated that they should follow her. When she turned away, Zo'kar gave Zhair'lo a sideways glance before nodding toward the finely sculpted, and nearly exposed, cheeks that twitched in front of them.

Zhair'lo smirked.

Yeah, Zo'kar really was a hopeless case.

-----------===================-------------

The girls were starting to get desperate. Within was inhaling as much of his erection as she could while Abundance was smothering him with her breasts. But it would go no better for her than it had for her partner.

It turned out Abundance had a Point upgrade, and as much fun as her breasts were for him, the attention he could lavish on her nipples in turn would prove too much for her. When he reached under her belly, questing for her lips, she made no resistance but rather welcomed him. When he plunged between those lips, she let out a sigh and pushed her breast more deeply into his mouth.

It took barely any movement from Shen, for she did most of the grinding all on her own. He teased her, keeping the pressure on her weak so she had to work harder and harder to get the sensation she needed.

Within removed his erection from her mouth to watch in fascination as her partner began moaning and forced Shen's hand to push harder against her mound. He obliged, simultaneously letting his teeth sink -- every so gently -- into the flesh of her breast.

That was how he made the second girl come, with one finger and his teeth upon her nipple. When the pulses around his digit ceased, she backed off to sit her bare rear on the floor while gasping for breath.

"Enough of this," Within said sternly. "Sit him up."

Abundance groggily came around and helped her pull Shen up so he was sitting on the edge of bed with his legs spread. Within pushed the large breasted girl down, positioning her under Shen's testicles. She started licking underneath and Within went back to working the tip.

He watched, helplessly unable to do anything to distract himself, as they worked in flawless coordination. Abundance would take both of his testicles in her mouth, then pop them out and lick her way up to his tip. As she did this, Within would come off the tip and flutter her tongue down until it was her turn to take his pair in her mouth.

They did this over and over again and Shen fought to keep himself as steady as he could.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo and Zo'kar were having their own battle -- attempting to maintain eye contact with the gorgeous specimen of femininity who, having led them to a small room laid out much like a school, was briefing them on their duties as Conduits.

"As you can imagine," she cooed to them, leaning the backs of her thighs against the large desk at the front of the room, "things are a little more delicate here than elsewhere."

The boys nodded amicably and didn't look down below her waist at all, though her genitals were ever in the periphery of their vision. Zhair'lo had no doubt that, in the brighter light of this room, the skirt she wore would turn out to be more than just translucent.

He'd be able to see everything.

"While I am sure that the two of you are quite confident," she went on. "You should know that the Seizing points are scarcely separated in this Division and that you must take great care in positioning your ... selves."

This last sentence she finished with a slow turn of her eyes towards their pants. Zhair'lo found his own gaze inexorably drawn to her skirt.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 11



Yep. See through. Quite the mat of hair in that triangle.

He twitched his gaze back up, hoping she hadn't noticed.

"Unlike Endowment and Form," the woman continued in her sweet tone, "we actually do have to call off Upgrades because of incorrect Seizing. So please pay attention. I would hate to blemish your vaunted records."

The boys nodded again, utterly attentive.

Next, they watched as the woman lifted herself up to sit on the edge of the desk and slid back across its surface until her knees touched its edge. Zhair'lo gulped, quite involuntarily, as she untied her skirt and laid it down across the width of the desk, under her tightly closed thighs.

"Watch closely," she admonished.

Unable to speak, the boys merely stared back at her eyes -- which she rolled.

"Watch closely -- here," she emphasized, pointing at the triangle of hair between her legs. Their eyes shifted.

"There are three Disciplines in Sweetness. As you well know."

With this, she spread her legs, lifting her feet and planting them on the desk. In that position, her lips parted a little all by themselves, revealing a thin pink line through her hair.

Zhair'lo tried not to bite his lips. He'd done lots of upgrades after all. Hadn't he rubbed his erection against the very finest -- and largest -- breasts? The most pert and beautiful nipples? He really should be able to look at a woman's crotch without gasping for air.

"First is Pussy," she said, lightly brushing her soft, dark curls. "Make contact only with the outside of the genitals. The Source will undoubtedly turn her body to make it easy for you to avoid the ... vertical cleavage."

"Second is Lips," she went on, parting her flesh to give them a view of the pinkness inside, including her somewhat engorged and reddened clitoris. "Keep the tip of your penis between the lips. Avoid touching any of the hair and do not delve towards the vagina."

The boys waited, unable to tear their eyes away nor -- really -- to breathe properly.

She shifted her weight back a bit and opened her lips a little farther down, letting her clitoris fall under their hood as she exposed her tunnel to them.

"This last, Within, is the most delicate of all," she said carefully. "We have very specific rules about sex between people of very different ages. Contrarily, a certain amount of contact is required in order to facilitate the transfer."

"Zhair'lo," she said. "You should be clear on exactly what you will do tonight, for you will be doing a Within upgrade. You must know, with perfect clarity, what you are permitted to do. Do you understand how important it is that you listen to what I say next?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Good," she said.

Zhair'lo wouldn't miss a word.

-----------===================-------------

At half past the sixth bell, Tia looked up from her work and waved across the room to Jora, who was busy considering her own papers.

"Go collect the boy," she instructed. "See how long he lasted."

"Mistress," Jora replied.

She gave a curt bow as she rose and moved across the room to the door. Pushing it open very gently, she peered into the room beyond.

"Mistress," she whispered again. "He's still going."

Tia's eyebrows rose as she stopped in mid scrawl.

"Really?"

She gathered herself up and walked around her desk so she could join Jora peering through the crack in the door.

There indeed was Shen, lying on his back on the bed while both of the girls lay alongside him their positions reversed to his so they could simultaneously lick his erection. At the other end, they kept their legs spread so he could penetrate each of them with two fingers.

One of them, the Within girl with her light fuzz of soft, brown pubic hair, was panting heavily. As Tia and Jora watched, she grabbed Shen's wrist and began jerking at it with considerable force. She took her mouth away from his penis so she could bite her lips and let out a muffled scream.

"Incredible," Tia said.

Jora, never having seen this particular test, could only nod.

"It feels a little odd," Jora pointed out. "Watching them like this."

Tia considered this with a tilt of her head. She withdrew from the doorway and silently closed the door. Standing straight, no longer the voyeur, she knocked heavily on the door.

Jora noticed a faint smile on her Mistress's face, an unfamiliar expression of bemusement, as she counted off a few heartbeats and pushed the door open.

Shen was sitting up, looking bewildered and not entirely mentally present. He hadn't bothered covering his erection.

The girl who'd just had the orgasm was kneeling on the floor, still panting and quite naked. The one they'd brought in from Endowment sat next to Shen, her breasts covered haphazardly by her top and her skirt having fallen back into place.

Tia turned her nose up just slightly as she walked across the floor and examined the girls who would not meet her eyes.

"Some trouble here?"

There was no answer. Jora stifled a giggle. Her Mistress's imperious air was a little too much.

"How many orgasms have you two had?" she asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer. "More than he has, I'd wager."

She let that linger as she passed around behind the Within girl.

"Did we forget our purpose here?"

That deserved its own set of heartbeats for rhetorical flourish.

"Very well," Tia said. "Shen, dear?"

Shen, in some fugue like state, awakened with a jerk and looked at her.

"You've passed, dear," she said. "It's alright now."

Eyeing his erection, she considered each of the girls in turn.

"We've never had this problem with this test before, you see," she pointed out to the room at large. "Things like erections are taken care of by this point. But what shall we do with you?"

She looked back and forth between the two girls.

"Which of you -- no, no," she said. "Neither of you gets to mesh with him."

The girl from Abundance found herself being pulled down to the floor.

"Off with your top, you," Tia instructed. "Shen, stand up."

Her last act was to put a hand to the side of each girl's neck and push their heads together.

"You know what to do."

Tia turned to Jora and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper which belied the attitude she'd laid on the younger girls.

"Let him sleep for a bit afterwards and then send him home."

"Mistress," Jora said with a bow and watched her superior leave the room.

She was to be allowed to watch, then?

Clearly, neither of the three participants in the test were concerned by her presence.

The Within girl, still delirious, leaned helplessly upon her companion. Fortunately, the other girl knew what she was doing. Jora watched as she stroked the boy with one hand and fondled his testicles with the other.

"You're done, Shen," she breathed. "You can come now. Get us both."

Shen looked down at the two sweat tacked faces that were turned up under his throbbing erection.

"You sure?" he panted back.

"Yeah."

"Okay."

The large breasted girl began pumping madly away at him, desperate to finish the deed.

"Here it -"

That was the last thing he uttered before his orgasm took him.

Jora watched his cock twitch and spray a thick stream of semen across the foreheads of both girls, dripping down the side of the Within girl's face into her hair and ear.

Shen's body spasmed violently, jerking his hips back before the second volley launched from his manhood. At that angle, there was no way it could hit either girl's face. Instead, the Abundance girl took it across her cleavage -- the best she could do, really.

His body was soon righted, though, and she carefully lined his erection up again so it could play it's last spurts of white liquid across both of their faces, dotting their noses and lips in alternation between the two girls. Jora thought that the distribution of semen seemed quite fair.

Somehow, the boy remained standing in spite of his obvious exhaustion. Maybe it was just that the girl continued to milk the last of his juice out onto her chin. It wasn't until she let go of him, letting her hands drop to her sides, that he fell to a sitting position on the bed and slowly slumped over -- unconscious.

"That was well done, girls," Jora commented drily. "Clean yourselves up and be off now."

She clapped her hands to startle them into motion.

"Yes, Mistress," they murmured and, stumbling, moved to obey.

-----------===================-------------

Oral pleasure, it turned out, never got boring. It didn't really matter how many times a girl -- or a pair of them -- worked his erection via mouth and tongue, it was never anything less than incredible. These two had done a good job, as good as any he could remember.

As it neared time to move on, the black-haired one slid on and off his swollen, rock hard member while the one with the lighter brown hair licked his balls from underneath.

The odd thing about Sweetness girls, Zhair'lo realized while looking down at them, was that he couldn't tell much about them from the outside. Sure, one of them was an Initiate from Pussy, so she had that thin layer of hair between her legs, but the other was either from Within or Lips and was as bare as anyone else he'd seen.

They looked up at him adoringly before the brunette working his testicles stood and fetched his robes. The other, quite naturally, kept sucking him while maintaining her simpering eye contact. She would stay on his cock until the very last possible moment.

Just as the knock came at the door, the upper half of his fur robe was placed over his shoulders. It was the signal that, in a few short moments, he would leave this room. The lower half of his robe was wrapped around his waist and still the girl, her head now hidden in folds of fur, continued her work.

"Here," the light haired girl said and thrust a glass into his hand.

Zhair'lo looked at it wryly.

No choice, really. This had already been explained to him.

The girl twisted her lips and tilted her head, as close to a shrug as a woman would ever give him.

He drank deeply, draining the glass. It tasted and smelled like water, but he knew better. Even if the only thing he felt coursing through his body was a vague sense of refreshment, the part of his brain that was wise to the Temple told him that the drink was doing things to his body. 

The last set of knocks came at the door and it began to creak open. The two naked girls whisked themselves aside and out of visual range, letting his robe fall about him. It was time to perform. The drums were already beating, which was a comfort after the dreariness of so many Form upgrades.

Zhair'lo was also pleased to discover that Sweetness's idea of an Augmentation Chamber ran more along the lines of Endowment than those of Form. He entered the Chamber from a place between the pair of altars where the women waited for him. Lighting came from the sides of the chamber, behinds the altars, where fires burned in recessed tunnels so their light shone only on the altars and their players. Up past that pair of women, there could be any number of others watching and Zhair'lo wouldn't know it.

'Except that they're breathing,' he thought. 'I can hear them ... feel them.'

On his left, reclined almost to the point of lying on her back, was a woman wearing a heavily jewelled green blouse and nothing else. Her hands were folded across her bare stomach as she stared at the ceiling, her legs crossed so they wouldn't be hanging awkwardly over the edge of the altar.

Across from the half naked Sorceress, a nervous Virgin awaited him, equally unclothed but far more nervous. Zhair'lo felt a surge of sympathetic uneasiness when he recognized the girl's discomfort. He pushed it away, reminding himself that he could help her -- would help her -- and that in very short order all of her misgivings would be washed away.

He stepped up onto the dais between the two altars, his face lit by the torchlight shining from the sides of the room, and stared into the darkness. From the echoes of his footsteps and the resonation of the drum beats, he knew it to be a tall and deep space, but his eyes could discern nothing. Somewhere, however, were those superior to him in rank and power. So he bowed, following the Protocols that had been laid out for him, and turned to his left.

It was only a few steps -- Sweetness seemed to like its affairs a bit cozier than the others -- to reach the altar, but attendants were already upon him, whisking away the lower part of his robe. A murmur went up from the audience as his erection was revealed. No particular voice stood out to his ears, but the collective intake of air was still quite loud.

'Nine gods,' he thought, 'how many women are up there?'

The Sorceress tilted her eyes to the ceiling and sighed. He couldn't see her face very well, given that the torchlight was at her back, but enough light came through from behind him that her blue eyes twinkled.

"You'd think they'd never seen one before," she muttered wryly.

Which was oddly fitting, given what she did next. Her legs had been crossed so that the ankles shielded her genitals from his eyes. As she finished speaking, she uncurled herself, spreading her legs in the air and revealing her immaculate triangle of warm, soft, black hair.

Spreading further, stretching her thighs out, the flesh of her lips was pulled slightly apart to reveal a thin line of pink peaking out from beneath her hair.

Zhair'lo staggered for a moment, overcome with the beauty of what had been so gracefully revealed to him. It had been so smoothly done that he was reminded of the women of Form with their powerful muscles and talent for gentle movements.

He straightened himself, slightly embarrassed.

'You'd think I'd never seen one before.'

And he hadn't. Not like this, at least.

The Sorceress beckoned him closer and the drums took up a new beat. It was just like Endowment in that respect. How odd that Form, the home of Facial and the source of all things musical, seemed so averse to anything even faintly approaching melody or rhythm. At least the Sweetness women had this much figured out.

His hands soon found themselves nervously holding a chalice. There was nothing to do but observe as the woman in front of him dipped her fingers into the clear syrup and lowered them to her genitals.

It wasn't enough to merely rub the stuff in. Of course not. One hand was used to spread her lips, revealing the opening to that warm, pink tunnel.

Zhair'lo gulped. Eleven upgrades. He was looking upon the entrance to a passage of almost unbelievable perfection. What would it be like to slide up inside her? He wouldn't be permitted to find out. His job, a duty he suddenly found most distressing, was to not-quite penetrate her.

Instead, in a gesture of consolation so ill advised that it almost seemed as if it were laid out by design to tease him, he was permitted to watch as she slid her syrupy fingers in circles, running around the rim of her vagina before sliding two of those fingers up inside herself.

He held back a whimper, watching helplessly.

"Ah," the Sorceress sighed, either slightly discomfited by the penetration or mildly aroused by it. "Now we're ready. Come here."

There wasn't much further to go, really, but he shimmied a bit towards her anyway.

For her part, she splayed her lips out of way.

"You know what to do, right?"

He nodded, too nervous to speak, for here was the whole thing laid out for him: the gorgeous soft hair pushed out of the way; the lips and engorged clitoris just above his target; and the entrance ... the sweet tunnel within ...

Taking his hardened shaft in hand, he placed the tip against the upper edge of her opening taking great care not to touch her clitoris -- the whole thing could get screwed up if he did.

The moment of truth approached. He planted his feet as firmly as he could, keeping his balance against the wave of nausea he would feel once his body started Hunting. This was the peril against which he'd been warned. A moment of dizziness could move him one way or the other, and a rub against pubic hair or lips could find him Seized to the wrong Discipline.

But he held, gulping and inhaling cool air to stomp on the twisting feeling in his gut. The Sorceress rotated her hips, leading the tip of his penis on a trip around the rim of her vagina.

The nausea intensified and Zhair'lo buckled down, feeling a cold sweat come between his body and the half of a robe he still wore. The woman had warned him, hadn't she? That Sweetness upgrades took longer to Hunt for?

Endure, she'd said. That was all. Just endure.

So he hung on and, just as the urge to vomit rose almost to unbearability, it snapped.

He'd Seized.

His state of hyper alertness had taken over. The Sorceress, whose face had previously been shrouded in darkness because of the arrangement of torches, was now revealed to him. The twinkling blue eyes, which had seemed to shine in the darkness anyway, were still there. But the features of her face were sharp, her brow furrowed as she focused intently upon him.

He couldn't escape the feeling that he was being ... examined. It reminded him of the night of Talla's quadruple upgrade, when that doctor (the one who had not been dressed as a doctor) had poked and prodded at him to make sure he wasn't damaged.

Something was odd about this one, though. Her chin seemed to quiver and her mouth opened a bit. Nothing too weird. Nothing that rung any alarm bells for him. Just odd.

"Not too far," she breathed at him.

This time he found his voice.

"Of course, Mistress," he said.

He was steady now, seeing more in the dim torchlight than any normal person probably could. Now for the truly delicate part of the operation.

It would not be enough to simply run his cock around the edge of this perfectly displayed opening. No. He would have to push the tip just inside in order to make contact and get a proper charge from her.

And no farther than that could he go. The woman in the briefing had been very clear on that. The ridge at the back of the head of his erection was not to pass into the Source's body. That would violate the Temple's restrictions on differences in age, for the woman against whom he rubbed had more than a decade on him. She might be twice his age, for all he knew.

So Zhair'lo set himself in place and pushed ...

It was disconcerting not to mesh at this point. The mesh was such a thrill, yes, but it was also a comfort, to merge in that emotional way with another person -- to know that her arousal and his were synchronized.

There was no mesh here, even though every fibre of his being was telling him that it should have already started. Intellectually, he'd known there'd be no mesh. The tasteless drink had taken care of that.

And there he was, on a precipice to perfection, when the strangest thing happened.

The Sorceress moved her hips, pushing down. It surprised him. She wasn't supposed to do that. Taken unaware as he was, he was a moment too long in backing away. He felt the tight ring of muscle around her entrance pass over the head of his erection ... and he felt it once again as he pulled away, sliding himself back out of her.

She gasped, but it was the quietest of inhalations. Probably only Zhair'lo heard her. Was it very important, what had just happened? Had she meant it? It must be very uncomfortable, lying on her back on a slab of marble. Maybe her muscles had just gotten tired?

Zhair'lo paused only a moment. There was almost no chance that anyone else in the Chamber had noticed, so subtle had the penetration been. Whatever had happened, the woman made no more movements whilst he softly drilled away at her most tender flesh.

His senses heightened, the affect of the magic he was beginning to absorb. He could hear every breath from the audience, every rustle of cloth and dragged movement of foot against smooth marble floor. He risked one glance sideways into the audience. There were two Sorceresses and a Queen there, as well as hundreds of other women behind them. None showed any awareness of the mistake that had been made.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 11



What could he do? Had it been his fault or hers? Maybe he was only deluding himself that she had moved. Perhaps it had been he? No. Couldn't have been. He was rock solid and perfectly aware of everything his body did. Seizing had done that much for him. Carrying magic from one place to another always did.

It had been her. But were the women who policed such things likely to believe that? Or would they prefer to believe that it had been he who had made the error?

Best to go on. Pretend it hadn't happened. The Sorceress seemed to want to do exactly that.

To anyone watching, a tiny hiccup might have been noted. No more than the little jolt that occurred when he had Seized.

But really, he'd just been Served -- sort of -- by a Sorceress. Maybe Served was the wrong word. That usually meant a mesh and an orgasm, didn't it? Maybe 'had sex with'? Fucked?

No point thinking about it.

He went on with the ritual, carefully reaming her opening without pushing inside.

"You're ready," she said.

The change in her tone was considerable. He might have expected ice, since things had gone wrong. Instead, she was out of breath, almost desperately warm. That was quite reassuring. She seemed content to ignore the fact that she'd enveloped him, however briefly.

Was it to much to hope that she hadn't noticed? It seemed ridiculous. Certainly that ring of muscle had to be at least as sensitive as the ridge that had passed through it.

Irrelevant.

Go on.

He straightened up, pulling away from the strange woman and turned toward the Virgin opposite, swinging his eyes and his manhood past the audience. They had told him to always do it that way, to face the open Chamber when he turned. It would be rude, they said, to turn his back to his superiors.

As he looked up, he saw the hundreds of women gathered there, stretching up into the darkness. They wore all manner of clothing, as if they were going out to Serve instead of spending the night inside the Temple.

His eyes strained to see farther up, where the darkness was even too much for him to make out the faces of the girls in white who were consigned to the rear most seats.

Past those girls, in some sort of viewing box, sat the strangest woman he'd ever seen. Zhair'lo's eye met the woman's eyes and she blinked, sending blue sparks off her eyelashes. The sparks twinkled down her face, the flesh of which reflected their light in a golden hue.

Talla's knowledge, embedded in his brain, was enough to identify the woman.

The Goddess.

Here, watching him, from a private box that -- in all likelihood -- allowed no one but he to see her.

This was more than he really wanted to deal with right now, so he scrubbed his brain and tried to ignore the whole thing, concentrating instead on the girl in front of him, the one who spread her legs as he approached.

He appreciated the kindness of the people of Sweetness then, as they had made the awkward 'walking with an erection' phase of the ritual shorter than any other Division. It was only a few short steps before he found himself leaning his thighs comfortably against the second marble altar.

The girl before him looked up and blinked at him, long eyelashes twinkling in the firelight.

"Hi," she whispered, her voice barely more than a gentle breeze through a field of wheat.

"Hi," he said. Putting as much reassurance as he could into his voice, he added, "It'll be alright."

Her lips squeezed shut for a moment as she looked around nervously. The firelight caught her eyes when she turned her gaze to the side. They were a very pale brown, gone nearly clear, the like of which he had never seen. Her skin, even in the weak torchlight, was the colour of a coffee that had been lightly touched with milk.

When she handed him the chalice, she pursed her lips in a way that accentuated her high cheekbones.

"Which one are you?" she whispered again in that faint voice.

"Zhair'lo," he said. "What's your name?"

"V'shika."

That was all that was said for a while, as the girl busied herself smothering her bare mound -- inside and out -- with Synergist. It was nothing compared to the overwhelming effect the Sorceress's ministrations had had on him. Zhair'lo found himself able to calmly examine the jittery girl in front of him, even as she penetrated herself very slowly with one of her fingers.

Something about the eyelashes.

And it clicked. He'd seen this before. In Endowment. It had been one of his first upgrades. Who had it been?

Nadine. There could be no doubt about it. He remembered upgrading Nadine and specifically noticing the power in her eyes; the length of her eyelashes. He distinctly recalled those eyes, the following night, when she had driven herself down on him, a reminder to keep his promise to free every single Sealed Virgin.

Those eyelashes did not belong on a Sealed Virgin, no more than Zoe's breasts had belonged on her Sealed body. This had to be important though he didn't know why.

"Okay," V'shika said, setting the chalice aside.

Her head was still tilted down, her lower lip still caught between her teeth, when she reached for him.

"Get as close as you can," she said. "The magic gets weaker the longer it's out of your body."

Zhair'lo, veteran of these rituals, already knew that. He also knew this warning was more about her comfort than a chance for him to show off his knowledge. There was no need to say anything. Besides, he instinctively avoided letting anyone find out the breadth of his wisdom when it came to Temple lore.

"It'll be okay," Zhair'lo promised.

V'shika nodded, but also winced as if she didn't quite believe him.

"You ready?" he asked, somewhat concerned.

"One more try," she said, looking down below even the level of his erection. "Last time."

That sounded downright ominous. Zhair'lo hadn't ever heard that there was a limit to the number of attempts a Virgin got at breaking her seal.

"It'll work," he told her firmly. "Go with it."

Her eyes, pale though they were, rose to meet his. For a breathless moment, they stared at each other. This was a girl who knew a kind of misery Zhair'lo didn't recognize. Deep inside those eyes was a longing he'd never known and couldn't quantify. He'd seen hunger and anger; he'd seen pity and grit. But he'd never seen a soul so starved of hope as this one.

He narrowed his eyes, radiating all of the confidence he could, imagining himself as a roaring bonfire of absolute certainty come to warm the coldest of travellers on the darkest of nights.

V'shika staggered a moment under that gaze. He watched her inhale. Her chest, bound by the tiniest bit of white rectangular cloth, expanded with a new found determination.

One last time, then.

She took hold of him with sudden vigour, her narrow face now contorted with a strange mix of rage and resignation that -- regardless of the contradiction -- left her beautiful to look upon. There was no patience in her grip or in her strokes. That she'd been here many times before was abundantly clear from her skill.

Parting her bare lips with her left hand, she leaned further back on her altar and directed his erection to point directly into her vagina. The distance was minimal. In fact, she pulled him so close he repeatedly bumped against her entrance with each stroke. She would take no chances.

To accentuate her desperation, she spread her legs further, making sure that her lips would be pulled out of the way. The left hand, then, was free to form a cup underneath her genitals. Nothing would be wasted.

"Ready?" he asked again, feeling himself swell.

"Yes," she hissed, biting the side of her lip again. "Go."

He went.

Her vagina wasn't open particularly wide, but his first volley was right on target, wetly soaking her little hole. Her left hand, its finger sealed tightly against the lower edge of her vagina, caught that which didn't go in. V'shika made to push the semen into herself, but was delayed by the immediate arrival of second volley, which splashed over her lips and tiny clitoris.

While the second load dripped down, she had time to quickly push the overflow from the first inside herself. It was done rather savagely, with more fingers than she was probably accustomed to accommodating, but she was afraid of the dwindling power of the magic his juices were carrying.

She'd smartened up, though. He noted that she was now intentionally letting his ejaculate hit her genitals above her vagina and letting her spare hand do all the work of getting it inside

It occurred to Zhair'lo that it would be a lot easier if they could just have sex. Why that was forbidden, he didn't know, but doing it this way seemed to lead to a lot of complication and entirely unnecessary mess.

He was relieved, nevertheless, when his erection was spent. V'shika continued milking out the last drops from his flagging member, wiping them off on clean spots on her thighs and then using her fingers to insert it into her vagina.

From her reclined position, she looked up into his eyes and he watched a change come over her. There was a brightness suddenly, as if something inside her had cracked open.

"It worked!" she called out in joy a thing like sunshine came from her eyes.

She leapt up to a seated position and wrapped her arms around him, burying her head against his neck. Zhair'lo, unsure of what to do, gently returned her embrace. What else could he do? Offend her by pushing her away? That seemed horribly rude.

There was a bit of laughter from the audience and a few surprised gasps.

Behind V'shika, however, the butt of a spear cracked against the cold marble floor; a rebuke against this violation of Protocol.

V'shika pulled away from him and a fierce look overtook her features. If he had brought warmth to a cold traveller, here was that same traveller now set on fire. Her eyes burned with anger as she twisted around to glare at the source of that warning.

Zhair'lo was just happy that look wasn't intended for him. He'd only caught the barest fringe of it as she turned away. The joy in her face was only denied to him for a heartbeat. Her gaze came quickly back to meet his and the last traces of anger faded as quickly as it had arrived.

When she spoke again, it was in a whisper, but one wholly different from before.

"I'll come to you soon," she promised.

He could only nod, thinking, 'Nine gods ... can you and I be friends?'



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 12



In a corner of the giant hall, as far as they could be from any of the crackling fires that kept the cool, midnight air at bay, two women sat with their feet up on the low table in front of them. They faced each other from opposite sides of the table, their ankles crossed for the sake of propriety even as their legs physically blocked anyone from entering the little nook they'd sectioned off for themselves.

Not that anyone would have joined them uninvited. One didn't simply walk up to a Sorceress and her Second unless summoned or on an errand of some importance.

"You seem troubled, Mistress," Tia observed.

She took a sip of red wine from the glass in her hand and waited.

The Sorceress of Within didn't speak, nor did she meet her eyes. She stared, instead, at her own glass of white wine. There wasn't much that Tia could do at this point. Her Mistress had asked her to come down to the Hall, handed her a drink, her favourite one, and led her to this table.

Finally Within turned her eyes up to meet Tia's, bringing with her gaze a leaden weight of darkness. The Sorceress reached down to the hem of her olive working skirt and flicked it up, giving her Second a brief glance between her thighs.

It was time to be human, was it? A friend? It occurred to Tia that her Mistress might not have any real friends, lofty as her position was. Here, with this gesture, she asked Tia for confidence and frank discussion.

The Second returned the gesture, feeling the cool air of the hall seethe along her legs as she gave a flick to the hem of her own skirt.

"Last night," Within said, by way of introducing the subject.

She stopped, quite uncharacteristically. This was a woman who always spoke her mind. She was a physician, for nine gods' sake, and here she was unable to complete a sentence?

What had happened last night? Tia could only think of one thing.

"The upgrade, Mistress?"

"P'ren," the Sorceress said.

"Pardon?"

"My name, Tia," Within said. "My name is P'ren."

"I – I see," Tia stuttered.

A serious violation of protocol. No matter the situation, one simply didn't use a Sorceress's name.

"Was it the upgrade?" Tia asked.

She wasn't willing to use her Mistress's given name, but she could at least try to remember not to put the honorific on the end of every sentence.

"Yes," the Sorceress said.

The woman in green was staring, utterly befuddled, at her drink again.

"It was Zhair'lo, was it not?"

"Yes, I chose him on purpose," Within – P'ren – volunteered. "I told myself it was because I had to see what he was about, whether he was as powerful as the previous accident had led us to believe."

The previous accident being, of course, the episode in which the Second of Abundance had ploughed four times the advisable amount of magic into the poor boy and nearly killed both him and the girl he'd been upgrading.

"You had tasted his seed," Tia volunteered, meaning 'you already knew his power, didn't you?'

The Sorceress nodded, agreeing to her statements both spoken and not.

"I wanted to see his strength in the Chamber," she replied.

"You found it unusual?"

"He caused me – I was drawn – I allowed -" the Sorceress stuttered to a halt.

Tia had never seen her Mistress like this. Was she getting that old? Was this unsteadiness some strange onset of senility? She knew her Mistress's medical status. Even though the weight of Perfection could take some years from a woman's life, this particular woman was nowhere near the age of Weakening even for that.

P'ren's eyes snapped up to meet Tia's.

"I moved my body," she said, boldly. "So that he penetrated me."

Tia gulped.

"A nervous twitch, perhaps," she spat out in desperate rationalization. Anything to excuse her Mistress's error. "A muscle spasm."

The Sorceress gulped and shook her head.

"No," she said. "I felt him against me. It felt like I was a Virgin again, desperate to feel a man inside me. Heedless. Careless. From the moment his erection touched me, I felt desire overwhelming me. I pushed down. Took him inside me."

"Briefly, though," Tia said by way of excuse.

"Oh quite," the Sorceress confirmed. "He backed away instantly, the bare centimetre that was required for withdrawal. I'm sure that no one saw anything."

"He backed away?" Tia asked. The unspoken question being: 'And not you?'

"He did."

The Sorceress took another sip of her wine before sealing her lips and returning her gaze to the table.

Tia watched her Mistress, watched the emotions swirling across her face. Here was a Sorceress, a woman of Within, trained as much as anyone to use her genitals to control men on behalf of the Temple. And here she was, admitting to Tia alone, that a man had somehow controlled her. Not even a man – or barely a man – a boy.

"He's more powerful than we had thought," Tia observed.

"More powerful than they had ever thought," Within observed darkly.

-----------===================-------------

"Welcome back," H'reena said, her voice as sweet as ever.

Maksa offered a slight bow to the Officer.

"You are disappointed," H'reena added, waving Maksa to a seat. "I can only apologize for having misled you."

It was nicely said, but that was Facial's skill, wasn't it? Saying things nicely?

"I had expected this weeks ago," Maksa said, trying to take the accusation out of her voice. "As you had indicated."

H'reena tilted her head sympathetically.

"Yes, I did," she admitted. "But I failed to take into account the ... historical antipathy between Pussy and Form."

Maksa locked the muscles of her face up. This was not a time to let her body language give away information. If only H'reena knew exactly how justified Form's suspicions were.

"You'll learn to school your expressions better than that," H'reena observed. "Among other gifts we will bring you."

"Damn."

"Indeed," H'reena said. "As I was saying, between the general dislike that Iron and Tight have for Pussy's stranglehold on mating and the fact that you have changed Disciplines ..."

H'reena let out a sincere sigh.

"They did a lot of stalling," she added. "Let's leave it at that."

Maksa nodded.

"Well, I'm here now."

"Indeed," H'reena repeated, brightness returning both to her face and to the music that was her voice. "And so let me acquaint you with our Protocols."

-----------===================-------------

It had been a good day, by all accounts. The men were taking their ease at what they called, with typical Hunter simplicity, the Halfway Camp. It was the place where they had a certain degree of civilization on the fourth night of a week long Hunt through the forest.

Given that they weren't in rut, taking down four bucks on the same day was a fine show for their efforts. The beasts had been field cleaned, strung up on poles and carried to the Halfway camp. On schedule, the carters had shown up at dusk to take the fresh kills away, leaving just enough for the Hunters to make a nice dinner. Though Is'ka didn't go out on Hunts, he always sent them out with enough bread for several days and a pouch of spices for anything they might catch.

Zhair'lo was proud that he'd actually managed to put an arrow through an animal and, though the killing shot had most likely been delivered by Kenji, he was glad to have a part in the day's over achievement.

Satisfied with their success, the Hunters reclined by their fire.

For once, Zhair'lo was content. There was food in his belly and there was a certain feeling of pride, watching the cart go away with its load of fresh meat. He'd done his job, after all, serving the women. It bothered him to feel that way, when he also wanted to tear the Temple down to its foundations.

What to make of it?

What did the other men do, after all, but serve the Temple as he had just done?

Was he any different, helping that which he hated?

He didn't like that idea at all.

No, it wasn't the Temple he served, but the women – and the men. He would bring the Temple down and everyone would be free to take to bed with whom they chose, when they chose.

'I serve the women,' he decided. 'And I will take pleasure from doing so. But not the Temple. Never the Temple, except by the coincidence that the women I help are inside it.'

At this point, it was quite natural for his mind to be focused on women, and not just because the bounty of the Hunt had been taken to them. Four nights ago he had upgraded V'shika. The morning after, they'd headed out on this Hunt and he hadn't seen a female body since. The other men seemed pretty relaxed about that, but it had been a long time since Zhair'lo had gone three straight nights without female companionship. For a while, back when he was doing upgrades for Endowment, it had been alternating nights of ejaculating on women and inside them.

Fortunate that Hunting was such tiring work, he didn't think much about it by the time the sun set.

Zhair'lo closed his eyes and laid back against the rock he'd padded with his animal skin carry-all and folded up cotton sheets, dreaming of Talla. He remembered the toss of her hair, the way she'd run at him and knocked him to the ground, the blue aura around her body the last time they'd meshed and the way she'd laughed ...

He could almost hear her laughing now, the sound buried under the crackling and spitting of the fire. Letting his mind wander, he drew the sounds of joy out of the whispers of flames, making the former louder in his mind.

A light sound of giggling was added, multiple voices now.

Zhair'lo's eyes opened.

The female voices were not in his imagination. He sat up, looking over the fire to the cart path that led a winding way north towards the city. Torchlight, bobbing along, shone through the trees and he quickly became aware that a party was headed this way.

The Hunters took this in stride, which made it very little different from the way they handled anything short of being hit by lightning. Clearly, these guests were expected. Zhair'lo had never really believed that women would come out this far just to Serve them. It seemed to him a very long walk and, never having been on a Hunt longer than three days, he had only Kenji's vague assurances that women would appear at some point.

As they came round the last bend into full view, the other men looked up, the appearance of welcoming in their expressions – perhaps even a touch of polite enthusiasm. But they were still Hunters, so they waited, as Hunters always did.

The three torchbearers were at the front of the group, the glare of their torches blurring out all but themselves. Once his eyes readjusted, Zhair'lo saw that these were the tallest of the women and they carried their torches on poles as tall as they were.

The men on the north side of the fire stood up as the women approached and made space for them around the fire.

Zhair'lo didn't have to count the women as they planted their torch-spears in the sand and gathered around the fire. There would be eighteen of them, to match the eighteen men. No way would the Temple leave anyone out of the cycle for more than four nights.

It was hard to tell the colours of their clothing in the firelight, for every piece of light fabric appeared yellowish-orange and every darker piece appeared reddish-orange. Even the shapes and cuts of their clothing gave him little to go on, what with the clear violations of the Temple's rules for that sort of thing.

But they would go in order of rank, wouldn't they? Why did he even care?

When the first of the gaggle of women stepped up to the fire, the others ceased their chattering. Zhair'lo became acutely aware of the benefit of his seated position.

She was a tall one, almost certainly from Form if he were to go by the legs, which were placed shoulder width apart. The skirt she wore – he supposed it could be called a skirt – was twin panels of fabric. One panel was hooked at her left hip and curved across the centre of her body at the level of her crotch to became ankle length on the right. The other panel went from the right hip, across the crotch to the left. The concave curves of fabric, most notably, did not quite cover the dark triangle between her thighs.

Above this, she wore a blouse of the same theme: shoulder to cleavage to hip; quite symmetrical and quite revealing though her breasts were slim. Zhair'lo might have noted that he was looking at three or more upgrades of Abundance, but he was far too captivated by the view down below.

He became aware that she was scanning the crowd, trolling for reactions perhaps, and her eyes caught his. Slightly embarrassed, he brought his gaze up. She smirked a moment, a smart twist of the left side of her lips, before slowly lowering her gaze to examine the place where her skirt parted. Her gaze came up again, watery blue eyes blazing back at him with reflected firelight, and she smiled.

The captivating woman took a deep breath.

"Kenji," she sang out, her voice sweet as a song.

Lucky bastard. That's what the guys on Harzen's Farm would say – politely waiting until the women had gone up before saying it.

They came forward one at a time after that, casually preening in front of the fire, parading both their bodies and their clothing. None held a candle to the first one, in her rather courageously revealing skirt, but each had her own attitude and style.

'If there's one benefit to being the youngest here,' Zhair'lo thought, 'it's that I get to see everything that comes by.'

Slowly, the count of the women dwindled as each was led away from the fire by her man-for-the-night. This was why every man had a tent to himself. The tents were permanent and well-maintained, the men bringing only their own blankets with them: one to protect their backsides from the rough canvas of the tent; the other as a coverlet to ward off the coldness of night.

And so it was that the count dwindled to one.

One girl standing before a fire, wearing a long, white skirt.

One boy reclining against a rock, directly opposite.

Zhair'lo tilted his head a notch, curious. The protocol for this was clear in his mind, he'd been through it so many times. It was so well drilled into his head that he expected her to follow it, no matter they were alone, in a forest, without anyone caring whether they did it right or not. So he pulled his legs up half way to his chest and let his elbows rest on his knees.

V'shika was looking at the fire, seemingly lost in a trance. Her eyes began to lift, dragging her gaze almost painfully across the sand round the fire, then over the soft grass at his feet. She traced along the length of his body, over his chest, until her eyes met his.

She gulped.

What was in her eyes? It wasn't just that the eyes and the eyelashes didn't belong on a Virgin of Within. Something else was in there. He'd never seen the like. There had been anger in the eyes of women. Desperation. Arousal. Fear. Disappointment. He'd thought that he had, by this point, seen every emotion he would ever see.

But V'shika held a new and terrible thing inside her.

A thing? What thing was it?

It seemed to be a kind of emptiness.

Her gaze wandered away, dispassionately, and she looked from the sand on one side of the fire to the sand on the other.

It didn't seem like a large decision. To reach him, assuming that she wasn't immune to being burnt, she had to walk around the fire. She merely had to pick left or right. A trivial thing, but it seemed to paralyse her.

Zhair'lo tried to see her face, but her neck was bent now, hiding all but her eyelashes and the points of her nose and chin.

A sigh made her chest rise and fall. Her head swung to one side and she began walking around the fire. He'd seen shy, but this wasn't shy. The body language was all wrong for that. Something was really wrong with V'shika.

He watched her approach, trying to see what expression was on her face, hoping he might find a clue there that explained all of this. But her face was down and, once past the fire, so little light fell on it that even from his position on the ground, he was unable to divine anything.

She came to stand between his legs and paused there a moment.

No expression on her face at all.

Time passed, awkwardly, and she decided to sit down, taking her place on the ground between his thighs and facing with her feet to his right. Her legs she placed over his right thigh as she curled up into his chest with her head tucked under his chin.

Cozy.

He didn't suppose there was anything particularly wrong with what they were doing. It didn't follow protocol, but he didn't imagine they'd get in trouble for it – even if any of the other women came out of their tents, which was unlikely anyway.

For all of that, it was pleasant, but odd. This was the sort of thing you did after sex, or between sex and more sex, not beforehand.

V'shika, however, was troubled. He should probably get to the bottom of that before anything else. But was it his place to start prodding her, or was it better to wait for her to begin speaking? That might be forever and she had, at least physically, gone to the effort of coming to him. Perhaps the next move was his.

"You are worried?" he asked, slowly.

There was a slight movement, a tilt of the head that said, possibly, 'No, not quite.'

He twisted his lips thoughtfully. She wasn't worried, which probably excluded 'afraid', 'shy' and 'nervous'. What else could be wrong.

"You waited a long time for me?"

"No," she whispered, a frail but beautiful sound that was nearly lost in the whistling of the fire

She inhaled and went on.

"You doubled me," she explained, speaking into his shoulder. "I needed the time to heal ... inside ... anyway."

He nodded. So that wasn't it.

'Think, gods damn it.'

Then it came to him. Her strange words before the upgrade attempt, three nights ago. While he'd held the magical charge within himself and approached her, she had whispered those inexplicable words.

'One more try.'

There had been a pause.

'Last time.'

"Why was that your last try?" he asked. "What were they going to do?"

As far as Zhair'lo knew, the Temple would let Sealed Virgins try and try again. What else was there?

"Nothing," she whispered. "They weren't going to do anything to me."

Well, that was just mysterious. Then what had made it her last time? If the Temple wasn't going to limit her number of attempts, then who was?

Oh.

Nine hells.

"You were going to give up," he said.

He couldn't fathom that. He saw it in her now: the listless glances; the indecisiveness in the face of a tiny obstacle; the sagging shoulders.

V'shika nodded.

Give up. What did that mean?

"But how would you do that?" he asked.

Would she just refuse to go to her next upgrade attempt? Block the door in her bedroom and refuse to come out?

"Lots of ways," she whispered. "At the neck. Or the wrists. The doctors in Within have potions – strong ones. I could just take too much of one of them."

Zhair'lo's eyes bulged as he realized that V'shika had been about to kill herself. He'd never even heard of anything like that.

So when she finally lifted her eyes to meet his, the expression she saw on his face was one of outright shock.

"But I want you to know," she said, each of the tears in her eyes a tiny burning fire, "you've helped me so much."

"Enough to keep living?" he blurted out.

She nodded.

"I think so."

That relieved him.

"Look," he said. "I don't want to ... to lecture you like some teacher. I don't want to tell you what to do, okay?"

She nodded, looking at him curiously.

"But I've been through some absolute bullshit, too," he told her firmly. "And it gets better. We can make it better."

Then, even more firmly, he stared her directly in the eye and lowered his eyebrows.





Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 12



"I'm working on making it better," he promised.

She looked back at him, feeling the power of his intentions, the commitment behind his words. Something in her sensed the truth of it, reflected it back. Vitality came to her face.

Suddenly, she moved, and their lips were locked together.

What it was to her, Zhair'lo couldn't be sure. Not until they were meshed. For his part, he was still dealing with the shock that here, in his arms, was a girl who had been so hopelessly miserable that she had considered ending her life. While it was some consolation that none of the other Sealed Virgins had ever hinted of their plights being so awful, it was still more pressure than he wanted to deal with.

What would have become of V'shika if he'd failed to upgrade her? Might he have been responsible for her death?

What if he had made a mistake of some kind four nights ago? 

Nine hells.

He had made a mistake four nights ago. Or someone had. He had penetrated the Sorceress of Within, which wasn't proper. The whole Rite could have been called off in that instant. They might have left V'shika sitting there on her altar, alone and untended, more hopeless than ever.

But she kissed him now, with a softness of lips and talent of tongue that didn't belong to someone of her Discipline. She kissed him with life, desire and, above all other things, the energy of hope.

So he kissed her back, and gave to her what life he had, that she would desire to go on and find life better than it had been.

After a time, they came apart, panting for air.

"Zhair'lo," she whispered, her voice quick and happy.

"Hm?"

She gulped, looking away and biting the corner of her lips. One of her eyebrows twitched up.

"I'm supposed to call your name," she said, her words coming fast and light.

"What?"

"And then you lead me to your room ... err ... tent, I guess."

The protocol. They smiled at each other.

She leapt up and pulled him to a standing position alongside her. She made a sudden move to draw him toward the nest of canvas dwellings, but turned back and pressed her body against him.

"But maybe a tent farther away from the others?" she asked. "I want a little privacy."

"There's another clearing with a few tents set up," he offered. "For when there's a bigger Hunt."

"Good."

-----------===================-------------

Maksa was twenty two years old, which was considered extremely young for an Adept. She had learned just weeks ago that there was a thing called an Officer Track, which she was probably on. It meant that advancement and promotion would come more quickly since she was seen as a rising star.

There were other effects of being only twenty two, however

These too occurred to her as she was led to stand by a small blanket on the circular dais used by the Division of Form for its upgrades, but she was distracted by the simultaneous arrival of the Source.

Across from her was H'reena, looking absolutely resplendent in her layers of jewelled, orange silk. The Officer bowed politely to her, tilting her head only slightly so as not to dislodge her golden circlet, and offered a reassuring smile. The woman's clothing was amazing: transparent in all the right places; layered but still snug and flattering where it mattered and composed of so many shades of orange that it was dizzying to look at.

Attendants, clothed in the white mid-length skirts of Virgins, stoked the fire quickly and moved aside.

Behind the fire, the Queen of Form rose from her seat.

"Who comes before me, requesting an upgrade?"

The formula changed, from Division to Division, but the relevant particulars didn't. In Endowment, there was a Warden of sorts who introduced the candidates. In Sweetness, they called out names from the list. Here in Form, she was expected to speak for herself.

"My name is Maksa Ayella."

"What is it you desire, daughter of Sweetness?"

That was odd. Was it necessary to let everyone know that she was an outsider? Maksa always felt out of place in Form as it was. This seemed to rub it in.

"A Facial upgrade, Highness. My first."

"What say you, Sorceress of Facial?"

The blonde Sorceress in her emerald green silks touched two fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to Maksa. The woman's smile alone was enough to warm her heart, even in the deepest, darkest part of Form.

"I approve, Highness."

"Very well," the Queen called out. "Bring in the Conduit."

Maksa knelt on her blanket as torches were doused and drums began beating. She'd been worried a bit since H'reena had warned her that Facial upgrades were a bit different where music was concerned. The familiar beating assuaged her homesickness, inasmuch as it felt much like her other upgrades.

Then the singing began.

The voices were beautiful. She'd been to Bazaars and several kinds of festival before, so she'd heard the women of Facial sing, but never like this.

Perhaps this was a song they sang only for upgrades. It had a sense of sadness and deep regret in it, but with a layer of everlasting hope bursting out from the centre. It seemed as if a fountain had been buried under water and there was just a little spot in the surface of a pond where water heaved in response.

The Conduit passed by her, heading for H'reena.

Maksa gulped and returned to her thoughts.

One of the other things about being only twenty two was that it had been less than five years since the advent of her eighteenth birthday and her entrance to the Temple. Less than five years since she'd gone through the Temple's Initiation.

So she remembered very well, as a skinny teenager, making all those boys ejaculate on the different parts of her body: three to her genitals; three to her breasts; one on her ass; one on her stomach and one more – the last one – on her face and hair.

It seemed everyone left Facial to last, it being the messiest and most frightening of the bunch. In the same way, the entire Discipline of Facial was left to last. Last choice of Virgins doing their Initiation. Last choice – in fact never a choice – when looking for Goddesses. Sorceresses of Facial rarely made it to Queen, so great was the fear of a Goddess springing from that corner. It was often considered safer, all other routes failing, to promote a Second of Iron or Tight straight through Sorceress to Goddess rather than put Facial anywhere near the obsidian throne.

And yet.

Something had drawn Maksa here.

At first, she'd thought it was the pretty eyes. Then she'd thought it was the graceful smiles and those liquid voices that could sing a charging tiger to sleep.

But, no, it was something else. These women knew something – knew how to do something – and Maksa wanted to know what that was. She also, probably, wanted to be able to do it.

The only way to get there, from here, was by having a man ejaculate on her face. That seemed a little odd, but not absurdly so. She sometimes wondered why the Temple hadn't found a way to deliver upgrades without all the mess. Allowing men to have any power at all just wasn't their way. As things stood, the men didn't seem to see it this way, instead counting themselves lucky to be permitted the privilege.

Maksa would have thought that removing men from the equation entirely would have been high on the list of the High Officers' priorities. Nine hundred years of research ought to have found something.

She couldn't see what H'reena was doing to the Conduit, as only his backside was visible to her, but she imagined the man's erection being rubbed all over the Officer's face and hair, and possibly being worked over with tongue and lips.

The Conduit stepped back, made a polite bow towards H'reena, and turned his body past the fire to face Maksa.

Pretty well endowed, as far as men went, but she wasn't concerned about length or girth at the moment. The important thing was the rigidity of his manhood. Maksa was too nervous, both about where she was and what she had to do, to be aroused by the sight of him. On a purely technical level, with his erection just above the horizontal, he looked capable of delivering the goods.

He was sweating. She saw that when he arrived. Sweating, but not profusely. She held the chalice up to him and noticed the way his shoulder length blonde hair, still wet from the showers, glistened in the firelight.

She began spreading the Synergist across her forehead and cheeks and over her lips, pursing them afterwards so the liquid coated her thoroughly. From there, it was into her short brown hair. She wondered, as she rubbed it in, which way her hair would go. There was no hint, as of yet, what the gift of Facial would bring in that department.

The job complete, she recaptured the chalice and carefully laid it on the floor beside her blanket.

There was nothing complicated at this point. She was a woman with four years of experience handling men. She pulled him in close, rising up to her maximum height in this position, and pointed him directly at the bridge of her nose.

Really, there was nothing to feel anxious about, was there? Once he began ejaculating she would close her eyes. She was already covered in clear syrup anyway, so what would a little come matter?

The Conduit inhaled sharply and let out a long, sharp breath. She felt his testicles tighten in her left hand even as the right stroked him to a swollen shade of purple. He was ready.

His ejaculation? She never saw it. Instead, the first telltale twitch of his penis triggered an instinct that shut her eyes instantly. She felt him coming; felt an impact across her brow and over her left eye. Freeing up a hand for the purpose of smearing the charged liquid over her face, she continued stroking him.

There was another contact over her right eye. No telling what the volume was like, but it felt pretty solid. She distracted herself from the thought of semen getting in her eyes by spreading what had already been launched at her down to her lips.

What could she do now? H'reena had told her, quite explicitly, what was to be done if she wanted the full advantage of the Facial upgrade.

'If you want to speak as we do,' H'reena had said, 'and sing as we do, there is only one way.'

She pushed some of the mixture of Synergist and semen down to her lips and, with a sudden impulse, pushed some of it into her mouth.

The taste was a strange mixture of sour and bitter. She had rarely tasted semen and never tasted Synergist, so she had no idea which flavour came from what, but she surreptitiously sucked it over her tongue and down her throat, as H'reena had advised.

'It's not an overly pleasant taste. You'll want to get it to your throat quickly.'

Maksa hoped it was worth it.

She had tilted her head down, making sure the Conduit put two or three solid shots into her hair. She wanted, now that she was in it, to have beautiful hair. Wavy, curly and long – any colour would do as long as it wasn't dirty brown. Black, blonde or, gods help her, red would be wonderful.

Then he was done.

Maksa released him, using both hands to rub the Synergist and semen mixture over her face and hair until she eventually admitted to herself that the warmth was gone and she'd taken all she could from the Rite.

The singing came to an end and she felt her sense of urgency evaporate into the night sky.

Though her eyes were still closed, she detected the presence of someone nearby, on her right, so she reached out and found a warm, wet towel placed in her hands. Gratefully, she took the towel and began wiping her face.

Thus ended her first Facial upgrade.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo was glad to see that the girl who had sunk into his lap and curled against his chest in utter dejection had brightened up so much. There was a light in her eyes that reminded him of the unapologetic glee he'd seen, just four days ago, the moment she'd realized her upgrade had worked. They stumbled from one clearing into the other as she pulled at the ties on his shirt and he attempted to keep hold of the hastily folded blankets from his assigned tent.

They never quite made it to any of the tents.

V'shika yanked the blankets from his hands and snapped the warmer one out over the grass. Reflected moonlight burning in her eyes, she leapt into his arms. The moment she gave him to prepare for impact wasn't quite enough and he staggered to the ground.

"You were wonderful," she said, heedless of the tumble they'd taken. "I can't thank you enough."

He smiled. This was the kind of behaviour he was used to and he was glad to see it come to the fore.

"Doing my duty," he said. "And I promised a girl, a while ago, that I would break every seal I could."

"And you did."

She kissed him, heavily and wetly, mouth open and tongue probing.

"Nine gods," she muttered around their kiss. "Nine gods, how I've wanted to do that."

She rolled over on to the blanket, pulling him on top of her.

"C'mon, c'mon," she breathed into his ear while tugging on his shorts.

With the ties loosened, she bent her knees so her toes could hook the fabric of his clothing and pull it down the length of his legs.

"Put it in," she begged. "I'm not wearing anything underneath ... just put it in."

She hiked her skirt, gathering its folds until they were up past her waist in a bunch on her slim abdomen.

His eyebrows rose. It wasn't strange that a girl came to him without underwear on. That was pretty standard, really, even for the virgins on their first nights. Since Illya, in fact, he couldn't remember a single girl who had worn anything under her skirt.

That wasn't what bothered him.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "Don't you want to be on top?"

"Why?" she replied, confusion evident in her tone.

"So you don't get hurt ... you can control the speed -"

"Between my legs, I ache with two upgrades," she pointed out wryly. "Don't think you're going to hurt me any worse than that."

Zhair'lo exhaled through pursed lips.

"All right. Ready?"

"Do it."

He set himself against her lips, feeling the wetness that was already leaking out. It would be smooth then, at least, even if it might be too tight for her comfort. The mesh would tell him, though, wouldn't it?

V'shika spread her legs, exposing her more tender flesh to his probe. He slid down past her clitoris until the head of his penis reached the point where her divide deepened. She gave him one more nod, prodding him to keep going.

So he pushed, feeling the little popping sensation as the ridge of the head of his erection slipped past the ring of her entrance.

The mesh came on like a pack of wild horses. Zhair'lo could barely make sense of it. V'shika was full of energy – wild, unstable energy. Harnessed, she might go all night. Untamed, there was no telling where exactly she would go when she went. Meshing with her was like trying to run through a field so soaked with rain it had become mud. He kept thinking he was going to slip and fall on his face, but there she was, taking his hand and dragging him along as if walking through this mess were an everyday occurrence for her.

Was her life always like this?

As much at her behest as his own, he pushed forward until he was fully buried inside her.

"You've never had a double Within girl, have you?"

Zhair'lo thought about that. Initiates were pretty rare in his bed. Most of his bedmates were Virgins in knee-length skirts. Thinking through the companions he'd had with shorter skirts, he couldn't think of one from Within.

"No," he said, shaking his head.

She smiled.

And then she moved. Not on the outside ... just on the inside.

He gasped.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm so glad you doubled me, just so I could do ... this."

She did another thing, inside, a ring of pressure running from the bottom of his shaft and up towards the tip. It didn't make it all the way to the end, but it was more than enough and it was more than he'd felt from anyone else.

"I'm gonna make you come," she said, gritting her teeth. "Make you come so hard."

He inhaled deeply, trying not to let his words come out as a whimper.

"Won't take long."

"I can do this to you again and again," she threatened. "A hundred times a night."

That sounded absurd, but Zhair'lo couldn't think much of it because she continued to do that insane thing with her vagina, over and over.

His shaft hardened inside her, ready to explode from the pressure she was building up in the tip. She pushed him, over and over again, pulling his head down until their foreheads touched and she could feel the sweat off his brow.

When he felt that he could take no more, he pushed for orgasm. In that very moment, when it became inevitable, she clamped down her entrance as tightly as she could.

His eyes went wide in dismay. He couldn't ejaculate. She had somehow physically stopped their orgasm, right at the point of no return.

V'shika's head went back and her back arched with the strain of squeezing her internal muscles with such force. She couldn't hold out very long, could she? Zhair'lo began to panic. Could she?

No, fortunately.

Her vagina, exhausted, gave way, released them both.

Zhair'lo let out a shout of relief and the first burst from his loins exploded inside her.

Did she scream, too? He couldn't even tell, he was so far gone.

Spasms of joy racked his body and hers as their twitching bodies hammered at each other for gods only knew how long.

When he slipped out of her and felt on his back at her side, his last thought before passing out was, 'hundreds of times?'

-----------===================-------------

Maksa could feel the skin on her face itching. Her flesh felt taut and drawn, as if she was smiling her most ridiculous smile and her face was about to be torn from the pressure. Except that it wasn't just her face. The pain went up over her forehead and into her scalp all the way down to the back of her neck.

Her throat felt funny, too, and she had trouble swallowing.

'The thing with having trouble swallowing,' she thought, 'is that it makes you want to swallow more often.'

She tried to think about something that wasn't swallowing, but there was little around her to distract her, even if she were capable of seeing properly. Her vision had started going blurry before she'd even left the Chamber.

She knew that she was sitting on the edge of a bed, bracketed by white curtains and watched over by a leather armoured guard, waiting for whatever doctor was on duty. It would have to be somebody from Sweetness, wouldn't it? All doctors were, as far as she knew.

She heard a door click open, somewhere to her right. The guard, fuzzy though she was in Maksa's vision, definitely turned to look in that direction and seemed to come to an even stiffer attention.

"Mistress," she intoned.

That was saying something. The guard was not of any middling rank. Someone important must have come in.

Blonde hair flashed into view, trailed by flowing green clothing that sparkled with jewels. The Sorceress of Facial leaned in close to Maksa.

"How are we, dear?" she sang. "Vision a bit blurred."

"Actually it's very -," Maksa started.

"The eyes," the Sorceress interrupted, "are going light blue, maybe even grey."

Facial gave her no opportunity to say another word, pattering on about the changes she would feel in the coming days. Her vision would be a minor inconvenience for a few hours, after which it would greatly improve. Her hair would start changing colour at the roots. The Sorceress guessed it might go black, but couldn't be sure. Hearing would improve somewhat, as would her sense of -

Maksa never found out what sense the woman in green thought would also improve, for the door clicked open again. Supposing it to be the doctor, Maksa mentally prepared herself for some type of examination.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 12



Instead, two more women entered.

"My Mistress needs to see her quite urgently," someone familiar was saying.

Maksa's ears strained and finally recognized the speaker as the Second of Pussy, a genealogist named Dol'ya.

"It will only take a moment to examine her," another woman said, her voice unrecognizable to Maksa.

"I was instructed that it was an urgent matter."

The guard coughed.

"It is a matter of Protocol," she pointed out firmly. "All upgrade recipients will be examined."

That seemed to settle the matter for her, and she did have the advantage of being the only one in the room with a spear.

"Oh, nonsense, Mara," the Sorceress of Facial sang out, never turning her head away from Maksa. "If there's something important happening back in Sweetness, we can examine Maksa later – or have someone examine her when she gets home. There's nothing in the Protocols that says the examinations have to happen right away."

The guard stuttered, caught between Protocol and the rank of the woman in front of her.

The Sorceress leaned in close enough that Maksa could see her face clearly.

And then she winked.

"You feel just fine, don't you, dear?" she asked Maksa. "Not light headed or anything like that?"

"No, Mistress," Maksa lied, unsure of what was going on but placing her coins on the side of the very convincing blonde woman in front of her. "Just fine."

"Don't speak anymore," Facial reminded her. "Let your throat rest. Now be off, the two of you. Hup, hup."

Dol'ya hooked Maksa's arm and swiftly led her out of the room, past the flustered guard and whatever physician that had been.

When she felt they were safely out of earshot, she leaned over to whisper to Dol'ya.

"What in the nine hells was that about?"

"Not here," was the only reply.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 13



"How's the vision?"

Maksa couldn't see a gods damned thing, really, and that was more unnerving than she could have ever imagined. Anywhere she had ever been, in her entire life, there had always been the knowledge that light was close at hand. Even in the dead of night, torches were kept lit in hallways and alleys. A woman only had to step outside her room to find the comfort of a clear, if somewhat dim, view.

Her eyesight had been reduced to a faint and fuzzy blur and it had been that way for more than a bell now, since her Facial upgrade. The Second of Pussy had shown up and whisked her out of the examination room as quickly and oddly as was possible. The woman had refused to answer any questions and instead brought Maksa home in silence.

Well, not "home" precisely, but back to her Mistress.

Maksa's eyesight might be useless, but her sense of direction and hearing were still working. She was in Principia Pussy and the woman who had spoken was her Sorceress.

"Terrible, Mistress," she replied. "There's a burning sensation, too."

Maksa felt the echoes in the room change; she experienced a vague feeling that something was quite close to her face. Her vision dimmed, as if light was being blocked.

"The dilation is extreme, Mistress."

So it was Dol'ya, leaning over her. She had some medical training, in addition to being a genealogist and the Second of Pussy.

"They've kept their promise, then," the Sorceress remarked.

"It would appear so."

There was a pause in conversation. Maksa opened her mouth to speak, but her Mistress was already talking.

"You got to her before she even had a chance to bathe, Dol'ya?" Pussy chided.

"Yes, they were going to examine her first," the Second replied. "I had no choice."

"Use my shower, then," Pussy told her assistant. "We can talk after you get the semen out of her hair."

"Or while shes gets this mess out of my hair," Maksa protested, her voice cracking in panic. "I'd really like to know what's going on."

Her voice had come out hastier than she'd meant it to. She hadn't realized how much being blind had affected her. There had been an expectation on her part of a quarter bell's worth of impaired vision, but this had gone on much longer and been much worse than the briefing had implied.

Pussy let out a sigh of sympathy.

"Very well, dear," the Sorceress agreed. "Get up now and let Dol'ya walk you over."

Maksa obeyed, clinging to the taller woman's arm as they stood up together.

"Come around the table," Dol'ya warned, pushing a bit on Maksa's stomach so she would miss the corner of the piece of furniture. "Here, have a seat."

Maksa found herself being seated on a cloth chair with a back so reclined that she was almost lying down. She imagined that the chair might be upholstered in some shade of green, but it was only a picture in her mind. All she knew was darkness and a few faint blurs of light splashed here and there from the fire in the centre of the room.

"Close your eyes."

It wasn't as if she'd been using them for anything.

A lever creaked and warm water splashed over her forehead and back into her hair. That was comforting. The water stopped and she felt a liquid soap being poured over her head. Dol'ya massaged it into her scalp.

Maksa inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself.

"How long until my vision returns, Mistress?"

"Tomorrow morning," Pussy replied. "Noon at the latest. It might be imperfect for a few bells thereafter, but it should be fine by fall of night."

"Why?"

With a heavy sigh, the Sorceress sat next to her.

"We made an arrangement on your behalf," Pussy began. "It wasn't easy, you see -"

"On my behalf?" Maksa asked. "Without telling me?"

"Think about that, dear."

As Dol'ya scrubbed, Maksa thought.

What if she had been told that they were planning on doing something special for her upgrade? How would she have acted? Would the enforcers of Form, with their legendary intuitions, have wondered at her anxiety?

"You didn't trust me to keep a straight face," Maksa admitted, thinking back to when H'reena had seen through her guilt. "And you're probably right."

"Indeed," Pussy said. "No slight was intended. You simply aren't -- or weren't -- a match for them in that regard."

"But now you can tell me?"

"Oh, quite," the Sorceress said. "We arranged with H'reena and her Mistress for you to receive a double upgrade."

Maksa might have guessed as much, based on the blindness and pain.

"And you arranged for Dol'ya to be waiting there, pretending an emergency?"

Her tongue traced around her lips, as if tasting the words that had come out of her mouth and finding the flavour unfamiliar.

"We couldn't allow you to be examined in front of someone of Iron or Tight," Pussy said. "They were upset enough about your sudden promotion and transfer of Disciplines. That sort of thing tears them at the seams. I would advise you, for the next little while, to avoid any Iron or Tight upgrades."

The lever creaked again and warm water poured over her head, washing away semen, soap and Synergist, relieving her of the illicit burden so recently deposited.

"Why did Facial go along with it?"

Pussy grunted in uncertainty. It sounded as if she might have shrugged, but Maksa would never know.

"One never knows with that lot," she told her Disciple. "Spite directed at Iron and Tight, perhaps? A gift to you? Some hope of future consideration from our quarter? We made the request, through channels I will not discuss, because we knew it would be some time before you could put anything through Form again. Why they accepted ... you would have to ask them."

Dol'ya took a moment to towel Maksa's hair dry before helping her to sit up.

"Now let's have a look at you, shall we?" Pussy said.

"The hair is going black already," Dol'ya pointed out helpfully.

"And the eyes," her Mistress added, "have already shifted to a faint blue ... or perhaps grey. Only sunlight will say."

Maksa felt a surge of excitement at this news. Upgrades had been rare in her life until recently, and the changes this one would bring to her body were looking to be quite substantial.

"Grey eyes?" she asked.

"Perhaps," Pussy replied. "Best you get some rest. We've made up a bed here for you, lest some snooping person spot you wandering around and doubt the authenticity of our emergency."

"Or find her bumping into things and wonder why her eyesight is so bad," Dol'ya added drily.

"Indeed, Second of Mine," Pussy said. "Get her off to bed."

It became clear, then, to Maksa, why Dol'ya was doing all of the work that would normally be assigned to some Virgin or Initiate. No others were to see Maksa in this condition.

-----------===================-------------

"Let's get inside," V'shika said.

"Hm?"

She was trembling, Zhair'lo noticed, and it wasn't from the cold.

"Before someone catches us," she added, nervously scanning the dark clearing.

"Sure, sure," Zhair'lo reassured her.

She was already on her feet, her clothing falling back into place. Zhair'lo only felt the need yank his shorts back up and loosely tie up the laces so he could lead her, without too much awkwardness, to the largest of the tents in this clearing.

The tent, reserved for a Hunt leader perhaps, was a palace compared to his usual sleeping quarters. The peak of the canvas roof was tall enough for him to stand under and his blanket covered barely half the area of the grass floor. He lit a stick-mounted candle and staked it into the ground a safe distance from the sloping walls of the triangular tent.

V'shika took a moment, while he did this, to lace the flaps of the tent closed.

She turned to face him.

"That's better," she whispered.

Biting both her lips, she walked over to him, put her arms around his waist and put her head to his bare chest.

Not quite sure what was going on, but desperately needing to get off his feet, Zhair'lo bent down to scoop up her legs and bring them both to the floor with her in his lap. For her part, V'shika was nearly limp; only her arms seemed capable of anything and they had moved to encircle his neck.

With her head still bowed low, her eyes never meeting his, her body began to jerk.

Zhair'lo realized she was crying.

"What -- what's wrong?"

She shook her head, not in denial that anything was wrong, but rather a gesture meaning she couldn't speak and he would have to wait.

What was there to do? He simply held her, tightly as he figured was appropriate, and waited for her body to stop shaking. The time was best spent trying to understand what was going on. Some of the girls he'd been with had broken down in fits of laughter after an orgasm, after all, so anything was possible.

Hadn't Yua cried, too? He seemed to remember that happening, but it hadn't been like this. V'shika was a very special case and she made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. The words he spoke to her -- past, present and future -- could very well affect whether she took her own life or not. He'd never felt such a burden as the one that she'd lain on him.

It occurred to him once again that if he had known during the upgrade how much was riding on his abilities, he might have faltered.

Why? Why did she have to do this to him?

If there was one thing that a life ruled by the Temple had given him, it was not having to worry about things like this. A man simply had to know what his vocation was and what the Master of that vocation expected of him. Decisions -- the serious kind -- were left to those with a great breadth of experience.

But here was Zhair'lo, decidedly not experienced, being expected to make Decisions -- lots of them -- in the course of the next few minutes.

Based on the actions he would take in the next bell or two, a girl might decide -

Suddenly, the shaking subsided and V'shika took a breath in preparation to speak.

Then she sighed, pathetically, and took another breath.

"There's just no point," she said.

He let that sit a moment, in case she wanted to be more specific. When it became apparent that she wouldn't be following up, he stepped in.

"No point in what?"

"Any of it," she said and added, as if to clarify, "Living."

"The sex can't have been that bad," he said, which he meant to be light and humorous but, in retrospect, was probably not the brightest thing to say.

"Oh," she sighed, still looking down and hiding her face. "The sex was good. Great, really."

"So?"

"So tomorrow, I go back to the Temple," she said. "And I learn some stuff, like the other girls -- women -- and so what?"

That was easy. They taught that one to children when the girls and boys were still together.

"So you become a better person," Zhair'lo said.

She shrugged.

"So they can use me up?" she asked. "I go from being useless and cast aside to being useful until I'm used up and I die."

Zhair'lo frowned.

"There's some good stuff in between now and death, I think."

He wasn't sure why he felt the need to advocate on behalf of life. Who had assigned him that duty? Was he qualified to make the argument? Shouldn't there be some woman, well read and educated, to take this stand?

Besides which, did living really need an advocate? It was rather universally preferred over the alternative, wasn't it?

Well. Maybe not universally.

"Oh, probably," V'shika admitted. "Some passion. Some huge number of meshes and orgasms. A couple of babies, I'd imagine."

Babies.

Zhair'lo had never thought of children.

"And then what?" V'shika asked. "The Temple takes my babies and raises them to have a life just like mine, just to keep itself going. What's the point?"

That was the sort of thing that Zhair'lo wanted to hear, if he was enough of a fool to pay attention only to the words she was saying. This attitude was exactly what he and Talla were looking for.

On the other hand, there was something really wrong with V'shika, an instability of personality that left him well out of his element. Who was she, really? Could she be trusted from one day to the next? Nine hells, could she be trusted from one bell to the next? She'd been happy and passionate only moments ago.

But girls could change very quickly, before and after an orgasm. He'd seen that loads of times. Twisting his lips a bit, he decided to wait her out.

"I don't know," Zhair'lo said. "Most people are happy, I guess. Don't you think your babies will grow up to be happy?"

She appeared to be considering this. At least the shuddering had stopped. It occurred to him that in comforting her he was working against his own intentions towards the Temple. Shouldn't he be encouraging her in her seditious thoughts?

V'shika pulled herself into a ball, which alarmed Zhair'lo at first, but she was only doing this so she could turn her body to face him and wrap her legs around his waist.

Her eyes were brimming with tears but there was a desperate, clinging hope in the way she stared up at him.

"You really think so?" she asked. "You think I could have children that wouldn't feel as bad as I do?"

"Why not?" Zhair'lo asked in return. "If most people are happy, any babies you have will probably grow up happy, too."

"That's what they say, isn't it?" V'shika said and shrank. "That's what they tell us, but it's just the same thing, generation after stupid generation."

Zhair'lo eyed her curiously. She seemed energized now, but by what he couldn't say. If he was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he really didn't know enough women to say what was normal and abnormal behaviour after sex. There was always something new to see and learn, wasn't there? And this being V'shika's first time, possibly this was her way of dealing with it.

"Maybe there's a way to change things," he volunteered.

She perked up at this.

"Change things," she repeated. "Change the Temple? The Temples have been here for centuries. Temples don't change."

"Then we change the Temple," Zhair'lo said. "Or we change and leave the Temple behind."

V'shika looked at him doubtfully.

"Have you ever been anywhere besides Gern?" she asked. "Whichever way you go, it's just more Temples."

That couldn't be true, though, could it? If that was so, why did Fighters have to exist?

"There has to be a way," he told her, gathering up all the confidence he could in his voice. "There are people who want to change it -- to end it, if we need to -- to make things better for everyone."

V'shika's eyes went cold and narrow with -- with what, exactly? It took Zhair'lo a moment to figure out what was in her eyes.

It was a complete and utterly rapturous glee.

"End it?" she asked.

She pushed him on his back quite suddenly and towered over him as she straddled his chest.

"End the Temple?"

He looked up at her carefully before answering. There was a violent hatred in her eyes and he was quite certain it was directed not at him for his sedition, but at the Temple for its contribution to her misery.

"Yes," he replied, watching her reaction.

Her eyes widened and she inhaled deeply with excitement. He watched her eyes dart all about the walls and floor of the tent as a impenetrable flood of ever changing emotions washed over her face.

Panting with excitement, she turned the gaze of her pale brown eyes upon him again.

"I would meet with these people," she demanded.

"I need to know I can trust you," he warned. "Before I give you any names."

"How?"

"Mesh with me again," he said. "So I can feel what you feel."

Her eyes lit up.

"For you? And the end of the Temple?"

He nodded.

V'shika batted her long eyelashes at him.

"As. You. Wish."

With sudden determination, she lifted her body off his chest and moved to his right side. From there, she unlaced his shorts and yanked them down his legs.

"Not quite ready yet," she observed with the air of a woman who would not be stopped by anything so trifling as a lack of rigidness.

Still at his side, she went down with her forearms on his thighs and, without a moment of hesitation, began applying her tongue to the length of his semi-erect penis. Zhair'lo imagined that there was a lesson the Temple gave to all its girls before sending them out on their first night, because they all seemed to do this particular thing in very similar ways.

Even for all of that, she would have a tough go. The best thing for him to do was not think too hard about it. Instead, he looked over her body, neatly in profile for his viewing pleasure. The scant white top; the thin waist; the long, white skirt now getting scuffed at the knees.

He could reach that skirt -- reach the lace that held it fast to her waist. When he touched the fabric, she shifted her body closer to make it easier for him, but otherwise devoted her attention to her work down below.

The lace was undone and she skirt came free, flowing over her cheeks and thighs into a small pile on the floor. He traced a hand over her bare flesh, from the ankle to knee, over the back of her thigh until he cupped one cheek in his hand.

V'shika, meanwhile, had taken his penis in hand and was busy swirling her tongue around its swelling head. As his hand moved up and down her leg, she moved her body even closer to his, so that her knees were against his side. This motion he took for an invitation, and slid his fingers between her legs to caress the narrow slit that split her mound.

She let out a low moan, after which followed a pause as she broke away from his ever rising member.

The only warning Zhair'lo got was a sudden inhalation of breath. A moment later, she took the entirety of his manhood into her mouth, her hand now gently juggling his testicles.

It was his turn to moan and his eyes closed involuntarily as he experienced the sensation of her long tongue slurping greedily down to the base of his shaft.

His fingers, still between her legs, felt the presence of her fingers. He tilted his head so that he could see what she was doing, and found that she was spreading her lips, revealing her inner pinkness and the little tunnel that was waiting for him.

Zhair'lo began running one finger around the rim of her vagina, eliciting ever more enthusiastic tongue work even as her hips pushed back against his finger. Was that what she wanted? It appeared so. He pushed his index finger into her opening and watched as she pushed back, enveloping it in her warmth.

Her hand -- the one between her legs - reached back to grab him by the wrist, insuring that he would not retreat as her mouth came off his erection and she sat up. His finger was inside her, well past the knuckle and her eyes were half lidded with pleasure.

"Two fingers," she whispered.

If that's what she wanted ...

He carefully slid his middle finger into her, alongside the index.

"Three," she begged.

In went the third finger.

She moaned.

"Just like at home," she said in a low voice.

Zhair'lo almost wanted to ask what sort of things she did 'at home'. Was it more arousing to imagine her masturbating? Or doing this with some other girl ... taking turns ...

"Now for the real thing," she said and gently lifted herself off his fingers.

Zhair'lo nodded. He was ready now, no denying that.

"Then you'll tell me?"

"Then I'll tell you," he promised.

She threw a leg over him and lined herself up.

"You'd better," she charged.

And slid down ...

...

It was the same mess as before. A sloppy slog through a muddy field. But this time there was a solid path of interlocking stone bricks. Wet though those bricks were, V'shika was taking his hand and pulling him through with a certainty borne of expertise and the surefootedness of a feral cat. As frightened as he was of the chaos in her mind, it was clear that she was determined to see him to the other side.

She'd come down all the way by then, and held him entirely inside herself.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 13



So he probed at her mind as she worked at the probe in her belly.

Determination. That was present as it hadn't been before.

Hatred. This was new, a dark undercurrent that hadn't been visible.

Indecision? Washed away somewhere he couldn't detect.

Certainty? Hardly. V'shika just hated. V'shika wanted it all burned to the ground; all the rules and protocols and rites and everything

Sympathy? Caring? No. That wasn't her field.

Happiness? She would never have that for herself, it seemed, but maybe she could bring it for others if she brought the Temple down.

'You will do,' Zhair'lo thought. 'You scare several hells out of me, but you'll do.'

An echo came back. It was nothing like what he'd had with Talla; nothing at all like that clarity of understanding. But it was something. Some shred of V'shika's conscious mind noted his positive judgement and responded.

'I will do what needs doing,' she seemed to be saying.

Anything else was lost to ecstasy. Her pleasure at receiving his approval drove her to madness. She twisted and squeezed at his erection, rotating her hips and grinding at his pelvis. She didn't bother trying to hold back the orgasm this time as there was no part of her that wanted a delay. Mindful of her purpose, she sped things along until she could get what she wanted.

It mattered very little. The emotional connection, the anger and the young bodies fastened together by the power of the mesh were a powerful brew.

Altogether, it made for an orgasm that blinded him and numbed his body to all sensation except for a mindless pulsing that racked him and deprived him of the ability to breathe. It might have gone on forever if it weren't for that last bit. Asphyxiation is never subtle about demanding a response.

He inhaled hoarsely, madly gulping air into his lungs. V'shika, sweating from head to toe, fell on top of him, nearly knocking his wind out just when he needed it most.

It took the two of them some time to regain their breath.

V'shika, perhaps because she was on top, got her back first, and lifted herself off his chest.

Through bleary eyes, she stared at him.

"Now," she demanded. "Tell me what I want to know."

"There's a lot to tell," he warned.

"That's all right," she replied. "I have all night."

"Okay," he began with a weary sigh. "The first thing you will need to do is find a girl named Talla. She's in Endowment, so it might take you a while ..."

-----------===================-------------

It seemed to Maksa that every time she walked through the domain of Form, it was a more nerve wracking experience than all of the previous times combined.

This time, on top of the general guilty conscience that the strict disciplinarians of Form managed to induce in every visitor, there was the knowledge that she actually had been involved in some fairly backhanded dealings.

As if it wasn't enough to have that in her mind, there was the all too obvious fact that her hair had gone blacker than it ought to have and her gods damned eyes were going, of all things, a slightly purple shade of grey.

Purple? Who in the nine hells ever had purple eyes?

She kept her gaze straight ahead of herself as she walked, pretending that the sunlight reflecting off the white cobblestone lanes was forcing her squint. Were other people squinting? Perhaps. She dare not look. Could she even tell other people's eye colours from this distance? She hoped not. Besides, did any of these people know who she was? She shouldn't worry. Worrying would make her rush and stand out. Of course, so would dawdling.

Into the Offices she went, giving the guard a courteous and officious nod as she moved to the stairway.

She was glad when she finally stood upon the threshold of Facial.

It wasn't quite home, but it would do as a refuge if it came to that.

Maksa exhaled a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. She'd been breathing shallow for quite some time without knowing it.

Her eyes having had a bit of time to adjust to the interior darkness, she was able to have a look around Principia Facial.

Over the past few weeks, she'd grown used to a number of things that had come with her Facial upgrades. The first was the clarity of her vision, allowing her to see much more distant things far more sharply than before. The second, and more surprising change, was the way she perceived colours and shapes. That perception came into play at odd occasions, and entering the domain of the artists was definitely one of those moments.

There was an artistry here in Facial that surpassed that found anywhere else inside or outside the Temple. The mixing and matching of fabrics, the way those fabrics were hung, the way they complimented the clothing of the people who worked near them -- all of this was a strange and wonderful sequence that flowed around her like a continuous wave making its way around a circular pool. Tiny eddies -- floor patterns, reflected sunlight -- worked against the greater flows of curtains and fabric to create something she found indescribable.

She could see all of that with only two upgrades to her name. What more was there to appreciate if she were to get more? With a frown, she remembered what her own Mistress had said -- that Form would likely block and delay and further upgrades from its corner of the Temple.

"Ah, there you are, dear," H'reena called out softly, appearing from behind a curtain. "Come along, now."

There was a faint note in her voice, meant only for Maksa to catch, that put the emphasis on the word 'now' as if to say, 'get out from where people can see you as soon as possible.'

Maksa moved immediately, compelled by the subliminal signals in H'reena's voice even though she was able to sense them.

"How long has it been, dear?"

"Four weeks."

"Indeed, indeed," H'reena said. "Dreadful how long we've had to wait for this checkup. Should have been done weeks ago."

But her voice, Maksa noticed, indicated that there was nothing dreadful about it -- at least not from H'reena's point of view. There was, buried in her tone, a second, deeper sense of irony -- a sense in which it really was dreadful.

Maksa puzzled over this contradiction a moment before realizing that all of the awfulness was being felt, not by H'reena, but by someone else.

'Iron and Tight,' she thought. 'You delayed my checkup on purpose, not just to hide my face until everyone had forgotten about me, but also to annoy your neighbours with an unchecked box.'

It was a strange thing, even a month into it, to be able to read all of this from the tone of a person's voice, the tilt of her shoulders or stoop in her back. People gave away so much without even realizing it, that it was often as clear to her as interpreting her genealogy charts. Knowing so much about body language, naturally, made her quite a bit better at hiding her own feelings. But she was no fool. The women of Form had far more upgrades than she did. She was by no means prepared to count toggles against any of them if it somehow came to a contest of lying and deception.

H'reena ushered her past desk after gloriously decorated desk, past women in finely made dresses and skirts, up a set of wide, shallow marble stairs inlaid with golden patterns of vines and flowers, to the room furthest to the back of Principia Facial.

"Sit, sit," H'reena waved Maksa into a seat.

At the moment she prepared to sit down, however, a blonde woman in a flowing green skirt and transparent blouse appeared from another entrance. Maksa rose back out of the chair and started to kneel.

"No, no dear," the Sorceress chided. "You're an Adept now. None of that."

Which was ridiculous: an Adept still had to kneel to a Sorceress entering a room. There were exceptions; working rules and such, but those only applied to a woman's own Sorceress.

"Now sit down and let H'reena have a look at you," the blonde woman instructed, keeping her voice quite casual as she took a seat behind a large wooden desk and began reading some documents.

Maksa twitched an eyebrow. It had certainly seemed as if Facial had walked into the room on some cue from H'reena. The assumption was that the Sorceress was here because of Maksa's arrival. Yet there the woman sat, working alone at her desk, all but ignoring her guest.

Odd.

"Let's see what we have here," H'reena said. "The eyes have gone one and a half steps lighter towards grey and -"

"They're purple!" Maksa blurted out.

H'reena looked at Maksa and smiled humorously before tilting her head and pursing her lips in admonishment.

"Trust me, dear," she said in a low whisper. "They're just slightly greyer than before."

Maksa stared at H'reena as the woman in orange went on.

"The hair has darkened," H'reena commented. "Going towards black."

'Towards black?' Maksa wondered, but kept her mouth shut.

What was going on?

"Look over to that wall there," H'reena asked. "Can you read the third line?"

'I can read the first six lines,' Maksa thought.

"Elephants tread lightly at dusk," she read the sentence.

"Excellent," H'reena said. "Everything is in order then."

Maksa looked at the Officer carefully.

"That's it?"

"You were expecting something else?" Facial asked without looking up from her work.

"It was a long walk for such a short exam, Mistress," Maksa noted, keeping her tone polite.

The Sorceress looked up, but at H'reena rather than Maksa. Some mental exchange occurred, well above the ken of a mere Adept, and H'reena gave a nod of acceptance before walking away.

Facial turned to Maksa and called her forward with a small hand gesture.

"Do you understand beauty, Maksa, my dear?"

"Beauty?"

Facial nodded.

"I, well -- I suppose that -," she stuttered. "It has to do with appreciation, does it not?"

The Sorceress walked around to the front of her desk.

"I suppose," she replied, not altogether agreeing.

H'reena returned with a small artist's canvas and a bundle of green fabric which she handed to her Mistress.

"Tell me about this," the Sorceress said, handing Maksa the canvas.

Maksa turned it over in her hands.

"It's a canvas," Maksa said, trying not to shrug. "For painting, I presume?"

"Among other things," the Sorceress said. "Is it perfect?"

Maksa examined it more closely, trying to get the point of all this.

"It appears to be laid upon the wooden backing quite squarely," Maksa observed. "There are no obvious flaws in the weave."

She felt the need, for some reason, to hedge her evaluation. 'There might be flaws', she wanted to say, 'but I can't see them.'

"Is it beautiful?" the Sorceress asked with more force in her voice, as if this was getting to the point.

"It's unpainted," Maksa said. "It's well made, but I don't see how it could be beautiful."

"And this cloth. Would you assess it the same way?"

Maksa examined the section of silk.

"Soft and perfect but plain," she concluded. "Yes, very much the same."

The Sorceress laid the cloth out on her desk and placed the canvas, weave down, over top of it. She wrapped the cloth around the edges and, using pins taken from her hair, fixed it in place. When she flipped it over, the fabric was seen to be held tightly in place over what would have been the painting surface.

"Perfect," Facial observed her own work. "But beautiful? No."

Maksa eyed the woman in green very carefully.

"Now watch."

She gripped a piece of the taut fabric carefully between her thumb and forefinger and twisted it. The perfectly laid material made a spiral as it was bent out of its position. Plucking a multi-pronged golden brooch from her hair, she stabbed it past her fingers and through the centre of the spiral, holding it in place.

Two more spirals were deftly made, each pinned with further pieces of hair adornment.

"Is it perfect now?" the Sorceress asked. "This twisted thing?"

"No, Mistress."

"But is it beautiful?"

"I -", Maksa began.

She staggered to a halt, thinking hard. What was the message?

"Yes."

"I'm glad you think so," the Sorceress said, the tone of her voice making it sounds as if she had ached to receive this compliment.

She then held the object out to Maksa, who could only raise her eyebrows. Did she really mean -?

"A gift," the Sorceress clarified, "to remind you of the source of beauty."

"Mistress, I ... thank you," Maksa stammered.

The hairpins alone -- she couldn't imagine.

"Off you go now."

"But the exam -"

"All done dear," she told Maksa. "An Officer inspected you under the supervision of a Sorceress. All very official. No one could argue."

'Official lies,' Maksa thought, still confused.

"Beauty, Maksa," the Sorceress repeated. "It's always about beauty."

Maksa bowed politely and turned to leave, entirely bewildered.

Facial had not been talking about Maksa's appearance. Even she knew that. The 'beauty' of which they had spoken had to do with her double upgrade, but not because it had made Maksa more attractive. It also had to do with this curious work of art in her hands.

Flaws of disorder. Twisting imperfections. Beauty.

She would put this thing up in her bedroom and stare at it for hours until she figured out what was going on.

-----------===================-------------

"Do you suppose she'll get it?" H'reena asked.

"Oh, quite," the Sorceress answered, watching Maksa depart from her realm. "In time, at least."

"It's a wonder so few understand why we do what we do."

"Indeed."

The woman in green took a step and craned her neck to look at something near the entrance.

"What's Lacy up to now?" she asked.

"Another arrangement presumably."

They watched the girl slip across the marble floor and, after taking a quick glance around, start leafing through the assignment sheets. The eyesight of a Sorceress and Officer of Facial outstripped anyone dressed in white. Lacy, on the other hand, probably couldn't tell she was being watched, even if she was to look in the right direction.

"Amazing isn't it?"

"Mistress?" H'reena asked.

"They think they're being so clever," the Sorceress pointed out. "Does it ever occur to them that there's no good reason to leave those sheets out there where anyone can read them?"

H'reena laughed.

"Did it occur to us, at her age?"

"Indeed not."

"She's been very diligent, this time around," H'reena observed. "Coming in every day. This must be an important one."

They paused then, as Lacy froze suddenly.

"Ah," Facial said. "She's found it, at long last."

It wasn't really necessary to say this aloud. H'reena would have read the triumph in the young one's body language just as easily.

"Let's just hope they're careful about it," she told her Mistress.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 14



"What in the nine hells is this?"

Tina turned to look at Talla, who was holding up an assignment card in bewilderment.

"What's it say?"

Talla flipped the card over and showed it to Tina.

The only things on the card were the current date and a curious symbol: a semi-circle with a horizontal arrow bisecting it and extending past its borders on either side.

"It's a bow and arrow," Tina said. "Military training."

Talla shook her head.

"We take military training?"

"Of course," Tina said. "Weren't you listening in History?"

"Apparently not."

"'If no one stands on the wall, the city will fall'," Tina quoted.

"So they train us to stand on a wall?"

"Shooting arrows and what not," Tina went on. "Some of the trusted men are supposed to be on the inside, too."

"Oh."

Would Zhair'lo be one of the trusted ones? Talla imagined so.

"Every Virgin has to take some training," Tina explained, shrugging. "They take you in big groups, so they can do the training all at once. You're gonna suck at it, though, without any Form upgrades. We all do."

"I've got one in Strength," Talla protested.

"And giant boobs getting in the way," Tina added as if Talla hadn't spoken.

The teasing tinged with jealousy was the sort of thing Talla was used to.

"Oh, but you have to head over right away," Tina pointed out. "They start at seventh bell."

That made it only slightly better than doing laundry. Talla supposed it made sense to get this sort of thing done before the heat became oppressive.

"Head over where?"

Tina grimaced.

"Form," she said. "Show them the card and they'll direct you."

Talla's face fell and turned pale.

"I'd go with you," Tina said. "But I've got to get to work, too. You should be done by third bell, though. Come find me in the baths?"

It was still their favourite meeting place, where they'd get together with Yua and whoever else could make it.

Talla nodded, her mouth suddenly dry, and turned away. There was nothing further that Tina could do for her. She feared even to give her friend a parting hug, lest that damage her composure. She was going need all of her resolve, wasn't she? Just to keep it together? How many days of training would she need? She could have asked Tina, but she wasn't going to do so now. Any reversal of course would break her at this point.

She passed out of Endowment Hall into the plaza in front of it. Women were milling around, just getting ready to start their days. Their utterly normal, completely non-frightening days.

Talla went through the crowd, trying not to think of anything at all and failing even at that. She knew where she was going and couldn't hide it from herself.

Wooden beams. Wooden walls. Wooden tables.

She mustn't think about the tables.

Somehow, she ghosted her way out of Endowment's triangle entirely and found her way across the Goddess's domain to the gates of Form. Dozens of other girls in white skirts were standing at the gates, already waiting.

"Hey, Talla!"

Talla turned to see Yua and fastened her gaze on her cheerful friend.

"So glad you're here," Talla stammered before clamping her mouth closed, not trusting her voice any further.

It wasn't just Yua though. Lara and Salee were there. So were Anzha and Nadine and all of the others who had been Sealed Virgins.

Talla heaved a sigh of relief. She wasn't doing this alone. There might be a hundred or so girls going in with her.

'Wait,' she thought. 'Does that mean ...'

She started looking around at the other groups of girls, clustering around those they knew. There was Natta, who had been the winner of Talla's Initiation, bunched up with what Talla took for Sweetness Virgins. For a moment, Talla thought to search for Zoe, but remembered that Zoe would, naturally, be on the other side of these gates. Possibly this training session was only for Endowment and Sweetness anyway. There might be other arrangements for those inside Form.

A wave of relaxation came over her. Friends were abundant. She would take the comfort of home along with her when she went to Form this time. There would be no trouble. She would do nothing suspicious. They were going to teach her how to use weapons and she was going to listen intently and diligently obey every order.

There would be no need for tables ... or whips.

Talla began to relax, letting the sounds of the other girls giggling and talking wash over her like a warm shower.

"Attention!" a voice cracked over them all.

Quite suddenly, the chattering came to an end. It was understood that one of the talents of From was that its women could do that with their voices.

The one speaking was not someone Talla had seen before. She wore black leather, shoulder to ankle despite the heat, and a wrought iron circlet on her brow. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept back over her ears, accentuating her sharp nose and her deep, blue eyes.

Those eyes glared over her captive audience.

"Those attending military training will enter now," she commanded. "Show your cards and keep them. Do not lose them. You will need them to gain admittance every day for the next four weeks."

There was a cadence in the woman's voice that disturbed Talla, almost as if she were used to singing but chose to put a lilt in her voice to punctuate the beginning of every sentence. It was a style of speaking faintly reminiscent of the manner in which Shanata had taught them before their Initiation.

The girls filed silently through the bronze gates, all pretence of amusement having been hammered away with a single shout.

Two guards stood just inside the gate, sternly demanding the display of cards, while the woman in black leathers walked at the head of the column.

Instinctively, without being aware of it, the girls had sorted themselves into two files. There appeared to be about eighty of them in total, as best Talla could tell. She waved her card in the air as she entered, refusing to make eye contact with the woman assigned to check it.

Down the long central road they went. Where else would they go? It was obvious, wasn't it? Where else could they do any military training except in the same giant courtyard where the Bazaar had been held?

That courtyard had, once again, changed. It wasn't empty, as it had been when they'd been here for punishments. It wasn't festooned with colourful fabrics and full of excited women as it had been for the Bazaar.

No, they'd done something entirely different this time around.

At one end, where they entered, there were two rows of thin, circular bales of hay mounted on what looked like artist's easels. At the other end was a long platform, parallel to the rows of hay bales, built on scaffolding about three metres high.

The woman in black marched them around the edge of the field and brought them to the midpoint of the hay bales and the scaffolding. The girls, assembling themselves unevenly, gave the clear impression they were out of their element. Their discomfort told the story of people who wanted to leave, even while that same discomfort kept them in line.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the woman in black intoned as she took a place between the girls and the bales of hay.

She continued hammering on the first word in every one of her sentences.

"My name is Gillian. I am an Officer of Iron. I am your instructor. You will address me as 'Mistress'."

There was a long pause, not because Gillian was unsure what to say, but because she wanted them to feel awkward.

"In times of strife," she went on, "it is the women of Form who are trained to go out beyond the walls and wreak havoc among those who would bring us harm. The rest of you stand on the walls and defend the city."

It was clear, from her tone of voice, which group held the higher honour.

"Today you will learn, as women have learned before you, how to loose an arrow."

Another long pause.

"You may not consider it very likely," she said. "But there may some day be barbarians at our gates. And if no one stands on the wall, the city will fall."

Her voice softened for a moment, losing all of its beat but none of its inhuman menace.

"It would be a shame," she cast her voice with a mockery of sadness, "if your sisters in Form returned victorious only to find a city in ashes."

Gillian drew herself up again and returned to her former mode of speaking.

"There are twenty instructors today. You will be broken into groups of four. You will be taught the basics of handling a bow. You will learn to notch an arrow. You will learn to loose an arrow. You will learn to be lethal to your enemies and safe at the backs of your friends."

Lethal to my enemies, Talla thought, and safe with my friends? I can't promise my friends anything, but my enemies are going to get what they have coming.

-----------===================-------------

"Take it," Kenji whispered.

Zhair'lo had seen the deer coming up the path toward them, unaware of their perch above it.

The tree in which the two Hunters waited divided a deer trail in two, the halves of the path rejoining on the other side of the giant oak trunk. Once they had seen it coming, the only choice the deer had was as to whose arrow would fell it.

And the beast had chosen Zhair'lo's side of the tree.

If Kenji's voice had been heard by the animal, so many metres below, it gave no notice. Perhaps that was another skill of the Hunter -- the pitching of a voice to some subtle register that left their communication secret.

Zhair'lo knew what to do.

He notched his arrow and waited.

The target was not yet in position, but he had all the time in the world.

-----------===================-------------

Talla stood at the bottom of one of the cheap wooden stairways that led up to the top of the scaffolding. Above her, untested women of both Endowment and Sweetness were taking turns with instructors. Clumsily, they were holding their bows, notching their arrows and trying to hit the little red paper targets on the bales of hay below them.

Absentminded, she looked down at the bow she'd been given. It had a nice, smooth, wooden finish -- nothing like the rough-hewn look of every other wooden surface in Form. The bow didn't creep her out the way almost everything else made out of wood did.

This was elegant; well-made; comforting. She placed her left hand on the grip, feeling the way it fit into her hand. She gave a satisfied nod. There were no nightmares buried in this wood.

Somewhere, perhaps in an unseen hall or even on a rooftop, women had begun to sing. It sounded like the music from the Bazaar -- the song she'd heard when she'd met Zoe. Talla found comfort in those notes, though they were so faint that it seemed even a light breeze would steal them from her ears.

"Next!" the instructor called.

The girl in front of her -- someone from Sweetness probably, given the slimness of her chest -- stepped down from the platform and swept past Talla. For a moment their eyes met before the other girl's gaze fell to Talla's cleavage and jerked back up again. She opened her mouth to speak, a look of glee on her face, but Talla was already moving up the stairs, propelled by a sudden desire to get to the business of loosing an arrow.

The woman waiting at the top of the scaffolding was tall enough that she looked down at Talla even though they were standing on the same level.

"Well, good," she said, a note of surprise in her voice. "I see you've got a proper grip."

"I do?" Talla asked, though it was barely a question.

She knew she was holding it properly. It felt exactly right.

A quiver, overloaded with arrows, hung from a post at the front of the scaffolding.

"Now take an arrow between your index and -" the instructor stopped speaking in midsentence.

Talla had, by then, already taken an arrow between her fingers and notched it against the bow string.

The Form woman let out a light gasp.

"I see you've been paying attention to those in front of you," she said with admiration. "Well done."

It might have been that the wind had shifted, because the singing voices were getting louder and, with them, Talla's desire to launch her arrow grew stronger.

"Which is my target, Mistress?" she asked.

-----------===================-------------

'What is your target?'

Those were Master Lyric's words, repeated over and over.

'The heart, if you can get it. If not the heart, then the lungs.'

There were few ways to bring a deer down quickly. The beasts could run a long way if you didn't hit them right, and then you'd be tracking their blood for a kilometre or more.

'If you can't get either of those, then what?'

'The neck.'

'The neck? Why?'

'If you can take out the artery in the neck, the deer will collapse in seconds.'

'Correct, but that requires mastery of the bow. Or a lot of luck.'

The deer was directly below Zhair'lo. He braced himself, his left leg half-wrapped around a nearly vertical bough; his right extended to a horizontal limb. The bow was drawn to the point where the back of the arrowhead nearly touched wood.

His angle wasn't good for the lungs, what with the way the animal was twisted, picking at something on the ground and the heart was well protected by the spine and plenty of tough back flesh.

Zhair'lo's eyes narrowed as he set his sights on the side of the animal's neck.

He took a breath.

'Today,' he thought. 'Today I am the master of the bow.'

And he loosed his arrow.

-----------===================-------------

The song echoed in Talla's head, so loud now that she had to believe the choir was marching through the courtyard somewhere behind her. She ignored the words of the instructor, taking aim not at the first, nearest row of targets, but at the second set that was placed another twenty paces farther back.

"You're a bit high, dear -"

...

A voice breathed in her ear, scarcely louder than the wind.

"Now!" it seethed.

...

And she released the bow string.

The arrow twitched around the shaft of the bow, straightened itself out and slid through the air like a whip, planting itself nearly dead centre in the red paper target in the middle of the farther stack of hay.

Talla felt a wave of pride and satisfaction wash over her. The left half of her mouth bent up in a sneer of triumph.

"Halt!" came the shout from below the scaffolding.

"Bows down!" the instructors shouted, following close on the heels of the initial order.

From under the platform, Gillian marched out and looked back towards the section on which Talla stood.

"Who loosed that arrow?" she asked, her voice sharp with command.

Talla held up her bow, still tight in her grip.

"I did, Mistress."

Gillian raised a finger, pointing it at Talla's instructor, and gestured with it in Talla's direction.

"She wants you to take another arrow," the woman whispered to Talla. "Do it again."

Below her, Gillian turned around to watch the target.

Talla did as she was told.

It felt different, this time, almost foreign. If she hadn't known, on an intellectual level, that she'd just done this, she would have sworn that this was her first time.

But her muscles remembered. She notched the bow just as she had before, pulled it back with the same strength. Part of her brain told her how much she should aim above the target to make up for the way it would drop on the way there.

She aimed. She exhaled. She released.

It sailed as it had before, planting itself just a handspan below her first shot.

Gillian turned back to face Talla.

"So it wasn't an accident."

Talla took this for a compliment. It was all she was going to get, as Gillian was already returning to her place under the scaffolding

"Good work, dear," her instructor nodded approval before calling out, "Next!"

She brushed past a girl on the stairway, still in a daze. How had she done that? She had been watching the other girls, but she hadn't been paying any attention to how they'd held their bows or arrows. And yet, with the bow in her hands, she'd known what to do.

Where were those singers, anyway? She could have sworn they'd been right next to the platform, from the volume of their voices. But the singing had stopped and they were nowhere in sight.

"You're Talla?"

"Huh?"

A bright eyed girl popped up in front of her.

"Talla?"

"Yeah."

"I'm V'shika," she said excitedly. "I thought it was you."

"Really?"

V'shika nodded, blinking and flashing her eyelashes to clear away faint traces of tears that were welling up.

"He sent me to you," she whispered.

Talla twitched.

"Who?"

V'shika leaned in closely.

"Zhair'lo," she whispered through her teeth. "He told me -- he told me what -- well, I want to help."

Talla felt panic rising up from her stomach.

"We can't talk here," she hissed back.

"Of course not. Then where?"

"I always come out through the main gate -- when I Serve," Talla said. "Meet me there at half way to the seventh bell, by the fountain."

V'shika's smile went all the way up to the dark circles under her eyes. Talla imagined that the girl hadn't been sleeping well lately.

"Okay," she said. "You're on. I'll be there."

The Sweetness girl gave her a last smile -- an eager grin that Talla found disturbing in its intensity -- before dashing off to return to her line.

-----------===================-------------

"Ho!" someone called out as they entered the camp.

Since it was early in the evening, the campfires were just started and their light was dwarfed by the setting sun which cast an orange glow over the Hunters scattered about the clearing.

"Ho," Kenji answered.

Zhair'lo had let his mentor take the lead, hauling the front end of the spear from which their captured prey hung. It was a moment Zhair'lo had been looking forward too since he'd brought the beast down.

"Nice catch," another Hunter said, honest admiration in his voice. "You?"

Kenji shook his head and gestured behind him.

"Zhai?"

The Hunters now gathered around as they moved into the centre of the clearing.

"Look at that ..."

"Right through the artery ..."

"Tore off the side of neck ..."

"A Masters's shot, Zhai."

His first kill, and it had been done exactly right. Zhair'lo couldn't help but grin as he accepted their praise.

"Let's stoke a fire and cook this thing," Kenji ordered. "Who has Is'ka's kit?"

"We're going to cook the whole thing here?" Zhair'lo asked.

Kenji nodded.

"The Carters won't be here for a bell or two," he said. "They can have the rest of the kills that come in later. We'll let them take a good chunk of this one, too. Don't worry."

There were a pair of metal posts with wyes at their tops, designed purposely as a place to hang up prey animals. It was onto the first set of these pairs of posts that they places Zhair'lo's kill. The assorted hunter immediately began butchering it, separating its organs and meats and placing them into cooking vessels.

One of them clapped Zhair'lo on the back.

"Don't worry, lad," he said. "A mighty fine stew we'll make for ya."

Hunters could be dead still when they needed to be, but when movement was needed, it was done with a stealth and efficiency that Zhair'lo had yet to attain. In short order, much of the organ meat was cut up in to cauldron over a suddenly roaring fire, thrown in with potatoes, carrots and a good size chunk of Is'ka's spices. Other chunks of venison were pierced with a spit which the men took turns to rotate.

It appeared that, in celebration of his victory, Zhair'lo wouldn't have to do anything this evening.

This gave him a few moments to look down the path toward the city -- that path that the Carters and women would use to reach the camp this evening.

Something was wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

Nevertheless, every time he looked down that path, he felt a shiver go up his spine, as if he expected some horror to come his way.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 14



-----------===================-------------

It would have been vastly more intelligent, Talla realized, to have told V'shika to meet her right after their training ended. With all the girls leaving Form at once they would have been well hidden in the herd. Meeting up just before Serving meant that their was a need for haste. The best Talla would be able to do was set up another appointment.

Still, she had promised to be here, and whoever this V'shika was, she had been sent by Zhair'lo and that meant a lot.

So Talla arrived, nice and early, well before the minor bell that rang half way between the major ones, and hoped to have time to for a chat. From her point of view, it wasn't much of a deviation. She had to come out through the main gate anyway, didn't she?

There were a lot of things to think about, while she sat on the edge of fountain. Even given the numbers of women she was accumulating as friends and co-conspirators, they'd yet to come up with a reasonable plan for preventing a Queen from ascending to Goddess. Force of arms was out of the question. Sure, she'd just learned how to loose an arrow -- and she seemed to be damned good at it -- but there was no way she could sneak a bow and arrow anywhere near a Queen at the time it would matter.

But if they weren't willing or able to kill anyone, how could they prevent the final upgrades that would install a new Goddess?

She bit her lips and looked up at the portal of the Main Gate. How many nights had she been coming here now? Waiting for that which might never come? She'd lost count. It wasn't really hope that kept her coming back. Not every night, anyway. Sometimes it was just stubbornness. Sometimes it was the worry that she'd be seen as a promise breaker. Other nights, she couldn't even explain it. Force of habit maybe.

No one was here this night, but it was early.

"Talla?"

She jerked her head around.

"V'shika," she recognized the slim girl with the long eyelashes as she approached.

V'shika was out of breath and excited, a mood so opposed to Talla's stoic determination that Talla almost found it offensive.

"I've been dying to talk to you."

"We have a lot to talk about," Talla said. "But first there's a test I have to do, so I can trust you."

V'shika faced Talla, holding her arms wide with her palms up.

"So? Test me."

Talla looked around the plaza and rolled her eyes.

"We can't do it here," she explained. "We need privacy."

"Oh," V'shika shrank quite suddenly and took a seat beside Talla. "It's going to be tough, being in different Divisions and all."

"We might be able to set something up," Talla said. "I have friends in Form. Maybe at the next Bazaar. Have you ever been?"

"No," V'shika brightened visibly. "But it sounds like fun. Is it?"

Talla's lips twisted.

"I couldn't really pay attention at the last one," she said, watching how quickly the other girl's moods changed. "I was busy."

"Well, listen," V'shika said. "I'll tell you what I know, from what Zhair'lo told me."

"Alright."

This would be interesting. What would Zhair'lo have considered appropriate information to tell this girl? It would give Talla a good idea of how much he had trusted her.

"First off," V'shika said. "You have friends in Endowment and a few in Facial. But you have none yet from Sweetness, so I can be a big help there."

Talla nodded, as if conceding the point. V'shika, encouraged, went on.

"He told me what happened -- what Form made you do. He told me what meshes are like between the two of you. I mean, I can even feel the difference between him and the other guys I've Served, but for the two of you it must have been real special."

"Yeah, it was," Talla replied bluntly.

Talla`s tone seemed to chill V'shika considerably.

"I'm sure you'll see each other again," V'shika said, trying to cheer Talla up.

"Yeah, I'm working on that," Talla said. "But -"

Pause.

V'shika was looking at Talla with a great deal of concern as she had just turned pale white.

"What is it?"

Talla was staring straight out the Main Gate where a constant stream of women was moving in both directions in the street outside, all of them headed out to Serve.

Suddenly, her eyes snapped back to V'shika.

"Meet me immediately after bow practice tomorrow," Talla ordered. "In the main baths in the central triangle. You know where that is?"

"Of course," V'shika replied, confused. "But -"

"No time now," Talla cut her off.

A smile crossed her face.

"Talk to no one about this," she said. "And don't talk to me until we meet in the baths. Nothing obvious must pass between us."

"Okay, but -"

Talla was beaming now, absolute ecstasy taking over her features.

"Tomorrow," Talla said.

V'shika nodded, her face brightening. She couldn't really be sure what it was that had made Talla so happy, but all she really cared about was that Talla would let her in on their conspiracy.

'Tomorrow,' she thought. 'Tomorrow we can really start.'

-----------===================-------------

Sitting by the fire, Zhair'lo watched the women come forward to call out for their men. He'd already done the count, though. The cadre from the Temple was one short and they were all wearing yellow and orange. Sure, the firelight could be playing tricks, making white cloth look yellow, but he knew by now the correct clothing patterns and none of these outfits were appropriate for girls of the age that might come for him.

As the last of the women went with the last of the men, she tossed her head back to Zhair'lo.

"I'm sure she'll be along soon, dear," she said dreamily. "They all know the way."

But Zhair'lo was a Hunter now -- a real one, of the kind that brought down actual prey - and a Hunter knew how to wait.

That is to say: quietly and without letting on that it bothered him to wait.

Besides, he still felt queasy, looking down that path to the Temple. Things just weren't right and they hadn't been since he'd torn the side off the neck of that deer. A cold wind blew towards him from the fire. The wind carried no heat to him, just some cold smoky air that put a chill through his body.

Something was coming.

It was coming right gods damned now and it was scaring the hell out of him.

Every hair on his body was standing on end. Every nerve ending tingled.

He stood up, keeping his centre of gravity low, and stepped back from the fire, moving for the bow he'd left leaning against a tree.

Darkness. That would provide cover against whatever was coming.

What was it that the Fighters fought, way out there in the lands beyond the city? Was that what was coming for him? Should he wake the others? Call for help?

Why, though? There was nothing here. Nothing but his fear of some unknowable thing that he suspected was coming down that path.

And if something dangerous was coming, wouldn't it be approaching from the other side? The side away from the city? Shouldn't he be worried about what was behind him?

No. There was no logic to it. His fear was focused on that path. He knew, in a way that went beyond knowing, that the danger was there.

He slunk away further, having instinctively retrieved his bow and quiver of arrows, and backed away into the farther of the two clearings. Whatever it was, he would have time to see it cross the clearing, time to see it pass through the firelight. He could sink several arrows into it before it could even see him.

The air around him started to hum and that was when he saw it.

There it was, the weak, bobbing torchlight that justified his trepidation. What person, up to anything legitimate, would be carrying such a dim torch? This villain was here for sneaking, for treachery, for unjust purposes.

He sank to one knee and notched an arrow. There wouldn't be time to wake the others. Yelling out would only create chaos and get one of his friends hurt. Let this interloper approach, thinking it was the Hunter, when it was merely his second catch of the day.

The torch bearer rounded the corner.

Zhair'lo squinted, not yet raising his bow.

The sense of danger was rising, but his eyes didn't agree with the assessment at all.

It was just a girl, wearing white.

But she was supposed to be here. How could he be afraid of her?

Was the danger behind her?

The humming was getting worse, singing a song in his ears.

Stunned, he dropped his bow.

If she heard the sound, she didn't twitch or look his way. Instead, she simply approached the fire as cautiously as she had been walking down the path.

He squinted harder, his anxiety increasing.

The breasts.

That was when something clicked inside his head. There couldn't -- there just couldn't -- be a girl with breasts that large who wore white. There was only one of those.

The song howled in his ears now and he couldn't restrain himself. He bolted into the clearing, all sense of stealth and patience gone from his movements. She took notice of him even before he began to move, as if his recognition of her were enough for her to see him, even in the darkness.

She was glowing.

Even in his urgency, he noticed the blue aura, it was so obvious. When it started to cloud his vision, he realized that he must be glowing, too.

It occurred to him that charging at her like this wasn't the most brilliant thing to do, all things considered, but he couldn't stop himself any more than a dam could stop itself from collapsing once the first brick had burst from the pressure.

He leapt over the fire at her as she dropped the torch on the ground and ran to him.

When their bodies collided, something happened. It was an event that they couldn't make sense of and, as there were no witnesses, there was no one else to make sense of it for them.

One moment, they were glowing and running. The next moment, there was a horrendous crack, as if lightning had struck the ground right next to them. A blue light flashed in their eyes, blinding them. Zhair'lo felt something slap his face - hard - and a force like a punch in the gut hurled them back away from each other.

HE landed on his back side, less than a body length from the fire. He could feel the heat from the fire pit, and when he turned around in a panic, he found that the fire was no longer burning. When he looked forward again, he saw that Talla was rubbing her forehead

Her eyes bleary, she looked over at him from where she'd been blasted.

"What happened?" she asked.

Zhair'lo stood up, panicked.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "Let's get out of here before someone comes out."

There was a sense of urgency in that statement. Talla felt it from him more than heard it in his voice.

'You're inside my head, again."

'Yes.'

A jerk of his head was all that was needed. Everything else was explained mind to mind. Talla suddenly knew of a set of tents in another clearing, far from where anyone could listen in and that Zhair'lo was making a short stop in his own tent nearby to grab something critical.

Her head still spinning with the impact of ... of whatever that had been, she got back up and raced to the farther. By some unspoken agreement, they had decided not to touch each other again. It seemed that whatever energy had built up between them had been spent, but they didn't want to chance creating a commotion like that again and attracting the attention of the camp's other occupants.

Of course, they needn't have worried.

Though they didn't know it, they were the only people in the area who were still conscious.

-----------===================-------------

"Imminence!"

The shout came at her out of a black fog.

What had happened? She'd been sitting at her desk, looking around for some parchment or other. Then -

A wave of nausea swept over her, interrupting he recollections.

Oh.

"I think I fainted," she said, to no one in particular.

A voice she didn't recognize had called out to her, concern deeply evident in the speaker's tone. She still couldn't see.

Hands were under her elbows. Two people were trying to help her return to her seat.

"No. Leave her sitting on the floor."

This was a quieter, calmer voice. But it spoke with the deep tones of authority and it was obeyed. The women at her sides merely supported her so she wouldn't fall over again.

"Within?" the Goddess asked the slowly coalescing shape in front of her.

"Yes, Imminence."

"What happened?"

There was a pause as the Temple's premier doctor took her wrist in hand, feeling for a pulse.

"You appear to have fainted, Imminence."

"I shouldn't faint."

With nearly a hundred upgrades to her name?

"No," Within agreed. "You should not."

"The pregnancy?"

Everyone in this room was safe when it came to that subject.

"Always a possibility."

"The child?"

"In a moment, Imminence," Within replied, her steady voice forcing her superior to calm down. "I will first see to you."

A few moments passed in which the physician examined her patient, then directed the conspirators of Pussy to help her stand and move her to a nearby couch.

"You appear to have recovered quite ably," Within observed. "I see no reason for you to have lost consciousness."

"Now the baby?"

"Yes."

-----------===================-------------

"Get in, get in," Talla urged, holding the tent flap open.

At any second, they expected the clearing to come boiling over with people, women and men, demanding explanations. Talla could absolutely not afford to be at the centre of attention. Names and testimony were out of the question.

"What in the nine hells was that?" Zhair'lo hissed.

He snapped the blanket down over the grass floor of the tent.

"Worry about it later," she said and moved toward him.

They both stopped, with a distance of perhaps the length of their forearms between them.

"What if that happens again?" he asked.

"You're not glowing this time," she said. "Am I?"

"No."

And yet, neither one moved.

The last time they had touched had been pretty painful.

Now that they thought about it, collectively, the time before that hadn't been all that great either.

"But you came anyway," Zhair'lo said.

She nodded and exhaled, pushing air across the faint chest hairs his shirt left exposed.

"Of course I did," she replied.

Zhair'lo shivered and looked at the ground before her feet.

"After what I did to you -"

"That was my fault as much as yours."

"I meant to hold on -"

"I cut you off to save you the pain."

Overwhelming guilt, flowing from him to her. He looked up to meet her eyes.

"This is too dangerous," he said. "Us meeting -"

"We have a Temple to bring down," she reminded him. "There'll be a lot more danger along the way."

She felt his strength returning, both in the stance of his body and the emotions that flowed into her mind.

"True that," he acknowledged.

Taking a breath, he lifted his hand and held it palm out towards her.

Talla gulped, blinked once, and lifted her chest by way of invitation.

Slowly, he moved his hand towards the centre of her chest where the crossing silk panels of fabric parted to reveal her cleavage.

With a nervous glance around the room, as if she expected something to explode at any moment, Talla gave him an encouraging nod.

Only the width of a finger separated their flesh now.

The air began to hum.

That wasn't particularly reassuring, but what else was there to do at this point?

Fear mixing with dogged determination, they anxiously closed their eyes as he pressed his hand to her breastbone.

Talla opened her eyes first, looking around the giant tent.

'Nothing?' she thought at him.

'Guess not.'

Their eyes met for a moment before their gazes fell to his hand, still lying upon her chest, and a thing happened then; a sudden realization that struck them both.

Talla's arms fell limply to her side, not out of hopelessness or surrender but simply because they both knew this was the fastest way to get where they wanted to go. Zhair'lo's hand took the crossing fabric pieces of her top, whipped them off her shoulders and yanked them down past her little skirt.

Before the top even hit her ankles, she was working at the ties of his short pants.

Their lips met, ecstatically, teeth occasioning to collide in their mindless desire, or biting each others' tongues by way of encouragement. One of his hands snaked between their bodies to cup her breast, the thumb pushing upwards at the tip of her nipple.

She moaned, her manual dexterity suddenly failing her just when it was needed most for its unlacing task. But he kept it up, regardless, kneading her breast; working over her tiny nipple. She felt her arms go limp -- there was so much sensation in that one part of her body that everything else seemed numb by comparison. If his other arm let her go now, she wouldn't be able to keep herself from collapsing to the floor.

Zhair'lo easily recognized the precariousness of her situation and though he wanted to touch both her breasts, he knew she couldn't hold herself up. Instead, he simply held her with his left arm around her waist and milked her breasts, one at a time, as hard as he could with his free hand.

Helpless, she could do nothing but endure his attention. With the way he manipulated her soft flesh, and dug deep into the muscles that backed it up, he was pulling every lever in her body.

Knowing she couldn't take any more from the way her eyes were starting to roll back in her head, he lowered her to the blanket and relented his grip.

Talla felt her senses return to her. She could feel her body again, wiggle her fingers even. Her hands quivering, she found the ties on his shorts. This was a terrible moment to be so clumsy. How fortunate that undoing knots was easier than doing them up.

There, his pants were off.

"You're good?" he asked, aloud.

"Yes," she hissed back, meaning, quite simply, that he should stop wasting time.

First, she spread her legs as widely as she could. Then she wrapped them around his waist, pulling him in by digging her heels into spine. He didn't even take the time to set himself nicely against her lips. She was so wet it wouldn't have mattered and besides, neither of them had any patience.

The swollen tip of his erection pushed past the welcoming moistness of her lips, made contact with the tender skin on the inner rim of her vagina.

'Now! In!' she urged.

...

The mesh!

Every mesh in the weeks and months that had passed paled in comparison to this one. They could see through each others' eyes, hear through each others' eyes. He knew what it was for her to feel herself being penetrated. She knew what it was to be him, pushing inside her body.

He filled her to the end of length and held himself there, trying to adjust to the power of their mental link.

Memories were flooding now, back and forth.

He saw Zoe, silhouetted in a window, waiting for Talla. He felt the mesh the two of them had shared. For his part, he shared his memories of Zoe: the distance she'd been willing to do, letting him ejaculate in her mouth, to prove her dedication.

And Talla thought back, 'I'm not the only one.' And she laughed.

They were going back through time now, hurtling through sexual partners and conspiracies: naked girls in bathtubs and men in trees. Talla had been far more successful than Zhair'lo.

'They don't listen to you?' Talla asked.

'They don't. They pretend to be happy how they are.'

'Are they really happy?'

'No, but they think everyone else is.'

'What if no one's happy?'

An echo of Kenji's voice came from Zhair'lo's memory.

'You think that's really likely, Zhai?'

Trees. Archery. Naked bodies. Upgrade rituals.

Everything came by in a blur, information being transferred that couldn't be processed fast enough. They only hoped their minds would retain what they'd seen for later retrieval.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 14



But time, going backwards, could only end at one place.

It was the place they'd been when their link had been broken. The mesh -- the strange mesh they had -- was updating itself, recovering everything that had been lost in the gap.

And so they came to Vunja, and saw that encounter from two sides.

There was her view, through a veil of tears, watching from above as the man who'd just whipped her bloody was mounted by another. Zhair'lo could feel Talla's pain at his betrayal, made nine hundred times worse as he saw images of himself striking that other woman upon her dark-skinned cheeks.

Talla could see his view, blurry with whatever poison they'd given him. Delirious and incompetent, she felt him trying to fight the woman off, trying to escape her grasp. Zhair'lo had no memory of spanking Vunja. His brain had been long gone before that moment. Some lower part -- some animal -- had been in charge then.

So they both came to understand what had happened that day, after Talla had torn the mesh apart to protect him from the pain, after they'd been physically separated.

Zhair'lo pushed aside his horror, moving their thoughts elsewhere, seeking distraction in any way he could find it.

He slid himself partway out of her, letting her juices drip down between her cheeks, gave a little twist and pushed back inside.

She moaned, coming back to the present.

There was a glint in her eye. He could feel it from the inside just as well as he could see it from the outside.

Why so shiny?

Talla showed him her triumph from the morning, sinking an arrow into a distant target.

Ecstatically he showed her the deer he'd taken on the very same morning. But it was only a moment before his attention snapped back to her accomplishment.

The clarity of Talla's memory made the image breathtakingly crisp. It had been such a strange experience for her that the whole thing was etched into her brain as if it was carved into one of those stone murals the Temple made for events it meant to be preserved through eternity. Zhair'lo could make out every person in Talla's field of vision -- though most were wisely in the periphery. He could see the individual straw in the targets, the red marks, even the shadows ...

He returned to his own image -- the deer in the forest.

'The shadows, Talla.'

'The shadows?'

'The same time. It was the same time when you loosed your arrow and I loosed mine.'

Oh.

So it hadn't been her, really. She'd borrowed his skill. That's what she'd felt.

'But I only loosed one arrow. How many did you loose?'

She gave him the count.

'So you've learned. You've learned from me.'

'The mesh was already working.'

'And it will keep working, now.'

He pulled out of her until the ridge at the head of his erection met the tightened ring of her entrance, which was as far as the mesh would allow him to go. Then he pushed in again, quickly, and was rewarding with a thrill that shot up her spine.

"Yes," she said, aloud. "Like that!"

So he did it again, and again.

It threatened to push them to orgasm and it wasn't time for that yet.

Talla twisted and shoved with her hips, rolling them over so she was on top, dangling her breasts over him. She pushed down, taking him into her as deeply as she could.

"They can't stop us now," she whispered. "This mesh won't break."

He nodded, the blazing in their eyes a stark contrast to the pale blue light that permeated the tent.

Wait. Wasn't the flap of the tent closed? That couldn't be moonlight ...

There wasn't time to think. Talla lowered her upper body to his, stretching to bring her nipple to his mouth.

He suckled, teasing at her tip before remembering that there were no upgrades there. So he pulled as much of her flesh into his mouth as he could and started biting.

That would prove to be their undoing.

She reared back on her heels, tearing her breast from his mouth whilst driving herself down on him.

He squinted into the light.

'Nine hells, Talla. We're glowing.'

'Again.'

Orgasm wasn't polite. It wasn't quite as bad the moment they'd first touched, earlier, but it wasn't kind, either.

Their bodies were lit from inside, as if some blue fire were burning just beneath their skins, and their eyes shone at each other.

When his erection let out its first burst of semen into her belly, a wave of that blue fire blasted out of them as if a barrel of water had been dumped three storeys onto a stone floor and left to splash in all directions. The tent shuddered on its stays and the door flaps burst open.

Her muscles seized around his erection and again he pulsed at her. A circular wave of blue fire raced out a second time. They would surely burn to their deaths when the tent collapsed and was set ablaze.

He couldn't count how many time he came inside her, how many times her muscles clenched around him. It was only a matter of getting it over with so they could escape the death trap their shelter was about to become.

Talla rolled over and collapsed on the floor, urgently extracting his dwindling member with a suddenness so shocking that she cried out. Zhair'lo looked over at her with concern and made ready to carry her outside if she proved unable to move.

The tent, however, was still standing.

And it was not on fire.

-----------===================-------------

"Gods damn it," the Goddess hissed, gripping her chair.

"Imminence?"

"Another fainting spell," the woman in black admitted. "Not as bad this time."

"This was something else," Within replied. "I felt it, as well."

"What?"

"It was a mesh."

"An orgasm strong enough to make me faint?"

The Goddess seemed offended.

"Your upgrades make you more sensitive, Imminence," Within reminded her. "Not less."

"And the pregnancy?"

"That too, perhaps," Within said. "Though little is known about pregnant Goddesses."

The Goddess twisted her lips.

"It being illegal, dangerous and never having been attempted in the history of the Temples."

This got a roll of the eyes.

"Or so I'd been told."

Within had her moments. The Goddess couldn't deny it.

A gong rang at the entrance, drawing the attention of both women. Only a moment later, a woman in yellow stepped through the doorway.

"Imminence," she announced. "An urgent messenger from the Queen of Form."

"A moment, Nadia," the Goddess said, taking the time to move herself to her desk, from which place her belly was concealed. "Let her in, as per usual."

The girls of Pussy knew what to do. The Goddess's desk was located on a dais raised one step above the open area where she received official guests.

Nadia and her colleague ushered a long-legged Officer into the Goddess's chamber. They carefully stopped a good distance from the desk, at a location prearranged by the Goddess. The purpose was simple: make sure that not even the tallest woman in the Temple would be able to see the protrusion of her stomach.

"What do you have for me?" the Goddess asked.

"Her Highness the Queen of Form bids you well, Imminence," the Officer replied formally. "She asks if you noticed anything strange recently."

The Goddess locked her facial expression into one of curiosity. This was a woman of Form. It was guaranteed that any slip up now would be caught. The least sign of guilt would be the trigger for an investigation she could not afford right now.

"How recently?"

"A quarter of bell to half a bell ago, by her Highness's reckoning."

The Goddess made herself appear thoughtful.

"What sort of thing should I have noticed?"

"Her Highness describes it as like a mesh, but more disruptive," the messenger said. "She only caught a bit of it and wondered if she might be imagining it. With your superior upgrades, she thought Your Imminence might have felt it more strongly."

That was right about the time she'd first fainted, wasn't it?

"I'm afraid I felt nothing," she lied. "Is there anything else?"

And let us hope it doesn't happen again while you're standing there. I can't faint now.

"No, Imminence."

The messenger bowed smartly, turned on her heel, and walked out.

The Goddess collapsed with relief.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 15



"You alright?" he asked.

Talla was crouching on her hands and knees, seemingly ready to spring into action. She looked around the darkened tent, her eyes wide.

A moment before, it had seemed as if the whole place were about to go down in flames. But that had passed and calm and quiet ensued. Not even a cricket could be heard.

She sat back on the corner of the blanket with her legs spread so her skirt did nothing to cover her, and eyed Zhair'lo from this position.

"Ow," she said, wincing suddenly.

"Huh?"

Her hands went to cover her genitals.

"Shouldn't have pulled off so quickly."

"Oh."

A pause.

"I don't suppose," she said, "that you have an explanation for why we ... exploded, I guess? Twice?"

Zhair'lo shook his head.

"It's just our thing," he replied. "We get together and there's pain."

He held out his hand, inviting her in. She slid forward to sit in his lap with legs around his back, trapping his dwindling erection between her skirt and the silken smoothness of her lips. Her arms went round his neck and she pulled him close so she could lay her head on his shoulder and inhale his scent.

"I've missed you," she said.

"Missed you, too."

They sat there, for a while, saying nothing. It was enough, for the moment, that they could quietly be together, their minds and bodies tangled up, as they had been the first time she'd come out to Serve him. That time they'd lain there for several bells, barely feeling the time pass. Such luxury wasn't available this night.

Come to think of it -- and they did think of it - such luxury might never be available again, unless they managed to tear down an entire society. There was a giant, sandstone triangle standing between them and the infinity of similar moments they should be able to share.

"What now?" he asked.

"We have a lot to talk about," Talla said. "Tell me about this V'shika girl you sent me."

"Very reliable," he reassured her instantly. "She hates the Temple like you wouldn't believe. I could feel it in her when I meshed with her -- the second time. No question of her honesty."

Talla's lips twisted.

"I don't know."

"What?"

Talla pulled away from him and looked up at the ceiling of tent, trying to put her thoughts into words.

"I only met her today, but I get a weird feeling from her. She's really unsteady."

"Yeah," Zhair'lo admitted. "Meshing with her was, I dunno, complicated. It's like the inside of her head is scrambled up with all these feelings."

"And yet you trust her?"

Zhair'lo nodded.

"Whatever's going on in there, she knows it's the Temple that hurt her and she can't wait to bring it down."

Talla tilted her head in acknowledgement.

"That's what I felt," she said. "When I meshed with you, I mean. I could feel how you felt about her."

They mulled that over in silence.

"She's right, though," Zhair'lo said.

"About what?"

"That we have no one from Sweetness."

Zhair'lo now had a catalogue of names and faces for every member on Talla's side of the conspiracy, as well as a pretty good idea of which facts were most important in her mind.

"True. She's gotta know stuff that'll help us."

Another long pause.

"So you know what I've been doing," Talla said. "Do you have any men on your side?"

This was a point of embarrassment. Talla knew the moment she asked, not just from the way his eyes avoided her but from the shame she felt over the link.

"Nothing here," Zhair'lo said. "Every Hunter I meet has been tested with that gods damned ritual they do -"

Talla smiled.

"You'd think it would have been fun," she chided. "Chasing after naked girls and fucking them."

"You know it wasn't."

"Yeah. Sorry."

"S'okay."

A darkness had come over his features. As she ran her hands through his dirty, brown hair, she watched as that gloom slowly faded away.

"Anyway. Every Hunter here has been through that ritual. You pass, you get a bow. You fail, you don't become a Hunter."

"But you passed."

Zhair'lo bit his lips and averted his eyes again.

"I don't know why," he replied. "Since I want to destroy the Temple, their test should have failed me. They wouldn't have let me have a bow if they were smart. But I also can't see how I could have failed the test. What part should I have failed?"

"Then the test must have a flaw."

"Right," he agreed. "But what?"

"Well, let's think. What were they testing?"

"How much I want to have sex with naked girls?"

Talla laughed.

"No. That would be a stupid thing to test. Maybe they were testing your stamina?"

Zhair'lo snorted.

"Yeah, I wonder if falling over unconscious would have been a failure."

Talla closed her eyes and tried to call up Zhair'lo's memories of that night.

"No, that's not it," she said, keeping her eyes closed. "When you got too tired, she would slow down for you."

"She did? Which one?"

"Hm. The first one, Rh'ris, was definitely playing with you."

Though her eyes were closed, Talla felt the need to squint her eyes to squeeze more of Zhair'lo's memories from her brain.

"Erin let you stall by talking to her."

More digging.

"I can't believe you remembered their names."

"I can't believe you pulled them out of my head."

Talla nodded, still squinting.

"En'tha," she said. "En'tha was odd."

"The one who ran naked the whole time?"

"Yeah."

"What was odd?"

"When she got undressed ... didn't she look scared to you?"

"You know she did."

Talla's eyes opened.

"You're glowing again."

"We both are."

She lifted her skirt up to peak underneath.

"Hard enough to get in?"

"Nine hells, yeah."

A couple of gentle strokes insured his rigidity and, with that out of the way, she lifted her hips up and slid his erection into herself.

...

'There!'

'Different this time,' he noted.

'A little less crazy.'

'Yeah.'

'Show me En'tha.'

Pushing aside his misgivings, he showed her En'tha the way he most fondly remembered her: standing there with her skirt around her ankles and her little white top still in place.

'Go on.'

Zhair'lo's erection twitched inside as the image of En'tha started to remove her top. Talla sensed the layers of emotion wrapped up in this mental sequence: his arousal; his hatred of that arousal; his sympathy for En'tha as another victim of the Temple's manipulation.

'She was scared of you, for a moment there.'

'I'd noticed that, but it was just this little flash.'

'Show me the rest.'

Even as Talla gyrated on his manhood, working him around and around, he showed her the chase that En'tha had led him on. Push-ups and sit-ups and running, always chasing the naked girl in front of him, always watching those pounding legs. He sped through his memories as quickly as he could.

The race ended and there was a jarring, unpleasant moment in that little room. Zhair'lo skipped over it, not wanting to relive that disappointment.

'No,' Talla told him. 'What was that?'

It had been the moment when En'tha had lain on her back and spread her lips apart. It was deeply carved in his mind, that image of her, wide open so he could see right into the moist tunnel where he desperately wanted to insert himself.

And she'd told him to stop.

So he'd stopped.

Zhair'lo was finding the whole recollection extremely unpleasant. Talla could feel that, but she'd also found what she'd been looking for.

'Come,' she pleaded. 'Fill me up again.'

He didn't wait and she, sensing his discomfort, didn't try to hold him back. The first pulse of his erection, jerking inside her, brought a sense of closure to what she'd put him through.

In its own way, this orgasm was more of a relief than the previous. The last had been pent up physical desire. This time, Zhair'lo was running away from a memory and was glad to put it behind him. He let his seed rushing into her with great haste, without the usual desire to hold it back until the last possible moment. Thrusting his pelvis, he buried himself as deeply inside her as he could and left himself there, helplessly twitching to its end.

More conveniently, the tent didn't explode this time. There was still a glare of blue light emanating from their bodies, shining on the insides of their eyelids so it was blinding them even with their eyes closed.

...

Having emptied out her man for the second time, Talla gingerly lifted herself off his erection.

Zhair'lo exhaled.

"I didn't realize how much I hated that test."

"But now we know what they were testing."

So wrapped up in his own emotions, he hadn't even realized what Talla had been doing inside the mesh. But the moment he turned his mind to the path she'd taken, he saw that her mind had gone through his memories with an efficiency that would be the envy of any arrow ever loosed from a bow.

"They meant to test my loyalty to the Temple."

"But they missed," Talla said with a smile.

He felt her sense of absolute glee, because she was right and they both knew it. The Temple's analysis was as flawed as Talla's was perfect.

"All they really tested was my ability to stop when told to," he said. "All they did was get me as aroused and frustrated as possible and then see if I would listen when a woman told me not to have sex with her."

"That's why you passed," Talla concluded. "They confused your respect for people with your obedience to the Temple."

"That's a pretty basic mistake to make, isn't it?"

Talla shrugged.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"

-----------===================-------------

"What in the nine hells is going on then?"

"I have no idea, Imminence," the Sorceress of Within replied patiently.

She mentally sized up her superior, who was valiantly attempting to stalk ferociously across her bedroom in spite of her pregnancy enforced waddle.

Was the woman's instability some result of a late life pregnancy? Within had been through two pregnancies of her own and didn't recall any such emotional trauma. That had been in her early twenties, naturally, and well before she'd approached any aspects of Perfection. Was that what this was?

"I wonder, Imminence," she spoke gently. "Do you have any knowledge of the other Goddesses who have born children?"

The woman in black sighed and plopped herself down on the edge of her bed.

"No, not really," she said. "It's not the sort of thing we want recorded. The genealogists keep track of parentage and such, guarding the information carefully. We don't want our allies to know who are born of Goddesses, lest they inadvertently spoil the ability to measure the success of the programme. And we don't want those who would be our opponents in this stratagem to know, either."

The Goddess stared off at the ceiling for a moment.

"What were you asking?"

"Records, Imminence," Within reminded her patiently. "Records of previous pregnancies of Goddesses."

"I'm getting a little absentminded, aren't I?" the Goddess replied, a touch of surprise in her voice. "No. We keep no such records. We keep as little as possible, you see? That was the point I was making. Yes."

There was a long pause while the woman in black attempted to gather her thoughts and the woman in green wondered what would be left of her superior's mind when this was all done.

"Just a month left now, Imminence," Within said. "I recommend bed rest. I will investigate and see if others felt the mesh we felt earlier."

"Yes, rest," the Goddess said, yawning extravagantly. "An excellent idea."

Within waved to the two younger women who were waiting, politely out of earshot, at the entrance of the large bedroom.

"Her Imminence wishes to retire for the night."

The two women, wearing the yellow attire of second Level Adepts, entered the room swiftly, their grace speaking of the Form upgrades which made them so valuable lately. It was a simple matter for them to strip off their clothing as they approached their leader to prepare her for bed. Within stepped out of the way, taking only a moment to confirm the presence of the thick, soft triangle of hair between each woman's legs. It was Pussy, through and through, if you were working this office these days.

With the Goddess nearing unconsciousness, the two attendants were quick to pull her black dress up over her head, scattering blue sparks from her lustrous, black hair over both the bed and their own naked bodies. Her breasts, growing heavy in preparation for the arrival of a child, were supported by a second garment. This, too, was unhooked, eliciting a sigh of relief from the Goddess as the golden mounds of flesh were released.

Within slipped quietly out of the room, knowing that her superior was well cared for. But still, she was concerned. A woman with so many upgrades should not find herself so weak, either mentally or physically, in the face of something so common as a pregnancy.

But that was the key word, wasn't it? Weakening? That couldn't be possible. This Goddess was simply not old enough for that yet.

-----------===================-------------

Talla was lying on her back, gloriously and comfortably naked from the waist up -- they still hadn't bothered to remove her skirt. Zhair'lo lay crosswise to her, his head in the crook of her shoulder and one of her ample breasts. Both she and he were glowing a pleasant blue colour, the intensity of which was greatest where their bodies touched.

"Kind of unreal, isn't it?"

"Huh?"

"The glowing," Talla said. "Madra Zen, what's that about?"

"Something about us, I guess," Zhair'lo said. "I don't get it with any other girl, except when I do upgrades."

"You glow when you do upgrades?"

"No, just them," he clarified. "They glow, sometimes, wherever I'm upgrading them. It's easy to see when it's breasts, or faces. Harder to notice for anything in Sweetness and it's so spread out for Iron and Tight, you can barely see anything."

"Did anyone else see it?"

"I don't think so," he said. "I just figured it was normal for all the double upgrades they're doing."

Talla twitched, causing Zhair'lo to lift his head.

"Yeah," she said. "About that. How are you feeling?"

"Fine," he assured her. "I mean, I'm angry at them a lot, but I don't feel like it's hurting me or anything."

"You do seem healthy."

He gently brushed his lips across her nearest nipple, which began to both glow and perk up in response. So he moved across her chest, planting gentle kisses on her flesh as he went, evoking a glowing blue line to show his path. Her farther nipple was already erect when he reached, to he took it in his mouth and suckled gently. Soon, her aureola was glowing around his lips.

Unable to contain her joy, she let a laugh escape her mouth.

"I am not ready for another round yet," she pleaded with a heavy exhalation.

Zhair'lo smiled and propped himself up on his elbows, admiring the effect of his ministrations. Without sex as an immediate goal, he decided to sit up and began using his fingers to draw upon her body. Everywhere he touched, she would glow. He drew long curves from her breasts, down her smooth stomach to her bare mound. More along the lengths of her thighs and calves.

She, for her part, rose up on her elbows and watched as he painted her.

'We might never have this again,' she thought at him.

'I know,' he replied.

"What will you do now?" she asked aloud.

He stopped painting as his expression went dour. The reaction was so quick that she immediately regretted posing the question. But, sad as it was that the moment had ended, she had already known it couldn't last forever.

"There's nothing I can do here," he said, a jerk of his head indicating the camp, the Hunt and everything to do with Hunters in general. "I've learnt all I can."

"You're the gods damned master of bow?"

Pulling that phrase from his memory elicited a smirk.

"Well, good enough anyway," he said. "Considering there's no place in our plan for either of us shooting anyone with a bow."

"You never know."

"Talla, think about it. We have to concentrate our resources where they're most likely to matter."

It was board game talk again, she realized, just like when she was conspiring with the girls.

Did the Temple think of that, when they taught us to play games? That the strategies we learnt from the games might work against the Temple? And did Zhair'lo realize that the same argument had been used against the idea of involving men at all?

Talla revealed that conversation to him: the argument that men, outside the wall, would be useless for what was to come.

Zhair'lo was chagrined.

"They're kinda right," he admitted. "Here I'm no good. But I know a place where I can do something useful."

"Where?" she asked.

She was already dreading the answer, having blocked away any thought of it.

"With the Fighters."

"No," she insisted, flatly.

"Why not?"

"I don't want you going out there," she said. "It's too dangerous. I could lose you entirely to ... to whatever it is they're fighting out there."

Zhair'lo's back was up now, indignation lending him courage.

"You said yourself this was going to be dangerous," he argued. "You risk your life coming to see me. Why can't I -?"

"I'm risking my ass coming to see you, not my life," Talla insisted. "They might whip me again. They won't kill me. They won't maim me."

Zhair'lo sighed, almost a gesture of surrender.

"Look, Talla," he said. "I'm useless here. But if I get out there -- if I find out who it is that they're fighting, maybe I can find allies. Maybe I can find people who know something about the Temple and how to bring it down."

Talla laid her head back on the blanket and let out a sigh of her own.

"Besides," he added, throwing playful petulance into his voice. "You can't actually stop me."

She rubbed the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath before propping herself up on her elbows again.

"You're right," she said. "I shouldn't be telling you what to do."

Tension evaporated.

"I'll do my best not to get killed," he promised. "And you do yours not to get caught. Even if they don't whip you, they might send us both off to different cities."

"Like they did with Kenji?"

Zhair'lo nodded, confirming the transferred memory.

Sitting cross-legged beside her hips, from where he'd been colouring her body, his erection was within easy range of her hand. She reached over to cup his testicles and slowly draw her fingertips up his lengthening shaft.

"You're glowing, too," she noted.

He slid his body down on the blanket, keeping his erection in range of her hands while moving his head moved toward her breasts. Their bodies had gone without touching each other for so long that her skin had almost completely darkened. He suckled gently at first one nipple and then the other, watching as they brightened into tiny, blue torches in the otherwise unlit tent.

The mesh approached -- the real, sexual kind, not the general telepathic one they had going at normal times. Thoughts were starting to blend together, melting in a giant cauldron over a roaring fire.

Talla's mind became chaotic and suddenly difficult for Zhair'lo to read. Her hand paused in its stroking.

"What's wrong?" he asked, looking up from his work on her breasts.

The glow of her body waned and surged. She was holding something in -- he was sure of it.

"Talk to me, Talla."

She inhaled.

"There's something we need to do," she said, looking around frantically. "There's nothing in here that'll work though, and we can't go outside."

"Outside?"

Her mind was so full of dark, frightening fragments and jagged edges that he couldn't make any sense of it.

"We're glowing, right?" she said. "Too dangerous outside."

It seemed to him that she was hyperventilating. He watched her chest rise and fall with worrisome rapidness.

"We're a good distance from the other clearing," he said, keeping his voice tentative. "Why do you want to go outside?"




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 15



She gulped.

"Come on, then," she said. "It's worth the risk."

Hopping to her feet, she pulled him along through the tent flap. There was no need to light a torch. Her body, excited and anxious as she was, gave off enough light to see them safely to wherever she was leading him.

"There must be a table here," she said. "Right? Just like the other clearing?"

"Yes, this way."

He lead her now, until they came to a set of sturdy wooden tables meant as eating places for travelling Hunters. They weren't complicated: parallel planks of wood for an eating surface with more planks, lower down, for seating on either side.

She turned to sit with her cheeks on the end of the nearest table and pulled him in for a kiss. It was deep, passionate and incredibly nervous.

Pulling away, with her eyes closed, she spoke in whisper in the general direction of his chest.

"There's something I need to do," she repeated. "I think you need it, too."

He had cooled just a little, walking around naked in the moonlight, but she pulled him close and welcomed him under her skirt to warm flesh between her legs.

"You're ready?" she asked. "I'm wet enough."

When he nodded, she did the oddest thing -- she pushed him away a bit so she could turn her back on him.

"Talla, I -"

But she was already spreading her legs, opening herself against his erection.

"Put it in," she whispered over her shoulder. "You have to."

Even though she was still standing, the memory was too strong in his mind. The last time they'd been in anything like this position ...

'I know,' she replied in his mind. 'That's why we have to do this.'

He suppressed a shiver even as she tried to steady herself against the table. Neither of them was handling this particularly well.

'Nine hells,' Zhair'lo beamed back. 'I can't believe you have the courage to ask for this.'

"C'mon," she said out loud, her voice cracking. "Do it already. Please hurry."

"Okay."

He bent his knees to dip his body down, letting the tip of his erection slide under her skirt, down between her firm cheeks and then forward through the moisture that dampened her from front to back. The tingling of the mesh began to take hold. There was no avoiding it now. The mesh made demands and the bodies involved were helpless to disobey.

As he stretched his knees, he pushed his erection inside her, watching as her body lit up from her waist to the tips of her hair.

...

Why?

Why?

Why are you doing this? Why are we doing this? Why do you want to remember that ...

To scratch out a memory.

Scratch out?

Erase. Rub out. Write over.

He thought about that a moment.

'I don't want to think about that anymore, Zhai. I don't want it hanging over me. When I turn away from you, I don't want to cringe because I feel the whip.'

'Oh.'

'I want to remember this in its place. I want to remember you, inside me. I want to feel your body against my cheeks instead. I want to remember joy instead of pain.'

Then he understood.

Nervous tension came over the link again, from her to him.

'There's more?' he wondered.

She didn't answer, over the link or in words.

Instead, still shaking with an anxiety he plainly read in her mind, she started leaning her upper body down.

Down, down, down, until her breasts touched the night-chilled wood. That was an unpleasant shock, not just because he sensed the way the cold surface struck her nipples, but because it brought back such strong memories of how it had felt when she'd been strapped to the table in Form.

The link was getting fuzzy, even though they were meshed. Talla found she couldn't trust her thoughts to communicate clearly.

"It has to be like this, Zhai," she said aloud. "We have to take this from them."

"Yeah."

He pushed, ever so gently, to deepen his penetration, and slid half way out. It was going to be mild, this time, because he didn't think either of them would be able to handle it getting rough. He was reminded, quite inappropriately, of his encounter with that girl from Form who'd wanted to be spanked ... no, he put that out of his mind. He didn't need to start hyperventilating now.

In front of him, he watched as Talla stretched out her body, extending her arms to the edges of the table. Her intent was clearly to mimic the way they'd tied her down to that damnable table in Form. Zhair'lo, feeling the roughness of the table's wood grain against the soft flesh of her breasts, began to shake.

This wasn't going to work. It was prying at memories he didn't want opened. Memories of that wood, scraping at her chest as she had convulsed in pain ...

"My skirt," she pleaded.

"What?"

"Take it off."

Deliriously, he obeyed and untied her last vestige of clothing. 'Skirt' was an exaggeration. It was a rectangle of cloth with a tie at the waist. Once undone she took it from him and laid it on the table. It was upon that cloth she laid her breasts, protecting them from the cruel surface.

"Better?"

"Yeah."

"Now finish."

It was still disturbing. Zhair'lo tried to imagine what in his life had been more troubling than this. The test in which he had run after those naked girls? Not quite. The night he'd sat in the waiting room after Talla's first upgrade, wondering what he'd done to her? Wondering if she was even alive? Maybe.

But even in those times, he'd never been so conflicted. The only thing that even came close was the occasion, after he'd been forced to whip Talla, when they'd put him in that room and a very gentle girl had forced herself upon him.

He shivered, but pushed on.

For there was Talla, visible to his eyes, radiant, beautiful as ever. The mesh gave him all of her feelings and her all of his. And yet, there was the searing kiss of the whip, attempting to inject itself into the conversation with every thrust he made, no matter how slow, no matter how shallow.

Talla held on, helplessly. She had put herself in this position because she was sure it was the best way to clear up the mess in her brain. There was no word in her vocabulary for how she felt about Zhair'lo. She only knew that she couldn't go on fearing him, twitching at the thought of him, couldn't go on living with herself while there was this association between him and pain.

So she clung, defiantly, to the edges of table. Her breasts and stomach she firmly pressed against its surface whilst her legs were spread for him and his incredibly gentle work.

He admired the strength it took for her to do this, to place herself essentially at his mercy. Try as she might to pretend that her punishment had been her fault, the fact was that in a very literal sense it had been his hand that had cracked the whip. People could be complicated, but they could also be simple. It was in that very simplest sense that turning her back on someone who had caused her so much pain could not have been easy.

Zhair'lo knew it, because he felt her fear. He felt her shiver, both inside and out, as she let him -- insisted on letting him -- do this.

Somewhere in that sea of conflict, somewhere deep in the abyss of emotions that clouded his mind, the utterly undeniable astonishment he felt at her bravery was the rope he needed to climb.

Talla squeaked in surprise as he stiffened inside her. Positive energy flowed into him.

"Yes!" she shouted as she pushed her hips back at him.

The angle changed then, his hardened shaft no longer running neatly through the length of her but jutting harshly towards her spine.

She moaned and twisted, forcing the angle to something even worse even as he thrust through all her depth.

They would be able to see it this time, so much more clearly in the wide, dark clearing.

While he held himself deep inside her, she felt his head swell up to the bursting point. So she twisted again, and squeezed, and forced the first torrent of liquid into her belly.

As it went out from his erection, so did the bursts of blue light pulse out from where their bodies were joined. It was like a wave of water, falling brightly to the ground and racing across the clearing. As if, again, a bucket of some bright blue liquid were poured out and left to spread. It spilled off the eating tables and through the tents.

These were no ephemeral spirits, either, these bars of light. Tent flaps were blasted open. Trees swayed under the pressure. These were physical forces to be reckoned with.

Talla and Zhair'lo, facing the same direction, watched the effect roll away from them, failing to dissipate until it had spread well into the forest.

"Wow," Talla murmured when he'd stopped pulsing inside her.

She propped herself up on her elbows and watched as the last, weak wave slowly faded out in the distance.

They stayed in that position for some time, both realizing that, spent as they were, this was their last time for this night. Worse still, it would be their last chance for a long, long time.

"What in the nine hells are we?" Talla asked the darkness.

"Do you expect anyone to answer?" Zhair'lo asked, knowing the question hadn't been directed at him.

"The gods, maybe."

"Shouldn't you be looking up, then?"

She shrugged.

"They're suppose to be here to help us, but only when we really need it," Talla said. "We're suppose to be grown up enough to handle the rest on our own."

Trying to take some weight off her stomach, she moved her hips just slightly and accidentally dislodged his waning member from her body. With a hint of sadness, he withdrew. More sadly still, she stood and felt his semen dripping down her thigh. There was enough inside her, she supposed, that those few drops shouldn't be lamented.

"Do you think they meant the Temples to be like this?" he asked.

In the darkness, he could scarcely see her turn to face him. He felt her arms embrace him, though, and that was good.

"I don't know," Talla answered. "The history books say that, sometimes, the Goddesses can call for the help of those above. Sometimes, the gods even respond, but not always."

"So we shouldn't expect them to answer to us?"

"I doubt we're important enough."

Zhair'lo let out a sigh.

"So we take care of ourselves, somehow or other."

They held each other, standing in that jet black clearing, in a silence as soothing at it was absolute.

It was some time before the sound of crickets stirred them from their peaceful reveries.

"You're really going to join the Fighters?" she whispered fearfully.

"Yes."

"Be safe," she pleaded. "For me? Please?"

"I'll do my best," he said, pulling his face back far enough to look into her eyes. "The whole point is for us to be together whenever we want. I won't let myself get killed if I can avoid it."

Her eyes wet but, refusing to shed any tears, she nodded and pulled him closer again, chins to shoulders. They breathed deeply, willing this time to last forever.

There were other matters to which they had to attend.

Talla went over a list of the names of the girls he could trust, verifying that he had taken them all properly from her memory. Zhair'lo now realized exactly how she had tested them and found it fascinating.

"Illya sends her best, as does Yua," Talla said. "But Illya also wanted me to check if you kept her underwear."

Zhair'lo laughed lightly. Yes, of course he had. She could tell from his thoughts.

"I'll tell her," Talla said. "She thought it was really important for some reason."

"Alright," Zhair'lo said. "I'll find a way to get a message to you somehow, once I'm out there. I have no idea how the Fighters do anything at all."

Talla winced.

"Neither do I," she admitted. "I'd have checked with Zoe if I'd thought you were going out there. Hopefully we're joined together strongly enough now we can feel each other even from very far away."

It was Zhair'lo's turn to shrug.

"I don't know how far away they go."

"I don't know anything about them at all," Talla said. "It's weird, for all the studying we do, that they're left out of all of our lessons."

"Anything else? I don't want you to get in trouble for staying out too late."

"My name is Jenni, by the way."

"What?"

"Jenni," Talla said, "is a girl with super dark, black hair, blue eyes, two Facial upgrades and a Tight upgrade. She likes being spanked, in case it comes up."

"Oh, right."

"But I do have to get out of here, before the others finish up."

A last kiss. A final embrace. Fingertips extending to touch each other to the last moment before Talla ran from one clearing to the next. Zhair'lo watched her go for quite some time, making sure that no one from came from any of the tents. As much as he was sad to see her disappear, he was glad she was safely gone. There would be no whip resulting from this evening.

All that was left was for him to to gather his blanket and return to his proper tent.

And think. There was a lot of thinking to do.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 16



"What great emergency is this?" Abundance asked, her eyes flashing in irritation at the way her attention was being dragged away from the paperwork in front of her.

"Three of our lot, returned after the twelve bells of midnight last night," Atreya replied.

"Those three there?"

The Sorceress looked past Atreya to where a pair of Adepts and a Keeper waited at the edge of her innermost sanctum, nervously twiddling the hems of their yellow skirts.

"Yes," Atreya said, reading from a sheet. "They were out at Halfway Camp Seven, one of Master Lyric's camps, and all returned late."

"Don't I have better things to do than worry about this?"

Atreya pursed her lips.

"The gate guards wanted them tried today."

Abundance rolled her eyes.

"The gate guards want everyone whipped for everything," she sighed. "I don't care -"

She paused a moment and tilted her head thoughtfully.

"All three of them?"

"Pardon?"

"I mean," she explained. "All three of them came back late. I've heard of one woman falling asleep or losing track of time. But three, at once? In separate rooms with different men?"

Atreya rubbed the bridge of her nose with her index finger.

"Separate tents," Atreya corrected. "But that is odd, I agree."

"Bring them in."

The Second turned and waved the three law breakers into their Mistress's presence. They passed through the doors, one at a time, curtsying as they came. She had never seen such a dishevelled lot. There was darkness in their eyes that said they hadn't slept in days, though the troubling events were only the night before.

The Sorceress looked them over carefully, then picked one of the Adepts.

"Speak," she commanded. "Tell me the truth."

The woman in question rubbed her palms against her temples as if trying to grind her memories out of her head.

"There's little to tell, Mistress," the woman replied, her eyes on the ground, her voice quavering just slightly. "We arrived as we always do, with the women from Form and Sweetness alongside. We called out for our men as we always do."

Abundance folded her arms, waiting patiently.

"I began to Serve mine," she went on. "I'd been using my mouth and my breasts, to get him really ready, you see -- when something happened."

"Had he penetrated you?"

Now the woman turned a deep shade of red.

"No, he never did. I never actually Served him."

"What?" Atreya exclaimed. "You never Served the man you were assigned?"

The Adept let out a sob.

"I never had a chance," she complained miserably. "Something came over us. I don't know what it was. One moment I was there, playing with him in my cleavage; the next moment I'm being woken up by one of the Form girls, yelling that it's time to go and we're more than a bell late getting home."

"How did she know this?"

"The moon, I imagine, Mistress."

The Sorceress let out a sigh.

"So you rushed back? Without Serving?"

"The men were all deeply asleep, Mistress. It seemed pointless to try."

"Wait," Atreya interrupted. "A woman from Form was also late getting back, then?"

"All of them were," the Adept responded. "All the women. Endowment, Form, Sweetness. Everyone."

"You were all struck unconscious?" Abundance asked, waving her gaze over the three women before her.

The pathetic trio nodded in reply.

The Sorceress twisted her lips and straightened herself up to her full height.

"Tell the enforcers that their intention to punish my Disciples is ridiculous," she told Atreya. "I'll dictate a scroll shortly to their Mistress. We will also tell them that We are interested in their investigation into what caused sudden unconsciousness of so many women -- and men. Such a disturbance in the minds of so many speaks of something rather powerful and We will hope that Our attention is not so focused on rule enforcement that We are neglecting the health of Our Disciples."

"They mentioned no investigation, Mistress," Atreya replied.

The Sorceress speared her Second with a flash of angry, blue eyes.

"Ah," was all Atreya could think to say.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo ducked through the flaps of his tent -- his tent, not the one he and Talla had used in the far clearing. Nine hells if he would do anything even slightly out of the ordinary this morning. He intended to behave as much as possible like everyone else.

He was doomed to failure, of course, but didn't know that quite yet.

The first problem was the encampment. Zhair'lo couldn't remember ever being the first to wake up, but it was clear that no other Hunter had yet risen from his bed. There was a chill fog resting quietly over the wet grass as Zhair'lo uncomfortably noticed the lack of a crackling fire at the camp's centre.

Shrugging, he walked over to the fire and started to assemble kindling and tinder. He'd been an apprentice at enough vocations that this was a procedure well known to him. Scrape out some flint onto the tinder, then scratch, scratch, scratch. The dry grass, protected as it had been, was quick to catch. A few swift breaths brought the flames to the twigs and then to the larger branches. The dew hadn't been heavy, even with the fog. The smell of burning pine needles wafted up to his nose, an odour always attached to a promise of warmth.

Breakfast, when the Hunters were out and about, was usually a meat stew made with a good portion of boiled oats and that meant he would be getting a cauldron full of water from the well. Zhair'lo, dumping the first bucket into the big pot, was just lamenting the fact that he would have to do this all by himself when he started feeling a little odd. It just wasn't like his comrades to be this lazy.

The sun was up, for the gods' sakes! Where was everyone?

For a moment, he was angry, but this quickly melted into worry. Had he been the one to sleep in? Had they already left? This concern seized him like a yoke around his neck. What if they had skipped breakfast and made off?

He wasn't precisely sure where each man had gone the night before, but he knew which was Kenji's tent and it was there that he went first.

Pausing at the doorway in a moment of hesitation, it crossed his mind that he might be letting paranoia jerk his cart down the wrong path. He listened closely, hoping that he might hear some snoring or, if he was lucky, the sounds of his comrade and mentor stirring from sleep.

Not a sound reached his ears.

Could they really have left him behind?

Worry getting the better of propriety, he gently pushed aside one of the overlapping flaps at the front of Kenji's tent. The fact that the toggles hadn't been tied from the inside was a vague hint that something was amiss. It meant Kenji hadn't been awake when his guest left at the end of the evening.

Not like him at all, Zhair'lo thought.

There was Kenji, though, lying on his back, a deerskin blanket thrown carelessly over his lower body. Zhair'lo looked just long enough to see a hint of movement in the man's chest.

'He looked dead, there, for a moment, though, didn't he?' Zhair'lo thought.

His paranoia had been wrong and they hadn't abandoned him. Relief flushed through him, washing away even his vague embarrassment at having revealed his insecurity. They'd just had a really long night, that was all. Possibly the women had been extra energetic, due to some festival or other in town that had gotten them all excited. The men were a little more tired than usual and were taking their ease on a brisk morning.

Returning to the fire, he realized he hadn't put nearly enough water in the cauldron. He set about gathering more from the well and would follow that with stoking the fire to a proper blaze that could boil the whole thing.

They would all wake up eventually, and he would be very casual and stoic about how he'd prepared everything for them, just like a proper Hunter.

-----------===================-------------

A woman with an iron circlet on her brow stood up indignantly behind her oak desk.

"What is your purpose here?" she challenged.

Atreya looked at the Adjudicate and gave her best shot at a Withering Glare. She'd seen her own Mistress do it multiple times every day, seen dozens of women crack under that blue-eyed, blonde-haired gaze. A Sorceress needed that kind of look, so a Second ought to start practising.

Regardless of the effectiveness of her expression, she waited.

There was a pause from the angry woman with the iron circlet, not quite long enough to violate protocol, but certainly enough to be rude, before she added a final word.

"Mistress?"

Atreya smirked before nodding to Shanata behind her.

"We are here on the orders of the Sorceress of Abundance, to observe."

'Be vague,' Abundance had said, 'let them stew over what I've ordered you to observe.'

The Adjudicate, what was her name? Sonja, that was it. Sonja glared back.

"Your Mistress did not wish to come here herself?"

"My Mistress has many affairs to which she must see," Atreya countered. "Besides, there are protocols regarding the physical separation of Perfections."

'Accidents happen,' was another way of putting it, and accidents that happen to too many important people all at once had terrible consequences. It was a principle of Temple life that those who carried Perfections had obligations to keep their lives and, more importantly, their deaths very predictable. Putting several women with Perfections in the same room, when it wasn't necessary, was an unwarranted risk.

All of which had nothing to do with why Abundance hadn't made this trip.

'I hate that gods damned place,' the woman in green had muttered. 'You go; take Shanata. She'll know enough regulations to keep that whip away from Our Collective Ass Cheeks.'

Atreya's lips twisted as she remembered the phrase, spoken with a nobility only a Sorceress could lend it.

Almost poetry, she thought.

"Very well," Sonja replied. "We've questioned all of our women and those of Sweetness already. Your three will be next."

"You're interviewing them separately, of course?" Shanata asked.

"Of course," Sonja hissed in reply. "Though yours have likely polluted their recollections in the bells since by speaking to each other."

Shanata was unfazed. Unlikely Atreya, she didn't outrank the Adjudicate. In fact, she was two ranks below. On her side though, was her sure knowledge of the law and her certainty that she lived her life by those laws. As she knew herself to be above reproach, she could afford to be quite bold.

She let her voice go to ice against the fire of the Adjudicate.

"Have the accounts of the women you've interviewed differed substantially?" she asked.

Something cracked in the other woman; she pursed her lips in discontent and her tone softened quite suddenly.

"No," she admitted ruefully as she sank down into her seat. "And I doubt the reports of yours will differ either."

As Shanata took a breath to speak, Atreya made a small hand gesture to stay her. Shanata didn't understand until the Adjudicate went on.

"It makes little sense," she remarked, almost conversationally. "They called out names, just as they always do. They were in various states of undress and activity when suddenly ... nothing. It was one of ours, if it matters, who woke up first and alerted the rest when she realized how late it was."

Sonja rubbed the bridge of her nose.

"I've never seen anything like it."

Shanata turned to Atreya, silently asking permission to speak.

The Second nodded, meaning, 'Yes, now is the time.'

"May we sit in?"

Sonja started to shrug but caught herself and disguised the motion as an awkward sort of shoulder-rolling stretch.

"Be my guest," she said with a wave of her hand toward the empty chairs at her side.

She turned to her aide, a prim and proper Neophyte with several sheets of parchment on a small desk.

"Send the first one in, dear."

"Mistress," the girl bowed.

By the time the next bell rang, Shanata had determined that Sonja had been right. The accounts from the Endowment women, all three of them from Abundance, shed not a torch's worth of light on the situation, unless one considered iron clad confirmation of the ineffable to be somehow virtuous.

The last of the women to sit before them was an Adept, looking sheepish but somewhat relieved when she began to realize that the questions being put to her seemed more academic than accusatory.

"Well, thank you, dear," Atreya said. "Is there anything else you remember? Anything at all that might help us determine what happened last night?"

The Adept shook her head, but paused a moment.

"Did the young one come home late as well?"

"Young one?" Shanata asked. "What young one?"

"I was the last to go into the tents, you see," she explained. "But there must have been someone coming after. A young girl, probably in white, who was late."

"There were no Whites who came back late," Sonja said. "Hunters are generally too old for such girls."

The Adept's expression firmed up.

"No, Mistress," she said. "There was a young boy there. Couldn't have been twenty, even. He was the only one who didn't get named. I remember assuring him his girl would come."

"Is it possible he wasn't being Served that night?" Atreya asked.

"At a Hunter's halfway camp?" Sonja asked, entirely focused. "It could happen, but not likely. The halfway camp is usually where they stop after three nights without Service. Even then, the schedule would be to Serve half the men one night and half another night. We would never schedule to Serve all except one."

"Mysterious," Shanata declared. "We must find this one."

Atreya let out a breath.

"That will be difficult," she pointed out. "Determining who got sent where, after the fact, isn't easy."

Sonja shook her head.

"Not that bad," the Adjudicate argued. "We have to do similar things quite often."

"You have to search for lost girls?"

She shook her head.

"I mean when we suspect that two women have switched assignments. In that case we have their names and have to determine where they were sent -- that is to say -- where they were supposed to be."

"And this time," Atreya fired back, "You know where's she supposed to be, but not her name."

"It'd be easier if we at least knew the Hunter's name," Sonja tilted her head to the Adept. "Did you happen to get it?"

"Sorry, Mistress. No."

Sonja grimaced.

"It can still be done. I'll give the orders immediately."

"Thank you, dear," Atreya said. "You're done here. Tell the others you can all go home."

"Thank you, Mistresses," The Adept replied, quite grateful indeed, and departed with a quick bow.

If Sonja noticed that Atreya had just waived all punishment aside, effectively for all of the women involved, there was no reaction. Her facial expression was that of a woman deep in thought.

"I need to find a girl in white, knowing only where she was sent last night," she muttered as she stared blindly through the farthest wood-grained wall in her office. "Where to begin?"

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo had the pot boiling by the time the first of the Hunters finally woke up. He hoped that the scent of fresh spices wafting into the air would conjure some of them out of bed. It was Kris and G'len whom he first greeted, though their responses were well out of character for their occupation.

Scratching his head and squinting, even though the fog greatly diminished the light of the sun, Kris pushed his dark hair out of his eyes and grunted at Zhair'lo.

"How the hell was your night, kid?" Kris asked.

Zhair'lo raised an eyebrow. None of the Hunters had ever called him 'kid'. Not that he could remember. Eyeing them closely, he realized that both Kris and G'len, a lighter haired fellow who was sitting on the ground at the entrance to his own tent, looked like they'd walked through several hells just to get their eyes open.

"Fine," Zhair'lo deadpanned, trying to avoid the question by feigning that the stirring of a boiling pot needed a great deal of attention. "You?"

Kris shook his head groggily and began rubbing at his temples.

"Damned if I remember ..." he trailed off.

G'len, by this point, had figured out where he was and decided to try to stand. He did so with a reasonable degree of competence, but without any of the grace or stealth one expected of a Hunter. Walking over to the fire, the lighter-haired of the two experienced bowmen sniffed at the stew.

"A tad more paprika, lad," he advised. "Put any salt in yet?"

"Not yet."

"Two solid tablespoons, then," he added. "Say, did yours ever show up?"

"What's that?" Zhair'lo asked, pretending that the fetching of spices was consuming his mind and hoping the question would go away.

"Your woman. Last night," G'len clarified. "Did she show up?"

"Oh, yeah," Zhair'lo replied casually, focusing on stirring.

"What was she like?" G'len continued to prod as if it were his own memories he meant to poke.

"Oh, y'know," Zhair'lo said. "Typical Form type. Dark hair, blue eyes, into a good spanking. That whole bit."

It was Kris's turn to grunt.

"I can't remember a gods damned thing about last night," he said. "Not much past getting into my tent, anyway."

"Aye," G'len confirmed. "Me neither."

Zhair'lo twitched, but kept stirring, keeping his back to his comrades.

"But you remember yours?"

Now what? It was too late to lie, wasn't it? If he was going to lie, he should have started doing it quite a while ago. And what good was lying anyway? Should they ever find a way to check, what would Jenni say? She and Talla would have met on the way home -- at least that's what Zhair'lo assumed was to happen -- and shared stories. If Zhair'lo started lying so he sounded like everyone else at the camp, his story wouldn't match with Talla's. Or, more importantly, Jenni's.

"Yeah," he shrugged. "What happened to you guys?"

"I dunno," Kris said, still rubbing his temples and squinting. "I remember she wore orange. Must have been Endowment, what with the tits and all. She was rubbing me with them and then ..."

He shook his head.

"Nothing," G'len added. "Then nothing."

"Pretty much."

"Weird," Zhair'lo put in with a shrug.

-----------===================-------------

In the very centre of the widest, most cavernous office space in the entire Temple, an Adept stood nervously in front of the Adjudicate from Form.

"What you're asking isn't tenable, Mistress," the aide explained.

Though she stood with her arms folded, her attitude wasn't rude. Her manner was more defensive than outright rebellious. It wasn't that she didn't have a right to tick her chin up just a little, given that this was, after all, her place. But when a woman came from Form with that circlet on her head, it made everyone twitchy.

"Explain," Sonja replied.

"We don't have a way to track what you're asking for," she explained.

The aide took a deep breath and waved a hand around to indicate the giant, circular room that was officially called Central Service Allocation. Dozens of women were moving about and dozens more sat at desks. Satchels, labelled with the Division symbols of circle, square and triangle, were loaded up with cards. Once full, those satchels would be shuttled off.

"Our organization here is based on the men, not the women. The goal is to ensure no man ever goes more than three nights without being Served. When a man's name comes up, we send it off to one of the Divisions for handling."

"You must give them more than a name," Sonja insisted.

"Of course," she said. "We give them an age as well, to follow the protocols. If they're in a group, like the Hunters in question, or they've already gone three nights for some other reason, their cards are marked as high priority so that all get Served that night."

"And that's it?"




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 16



"After that, it's out of our hands."

"Do you keep track of the men?"

"Somewhat. How do you mean?"

"Well," Sonja said. "Could you tell me who was at Lyric's Camp last night."

"No," the aide replied. "We would have sent those name cards off yesterday morning, all marked as having a priority for immediate Service."

"And once the cards are sent out?"

The aide held her empty hands in the air, palms up.

"We have nothing."

"The cards must come back."

"Yes," the aide said. "They must be returned before noon. Over two thousand of them come in every day."

Two thousand, Sonja thought. In a city of some twenty four thousand, about a quarter of them adult males needing to be Served every three days. Two thousand women went out every night and two thousand cards came back every day.

"So we need to examine the cards that come back today and find the names of the men who are at Lyric's Camp," Sonja said.

"The entire Camp would not have gone on the Hunt, Mistress," the aide pointed out. "They seldom do."

"How do you schedule women to meet them, then?"

"Whenever a group goes out, their Master tells us in advance and we make sure to set the cards aside for the correct night."

Sonja nodded.

"The Fighters are far more problematic, of course -"

"I'd imagine," Sonja cut her off. "But now I'm concerned that we may have an injured girl somewhere and we don't even know her name. Should we be searching for her? Or has she returned safely, unaware of what happened to her companions?"

The aide scratched her head, suddenly understanding the insistence in Sonja's voice.

"Is anyone reported missing?"

"No," Sonja said. "We've checked. But depending on her assignment, it could be some time before she is missed."

"Whoever she is."

Sonja nodded.

"It's too late to find the Hunting party, I presume?"

"They'd have broken camp by now and headed out."

"What of their Master?"

"What?"

"Could you ask their Master for their identities? If there was an especially young one amongst them, Master Lyric should surely remember his name."

Sonja's eyes brightened. Why hadn't she thought of that?

"If you had his name," the aide pointed out. "We could find his card. It's possible that one of the Divisions will be able to help you then."

"Will you be able to tell me the Division to which you sent his card?"

"Sorry, Mistress. No."

Sonja twisted her lips.

"That will have to do."

"I wish you the best of luck, Mistress."

Sonja gave a polite bow to the Acolyte and bolted from the room. The sand was pouring through the glass. The longer she took to track this problem, the more likely it became that the information would be destroyed. It was as if she were following a trail of bread crumbs through a plaza, with the sandals of nine thousand women pounding the markers to dust.

-----------===================-------------

Zhair'lo couldn't be precisely sure when it started, but sometime while he and Kenji were out looking for a good tree to hide in, he became aware that Talla was inside his head.

She seemed to be idle and cast a vague enquiry about his location.

He showed her, as best he could, relating what he knew of the intended geography of their Hunt.

In return, he was treated to a vague image that he took for the courtyard of Form, where she was undergoing bow training. It wasn't her turn yet and she had a few moments of her attention to give him.

That was when he revealed to her the nature of the morning's fright.

She exuded a aura of calm. 'Stick to the story,' that aura seemed to say. For, indeed, she had told Jenni exactly the story they had decided on ahead of time, right down to the number of times she'd Served him and the positions they'd done it in. If everybody else had passed out, that was nothing on the two of them.

Zhair'lo relaxed a little. He'd assumed as much, but it was good to be certain.

A moment later and Talla's mind was whisked away from his. It took a great deal of effort, at this distance, to stay connected, and once her attention was focused elsewhere, the connection was lost.

The link between their minds was not what it had been. There was a strength there that had not existed before, that much was clear. But there was also an odd tenuousness to it. Though he never worried that it would disappear entirely, the whole thing seemed like a cart wheel that was wobbling on its axle. Maybe the wheel, pegged properly, couldn't slide right off the axle, but no one was really enjoying the ride.

"There," Kenji whispered, his quiet command shaking Zhair'lo out of his daydream.

The older man was pointing to a bough in a tree to their right. He tapped his chest and pointed to a second tree. Above them, the branches of the trees crossed and meshed together. They'd be able to see each other and sit comfortably while they waited for prey.

Bow laced to his back, Zhair'lo scaled the tree and found a place to sit leaning up against its trunk. Kenji was in position well before he settled in, looking up and down the deer trail before speaking.

"You seem to be the only one who remembers last night," Kenji said.

"Yeah, weird."

He could see Kenji regarding him with those cold Hunter's eyes but he refused to turn his head to meet that gaze directly.

"Do you remember anything odd when your girl showed up?"

'No details,' he thought. 'Give them nothing.'

He wasn't sure if the thought was his own or Talla's, but he agreed with it wholeheartedly.

"Nothing except that she was late," Zhair'lo replied. "She said my name and went to my tent."

"You didn't hear anything outside?"

Zhair'lo shook his head.

"I was kind of too busy to notice."

Kenji hummed noncommittally, an overtone of distrust that Zhair'lo particularly wanted to head off.

"What do you remember?" he challenged his mentor.

"Very little," he replied, worry entering his voice. "I was the first to be taken, you'll remember."

Kenji paused, gathering his courage. Zhair'lo had never seen the man so tentative. It struck him suddenly that the sense of distrust that he'd been sensing was not distrust in Zhair'lo, but Kenji's distrust of himself.

"She was from Form," he said. "She started using her mouth."

His eyebrows rose.

"Quite good at it, too."

He scratched at his chin and shook his head, a gesture of frustration Zhair'lo had never seen from him.

"Then something comes over me," he explained, turning his head to look over his shoulder, "It hits me right in the back and then ... nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I wake up the next morning, feeling like hell."

Zhair'lo shook his head. There could be no doubt now what had happened. He and Talla had unleashed something that could render other human beings unconscious, and could do so with violent suddenness. If anyone ever made the deductive leap between Zhair'lo merely being immune to the effect to his role as the source of it, there would be trouble.

'No one must make that leap.'

That was Talla, for certain, speaking directly into his mind. Her turn with the bow must have ended.

'I can only stick to my story,' he replied. 'There's no reason for anyone to blame me.'

-----------===================-------------

"Mistress Sonja!"

"Yes?"

"The runner returns!"

Sonja dropped the document she'd been reading and came out to the balcony overlooking the courtyard. Indeed, there was the woman she'd sent out, running full out through the courtyard. The woman was an Acolyte, the highest woman in Tight that Sonja could find. An enforcer by training, Sonja had ordered her to strip off her armour down to her most minimal clothing -- the tiny orange top that covered her breasts with a rectangle of cloth and the bottom that covered nothing but a triangle at the front and a thong at the back.

'Magnificent,' was all Sonja could think, watching the muscles of the woman's upper thighs quiver with each impact of sandal on dirt.

A fine specimen she was, in Sonja's eyes. The bare minimum of flashy, cumbersome Endowment was strapped down by a top tight enough to hold her breasts steady as she ran. This was a body pared down to be the most efficient fighting and running device the gods could possibly fashion. There was a glint of cold moonlight in Sonja's eyes as she flew down the stairs to meet the runner.

Having been impressed with the importance of her mission, the Acolyte was still heaving when Sonja met her. Noticing that, Sonja could appreciate why so many went for Abundance upgrades. It would certainly be an enhancement in situations like this, but the cost to a woman's agility ...

"The name?" Sonja asked. "Did you get it."

The woman was leaning on her knees, trying to catch her breath to speak.

Sonja waited impatiently, knowing that nothing would come until the woman could find space in her lungs for words.

"His name," she said finally, "is Zhair'lo M'han."

-----------===================-------------

The Queen of Endowment looked down from her top floor balcony to the cold, marble floor below.

"Why is there an enforcer of Form poking around in my Offices?" she enquired of her aide.

The Adept, on duty at the threshold of her Queen's domain, replied quickly.

"I don't know, Highness. She only just arrived and started asking questions." 

There were two enforcers at the very entrance to the Offices, sinecures required by a protocol from days long past. That pair was supposed to be there. This third one, however, was well inside the boundaries, and appeared to be interrogating the Queen's own Officers.

"Please enquire on Our behalf and determine what questions she is asking. We will attend shortly."

The Adept curtsied carefully, lifting the sides of her skirt just high enough to show a length of smooth, cool thigh, before darting down from that highest balcony to the Office floor. It certainly wasn't for a Queen to go rushing about like that, but haste was obviously required if she was to put a stop to this sort of interference. So the Adept was sent down at great speed while the Queen followed at a more dignified pace.

Seeing the intent in their Queen's eye, a small cadre of Officers followed immediately in her wake. If an emergency of some kind was in the making, they would be prepared to carry out any orders she gave.

It was the arrival of this organically constructed retinue at the ground floor of the Offices of Endowment that brought the Enforcer to a standstill. She had been emphatically gesturing to the women around her and froze when she saw the woman in the flowing red dress stalking towards her.

"Is Our assistance required for some great deed?" the Queen of Endowment wondered aloud, letting irony load up every word.

The fully leathered woman removed her helm and bowed.

"Highness," she stammered. "We believe a young woman may be missing, but we are unsure of her name."

The Queen glowered.

"A missing woman without a name?"

"We believe twelve women and twelve men were struck unconscious last night," the enforcer explained, getting her feet under her. "We have identified all of the men and eleven of the women. All of those are safe and apparently healthy."

"But the twelfth woman?"

"She remains unidentified. We don't even know which Division sent her. She may have gotten back safely already, or she could be out there, still unconscious."

The Queen paused only a moment.

"What do you need of us?"

"We know the name of the man she Served," the enforcer said. "We ask that you search your records to see if any of your disciples Served him."

By this time, the crowd around the enforcer had grown. The Sorceress of Abundance herself had made it to the floor from wherever she had been.

"This is possible?" the Queen asked, directing her eyes at the Sorceress.

Abundance merely turned to her side.

"Pril?"

"Yes, Mistress. Highness," the nervous Officer bowed. "It will take some searching, but we do track the men by name so that the same woman doesn't get sent to him repeatedly. Protocol, naturally."

The Queen nodded.

"Be about it, then," she said. "Let's see our sister safely home, whoever she is."

Pril gave a quick bow.

"We'll just need his name, then."

Her next words caused several stomachs to lurch.

"Zhair'lo M'han."

-----------===================-------------

"Zhair'lo M'han?"

"Yes, Imminence."

"Madra Zen, Pussy," the Goddess sighed. "What is that boy up to now?"

"I honestly don't know," the Sorceress replied.

The Goddess stood, arching her back to stretch out her swollen belly, and waddled over to a translucently curtained window.

"And where was Talla? Did you check?"

"Quite far away. Almost to the quarries."

The woman in black smirked.

"You're telling me where she was assigned. My pregnant wits are not so addled. I asked if you knew where she was."

The Sorceress dipped her head to the side by way of admission.

"It was them," the Goddess said. "You know it was them. The time those women fell unconscious was the same time that I collapsed. The same time that the Queen of Form felt something so strong she sent a messenger to Our Very Office to confirm it."

Pussy said nothing.

"We meant to breed them. Did we not?"

"Yes, Imminence."

"Do you consider that wise, now?"

The Sorceress gulped and shook her head very slowly.

"It may not even be wise," she said softly. "To allow them to be anywhere near each other."

-----------===================-------------

Dark haired, with blazing blue eyes, the young woman in the tiny skirt stepped into the small office with a look of radiant innocence on her fair face.

"You asked for me, Mistress?"

With a wave of the orange fabric hanging from her wrist to her shoulder, H'reena directed the girl to a seat next to her. Other women might have put their juniors across desks or tables to intimidate them. H'reena had no need. If she wanted to make someone afraid, she could do it with a glance and the inflection in her voice. She had no need of devices and affectations.

Besides, what she had to say was frightening enough. There was no need to pitch her voice to anything but its most pleasant and casual tone.

"Yes, Jenni, I did."

H'reena tilted her head and examined the girl. Everything about her body language spoke of an implacable reservoir of confidence.

"How was your Service last night?"

"Fine, Mistress."

"You'll have to do better than that," H'reena admonished.

Jenni looked perplexed.

"You wanted details, Mistress?"

"No," H'reena said. "I'm referring to the way your left eye twitched when I asked the question. If you do that when they start questioning you, you'll be in a spot of trouble."

"Mistress?" she managed not to sputter back.

"What was your Service like last night?" H'reena asked, now with the air of a teacher walking a student through a rhetorical progression.

"Quite nice," Jenni said, visibly forcing a shy smile into her face. "We went three times."

"Was he large?"

"Not too much so. Just big enough."

"Why didn't you go out at the same time as the rest of the women?"

"Washing up, Mistress. They'd gone by the time I was ready."

H'reena nodded.

"Better," she said. "But you'll want to be smoother than that."

Jenni looked worried.

"I don't know what you mean -"

"Don't," H'reena said simply, letting her voice go cold.

The black haired girl gulped once before her body turned to stone.

"You are confident Zhair'lo will tell the same story?"

"Yes, Mistress," she whispered. "We always make sure."

"Good," H'reena said. "You'd better be ready and convincing. They'll track you down in less than a bell."

"But why?"

H'reena stood and indicated that it was time for Jenni to leave.

"It's better if you don't know," H'reena said. "Your prevarications will be more convincing."

"Thank you, Mistress."

H'reena twitched her chin toward the exit and the Initiate left with a quick bow.

-----------===================-------------

Talla had no idea that anything had gone wrong. She had followed the protocol (for she could think of no other word for it) that had been laid out by Lacy and firmed up in the details by Jenni. It had felt mildly dangerous at the time, but once she was back in the Temple, enduring another day of bow training, she quickly developed a good feeling they'd gotten away from it.

After finishing with the bow, she made some quick arrangements with the others to meet V'shika in one of the pools in the central triangle -- the one place they could all meet without inviting too much suspicion. That meeting, however, could wait until the following day.

Today was a day for keeping things simple.

She walked through the giant brass doors of Endowment and returned to her room. Where her roommates were, she couldn't say, so she stripped off her clothes and laid down on her bed.

Her breasts were still an uncommon sight, sprawling there on her chest, cool licks of air drawing up goosebumps and bringing the nipples to stiff attention.

'You're next,' she beamed at those pink points. 'I don't know when, but I want to fix you up next.'

She added, more maliciously, 'If we haven't brought the Temple down by then. Then we'll make them give us the bodies we deserve.'

Lying naked on her bed, free of the distraction of having to deal with people and now feeling the power of her passion flowing through her, she slowly became aware of Zhair'lo.

Her eyes closed as she reached out for him.

There was a reassuring wave of energy bouncing back to her. It wasn't strong and by that she knew that the distance was great, but the connection was there as a kind of rope. Tenuous as it was, and as much as Zhair'lo might worry, she knew it to be anchored in a rock heavy as a mountain.

Nothing was breaking them apart this time.

'Do you hear me, man of mine?'

'Moonlight,' he replied.

Not precisely with the word, of course, because there weren't really words where they were. Instead it was images and ideas that somehow formed kinds of sentences that had meaning between them.

In this case, it was an image of Talla, straddling him with stars and a half moon over her shoulder. That was from their first night together. She inhaled deeply, smelling the straw and feeling the cold water from the well prickling at her skin.

When her right hand slid up her body to cup her breast, she could feel the link get just a bit stronger.

'I'm sitting in a tree.'

'So?'

'It's tricky enough not falling out,' he warned.

She smirked and let the palm of her hand slide further up so her nipple traced lightly across her palm. The left hand snaked down her stomach, ring and index fingers going to her bare lips.

Zhair'lo, in her mind, seemed to whimper.

'What happens if I come?' she wondered at him.

There was a vague sense that he was prodding her forward, so she pushed her middle finger down between her lips. Her body responded with a wave of pleasure which raced out to meet him and reflected back to her. The thumb and forefinger of her right hand plucked gently at her nipple, causing it to stiffen and extend even farther out from her body.

'Should I slide it in?' she asked of the finger of her other hand.

She was about to do so, her finger at the very edge of her vagina, when something on the far end snapped.

Images came at her very quickly. The one who was called Kenji was whispering something. Next there was a deer on a forest path. After this came a bowstring being notched with an arrow.

Talla sighed.

The spell was broken. Resigned to it, she took her left hand away from her mound and her right away from her breast.

A nap was probably a good idea anyway. She'd be Serving tonight and wanted to be full of energy for that.

-----------===================-------------

Dinner was kept light that evening. Talla found herself far too aroused to want much food.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 16



Even after the nap, her body was still giving her the occasional shiver as a reminder of her unrequited desire to play with herself while her man watched her.

The evening went by in a blur as she met with other women heading out to the Miller's quarters. Grain mashing and storage was a huge affair in any city, so there were women of Form and Sweetness already gathered outside the entrance when the Endowment contingent arrived. Jovial greetings were exchanged between the women of different Divisions. Tender embraces, occasionally, were appropriate when old friends met.

Talla had no desire for old friends.

She had a desire for but one man and, in his absence, she would take any other and imagine the one she wanted.

Time slowed then, once they filed in. Impatiently watching the senior women bowing to one another to decide who should have the honour of calling, Talla's frustration grew.

She was nearly the last to call out for her man.

"Marek," she said.

Somewhere far away, something twitched. Like a deer hearing a twig break, Talla cocked her head.

"Here," a boy called back to her.

He was a mousy fellow, dark of hair and a bit of dullness behind his brown eyes, but he was getting a man's growth in his shoulders. If he'd been milling long enough, that meant plenty of pushing, shovelling and lifting.

She couldn't help but think that he would be good enough.

"My room's up this way," he said in his simple voice.

His eyes traced down to the bit of clothing that covered her chest, a scant thing meant for easy removal more than containment or support.

"Whoa," he said.

"C'mon," she urged. "They're all yours as soon as we get behind a door."

"Right," he said, his eyes still bugged out.

Tepidly, he led her down a hallway, presumably toward his room.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

He nodded, still a little twitchy.

"Done this before?"

"Just a couple of times," he said.

"Oh!"

That sent a rush of blood through Talla. Not quite a first timer, but still, the idea of someone new to the game sent a thrill from the back of her head down to her spine to her tail bone and from there all over her insides.

In that electric moment of excitement, she felt a connection from far away clicking into place.

'That's Marek?'

It was fortunate that, at the precise moment Zhair'lo came through, Marek was looking at her breasts and not her eyes. If he had looked up, he would have seen something very strange come over Talla.

'You know him?'

'Friend. One of my best.'

Talla seized Marek's hand, her eyes alight and an eager smile spreading across her face.

"Let's go," she whispered.

As Marek led Talla to his room, Talla could take a moment to communicate with Zhair'lo.

'Where are you?'

He showed her an image of himself, sitting with several shadowed men around a fire.

'You gonna watch me?'

'Do I have a choice? I'll need to be alone, I think.'

'Quickly,' she advised, because Marek was ushering her into the darkness of his room. 'I don't know how this will work.'

'The mesh?'

'It got messed up once before.'

That had been memorable. The mesh had been so awful that they'd torn themselves apart and thought all was lost.

'That was different,' Talla replied. 'We were both having sex at the same time, and we didn't see it coming.'

'I don't want to lose you again.'

'Then we'd better learn how to deal with this.'

Zhair'lo seemed to sigh in agreement. Regardless of his approval, she felt reassured when she sensed that he had retired to his tent for the night and laced up the toggles on the tent flap.

That matter settled, there was Marek. The boy had lit one candle in his room, which left it about as dark as Zhair'lo's tent. That seemed to provide a sort of symmetry between the images in her head and the ones coming from her eyes. Even the smell of the candle matched with the faint scent of a campfire she caught off Zhair'lo's clothing.

She could do this.

The first step was shoving the boy down on to his bed, not as gently as she could have because a certain roughness was tolerated when enthusiasm was so high. After that, she straddled him and started to remove her top.

"I bet you've never gotten to handle ones like these," she said proudly as she let her breasts bounce free before his eyes.

Marek gulped and shook his head. She leaned over him, letting her endowment dangle under his chin.

"You have to be," she murmured in his ear, "very ... very ... gentle."

He nodded nervously and she let a faint smirk cross her lips. Then, very slowly, she eased herself forward so one of her nipples touched his lips.

"Suck on it," she said. "Just lightly ... ooh ..."

It was delicious, watching the timid boy cautiously take the very tip of her into his mouth -- barely past his lips. She felt that familiar tingle in her breasts. It wasn't as if she really needed any encouragement to be aroused at this point.

'Your teasing is merciless,' Zhair'lo chided her. 'Poor guy.'

Talla smirked.

'I do it my way,' she beamed back. 'He'll get what he deserves.'

The reply did not come to her as expected. Instead of a thought or an image, she felt her body move. Her hips rolled and her abs collapsed, pressing her breast into Marek's face. The boy inhaled deeply, sucking up her entire aureola and then some.

Talla's eyes opened in indignation. For a moment she thought that Marek had pulled her down, but no, the involuntary movement of her body had come from a much greater distance away.

'You did that?'

Zhair'lo's retort was a laugh that echoed in her head.

She should have expected as much. The last time she'd met him in the clearing by the well, he'd managed to control her movements when he guided her through the brambles and thorn bushes. That had been with her permission. She'd let him in, handed over control of her body because she had known that he could get her through much more quickly than she could have done herself.

This was different. He was inside her head, as she was inside his, and letting him in this far when she was in a vulnerable, aroused state was having an interesting effect on her ability to retain control of her body.

Her indignation faded.

'You think you know what to do with my body?'

Distantly, she felt someone far away gulp.

'Probably not,' he replied.

'Do you feel him sucking on my breast now?'

'Yes.'

'Give him the other one, then.'

Nervously, she felt Zhair'lo take control of her body, pulling one breast from Marek's mouth and shoving the other one in. It was very much as if his hands were there, upon her shoulders, moving her from one place to the other.

Clumsy as his control was, the sensation was delicious.

When it felt like her nipples had had enough attention, Talla pushed Zhair'lo aside and took her body back. She slid down the bed and undid Marek's shorts. Maybe Zhair'lo could control her body well enough to undo laces or maybe he couldn't. That level of experimentation just wasn't appropriate when she had a job to do.

"Ooh," she said out loud when she saw his erection.

'You're friend's got a nice one,' she cooed in her mind.

She felt Zhair'lo pushing her eyes away.

'No, no,' she said, pushing her eyes back. 'There's work to do. Use my tits on him.'

She felt those invisible hands on her shoulders again, moving her body back and forth in a steady rhythm so that her breasts swung and bounced Marek's erection back and forth between them. Drops of sweat began to bead on her skin, shaking loose as she shook her cleavage about.

'That's it,' she said. 'Can you feel how that is for me?'

Kilometres away, she sensed another gulp. In front of her, a boy whimpered.

"Your come goes inside me," she admonished. "Do you need a break?"

Marek shook his head.

"No," he gasped. "I can hold it."

"Really?"

She took his penis in hand and pointed it at her chin. Eyeing the boy carefully, she parted her lips.

'You know what to do. Just don't make me gag.'

Part of her mind wondered why she was making Zhair'lo do this, but there was little time to think. The invisible hand was already on the back of her head, pushing her mouth down over the boy's erection. She still had control of her tongue, but she used it only a little, well aware of Marek's swelling.

'He can't take much more,' she said. 'Let's get him inside me.'

Outright fear came from Zhair'lo now.

'Don't worry,' she comforted him. 'I'll be doing this part.'

After all, there was no telling what strange angle Zhair'lo might make her impale herself if she let him control her for the penetration.

She slid up Marek's body.

"Are you ready for me now?" she asked. "I'm ready for you."

Nervously, the boy nodded.

"Good."

A moment of truth was upon them.

What would happen next?

She set herself with the tip of his penis between her lips. Moving her hips down, her lips parted to accommodate his swollen tip. It pushed against her entrance, expanding the ring of muscle. Finally, the muscle gave way and one ridge of flesh passed another.

...

Nine hells!

I'm inside with you!

Relax, Zhair'lo.

Can Marek feel me?

No.

Are you sure?

Of course not, but I think so.

Nine hells!

And they both heard the echo of a physician's voice, speaking to Talla as she was dragged on her naked butt across a marble floor: "A mesh is no place for three."

But there were three in this mesh.

Do you feel him inside me?

Yes.

Good. Just relax. Imagine it's you inside me.

Outwardly, Talla began rotating her hips. She took Marek's hands and put them on her breasts.

"Squeeze," she hissed at him. "Hard as you can. Especially when you come."

Fingers sank into flesh. Skin was stretched. Nipples distended.

Zhair'lo, kilometres away in his tent, felt every bit of Talla's body, inside and out.

This won't take long, she told him.

What's going to happen to me, Talla?

How should I know? At least we can find out with some privacy.

Great.

Indeed, Marek was approaching the point of no return. Talla had little power to stop him.

She gave a hard twist of her hips and felt pain as ten fingernails clawed at her chest. The fortunate part was that those sharp edges were well away from her nipples.

Inside her vagina, the boy swelled and burst, a stream of semen firing into her. Inside her head, something else exploded.

As the pulses twitched inside her, waves went out from her mind across great distances and washed back to her.

...

Zhair'lo sat up, delirious. He was outside the mesh now and quite thankful for it. They'd proved that their connection could survive something like this, although it might be different if they were both in meshes with different partners.

That was a problem for another night.

For now, it was enough that he could see what had happened to his own body. He'd ejaculated. That much was obvious. Somehow he'd had the presence of mind to pull his cock out and direct his semen onto the dirt floor of his tent instead of his shorts or his blankets. Convenient at least.

He tried to remember how old Marek was. Scratching his head, he knew the difference was in months. Had he really been an adult so long that Marek was caught up?

Thoughts weren't flowing for him anymore. Terror and the weird mesh had taken too much energy from him. He sensed, vaguely, that Talla and Marek would be having a couple more go-rounds, but he was certainly done for the night.

Intensely uncomfortable, he found himself unable to sit upright. His head went to the ground and he passed out.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 17



Having set her scant clothing aside, Talla surveyed the steamy inside of the Temple's largest pool house. It had never occurred to her that she and her fellow conspirators needn't spend all of their time hiding out in Endowment's triangle. Here was a place, far more magnificent than the one they'd been using so far, and only the advent of needing to meet simultaneously with V'shika and their allies in Form had brought her to find it.

Fortunately, Tina and Yua were both quite familiar with the layout of the central triangle and knew the place quite intimately. With it's size, large pool and multiple smaller deep baths, it provided more anonymity in its large crowds of naked women than any other place within Gern's Temple walls.

"Let's get our tits under water," Tina muttered, looking around self-consciously..

It was the nature of conspirators, after all, to give anyone watching as little information as possible. With their clothing hanging on pegs along the stone walls, Tina, Yua and especially Talla, stood out in a quite literal way.

"Over there," Talla nodded toward a bath in the corner, trying not to look suspicious or nervous in any way.

Though many colours of filtered sunlight dappled down upon almost every pool in the hall, the crests of the waves in Talla's chosen bath were outside the reach of the light. There was nothing to shine upon their naked bodies as they slid into the water, nor anything to glint off their conspiring eyes.

Talla didn't feel safe until she watched her cold and nudity stiffened nipples dip below the surface. Securely concealed once more, they sat on the underwater ledges and spoke in low voices.

"What does she look like?" Yua asked, keeping her eyes on the main entrance.

"Slim," Talla said. "Of course. No boobs. Her hair's a bit dark. The thing you'll notice mostly is her eyes. It's like she's got part of a Facial upgrade or something. You can see it in the eyelashes."

'And the darkness,' Talla thought to herself. 'You'll notice the darkness in those eyes right away.'

It was not, however, V'shika who arrived first. A flash of red hair, glinting in the sunlight that glared through the entrance, announced that Zoe had managed to find her way. The eyes, the lustrous hair, the clever smile – it was enough to light a flare of jealousy in Talla. Not enough of a flare to go begging for a load of semen in her face, but still: a flare.

Watching Zoe disrobe however, even with all the filtered colours of sunlight highlighting her body from different angles, made Talla smirk.

'Yeah,' she thought haughtily, 'I've still got you there.'

"Ladies," Zoe gushed as she sank in to the tub. "The new one isn't here yet?"

"Haven't seen her," Talla replied. "Rika coming?" 

"No," Zoe tilted her head. "No point being too obvious about it, right. What about Illya?"

"Same," Tina put in.

"There she is!" Talla hissed, her eyes narrowing with an eager smile.

In her excitement, she stood up out of the water, revealing herself almost to her crotch. Her breasts beading with water, she waved to V'shika before quickly sinking back into the little pool.

The girls pretended to be having a conversation while waiting for V'shika to hang up her clothing. When she too slipped into the water, the others were able to take their first good look at her, each one trying to decide if Talla was right about half-Facial upgrade.

Talla looked her in the eye and V'shika glared back.

"You want to join us?" Talla asked.

"Yes."

"Zhair'lo said that we could trust you."

"You can."

"I trust him to the three corners of the world, to the nine seas and beyond," Talla said. "Do you understand?"

"He deserves your trust," V'shika said. "He's a good man."

Talla smiled.

"You aren't going to test her?" Zoe asked sternly, turning to face Talla.

"It was hard enough getting to be alone with you," Talla pointed out, featuring Zoe with a sideways glance.

Zoe frowned into the space between Talla and the new recruit. Talla noted with chagrin that she was beautiful even when she was petulant.

"She's been with Zhair'lo," Talla explained to the obstinate Zoe. "He's been inside her and I've been in his head."

Zoe seemed unconvinced, folding her arms underwater.

"I've never been on that table," she clarified. "I'd planned to avoid it my entire career."

"I can feel Zhair'lo right now," Talla explained, her voice gone low and tense. "V'shika has his – and my – complete confidence."

V'shika looked back and forth uneasily between the two of them.

"Look," she said, her voice full of placation. "If there's some test, I'll take it right now."

Nothing but eagerness in her eyes, she seemed almost hyperactive. Talla was briefly reminded of her days minding children at the nursery. Periodically, there were days of nothing but rain, when the children were stuck inside. V'shika triggered a clear memory of one of those children who had far too much energy and was ready to explode.

It was Tina who spoke, breaking the tension between Zoe and Talla.

"The test requires some privacy," Tina said. "How quickly could you reach orgasm?"

V'shika's face shifted to wide-eyed shock.

"You want to watch me masturbate?" she asked nervously as she pressed her thighs together.

"No," Talla said. "I can – I can mesh, with women, you see? And when I do, I can tell if I can trust them."

"It's not like you can just do that in a pool in public," Yua told V'shika.

Yua gulped and looked nervously at her companions.

"Right?" she asked desperately.

"It would be stupid to try," Tina confirmed, looking pointedly at Talla and then Zoe, who were glaring at each other.

"Once we mesh," Talla said, barely getting the words past her clenched jaw. "We won't be able to break apart. If someone walks over here, it will be obvious what we were doing."

V'shika's hands were underwater.

"What if ...?" she asked. "What if we got a head start?"

Talla looked over at V'shika.

"What are you ...?"

Then she looked under water and saw that V'shika's thighs were no longer pressed together and that her hands were quite busy.

"Seriously?"

"If it'll settle things once and for all and you'll trust me."

"This is not a good idea," Yua said, practically twitching with anxiety.

"How long do you need in the mesh?" V'shika asked. "Before we come, I mean."

"Not long," Talla said. "Five or six deep breaths. If someone wanders close to our pool, we'll come sooner and get out."

Tina looked over at V'shika, surprise on her face.

"Can you actually make yourself come? In public?"

V'shika nodded and smirked before replying.

"I used to do it all the time," she said. "Before they let me have boys. It's more exciting if there's danger."

Under the water, Talla began stroking between her own lips with one finger while her free hand squeezed at her breasts and lightly rubbed her nipples.

"Do you even know what you get if you're caught doing this?" Yua asked.

"All the more exciting, I guess", Talla replied, deadpan.

"Will it even work under water?"

"Yua," Talla sighed and rolled her eyes. "Why don't you be the lookout? Distract anyone who comes by."

Yua, admonished, nodded and gulped as Talla turned to V'shika.

"You ready?"

"I've never meshed with a woman," V'shika replied, her eyes alight. "Can't wait."

"Sit here on the ledge next to me."

Smiling with a disturbingly relentless enthusiasm, V'shika obeyed and spread her legs as she turned to face Talla.

Talla slid a finger underneath V'shika's legs, parted her lips and rested the tip against the girl's vagina, feeling that tunnel twitch with the same eagerness she read in V'shika's eyes.

"Do the same," she said.

V'shika was quick to obey and soon there was a tingling, both from her finger and the base of her spine.

"When it goes in, it's going to go in pretty quick," she said. "Just like when you mesh with a man."

The Within girl nodded.

Talla took one last look around before speaking.

"Now," she commanded, and pushed her finger up inside V'shika.

She had just a moment to become aware of how slippery and easy that motion was before she felt herself being penetrated – far too quickly to be accommodated, but this she ignored as the mesh took hold.

...

Nine gods!

Yes!

Quite suddenly, Talla became a first hand witness to an experience of which she'd only previously seen shadows. Zhair'lo had told her that V'shika was unstable, but Talla was unprepared for the complete mess she found inside the girl's head.

There was no time to dance around the point of this venture, though, as the level of urgency was still foremost on her mind. With the same disregard for comfort she'd used in penetrating her target's vagina, she delved into her mind.

'What a mess!' she announced.

What part of that sentiment reached V'shika, however, was a mystery, for the girl responded only with wonder and excitement. Talla felt a hand, not her own, on her breast, squeezing savagely and forcing a moan from her lips.

She checked her throat, lest a louder noise betray their actions, and dove deeply as she could.

Through the calamity that was V'shika's emotional state, past humiliation and excitement, shame and playfulness, past images of dark failure and one brightly burning success, Talla cut through. She imagined herself as the very arrow that Zhair'lo had somehow shown her how to loose.

Who are you?

Your friend. You can trust me. I can help.

There was no lying in the mesh. Talla would have spotted deception in an instant.

But even with the truth laid bare as their naked bodies, she had to know why.

So she dug, shovelling through the muck now that the arrow tip could no longer cut.

And there it was, a blackened core of fire-charred stone lying at the very centre of the catastrophe that was V'shika's mind.

It was hatred; steady and burning. It was a violent antipathy toward the Temple, born of humiliation and resentment. It was a loathing that would survive every up and down of V'shika's fitful personality; a driving force that would see the Temple destroyed even if V'shika had to surrender her own life.

Talla knew her well enough at that point and it was time to end the mesh

There was a flash of resentment at this, but Talla overrode it, curling her finger slightly and forcing it to hook around inside V'shika. Further to the point, Talla took control of V'shika's mind and forced the girl to squeeze the breast she held in her hand.

That did the job.

It wasn't even four breaths from when they'd started and already she felt the muscles of the Within girl involuntarily twitching around her finger even as her own vagina spasmed through their mutual orgasm.

As she became aware of her surroundings, she was able to see the shock on V'shika's face.

"Madra Zen," she whispered.

"You're done?" Yua asked in amazed relief. "That was fast."

As soon as the dissipating mesh allowed, Talla gently slid her finger out. V'shika, limp as she was in every part of her body, simply let Talla back away, her finger idly slipping free.

"Good?" Zoe asked.

"Yes," Talla declared, trying to regain her breath. "Quite good."

"I'm sorry," Zoe said, her eyes downcast. "For pushing you so hard."

"It's alright," Talla said. Heaving a sigh, she added, "I know her better now. It was worth it, even if it was dangerous."

It was how they'd learned to behave, as children in the nurseries. Conflicts were not to be allowed to fester and grow. Bitterness and resentment were not acceptable, especially between women. The tension between them dissipated very quickly, as if the orgasm itself had been felt by everyone.

"We'll make her a sister, then?" Tina put in.

Talla nodded immediately and they politely urged the dazed Within girl to get her chest above the water line.

Taking it by turns, they planted kisses on each of her nipples before letting her sink back into the water.

When that was done, Talla lifted herself up so her nipples, now stiffened by her recent arousal, narrowly cleared the water. The other girls did the same, making an arc around their newest recruit.

V'shika, seeing them so displayed, began with Zoe at the far end, giving each of her nipples a light peck. She worked her way through Yua and Tina, going from smallest to largest, with each girl sinking back into the water when her turn was done.

When she arrived at Talla, her breasts as large as all the rest put together, she took the whole of the first nipple's aureola in her mouth. As she moved across Talla's chest, she looked up into Talla's eyes and spoke.

"Mistress," she said, and immediately took the other nipple in her mouth.

Talla choked on a protest, but Tina grabbed her elbow before she got a word out.

"No," Tina told her. "Accept it."

"But I'm not -"

"Yes, you are," Yua interrupted. "You're the one we trust to lead us."

Zoe agreed, jerking a thumb in the general direction of the centre of the Temple.

"Better than that lot."

Talla glared at them.

"I don't want to just replace them," she said firmly. "I want to get rid of them. I want everyone to be ... to be ... to do whatever they want."

"You're still our leader, like it or not," Tina said, a light smirk of determination touching her lips.

"Accept it," Zoe said firmly, repeating Tina's advice.

Talla was still standing in the tub, her breasts out of the water, nipples getting harder and harder as the steaming water evaporated off her chest.

This is how it was when, Tina going first, the girls floated over to her, took each of those little pink nubs in their mouths, and called her 'Mistress'.

"Whoa," Talla whispered.

There was silence for a while as they let Talla, temporarily overwhelmed, recover her wits.

"So what's the plan?" V'shika shook them from their daze.

It was Tina who answered.

"Not much of a plan yet," she said. "We know the weak spot is the Ascension of a new Goddess, but we can't figure out how we can get in the way of that. All we really have to do is prevent one Queen from passing on her Perfections, but -"

"We figure the best target is Form," Zoe put in. "The Queen of Form rarely gets to Ascend, so if we can reliably plan to interfere with her progress, whatever plan we might make is most likely to survive contact with actual events."

"Are you kidding?" V'shika snorted. "With all those enforcers around her? And even if you get past them, she's personally the single most dangerous person in the entire Temple."

"Exactly," Talla sighed. "But those are the facts. The weakest point in time – the Ascension – is the hardest point is space. There are a lot of games like this that we know how to play, but I don't see a way through. You've got three Queens coming together, and they'll all be heavily guarded. How do we get in the way of that?"

The girls felt very small, then, imagining the walls of armoured Form women, bristling with spears, that would turn them into breakfast.

"Three Queens and Synergist," V'shika corrected with a light tilt of her head.

"What?" Talla twitched.

"Synergist, right?" she clarified. "That's the actual weakness. The stuff is fragile as all nine hells, hard to produce, doesn't last long after it's made and nobody trusts anybody with it."

Four pairs of eyes went wide.

"Why didn't we think of that?" Yua asked, bewildered.

V'shika raised one hand to just above the surface of the water so she could point a finger down toward her crotch.

"Within," she clarified. "It's why you wanted me in your group, right?"

"You know how they make the stuff?" Talla asked eagerly. "Where it's kept?"

"I can find out," V'shika promised. "I know the formula is complicated and the process is time consuming. They have to bring it out just before they need it, or it goes bad."

"Come on, though," Zoe pointed out, twisting her lips in doubt. "The stuff has got to be well guarded. Every time I see the chalice show up at an upgrade, there are, like, four guards delivering and watching over it."

"Yeah," V'shika agreed. "It's guarded that way so they can bring it to the Upgrade quickly."

"And when the Temple is between Goddesses," Tina pointed out, "it'll be even more heavily guarded."

"Still," Talla said, her eyes narrowing in that expression that had become all too familiar to her friends and followers. "Still, it's better than attempting an assault on the deadliest of the Queens."

-----------===================-------------

It was a sign of a good Hunt when the men returned a day early and for this particular Hunt Zhair'lo had done more than his part considering his junior position on the team.

There were thoughts on his mind, however, that pushed pride far to the back.

"You sure about this, Zhai?" Kenji asked.

It wasn't like him to repeat himself and he had already asked this question, phrased one way or another, at least half a dozen times.

"I think it's where I have to go, Kenji."

Kenji shook his head. The man's distress was so obvious that Zhair'lo was actually starting to feel sorry for him.

"What do you have against the Fighters?"

"Nothing against them, Zhai," Kenji replied uneasily. "It's you I'm worried about. You're pretty young, and it's not a ... it's not just a job like roofing, or farming, or even like Hunting."

The fact that Kenji was having trouble formulating sentences told Zhair'lo quite a bit. What it didn't tell him was how to respond, so he simply kept walking back toward the large hunting chalet that was the home of Lyric's camp.

"Why do you want this?" Kenji asked. "You have years of life yet. You could do this some other time."

"It's my time now," Zhair'lo said firmly. "I want to know what's out there."

Kenji, most uncharacteristically of all, shrugged.

"You'll have to tell Master Lyric," he said, his voice gone so flat he might as well be dead. "He'll handle it from there."

It wasn't a conversation to which Zhair'lo was particularly looking forward. He'd moved around a lot in his life, but the decision to change either vocation or location had never been his. A scroll would arrive, usually with a red ribbon, and he would pack up his belongings and get going. He'd kept a few friends, long term, like Marek and Plin, but had otherwise allowed such things to happen to him with no more opinion on the matter than a branch might have as it floated down a river.

This would be different. It would be his decision; the first in a long line of such. For once he was choosing his own road, and the road he would take today was one he hoped would end at a Temple in rubble.

"He'll be in his office," Kenji offered helpfully, for they were on the threshold of the gated garden around the lodge.

He left Kenji at the gate, dumbfounded, as the familiar scents of lilac and juniper wafted into his nose.

'I thought you were like me,' he beamed back at Kenji. 'I thought I had found a kindred spirit, someone who wanted to be with one girl more than any other. Someone who knew what it was to be wronged by the Temple.'

But Zhair'lo had been mistaken in that regard, for Kenji was a Temple man, through and through, and Zhair'lo couldn't lay a hand on that. Furthermore, Kenji was quite convinced that Zhair'lo would eventually feel the same way, once he calmed down.

'No,' Zhair'lo thought. 'I'll never let them own me as they own you.'

With that resolution foremost in his mind, he passed out of the late afternoon sun and into the lodge. Gone were the floral scents, replaced now by the scent of cedar and pine, of long extinguished fires and resin.

Lyric's office, directly off the large, airy common room of the lodge, stood with its door open so that the Master Hunter himself was visible to those entering the building. Zhair'lo noted that the man had his head down, tabulating a chart of some sort as he consulted several documents spread about his desk.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 17



He did not look up when Zhair'lo reached the doorway, but waved him in anyway.

"In, Zhair'lo," he said, his voice flat as stone. "Have a seat."

"Master Lyric," Zhair'lo replied, taking the seat across directly across the large wooden desk from Lyric.

"Tell me about Jenni."

"Jenni?"

"The girl at the halfway camp? I believe that was her name."

"Uh, yeah," Zhair'lo hemmed. "What about her?"

"Notice anything odd? I only ask because you were the only ones who managed to stay conscious."

Lyric had still not looked up from his papers.

"She showed up late was all."

'Keep things simple,' echoed into his head from far away.

There was a pause as the tall man finished up reading a document and levelled his eyes at Zhair'lo.

"They're investigating," he said, jerking his head in the general direction of the Temple. "On account of 22 women and men falling unconscious. They imagine some sort of poison in the air, though no one has found any such thing near our Halfway Camp."

Lyric had asked no question, so Zhair'lo could only gaze steadily back at the man and pretend to be dumbfounded.

"Tell me what you remember."

Zhair'lo looked over Lyric's head as if that would help him to recall the details, although all he really wanted to do was avoid having to lie while directly staring into the man's eyes.

"She showed up later than the rest of the women," Zhair'lo said, keeping his voice as steady as possible. "Called my name, as if it mattered to her or something. We went back to my tent. Did it three times."

He levelled his eyes back to his Master.

"You don't remember anything odd? Any sense of being lightheaded or dizzy?"

Zhair'lo shook his head. This he could answer honestly.

"Except for that feeling you always get in the mesh," he replied with a shrug.

Lyric paused thoughtfully.

"Did you mesh with her fairly early on?"

"I don't know. Maybe? Do older people wait longer than young people?"

Lyric let out a breath that might have an aborted laugh.

"Possibly that saved you from whatever happened to the others," Lyric explained. He waved his hand over the papers at his desk. "No one else had meshed yet, you see."

The large man shrugged.

"It's a problem for the women to solve," he said with a note of finality. "We're Hunters, not scientists."

Zhair'lo relaxed at this, though he was careful not to let out anything obvious like a sigh of relief.

"I believe, however, that you came here for some other reason," Lyric said, his voice trailing a bit high at the end, almost as if it was a question.

The moment of truth, then. Zhair'lo took a breath.

"I want to join the Fighters," he blurted out.

Another small breath of air escaped through Lyric's nose. It might have been something like surprise this time, though Zhair'lo had never seen the man taken off guard by anything, but it came out more like cynicism; an audible version of a shrug.

"A little early," was his first, dry remark.

"Kenji said I was too young, too," Zhair'lo began his defence. "I want -"

"Oh, not that, boy," Lyric gently cut him off, his tone that of a very old man speaking with exaggerated gentleness to his youngest apprentice. "It's just that the women had figured it would be six more weeks before you'd go off to the edge of the city."

"What?"

"Oh, yes. Don't ever think for a moment that they don't have you figured out top to bottom and front to back," Lyric confided. "Because they have. They were just a little off on their prediction this time."

Zhair'lo was staring at Lyric with his mouth hanging half open.

"They told you that I would want to join the Fighters," Zhair'lo stammered.

"Indeed," Lyric seemed to take a bit of pleasure in watching the younger man's shock. His speech took on a rhythmic cadence, as if he was reading from a scroll. "If you did not leave voluntarily in the next two months, I was to encourage you to do so. You see, the Fighters only take volunteers."

Zhair'lo's eyes were now on his hands in his lap.

"They want me to become a Fighter," he muttered in astonishment.

It was crazy on the face of it. The last thing the Temple should want was to teach him how to handle even more weapons, but there it was. This all hinged on believing Lyric, but Zhair'lo had no reason to distrust the man. The only conclusion was that the Temple had wanted him to know how to kill things using a bow and, that having been accomplished, also wanted him to learn specifically how to kill other human beings.

They still trusted him, in spite of everything. They believed in their test and he had passed it. End of discussion, apparently.

"The question is whether or not you want to be a Fighter," Lyric intoned.

Zhair'lo perked up, for this was not some idle enquiry. His Master meant something else by this.

"I ... said I did," he answered hesitantly.

"I have no intention of doing the Temple's bidding in this matter," Lyric explained, his voice going dark and just a bit haggard. "I will not encourage, cajole or browbeat you into choosing that vocation. Were it any other assignment, I would follow their instructions, but not this."

Zhair'lo felt his body go cold. He remembered Master Harzen's lecture, oh so long ago, that obedience to every "request" and "summons" from the Temple was absolutely mandatory. Disobeying orders from the Temple was no minor offence, and here was a man – a Master, even – confessing to that very crime in front of his most junior charge.

He found his throat too choked up for him to say anything in response.

"The Fighters aren't like any other assignment, Zhai," he said, fixing his hard eyes on Zhair'lo's. "You can die out there, for one thing. You have to kill people, for another. Generally, they do a lot more killing than dying, so the odds on a long life are good, assuming that matters as much to you as it does to most. But you should know that the path of that long life will be trail littered with the bodies of those you've killed, and – barbarians though those dead may be - that's no easy thing to look back on."

Zhair'lo gulped, unable to tear his eyes away from the darkness he saw in his Master.

"For another thing," Lyric went on, "you can never quit. You might leave the barracks and attend to other vocations, as needs vary and time changes everything. But you will always be a Fighter. They can always call on you when there's a need. Your status as a Fighter, like the memories of the people you've killed and the friends who have died, will always be with you."

A sudden realization gripped Zhair'lo.

"You," he let out a hoarse whisper. "You were a Fighter?"

It was barely a question.

"Am," Lyric corrected sternly. "Are you paying attention? I am a Fighter. They can call on my bow anytime they like."

Zhair'lo nodded a quick and fearful acknowledgement.

"At least you're thinking now," Lyric chastised with a wry grin. "So head on back out to the range. Put a few arrows through a target and see if it bothers you imagining it's a man you're striking down."

The Master paused a moment.

"Striking dead," he corrected. "After that, if you still want to be a Fighter, there's nothing I can do to stop you."

Standing up, Zhair'lo offered a half bow.

"Yes, sir."

With a wave, Lyric gave him a final dismissal. When Zhair'lo was out of sight, he took a fresh sheet of paper, dipped his pen in his inkwell and began writing a letter. It was fortunate, in his mind, that the Queen of Sweetness wouldn't be able to sense his chagrin in reporting that everything was pretty much going to work out exactly as she had figured it would.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 18



Beshenna

Kallidi, in her drab oranges, and Binyata, in her darkest blue, stood together in the long, shadowy hallway outside the open entrance to the Queen of Form's most intimate office."We've got nothing, really," Kallidi remarked, her eyes focused straight through the doorway to the where a woman with flaming red hair sat behind a monstrous oak desk.

"A warning," the Second replied, a look of chagrin on her face. "That's all."

Kallidi turned to look at her superior's face.

"You're disappointed."

"Am I?"

"You don't hide it well," Kallidi remarked. "But be honest. Whatever you'd like the truth to be, the evidence just isn't there."

Binyata took a deep breath and let out a sigh. She glanced back down the hallway through which they had entered into the Queen's Offices. Principia Form, with all its straight lines and taut banners, was a place that cried out for rules, demanded protocols and expected fair trials driven by high standards of proof.

"Endowment is right," Binyata said, turning away from those heartless straight lines. "We can't prove it, but she's right."

"You want it to be true," Kallidi dared to say, a note of accusation in her voice.

It was a tasteless gesture, really, accusing her superior of following emotion over evidence. She should have received a dressing down for her attitude.

Instead, Binyata let her eyes slide over the Officer lightly before she returned her gaze to the room ahead of them. There sat the Queen, looking slightly awkward in the odd shades of red she always had to wear to offset her complexion and hair colour, discussing some document or other with a handful of orange-clad Officers.

Kallidi looked up at her again.

"What are you going to tell her?"

"Let me ask you, Kallidi," Binyata spoke very slowly, in the manner of nursery teacher.

Somehow, that particular chiding tone made the question an even worse insult than what Kallidi had just laid on Binyata. The Officer barely managed to keep herself from taking a step back.

"I would tell her only what we can prove."

"So, nothing, then."

"Hardly nothing."

"Nothing we can prosecute," Binyata corrected, waving a hand to make the modification a trivial thing; causing Kallidi feel like a child again.

Indignantly, Kallidi turned to face down the length of the dark hallway once more, facing her Queen.

"It's the truth," she said, chin ticked up.

"Oh, indeed."

Kallidi felt slapped once more

"But I'm not in charge of this investigation," she said, still determined to save some kind of face, or at least keep her superior from doing something dumb. "What will you do?"

"I will -"

But Binyata's intentions were not to be announced in advance, because the warden just outside the door rapped the butt of her spear against the dark, wooden floor.

"Her Highness will see you now."

All further conversation quelled, the two women marched through the arched doorway into the brightly lit room beyond.

"Thank you," Binyata said.

One of the previous Queens of Form, some decades ago, had taken the opportunity to remodel the room along slightly different lines from the rest of Form. Instead of the rough, dark oak floorboard and panels that were the standard throughout this corner of the Temple, Principia Form had been done in a much smoother, lighter grade of wood. It made the place stand out, relatively speaking, but it also made it a breath of fresh air after waiting in the darkened hallway.

Consequently, the Queens of Form had always found that their visitors were quite relieved to step into this particular office.

The Queen chose to reinforce that feeling of comfort today by standing to receive her guests and putting them at ease with a kind smile on her face.

"Binyata, Kallidi," she called out, her voice making the address into a song. "Come around the desk."

The two women bowed, synchronized perfectly as they had been taught, and made their way around the desk as the Officers who had been attending the Queen swept past them.

"Chandra," the Queen spoke quietly, still standing. "Clear the room, please."

It was a simple command, made completely innocuous by the inflection in the Queen's voice. The door warden moved to obey in that quick but graceful way that appeared casual and unrushed.

"Attendants," the warden ordered.

Girls in knee length white skirts were almost like wall hangings. No one ever paid them much attention until a message needed delivering or some item needed fetching. At that point, a woman of high rank simply snapped her fingers and the next in line would jump forward to obey without a moment's hesitation. There were always such girls in any office, usually a pool of them shared by a number of women with real work to do. It was considered a sort of apprenticeship, so that younger ones could watch their experienced elders and see how things were done.

In a Queen's Office, however, there were perpetually six such Virgins, prepared for any manner of duty, and all came to attention at the Warden's call.

"Clear the room," the warden announced, knowing that it was her job to be loud where her Highness preferred to speak softly.

The Virgins, less graceful than their minder, quickly trotted out into the hallway with the warden, who pulled the heavy doors closed behind her.

Once the doors were sealed shut, the Queen's demeanour became considerably colder. She sat in her wooden chair and crossed her legs.

"What have you to report?"

Kallidi turned a nervous eye towards her superior.

"The Queen of Endowment, though fervent in her allegations, has no evidence," Binyata replied, keeping her voice as devoid of emotion as possible. "We have followed every lead Her Highness has offered, traced every child that we can trace. There is nothing we can take before an Adjudicate or Tribunal of any kind in order to prosecute either the Goddess herself or any member of the Discipline of Pussy."

Form, her face utterly passive and her body completely still, considered this for a moment.

"What have you discovered?"

"On very rare occasions, there are what appear to be errors in the records. That is all."

The Queen stared, not at Binyata, but into the space between her and Kallidi.

"Of what sort?"

"A child recorded as deceased will turn out to be alive," Binyata said. "In other cases, infant nurseries will appear to be processing more clothing, milk or bedding than is appropriate for the number of infants that are supposed to be present."

"No one is aware of your investigation?"

This question, delivered absolutely deadpan, was the most critical.

"No, Highness," Binyata replied, mirroring her superior's neutral tone. "All of the collation was done here, based on records to which we normally have access."

The Queen stood up quite suddenly, brushed tresses of red hair back over her shoulders, and walked toward the nearest window. Facing away from her two guests, she folded her arms and gazed out at a sky composed of many of the same reds from which her body was made.

"What does it mean, Binyata?"

"Nothing, Highness."

There was the tiniest of ticks in the Queen's shoulders. It might have been the start of a laugh.

"What do you think it means, Binyata?"

This was an entirely different question.

"My opinion?"

"Yes."

"They're hiding babies," Binyata said instantly, her voice twisting suddenly with cold, angry denunciation. "Pussy has never given up its meddling in breeding humans. What they're up to this time and why, I have no idea. I'd need to be able to get into that basement."

"The records from which we have barred ourselves," the Queen remarked, a hint of resignation in her voice.

This stirred Kallidi from her nervous silence.

"Barred ourselves, Highness?"

The Queen turned around to face her Officers again, taking the chance to lean against the window sill.

"Yes," she replied. "Didn't you know? It was our own desire to wipe out nepotism. We pushed through a rule, with the approval of all Disciplines, that the genealogies be sealed against all intrusion. We wished that, eventually, even a mother should not know her children. If ancestry is anonymous, then every woman will succeed only on her merits. A brilliant and noble idea, was it not?"

Kallidi straightened indignantly, her eyes widening.

"Of course!" she exclaimed. She would have risen from her seat if only she'd had the foresight to be sitting. "It should be no other way!"

This was, for any woman in the Temple -- and Form especially -- as primal an axiom as there could be.

"But incest, Kallidi," the Queen hissed, using the full force of eleven Facial upgrades to give her voice the silken smoothness that brought forth an image of a snake in the grass. "What shall we do about incest?"

Kallidi froze, for such was the power of the Queen's voice. A Lesson was about to be delivered, and there was nought for a schoolgirl to do but wait for wisdom to pour into her ears.

"That was Pussy's excuse," the woman in red explained, her voice gone simple with sarcasm.

The Queen's eyes turned to the ground. One imagined that her vision was focused at exactly the right angle, were there no walls or floors to intervene, to stare directly into that distant trove of records.

"They needed to prevent incest. So the records are kept, in giant vaults in the basement of Sweetness' Offices. These are carefully guarded, of course, to prevent women from nepotism and bias."

Half of a smirk came to the Queen's lips.

"Carefully guarded by the very women who should be watching over Pussy's shoulders, but aren't permitted past the gates."

She walked slowly, thoughtfully, back to her seat and took it once more, crossing her legs as before, letting the red panels of fabric drape off the sides of her chair to reveal great lengths of hard, muscled thigh.

"They preserve the safety of our genetic legacy," the Queen said. "So we let them be the only ones who are permitted to see the genealogies."

She closed her eyes as her right hand reached up to rub her temple thoughtfully. 

"What a mistake that was," she concluded.

-----------===================-------------

Gern

While Beshenna's Queen of Form was busy plotting her way through the subtle, internecine warfare of her city's Temple, the woman who held the same position in Gern had other things on her mind -- and her body.

Draped upon her hard, beautiful shape were the limbs of a Master Fighter, Commander of all military forces in the city of Gern, Kendrick himself.

On her mind was his odd behaviour.

Certainly he'd done his job. They'd had sex twice already -- once facing each other and the second time from behind so she could enjoy the full luxury of his tremendously strong hands striking her cheeks time and again.

And yet, something was missing. There was a certain feeling coming from the man that just didn't fit. There was a resistance or a hesitation, perhaps even a lack of confidence.

She had certainly seen that sort of thing among those she Served in her bed. It was often daunting, especially for the first-timers, to be called to the quarters of a Queen. There was a long walk from the gate, full of anticipation and anxiety, before she even saw them. She knew that sort of thing could take its toll.

None of that had ever managed to interfere with her plans. There wasn't a man in the world she couldn't bring to erection with her tongue, no matter how shy or nervous. In a moment, she would use those very skills to bring Master Kendrick around for his third go. How should they do it this time? Should she be on top? There was no need to limit him to his hand, either, as far as that sort of thing went.

But what of his strange attitude? She was a Queen, with thirty three upgrades in Form -- including the eleven that made a Perfection of Facial. She knew when things were going on behind people's eyes.

She tilted her head so her cheek rested against his as they both looked toward the ceiling. She set her voice with just the right amount of awe and a touch of playfulness.

"Tell me of your work, Master Fighter," she whispered.

It was flattery of the highest kind, for a Queen to address a man not by his name but by his rank.

"Our soldiers are strong," he said, softly rolling his 'r's in that odd brogue he'd brought with him from the far north. "Lean and resilient."

And again, the tone was wrong. It should have been brash, resilient and full of pride. Instead, the voice was flat, almost uncertain, even a touch defensive.

The Queen paused uncertainly.

"You will find the lads ready for anything," he went on, like a teacher describing her students. "When I came to Gern, they had not the wit to take down a pack of barbarians without taking great casualties themselves."

He paused a moment before inhaling and puffing his chest out just slightly.

"Today they are competent. They go where they wish, their eyes always open. They survive their battles, capturing whom they can, killing those they must."

Entranced, the Queen listened to his deep, rolling voice describe the history of the military forces since he had taken command almost a decade ago. She had not been a Queen then, for no women could hold so many Perfections for so long. Coming up through Tight, she had been wearing Officer's orange when Kendrick had arrived. She'd seen him then, when the assembled forces of the city had greeted their new Commander, and she'd been impressed with the cold, dangerous competence in his eyes.

The woman who had been running Form at the time had introduced him, explaining that he came fresh from the North, that mystical place where the weather could turn so cold women covered themselves neck to ankle for many weeks of the year. And not just the North, but the Frontier, where armies of organized men still attacked Temples.

When she'd first looked upon the man, she'd seen all of that, for he had walked every step with that experience at his back and legions of dead haunting his eyes.

She'd never forgotten that stark, bold first impression.

The man still walked that way to this day, and deserved every hint of bravado he carried.

In the months that had followed that arrival, and not without an indecent amount of caterwauling from the rank, file and Offices, he had torn apart their military structure and built it anew. His purpose in coming to Gern had been the passing on of what the Frontier had taught him of fighting.

When the complaining had ended, the men were better drilled, fitter and ten times less likely to die in combat. Most importantly, they now trained with the women, instead of being thrown together moments before a patrol.

Those protests had been memorable. Oh, the Protocols! Men and women sleeping in the same barracks? Women Serving arbitrarily as mission details permitted? And what of all the rituals Kendrick had brought with him from the North? The units were cohesive, but at what cost in perversion of the natural order?

The Queen smiled at the memory. She'd been just low enough in rank to participate in a few of those "perversions".

No one doubted Kendrick now.

She, on the other hand, had never doubted him in the first place.

This was why he came so often to her bed. There were rules about such things, of course, Monogamy being the curse word that it was. So she obeyed the rules and used her authority as a Queen to call him just slightly less often than was allowed, keeping a margin just for the sake of propriety.

Still, she looked upon him with a tinge of possessiveness that brought her a certain nagging guilt which occasionally had to be expunged.

She prompted him now, with little noises, and listened sweetly as he described those first, pitched battles with roaming barbarians. He spoke of how disappointed he had been at the sloppiness of Gern's soldiers, how such carelessness would have seen whole units obliterated had they been forced to fight at the Frontier.

He went on to tell of the methods he had used to select new leaders and train them to train others, how he'd built up his soldiers into the force they were today.

She knew the whole story by heart, having lived it, but hearing him tell it from his point of view, with that touch of pride and mysterious sadness he'd brought with him today, made it seem new again -- made her feel young again - like a Virgin taking the first mandated history lessons.

"You have saved many lives, Master Fighter," she said, when the telling was done, and there was no need to pitch her voice, for her expression of awe was a thing of honesty.

"Aye, Highness," he said, his voice a distant, rumbling thunder. "That I have."

She felt suddenly giddy with excitement, remembering who she had been and the thrill that Officer would have felt to know that she would someday be a Queen sharing her bed with the great man she had just met. How old had she been? Twenty five or twenty six? He had been thirty, but the darkness in his eyes had given him so many more years.

With a quick kiss on his forehead, she began sliding down the bed towards his flaccid member. Rising on all fours, she let her breasts swing over that manhood, the nipples grazing him lightly. She supposed, if she wanted, she could bring him back up with those. There was a bit of milk in them yet, as women with so many Endowment upgrades always kept themselves up, given its medicinal value. Fed to a man, or squeezed out over his penis, it could prove quite useful.

This Queen, however, was of Form and while she was certainly willing to use her breasts and their milk to Serve the men in her bed, her pride on her behalf of her Division always directed her elsewhere.

Where the breasts had been, the mouth went, taking in that soft member and swirling it inside. She tasted their previous encounters, the semen, sweat and the tang of her own juices. The magic that was her Perfection began to work and she heard Kendrick sigh as she felt him harden in her mouth.

This was satisfying to her, that all the work she had done to attain this rank and these upgrades was put to the use of Serving the man she had long considered the best of all of them.

When his erection reached what she knew by long experience to be its full size, an urge struck her so strongly that she almost carried through. What a surprise it would be for him if she took him all the way? Grasping the base of his shaft, for he was too long to fit entirely in her mouth no matter how she angled her neck, she began stroking him gently.

Could she? Queens didn't really do that sort of thing, leaving the mouths full of semen to other women sent to reward particularly Heroic men on the eve or conclusion of some great deed.

But what of this man? Was he not one of the greats? Had he not earned it? And who better than she to make that judgement and deliver the prize?

She paused in her stroking.

There was, after all, that other urge to take care of. That had to go first, all things considered, didn't it? Perhaps if he was able to go a fourth time, she could deliver that special treat. If not, he would be back in a few months, wouldn't he?

She slid him out of her mouth, giving one last, long lick to the swollen head of his shaft.

"Up," she said to him, for that word was all that was needed between two who had shared a bed so many times.

"I can never un'erstand, Highness," he said with a shake of his head. "How this works for you without the mesh."

"Fret not, my dear Master Fighter," she replied smoothly. "My needs are unlike yours."

It was not the first time she'd ask him to do this, so he knew well where to find the device she needed. It was always in the top drawer of the nightstand by her bed, neatly curled up. She took her place with her feet on the floor, leaning her sweat tacked upper body over the rumpled, red sheets.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 18



"Six, Highness?" he asked.

"As always."

This was her punishment.

Though she was following the law, sheet and line, there was no doubt that she was violating the spirit of the Protocol. In her mind, there was a part of her that rationalized calling this man to her bed again and again as the privilege of her rank. Was she not a Queen? Did her plethora of toggles not grant her some bonus? Was her life not shortened by the weight of so many Perfections on her body? Even on her soul? Did that responsibility not bear down on her shoulders so massively that she deserved a little breathing room here and there?

That was what she told herself when she sent off the scroll to schedule him for Service in her bed.

But when he was here, and she was enjoying the person he was, it felt different. Theirs was an odd -

An odd what? Her brain had stopped, trying to find a word for how she felt about him. There was a kind of bond between them, the two great warriors male and female. It meant something to her and yet her lengthy education in the vocabulary of the Temple had left her without a word to describe the association she had with this man who now gently rested the tail of a whip across her rear.

The word was no matter, was it?

Of course not. The point was that once he was in her bed, she began to feel that she was abusing the system, that she was taking advantage of her rank to do what women should not be doing. As the Queen of Form, she knew well the problems an outbreak of Monogamous sentiment could cause.

Consequently, the Queen of Form felt guilt. And as there was no one in a position to judge her -- or at least no one who would adjudicate her as guilty given the evidence - she called herself guilty based on what she knew in her heart to be true: this man was one she brought to her bed repeatedly for she desired to Serve him more than any other.

"Begin," she said. "And do not go easy."

"Of course not, Highness," he rolled.

She inhaled, tightening the muscles of her legs and thighs as the whip sang through the air. Given her many upgrades, it would take a whip of a considerably thicker grade to cause her serious pain. One with barbs might do it. It would be hard to convince the Master Fighter that this was sex play, however, if she started bleeding. Blood, the Temple had long made it understood, was entirely inappropriate in such a setting.

But without either a barbed whip or something of a higher grade, there was little chance to inflict the pain that she deserved. The best she could do was what she had already done by tensing up every muscle from her waist down.

The whip cracked off her rear and a thrilling shiver of pain went up her spine as she felt sweat fleck off her flesh to land upon her back and run down her legs.

"Again!" she ordered.

Kendrick was true to his word, slashing with the might one expected of man who had built his body to be a killing machine.

She let out a moan. It wasn't really pain she felt, not yet. These punishments, at least for the magically toughened skin of the women of Form, had always been more about the humiliation than the pain. That consideration went through her mind as the third strike kissed her flesh. What could be more shame inducing to a Queen than to be whipped like this? And by a man of all things?

Stretching out her arms and writhing in the blankets, she called for the whip again and again.

'It's nothing but what I deserve,' she thought. 'For I have found a way to skirt the rules to have what other women can not be trusted to have.'

"Last one," she said, inhaling deeply to savour the moment. "Give me everything."

Despite his exhaustion, and the concentration of his blood below his waist, Kendrick managed to deliver one last blow.

Mortification complete, the Queen rolled over on her tender rear as quickly as he could and pulled her man to her. His erection was still strong, as she knew it would be -- the work of a Queen easily stood the test of such a short period of time. There was no need to wait, either, for she also held near Perfection in Within and Lips, and could make herself wet at will. Not that such effort was required this night.

For her guilt was expunged, in advance of her crime, and she took this great man inside her, and meshed with him, her clouded conscience clear until the next time she called for him.

Without hesitation, therefore, she could enjoy the feeling of him inside her, the way she'd wished to feel him since the day she'd first laid eyes on him.

'Come inside me, Master Fighter, Saviour of our army, sword arm of the Temple. Plunge your sword inside my temple, and fill it to the hilt. There isn't a single word for how I feel about you. I don't know that I could find a way to describe it even if I had nine hundred words. But somewhere, I think, you know there is something strange and fragile between us, and I will not break it by thinking too much on it, or breathing a word of it aloud.'

Even having that thought in her head did not deter her when all was done and Kendrick lay dead asleep with his head at her breast. That face, worn down with the abrasion of his life's work, was suddenly peaceful and relaxed. So still was he that he had become his own statue, save the telling clue that he didn't shimmer with a coating of bronze.

By all rights, she should have gone to her private bed, for men and women came together for Service and did not share sleeping space. That way lay terrible levels of familiarity and a path towards the destruction of the rule of women.

As it was, there was no one to see them and no reason for anyone to know that they were done having sex. Not even Kendrick himself would be aware how long he slept in her powerful arms.

Half a bell she held him tightly to her chest, listening to the great man's gentle breathing and treasuring the moment of contentment, the time for which she yearned against the laws of the Temple that were her job to uphold.

She pondered whether she ought to wake him for that last gift that she wished to bestow upon him, the one act that a Queen with her many Facial upgrades could make more fantastic than any similar experience in his life.

Only one fact stayed her. For contrary to the confusion and worry he had shown throughout the night, he was now so placid that she could not bring herself to wake him, lest that disturbed aura take over his stern countenance once more. There would be another time for such things and it was better to enjoy this moment as the opportunity it was.

Time passed and there came a point, even with the strength of her illicit desires, that she knew she had to leave or else exceed even her considerable penchant for rationalization.

So the Queen of Form lay a last kiss on the brow of the Master Fighter and retired to her private sleeping quarters.

Alone.

-----------===================-------------

As the little slot in the Offices of Endowment had been empty today, Talla had the night off. She lay awake, her eyes closed against even the faint flickering of torchlight that snuck around the door frame and window shades.

With her body as relaxed as she could make it, she took a deep breath, held herself still and reached out with her mind.

'Zhair'lo?' she called, softly plucking at the thread that held them together.

Deep down, she no longer worried about breaking that thread, but chilling memories of the times they had torn themselves apart forced her to be gentle.

'Zhair'lo?' she called, more strongly now.

The thread disappeared off in the distance, as a road might. And just as any traveller on a road knew where the road was taking her, no matter the depth of night, Talla knew that her thread would lead to Zhair'lo, though she could not see all the way to the end.

'Are you there?'

He was there, alright, but in a curious state of passiveness and mental alertness. Images flitted in and out of his mind and through to hers. There were arrows. She saw lots of arrows, sinking into straw targets ... and the straw targets became men with faces of straw ... and the men bled and fell, their heads tumbling off. There was a mix of dread and curiosity as Zhair'lo observed them dying.

These were his dreams, she quickly realized.

Or, rather, she was experiencing his nightmares.

'Wake up!' she demanded.

Startled out of his recurring madness, Zhair'lo awoke quite suddenly. There was a foggy sense of disconnection for a moment as he seemed to be looking around the darkness of his room for whatever had woken him up.

'It's me.'

'Oh, Talla. I was sleeping.'

'You were having a nightmare. So I shook you out of it.'

'Thanks.'

There was a pause as he collected himself. She sensed that he was taking a breath or two, trying to calm his nerves.

'What was that?'

'Dead men. It's what Master Lyric warned me about.'

Talla learned then, of what Zhair'lo had been told, of the dangers that would come to him and the horrors that were due to follow.

'Looks hard,' she observed with chagrin, and choked back the instructions she wanted to send.

Don't do it, she would have said. Stay where you're safe

'I don't see another way,' he told her.

'No. Me neither.'

Zhair'lo wasn't a fool, even if she measured him by the standards of the well educated women of the Temple. He saw what was coming, knew it would be difficult and accepted it.

'You've had it worse,' he reminded her.

There again, from her own nightmares, that awful day when he'd been forced to whip her.

'No. We made that go away,' she insisted, pushing over top of her nightmares their last meeting in the clearing at the Hunter's camp.

'Oh, shit. About that ...'

'What?'

'We knocked everyone unconscious.'

'How!?'

'I don't know. That wave of energy we sent out. It took out everyone at the camp. The Temple women have been investigating.'

'What did you tell them?'

'They only talked to Master Lyric. He talked to me.'

'Did you stick to the story?'

'Of course,' Zhair'lo seemed slightly offended. 'I think Jenni must have, too.'

'She will. They're really serious about that bit.'

'Lyric seemed more worried about me joining the Fighters than anything else. He thinks investigating poisonous gases is a woman's job.'

'So we got away with it?'

'Far as I can tell.'

Zhair'lo drifted out for a bit. Maybe there was a noise where he was. Maybe he was just tired. Talla couldn't be sure.

'You still want to join the Fighters?'

'Yes.'

Unequivocal, that response was.

'How do you do it?'

'I'll find out in the morning.'

He drifted out again.

'What's wrong?'

'Falling asleep.'

She realized, at that point, how overworked he was. Hunting wasn't a leisurely trade, as so many were, and he was having to work all the harder for being new at it. He really did need his sleep.

'Good night, man of mine.'

There was faint sense of him wishing her well before she lost him for good. The thread was still there, no doubt, but there was no one answering at the end of it.

Talla sighed.

She needed her sleep, too. They were still teaching her how to loose a bow, weren't they? If there was one art she wanted to learn from Form, that was it.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 19



The afternoon sun beat down on a throng of exhausted girls as they wearily out of the square-embossed bronze gates of Form. Relief, if nothing else, was the emotion they held in common as the sweat from a day of military training soaked through their scant white clothing. Some were relieved to have finished with the gruelling physical activity. Others were relieved to have escaped the disturbing, guilt inducing aura that permeated the section of the Temple most known for its rigorous enforcement of discipline.

"Talla? Talla?" a shaky voice called out.

She spun around quickly upon hearing her name, before realizing that the enquiry was clearly being spoken by someone who didn't know her, for the tone of voice was that of a teacher taking roll call on her first day with a new class.

Talla grimaced. If she hadn't reacted so quickly, she could have pretended not to have heard her name and simply sauntered back to Endowment and soaked in a pool. Even if this was trouble – even if it was the whole affair with Jenni and Zhair'lo falling apart – she wouldn't have been able to dodge it forever. Ordeals, after all, were to be confronted.

The chance to run away had slipped by, so she faced the young Initiate craning her neck and scanning over the horde of departing girls in white.

"Yes?"

The Initiate fixed her eyes on Talla.

"Are you Talla?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"Mistress Tia wishes to see you immediately."

Talla was taken aback. Had she heard right?

"The doctor?"

"My Mistress is the Second of Within and also a physician," the Sweetness girl confirmed.

Talla disguised her sigh of relief as an entirely authentic sign of exhaustion. This was not a trip to Form.

She hadn't been caught ... at least, not yet.

"What about?"

"Not for me to say," the girl replied with a dutiful set of her shoulders. "I was only to summon you when you finished your assignment."

Since they were both Initiates, clad in the same style of tiny skirt and simple top – though Talla's was larger to accommodate her significantly larger breasts – they walked side by side.

"Is there a rush?"

"I hope not," the Initiate blew out a breath. "I've been doing nothing but running errands." She wiped away sweat that had been beading down her forehead and threatening her eyes.

Talla couldn't be sure of her own feeling right then. What could the Summons possibly be about? She wasn't due for any kind of check up, was she? She didn't think so. What else would a doctor want with her?

They marched through the Goddess's central triangle up the hill toward Sweetness and possibilities began to filter through Talla's head. Was this about that nonsense from the upgrade? Had they figured out something about Zhair'lo and her? Did it have something to do with whatever had happened in the Priming room?

Talla tried very hard to convince herself that this had to be a simple check up, following up on her quadruple upgrade. But this rationalization had more to do with the heat and her level of exhaustion than any logical examination of the facts.

'I'm just too tired to believe anything else right now,' she sighed in resignation.

The weary girls passed through the triangle-embossed, bronze gates of Sweetness and Talla found that her guide was leading her quickly through the hospital wing. Travelling down the hallway Talla spotted the room where she'd once helped revive Shen. The sight jarred her for a moment.

She did not want to remember Shen, lying on that table, grey as death and wasted away.

Wasting away, she reminded herself. Not wasted.

Talla had been in a panic then, knowing that she'd probably broken him that night. In her desire to right one wrong – of having escaped punishment where her friends had not – she had wronged another. She had selfishly forced her needs upon Shen, drawn the blood of her punishment from his veins, and damaged his mind in doing so.

Not her greatest moment, simply put.

Talla tried to shake it off, but pale ghosts clung to her back as she trod down the hallway.

"This way, Talla," the Initiate said, waving her through a narrow archway into the room beyond. "My Mistress will see you in short order."

It was a small, windowless space in which she found herself. No one would be foolish enough to light candles or torches on an afternoon as hot as this, so the only light was the many-times reflected sunlight that wended its way down the corridors.

Talla gulped. She sat, alone, on one of the four chairs which were the only furnishings in this room. No question which way she would go next, for there was only the archway back the way she had come and a heavy oak door – slightly ajar – opposite.

She found the heel of her left sandal tapping nervously on the floor.

'Don't think about Shen,' she steeled herself. 'Don't. Don't. Don't.'

"Talla. Is that you?" a mature voice called from beyond her door.

Talla inhaled stiffly, drawing as much courage as possible into her voice.

'I'm not guilty. I'm not.'

"Yes, Mistress," she assured herself that her voice absolutely did not sound like the squeak of a mouse.

"Come in, girl."

Talla stood, pushed the door open and entered the office beyond. It was a pleasant space, a storey and a half tall. The windows faced south but were very near the ceiling so sunlight shone off the north wall and softly lit the room. Behind a desk, half hidden by a mound of parchment sat a woman Talla well recognized.

But it was not the Second of Within who had called for her. Another woman, in yellow, beckoned her forward with a friendly wave and smile that seemed sincere.

"Hello, Talla," she beckoned amiably. "Please. Please, sit. We called you here because of Shen M'han."

Talla tried not to freeze in mid-step, but knew that Jora had seen her stumble.

"What – what about him?"

"Perhaps you could tell us," Tia looked up from her papers, a stern expression on her face. "Before you came along, he was an unstable wreck of a boy. Yinay ador. Unsuitable for upgrades. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Barely able to please his partners."

"My – my experience was the same," Talla said.

Gods damn it. Stammering was no good at a time like this.

"Was it, though?"

"He came in my mouth, entirely by accident," she defended. "He was ashamed – it wasn't on purpose, I'm sure of it."

"Had you Served him before?" Jora asked.

"No, Mistress."

Was the 'Mistress' necessary? It seemed safer, at this point.

Jora turned to Tia.

"She must have Served him, to know that about him."

Talla was taken aback by this. There was still some question of whether she'd done her duty that night?

"Indeed," Tia did not take her eyes off Talla. "Tell us, Initiate, what he was like."

"Ashamed, mostly," she looked down at her hands. "It took a lot of work to get him around for a second try, you know? But I couldn't leave him like that, feeling bad about it. I think he'd already had a lot of negative sexual experiences."

She paused a moment before looking up into the physician's eyes.

"We're supposed to help other people, right?"

The fierceness in Talla's expression surprised Tia so much that she blinked before smiling with amusement.

"Indeed we are, Initiate," she replied. "Go on."

"So I got him going, as gently as I could," Talla said. "And I rode him once, which went well because I could kind of control him, you know?"

"Control him."

Tia's voice was dead flat.

"You know, to keep him from coming. Hold off his orgasm?"

"Indeed, I know."

Talla gulped. Something had gone wrong here, but she had no idea what.

"So I made him come that way, and he felt better. So we talked for a bit – a long time, actually. It seems like he's had problems for a while. He'd come all over the Primers once and never gotten over it, I guess."

'Please,' she begged. 'Please understand that I was helping him. I was trying to do what you taught us. I was trying to Serve the one you assigned to me and make him better.'

"You though it your duty to restore his pride."

Wow. The women had read her well.

"As best I could," Talla drew herself up. "At least I could keep him from feeling worse."

"Did you Serve him again?"

"Yes," she reddened.

"Don't be embarrassed," Jora put in helpfully. "We've heard everything by now."

Talla cast a glance aside at the woman, before turning her eyes down. She'd really rather not talk about this in front of the doctor and her assistant.

"I got him to do it from behind," Talla admitted.

"Like a Form woman?"

That was uncomfortably close to mark, given what had followed.

"Yeah."

"That's nothing to be ashamed of, just because you're from Endowment," Jora noted. "You should feel free to experiment."

Talla nodded.

"It's also because my breasts are so big," Talla put in. "I hadn't had my Strength upgrade then, so they really hurt."

"And it was more comfortable lying down than if they were dangling?" Jora asked.

"Yes."

"There is something else," Tia hinted at accusation. "Something you do not wish to tell us."

Avoiding the appearance of guilt was apparently not in Talla's skill set. At least not today. What could she do? She was certain that it wouldn't be any good revealing what she'd done to Shen's mind. That sort of thing ought to be well outside her abilities.

She cast her eyes down. They knew she was hiding something, so she'd better have something good to hide, and it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible.

"He wanted to spank me," she muttered.

Both women twitched at this. She saw it in the corners of her vision.

"And you allowed this or did not?" Tia asked.

It was not an idle question. Men were not to hurt women, but what was arousal for both parties was always acceptable.

"I -"

She paused, putting as much drama into the moment as possible.

"I wanted it," she declared.

Neither of the women stirred at this statement. After a moment passed, it was Jora who spoke.

"That's not uncommon, Talla, even without a Tight upgrade."

Knowing she was in for it now, she decided to go all the way.

"My friends and I," she said. "Back a couple of weeks or so. We were – well – we were flashing our breasts at each other. They got caught, you see, by a couple of Enforcers from Form."

She didn't have to pretend to be choked up at that point. The images of that whole episode were burned into her mind as thoroughly as the whips had burned into the flesh of her friends.

"They were whipped?" Jora asked.

Talla nodded.

"And you were not?"

Her head dipped again.

With her eyes still down, she couldn't see what passed between Tia and Jora, but the rustling of blouses told her that they looked at each other.

"So," Tia concluded. "You thought to let Shen deliver your punishment and expunge your guilt."

"I made him spank me," she blurted out, faster than she meant to. "Forced him to, inside the mesh. Harder than he really wanted to, I think. Three times. He only barely held on. Then we came and after that he went to sleep and I left."

There, the whole of her crime was laid bare. She'd been guilty of getting M'lis and Adria in trouble for Jin Ree – for exposing themselves. From there, she'd tried to make things even but had only broken Shen instead.

Tia leaned back in her chair and looked over her steepled fingers at Talla.

"He still had difficulty withholding his orgasm the last time you Served him?"

What?

Talla looked up. Why weren't they angry at her?

"Uh, yes, Mistress," she replied.

"How odd," the physician thought out loud. "He is unstable with you, right up until he falls asleep. He sleeps for three days and when he wakes up, he is one of the strongest men I have ever seen. Do you know he held off two Initiates, determined to make him ejaculate, for almost an entire bell?"

Still stunned that she'd gotten away with her confession, Talla simply stared open mouthed at the woman in front of her. Didn't they realize that she had broken his mind? Forced him to go beyond what he was willing to do?

"We're going to give him another shot at an upgrade," Tia concluded. "The result will be interesting."

The physician inhaled and waved a casual hand at Talla.

"You are dismissed, young lady."

Talla bowed, not believing her luck, and stumbled out of the room as quickly as she could.

-----------===================-------------

When the girl had gone, Jora scratched her temple and turned to Tia.

"Mistress?"

"Yes," Tia replied, returning to the pile of documentation on her desk.

"What else do you supposed she was hiding?"

Tia looked up for a moment.

"Yes, there was something else there, wasn't there?"

She looked pensive, her eyes darting from one corner of the room to the other.

"Nothing important, in all likelihood," Tia concluded. "Probably something similarly juvenile. Perhaps she found having a man ejaculate in her mouth more exciting than she cares to admit."

Jora shrugged. Her Mistress was probably right.

"I'm more concerned about the other thing," Tia pointed out.

"Which, Mistress?"

"'Control him', she said."

"Indeed," Jora replied. "Can't any girl do that?"

"Not in Endowment they can't," Tia explained. "You and I, with our Within upgrades, could hold off his rush to orgasm almost indefinitely, or until we dehydrated at least."

Tia acknowledged Jora's wince with a nod.

"You gained that ability so long ago, my dear, you didn't realize what she admitted to being able to do."

She narrowed her eyes, looking through the open door toward the archway where the girl had bolted away. There was something odd about that girl.

-----------===================-------------

In a field otherwise darkened by a moonless night, a single torch lit the space around a pair of vaguely human shaped straw men.

Out of deepest darkness, an arrow whistled and struck, with a low thud, the straw man just to the left of where his breastbone would have been if it had been a man.

A handful of heartbeats later, a second arrow cut through the air and struck, two paces to the side, the second target.

Standing alone some sixty paces away, Zhair'lo lowered his bow and contemplated what it was that Master Lyric had asked him to do.

"See if it bothers you imagining it's a man you're striking down ... striking dead."

'But, Master Lyric,' he called out in his mind, 'there are no men I desire to strike dead.'

Were there any women?

He didn't think so, though that awful Form bitch who had forced him to whip Talla might rate an arrow to the knee, at the very least. He was honest enough to admit that he wanted her to suffer. He probably didn't want her dead, though, even if he'd contemplated the image of her severed head more than once.

Could he imagine himself putting an arrow through even that woman?

He tried to picture it: Sonja the Adjudicate coming at him with a whip.

The string was loosed and the arrow streaked, striking one of the straw targets very close to where his previous arrow protruded.

'Are you a killer, then?'

Talla had a way of popping into his head at times like these. She'd returned from a night of Service somewhere far enough away he'd only caught the faintest glimpse of her passion.

'I will be, I think, the way we're going.'

A wave of regret washed over him. He raised his bow, notched an arrow, and let it fly, sinking an arrow into the stomach of the second dummy.

'In the belly?' she asked.

'Easiest to hit the torso,' he replied. 'It'll stop a man just as well as anything else.'

'It's weird that you know that.'

'Yeah,' he agreed.

She was alone in her bedroom. He knew that, but there was no sexual desire in him right then, and she recognized it. They could have done something, together, if that had been the case. Gods only knew what sort of effect their mesh might have if they masturbated together.

Not tonight, though.

'I'm still going to do it.'

'Become a Fighter?'

'Yes. I'll tell Master Lyric in the morning.'

Zhair'lo's lips twisted cynically.

'He already knows, though. So do they. Sweetness has already scheduled me for a Seal Breaking tomorrow instead of a Hunt.'

No need to say who "they" were. Zhair'lo showed Talla how Lyric had revealed the Temple's plans to him.

'They knew you would join the Fighters?'

He confirmed this over the link, drawing another arrow from his quiver and setting it into his string.

'That makes no sense,' Talla told him.

'Makes sense if I hate 'em.'

'But they think you don't. They think you're loyal.'

Zhair'lo paused, just short of releasing his arrow. He hadn't really considered the ramifications of what Master Lyric had told him. He'd been so focused on himself that it had never occurred to him to think of the Temple women and their point of view.

'So they think I'm doing this out of loyalty.'

'Exactly. You're so fundamentally Heroic that you can't think of anything else.'

His lips twisted, this time in a sneer.

'They're in for a surprise.'

He released the arrow. It struck the dummy in the head, squarely between its two crudely drawn eyes.

-----------===================-------------

Maksa's eyes – her gods-damned purple eyes – were pouring over sheet after sheet of genealogical parchment. The riddle of guessing a woman's Discipline was, for her, long since solved. There were others, brighter with mathematics, who were busily applying exponential curves, inverse squares and quadratic functions to what she had seen instinctively, using some unfathomable algorithm deep in her brain.

That problem no longer piqued her curiosity.

Much more intriguing was the problem of the Catatonic, Enraged and Heroic. She could see how the women of centuries past had gone about trying to breed away the Enraged. Trivial associations had been noted.

They'd wasted decades, first of all, squeamishly trying to find some way to test men that didn't involve tasting their ejaculate. Having established that there was nothing better, they had simply taken steps to make sure women intending to have children didn't Serve any men who had tested out as Enraged.

A generation later, things had not improved. According to the records, they had known this in very short order. But they let experiment go on for thirty years anyway. Either the machinery of change was very slow or the women had let hope and pride cloud their analysis.

In any case, they had eventually realized they had failed. Even so, they had collected several generations of information. 

Sadly, their observations hadn't been perfect. Men who had tested as one category were retested and found to be another – the present Sorceress of Pussy assured Maksa this was an observational error. In the more rigorous days that had followed, it had been unequivocally demonstrated that men could not make such changes.

Maksa trusted the Sorceress on this, as least provisionally. The only other option was to spend years letting dozens of men ejaculate in her mouth and run her own rigorous experiment. A possibility for the long term, but it wouldn't help her now.

She spared a glance up at the wall, where she had hung that strange, beautiful gift from the Sorceress of Facial. Beauty, was it? She shook it off. There was a task at hand and she didn't want to waste mental space on a matter of artistic comprehension.

The observations those ancient genealogists had made had demonstrated that merely kicking Enraged men out of the pool didn't work. The male children of Catatonics and Heroics could also be Enraged.

She looked at the results of ancient studies, copied over time and again for preservation, and saw thorough charts listing fathers and grandfathers for six and sometimes seven generations. Whole trees, branching out, making no sense or pattern that Maksa could discern. Catatonics, Heroes and Enraged were mixed together in one man's family tree so thoroughly it seemed like the men were randomly chosen rather being his ancestors.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 19



Complicated mathematics had come into vogue, then, about two hundred years later. Scientists – genealogists – had tried to play the numbers, to make sense of the randomness, to find a piece of music where there was only the rustling of wind through the trees.

Maksa could see the temptation. Occasionally there did seem to be a pattern. A grouping of Catatonic men on one side of the tree almost seemed to lead to a Heroic after three generations.

She winced.

'Almost, but not quite.'

Something was missing.

But what?

She sighed.

Well, there was no use looking if she wanted to find something that wasn't there. 

Maksa closed her grey-verging-on-purple eyes and thought.

-----------===================-------------

Standing in front of Sweetness's small gate, Zhair'lo had to admit that the Seal Breaking Summons in his hand made a lot of sense. The moment that the Temple became aware of his intention to join the Fighters, they would naturally want to use his Seal Breaking abilities as much as possible. Everyone seemed to know the Fighters were given to long stints of work far away from the city centre.

'So I'm here,' he thought. 'Waiting.'

"Hello," a boy called out.

Zhair'lo sized him up. A bit on the stocky side, just coming into the confidence of his body but not quite there yet. He stood as if he was about to either spring at Zhair'lo to attack him or jump and skitter away into the cool darkness of the evening.

Faintly, at the edge of his consciousness, he noted the boy seemed familiar somehow. It had to be someone Talla had Served. He was sure it was no acquaintance of his own.

The kid looked up at the gate with a nervous kind of excitation.

"Shen," he said breathlessly, by way of introduction, without looking at Zhair'lo.

"Zhair'lo."

"You done this before?"

A first timer. Zhair'lo tried to remember when the sheer anxiety of being admitted to the Temple had seemed new to him. Feeling obliged to at least try to put the guy at ease, he softened his expression.

"Yes. Your first time tonight?"

Shen's face darkened, but only for a moment, like a cloud passing quickly in front of the sun.

"No," he said. "Second."

He turned to face Zhair'lo. Standing this close, Zhair'lo realized that Shen was both taller and older than himself. It hadn't seemed so, at first, such was his stance and skittishness.

"I'm sure I can handle it, though," Shen said, and all the firmness in his voice told Zhair'lo that this was not bravado but stark honesty.

Zhair'lo drew from this that the first upgrade hadn't gone well. Shen's attitude more or less prevented any discussion of whatever had gone wrong. If the guy thought he had it under control, so be it. He wondered if Zo'kar was going to show up.

"Done Sweetness before?" he asked Shen, who had turned back to face the gate.

"No."

"It's kinda neat, here," Zhair'lo said. "Nicer than Form at least, unless you get to do a Facial."

Shen squinted a moment before looking at Zhair'lo.

"How many have you done?"

"I – uh -"

How many had he done? He'd lost count. Maybe he could remember their names: Talla; Nadine; Anzha; Yua ..

Shen was looking at him, one eyebrow raised.

Right.

"A dozen or so, I guess," he answered, wishing that he'd actually kept proper track.

That got a wide eyed stare.

"At least one of each Discipline?"

"Yeah," Zhair'lo replied ruefully. "They did that on purpose, I imagine."

"Did what?"

"I'm a Seal Breaker, y'see. When girls can't seem to get their first upgrade to work, I go in and try again for them. So I've tried every Discipline by now because – I'm guessing – they want to make sure I can work on anything."

Shen was still staring, but a smile slowly broke across his face.

"Should I be impressed?"

Zhair'lo shrugged and turned to look through the gate.

"I'm a sledgehammer, is all," he said. "They want to make sure they can use me against any kind of wall."

That stopped Shen, at least, from feeling too envious.

"Seems like coming all over chicks would be fun."

"Yeah, it is," Zhair'lo twisted his lips in a half grin. "Plus, a lot of them come for a visit the next night."

This won a smile from the other boy, who even seemed to blush a bit.

"Here she comes," Zhair'lo said, jerking his head toward the gate.

"Huh?"

The gate was raised briefly so they could be beckoned in by a woman in a yellow outfit. Zhair'lo was a bit disappointed. He had been hoping to see the same woman he and Zo'kar had met the first time; the one in the transparent skirt. This wasn't so much for himself as he wanted to see the look on Shen's face,

"Come on, you two," she said. "The others are already waiting inside."

There was a visible change in Shen's attitude. It wasn't fear, exactly, but the bravado had disappeared quite suddenly.

"Y'okay?"

Shen only nodded solemnly, his demeanour having ticked completely over.

By the time she led them to the building Zhair'lo well recognized as the Sweetness's Augmentation Chamber, Shen seemed intent on biting through his lower lip.

Inside, in the little classroom they used for briefings, two boys his age were already seated, facing the front. They twisted around as the newcomers entered and Zhair'lo was pleased to see one of them was Zo'kar.

"Zhai!" he exclaimed as he rose out of his chair. "Good to see ya back. I've had to handle all the Seals without you. Where've you been?"

"Hunting," Zhair'lo replied with a shrug. "I trust you haven't screwed anything up?"

They exchanged a brief, back-pounding embrace. Zhair'lo was about to introduce Shen when the woman stepped up to the front of the room and rapped her knuckles on the desk behind her.

Now that they had some light, Zhair'lo was able to give her a once over. The yellow silk blouse, embroidered with gold floral patterns, covered a nice size pair of breasts, at least for a Sweetness woman. As well, while her hair was fantastically done and her eyes a brilliant blue, she didn't have the air of a Facial woman. Her attitude, in fact, rather reminded him of the stern Form women who had given him instructions in the past.

"We're short on time," she explained, "and this will be a heavy night, what with the four of you and ten more after that. Let's be about it."

Fourteen, Zhair'lo realized, was quite out of the ordinary. Someone whose memory he had drained had told him the average night was much lower than that.

"Zhair'lo, Zo'kar," she rattled off. "You've been here before and you know how delicate things are. Zo'kar will be doing a Within upgrade and Zhair'lo will do Lips. Your job is to keep the tips of your penises away from where they shouldn't be. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mistress," they replied in unison.

She immediately dismissed them from her attention.

"Jake, Shen. Pay attention closely. Sweetness upgrades are unlike any others. There's a degree of precision required here that wouldn't matter anywhere else."

Zhair'lo sat back next to Zo'kar, and watched as the woman discarded her skirt and spread her legs toward the four boys. It was tough to decide, Zhair'lo thought, whether to give his undivided attention to the immaculate genitals displayed in front of him, or to devote a small share of his brainpower to studying the shocked looks on the faces of the other two boys.

"Shen," she said. "You will be doing a Pussy upgrade. The Source will turn her hips, like so, to make it easier for you to rub against her pubic hair without touching the cleavage of her lips. Do you understand? You must not come in contact with her lips until you are certain you have Seized."

"Seized?" Shen let the query burst out of him.

Zhair'lo raised an eyebrow at this, but the woman in yellow went on smoothly.

"You can only hold one Discipline at a time," she calmly addressed both boys. "Once you have Seized to that one Discipline, you will be safe from any accidental collisions. At the start however, you must be careful."

The discussion went on and it became apparent that this was Jake's first upgrade, so absolutely everything had to be explained to him, from the Protocol for handing off the Synergist to the time and manner of bowing and finally the proper targeting of his ejaculation.

When the instruction was complete, she replaced her skirt and stood up.

"Sienna, dear?" she called to a woman at the door.

"Mistress?"

"Lead these boys down to the Waiting Room, please."

As they filed out, Jake looking far more stunned than Zhair'lo remembered himself being the first time this had been explained to him, the woman in yellow coughed very lightly, just enough to get Zhair'lo's attention. When he turned to look, she beckoned him over.

"Listen," she said, a hint of actual worry in her voice. "That boy, Shen, is a bit of a tough case."

"Some trouble with his last attempt?"

She jerked back in surprise, but quickly shook her head in what Zhair'lo knew was a gesture of concern over the time.

"Yes. We don't think it was his fault, but it caused him no small amount of trauma."

Zhair'lo tilted his head in acknowledgement of this. There was a part of him that wanted to know exactly what had gone wrong, but a much larger part of him felt it would have been a violation of Shen's privacy. Consequently, he said nothing.

"We're putting him third, just before you," she said. "Try to keep him calm. You should be able to give a man's point of view of how these things go, much more clearly than I possibly could."

"You think he'll have problems?"

She let out a breath of air.

"We're pretty sure he won't, but we'd appreciate you keeping his nerves down."

He thought about this for a moment.

"Why not let him go first, then?"

"What's that?"

Zhair'lo knew pretence when he saw it. The woman had given a false, panicked look over his shoulder only after he had asked the question. She was feigning that time was pressing in order to avoid answering.

He squared his shoulders and enunciated clearly.

"If you're worried about his nerves, why not let him go first?" Zhair'lo asked. "And why didn't he know what it meant to Seize, if he's tried this before?"

She twisted her lips, somewhat spoiling the beauty of her face.

"As I said," her voice soured. "The failure of his previous upgrade was likely not his fault."

The rushed look came over her face again.

"You really must get going."

'Not likely,' he thought. 'If we're number three and four on the schedule, we have plenty of time.'

But he also knew a few other things. The first was that this woman who had not even given them her name wasn't going to tell him anything more about the reasons for the upgrade order. The second was that he didn't really need that piece of information. The third was that, given how unimportant it was, there was no use pissing her off by insisting further.

With a shrug – because, oh, how they hated shrugging – he jogged off down the hall to catch up with the others.

"What was that about?" Shen asked.

"Some nonsense about Seal Breaking," he tried not to let guilt of lying show on his face.

"What's that?" Jake wondered nervously.

"Some girls," Zo'kar put in, "can't take their first upgrades very well. Just doesn't work. They call it being 'Sealed'."

"Oh."

"So guys like me and Zo'kar come in and we try a little harder," Zhair'lo added, wondering if this would make Shen more or less nervous.

"Apparently, it's a rare ability, this breaking of Seals," Zo'kar threw in.

Zhair'lo was about to add something about how Sealed Virgins were rare and they were usually thrown in after the new girls, since new girls went every night and always got first dibs. He caught himself short when something occurred to him.

How had it always been done? The new guys – the ones who had been chosen by their own Virgins – had normally gone first, hadn't they? After that, he alone or he and Zo'kar would do the Sealed ones.

But here was Shen, right in the middle.

Zhair'lo's answer to Shen's question echoed back to him: 'Some nonsense about Seal Breaking.'

He hadn't lied after all, except maybe the bit about it being nonsense. Something strange was happening with Shen. They were testing him for more than just his ability to control himself through an upgrade.

What was so special about Shen?

'Shen?'

That was Talla, coming through suddenly.

'What about Shen?'

'He's here, doing an upgrade.'

'He's the one who came in my mouth. No control at all.'

'Apparently he found some.'

Talla revealed to Zhair'lo her interview from the day before.

'So he's changed,' she thought. 'And they're retesting him. Good for him.'

'Not just retesting,' Zhair'lo answered. 'They're letting him try a Sealed Virgin.'

'Whoa.'

Talla disappeared again, one of them or both being distracted by external events.

Zhair'lo's attention returned to Shen.

"How ya feelin'?"

"Good," he said, his voice emotionless.

Zhair'lo nodded amicably, keeping his expression light and relaxed.

"Just try to keep cool," he told the novice. "It's easy stuff."

"I'm sure I can handle it," Shen said, though his nervous swallowing hurt his credibility.

The moment they passed out of the hallway into the little waiting room, Jake was beckoned straight through the door at the opposite end of the room. The other three were left to take seats on the benches with the much larger men who were casually chatting there.

"It's pretty straightforward," Zhair'lo explained to Shen. "Two girls are in that room between here and the Augmentation Chamber. They get you ready – and clean. They really want us to be clean for this, I guess."

Shen nodded. He would know all this already, wouldn't he?

"Anything you're worried about?"

Did it make sense to ask a question like that? Zhair'lo cursed himself.

"Naw," Shen said. "I'm sure I'll be fine this time."

They sat silently for only a short time before the Priming Room door opened and Zo'kar was called for.

It gave Zhair'lo a moment to think. If Shen really was attempting to break a Seal, it meant that there were Sealed Virgins lined up for tonight.

That spoke to a sudden rush, compared to the schedule the Temple had been setting, as well as a certain callousness. Somewhere out there, in another waiting room, were three Sweetness Virgins who had been stuck in the half-life of not-quite-adulthood. They had been denied the right to education and equal treatment with their sisters for weeks, if not months.

And what were the leaders of Sweetness doing? Testing Shen out on one of them? Did they give a gods-damned fuck about anything, high up in those Offices?

Zhair'lo had never actually seen any of the Offices, but he had an idea from impressions stolen out of Talla's brain that 'up' was the right direction.

He remembered Nadine and that Seal of hers that he'd broken so long ago. The anguish came to his mind first, followed closely by her compassion for those similarly trapped and ill treated. The pain and humiliation of that state had come so strongly through the mesh that her demand that he also free her sisters had hardly needed making. She'd merely had to point out the problem to get his assistance.

Through all of that, the path of his thoughts came back to Shen.

"You do look pretty steady."

"Yeah," Shen smiled. "Things have been going really well for me since Talla."

Zhair'lo tried not to twitch.

"Talla?"

Shen nodded.

"Take a deep breath, that's what she taught me."

"Deep breaths are good," Zhair'lo agreed.

"Got me through that weird test," he grinned. "After that, I'm pretty sure I can hold out against anything."

Shen had been tested?

"You planning to join the Hunters?" Zhair'lo asked.

"Huh? No. Why -?"

It was at that point that the door swung open again, smooth on its brass hinges, and the woman in yellow stepped out.

"Shen M'han?"

He nearly jumped off his bench.

"Yes, Mistress."

"Deep breath," Zhair'lo whispered a reminder.

Shen smirked, duly reminded, and calmly walked through the door.

Zhair'lo wondered if he'd done enough. The only oath he really cared about was the one he'd made to Nadine. He didn't feel any particular debt toward Shen, except maybe because the guy was a decent enough human being and decent human beings ought to look out for each other.

So what if the Temple found another Seal Breaker? He didn't see how the Temple gained any benefit from it, besides a slight increase in the throughput of Virgins as they were transformed into useful workers. It was a load off his mind, really, knowing there was Zo'kar and possibly Shen to back him up while he was off with the Fighters. How many Sealed Virgins were left anyway?

No, it couldn't matter, strategically speaking. For all the good that a Seal Breaker could do the Temple, Zhair'lo was willing to do it anyway. Helping Shen calm down, if indeed he had helped at all, had not aided his enemy.

It was, at most, a quarter bell before they called him through, and that was neither here nor there, as far as such things went.

The woman in the yellow skirt waved him in and was already leaving by the side door by the time he got in to the little tiled room.

"You know the Protocol, by now," she tossed over her shoulder, more than a hint of weariness in her voice. "V'shika and Lila will see to you."

It was fortunate, therefore, that he hadn't seen the two girls in white and that she wasn't looking at him when she said their names.

"V'shika?"

"In the flesh," she said. "I've found a job I really like at last."

Her expression turned a bit cold.

"At least for now."

"Lila," Zhair'lo said with a polite nod.

He had never figured out how to be courteous in these situations. It was best left up to the girls, really. Historically, they'd never been shy, and these two came through as well as any others. Their clothes were off in an instant.

V'shika, he knew rather intimately, was Within. With a glance at Lila's crotch, he was able to discern her Discipline as well.

"Pussy," Lila said, helpfully. "It's okay to look."

Rather proud of herself, then, she walked around behind him and led his hand to her patch of light, fuzzy hair while her companion knelt and made quick work of his pants.

"We'll get these back to you later," V'shika promised, throwing them on a bench.

Zhair'lo found that Lila was unlacing his shirt and pulling it over his head. This too was tossed aside. Had this been Form, the two Primers would have made a show of walking over to the bench and folding his clothes so very neatly whilst bent over at the waist. Sweetness didn't have such gifts to display; only Lila's fine hair upon his fingertips.

They nudged him over toward the shower faucet and the three of them were liberally dosed with hot water so they could soap him up and rinse him down again. As always, they were extra careful with his growing erection – both that it was tenderly handled and thoroughly cleaned.

"You never know," V'shika explained to Lila, "what Sorceress he might be rubbing up against tonight."

So V'shika had done this before and was training Lila? Zhair'lo, knowing V'shika as he did, knew that the girl was stroking her own ego just a bit, exaggerating the difference in experience levels. At the same time, Lila clearly was nervous.

"I'll go first," V'shika declared. "You towel him down."

With that, she knelt and took his already quite erect penis in her mouth. She was proud of herself, it seemed, having achieved whatever success she had found in her role as a Primer. At the same time, her shining adoration for Zhair'lo was clear in the devotion that blazed out of her eyes and into his. That, unlike her shameless self-promotion, was sincere and without exaggeration.

Lila was at his back again and he found her crotch with one hand while she wrapped her arms around his chest and nibbled at his ear.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 19



"Look at her down there," she whispered. "She's enjoying herself so much. Don't come yet, though."

Zhair'lo knew that much, though every single Primer he'd ever run into felt the need to taunt him with the reminder.

Lila switched ears, breathing heavily.

"At least give me a chance," she chided. "I've heard of you, you know?"

"Have you?" he breathed back, gasping as V'shika took him rather deeply into her mouth.

"Uh-huh," Lila simpered. "In the morning, I'm going to tell all my friends that I sucked you ... that I tasted a bit of you, dripping off the tip."

There was no sense of the word 'inexperience', Zhair'lo realized, that could attach itself to Lila. He pegged her now as one of those Admirer types, like that one who had come by the farm the night after Talla. What was her name? Natta? Was that it? Those ones made him distinctly uncomfortable, as if the fact his penis or his semen could do this magic trick somehow made him a better person.

'That's only how I was born,' he would try to tell them. 'It's got nothing to do with who I am.'

That line of argumentation had long proven pointless. He merely endured them, which wasn't hard considering that their devotion extended very well into Serving him in beds and showers wherever he might be.

Lila proved no different in that respect. She gave his ear lobe a last bite, whispered something unintelligible into his ear, and swapped places with V'shika.

This attitude, pervasive as it was, would never go to his head. The Temple had put him through far too many horrific things for him to ever develop an inflated ego, no matter how important his cock seemed to be. The only real difficulty, when he got right down to it, came in not abusing the power these women were surrendering to him.

There was Lila, who could probably make herself come right now with the tiniest bit of stimulation simply because she was so excited about inhaling his manhood. Girls like that would let him do anything. If he wanted some girl to take a load of his semen in her face, she would do it. He could spank Sweetness girls as hard as the Form girls liked it, if that sort of thing didn't almost cause his heart to seize up. He tried not to think about how far that could go, but he had to wonder if a girl like V'shika was really into the conspiracy because she wanted to be, or because Zhair'lo was and that was good enough.

He gasped as Lila plunged him far too deep into her mouth, touching the back of her throat. After a brief gag, she pulled him out.

"It's okay," she said, a tear in her eye, and quickly went back to work.

"Don't hurt yourself," he offered. "There's no need -"

But V'Shika was whispering in his ear.

"I've met your friend," she pitched her voice so low only he could hear.

"Ah?"

"We think we know how to stop it."

"Stop what?"

"The Ascension," she hissed. "The Synergist is the weak spot."

It was no place for laying out seditious plans, no matter how thoroughly entranced Lila seemed to be with her duty, but V'shika seemed unconcerned. Zhair'lo was relieved when the knock came at the door. Recognizing the pattern as the two minute warning, he wasn't surprised when the girls started to dress him in the brown fur robes he would wear for his brief walk through to the altars.

The robes weren't quite fashionable, but the women who had made it understood enough male anatomy to make sure there was good air flow and a reasonable amount of comfort for a man walking with a rock solid erection.

Lila, doing her part, went back down on her knees and stuck her head under the skirt-like lower part of the garment, ensuring to the best of her ability that his rigidity remained.

The last knock came at the door and the naked girls skittered out of the way just a moment before the door opened.

Zhair'lo had already known that their plan involved preventing the Ascension of the next Goddess, whenever that might be scheduled. Last time he'd checked, they hadn't quite figured out how to interfere with the process. As they had decided to avoid committing murder, for reasons of both practicality and squeamishness in equal parts, they had been stymied for some time.

But Synergist? What did he know of that?

Glancing around from one altar to the other, he could see neither of the chalices. There were two of them, weren't there? Or did they pass a single chalice around from altar to altar in the darkness around him? It wasn't something he had ever had time to think about. The stuff showed up; a woman spread it somewhere on her flesh; a man did his bit. It wasn't overly complicated.

He closed in on the left altar. As the Officer sitting there handed him the chalice, he started to wonder: where did the stuff come from? Was there a way to disrupt the flow of it? Steal it? There was an echo in his mind, a taste of an experience from Talla, of a moment of horrific panic and a brutal body search.

The message was clear: the Temple protected its supply of Synergist with a jealous and violent fervour.

The Officer quietly dipped her fingers in the Chalice and spread it deeply between her Lips.

At least, he thought, there would be no chance of accidental penetration on this one.

The chalice was out of sight already and there was little chance that he would be able to keep track of it while also occupied with the delicate operation of Seizing to the Discipline of Lips. With half his clothing whisked away, he was able to line up his erection with the syrup-coated and splayed lips of the woman in front of him.

She had carefully brushed her pubic hair aside and opened herself for him, so there was nought to touch but the innermost lips and her engorged clitoris. A light sigh of contentment came from her, and he saw through her thin orange blouse that her chest heaved with satisfaction. The blouse? He hadn't even noticed its transparency.

'Nice pair,' he thought, 'but not as big as Talla's, no matter what else you might have.'

He tried not to let his condescension show through. Any facial expression he might have made was likely lost in the wave of nausea that overtook him as the head of his shaft stroked up and down the length of the woman's bared lips.

With a deep breath, he held himself together until that moment, only a few heartbeats later, when his body Seized.

There. Clarity of thought was available once more.

"Good," she soothed, the first word she'd spoken. "Take a little bit more from me, just to be on the safe side. This is her third try, you know."

They didn't usually tell him things like that, at least not in the heat of the Upgrade.

"Poor girl," he tried not to let his derision show.

"I'm sure you'll take care of it," she replied, a bit of wary sarcasm in her tone.

Only a moment passed before the Officer, with a look of clinical detachment on her face, waved him off.

"You're good, now," she advised.

'I'm more than good,' he thought, 'I can see in the dark.'

He scanned his surroundings as he turned across the assembly of Temple women, all turned out in their finest garb. Where was the Synergist? There was no one behind the Source's altar save a lone guard with a spear in her hand. Behind the target, however, there was quite a crowd hiding in the darkness.

Attendants stood out, first of all, in their simple white skirts and tops. They waited with towels and clothing in their arms, all bundled up for the clean up and mass exit at the end of the ritual. Behind them, hidden more deeply in the darkness, were the leathered enforcers. Oh, sure, the armour they wore was the fanciest, most ceremonial kind: the sort that left mid-riff and entirely too much thigh vulnerable. Nevertheless, they were there and it was clear they guarded the chalice of Synergist, which was held by the one in the centre of their little group against the wall.

When he approached the smaller altar, the chalice was handed from guard to Attendant and then to the target where she lay.

Zhair'lo had, quite rudely, entirely forgotten about her.

She looked very helpless to him, taking into account not just the desperate look on her face but the machinations going on all around her of which she was probably completely unaware.

"It'll be okay," he whispered, taking the chalice from her hands. "I promise."

'A leaf on the wind, this one,' he thought.

She was thin to the point of waifishness, making him wonder if they were giving her enough to eat. The bones of her hips, bare as they were to him for the sake of his ritual, seemed to protrude a bit too much. Her dark brown eyes seemed almost hollow. Her hair seemed to have gone even more dull than any unupgraded woman he had ever seen.

"What's your name?" he asked.

Her voice was the faintest whisper he had ever heard.

"Deirdra."

The chalice went back into her hands and she placed it behind her on the altar. Very quietly, the attendant whisked it away and it was swiftly moved back into the hands of the enforcers. That told him everything he needed to know about the possibility of interrupting the Ascension of a Goddess. If this was the way they guarded a normal, every day portion of Synergist, Talla and her band of girls would have no chance against the kind of fortress they'd build around the magical syrup when it was bound for the future ruler of an entire Temple.

"Alright, Deirdra. Let's get this done. You ready?"

Her hands, frail though they were, took to his manhood very eagerly. He could see all of her strength was going into the effort, both to cup his testicles and to stroke the length of his shaft. It was a strange feeling though, for her touch was so light and fast that she scarcely seemed to be present. He found himself hoping that a draft of wind wouldn't blow through the place and knock her over.

For all of that, however, there was no contesting the powerful arousing force of the magic inside his genitals, nor the effort that V'shika and Lila had put into Priming him.

"Close," he warned. "Open up."

Deirdra nodded, taking the hand that was under his testicles and using it to spread her syrup-laden lips to him.

"This will work?" she whispered.

"Every time," he answered with a grunt.

"Go ahead."

So faint, that voice.

'Let my strength flow into you, then,' he thought at her. 'Take what you can from me.'

The tingling built up at the top of his spine. He knew exactly how much to fight it before thrusting his hips forward. He placed the head of his erection but a finger width from Deirdre's bare and open mound. Finally, with everything set as he liked it, he let his semen tear out of him.

There was a wet splatter as the first jet hit Deirdra's clitoris, embedding itself in the syrup. She stroked it deeply into herself, almost as if she was masturbating for his viewing pleasure. If he had mistaken her light touch for apathy, that error was cleared up now, for the eagerness with which she continued to jerk on him only increased even as she rubbed his semen into her flesh.

It was nothing to him, under her attention, to decorate her entire triangle with his ejaculate, even as she continued to mix Synergist with semen in a milky pool all over her mound.

Spent, Zhair'lo waved her off and waited.

Deirdra's gaunt face showed a level of weariness that went far beyond anything that could accumulate in a single night, even if he was to account for a whole day of anxious loss of appetite.

"Hot," she whispered.

He smiled.

"Told you it would work."

"Yes, you did," she nodded. Then added, with a touch of surprise, "Really hot."

"It'll be okay," he assured her.

The torches were being lit and towels were being handed around. It occurred to Zhair'lo, belatedly, to look for the women with the chalice. He figured that they must have already walked around behind the other altar, well out of his field of vision. It took a bit of willpower, but he managed not to crane his neck for them.

Instead, he turned his body toward those in the audience, still mostly shrouded in darkness and pretended to be occupied with wiping himself off. The pretence allowed him to look down at his body and glance quickly to the side.

There they were, huddled in a little group just on the edge of his waning, magical eyesight's ability to make them out.

So: one chalice; well guarded.

Good luck with that, Talla.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 20



Edited by the incomparable Mr. Ken Scades.

*****

The trick of meddling between an ascendant Goddess and her Synergist, a mystery Zhair'lo had decided to call "Talla's problem", was on Zhair'lo's mind for the entirety of the following day.

He wanted to commune with her in the space where the two of them could share thoughts, but found himself unable to do so. Most of the Camp had gone out on a large Hunt, leaving Zhair'lo behind on account of his Seal Breaking duties. With nothing else to do, he was out on the range, sharpening his skills with bow and arrow.

As there was no one to disturb him, Zhair'lo was at his most tranquil, the state of being in which he was best able to communicate with Talla. The problem was not on his end. 

Talla, however, must have been quite busy, because he was unable to reach her.

Zhair'lo's brain could only spin around in circles on the matter of the Synergist. They both agreed, along with Talla's fellow agitators, the transparent syrup was the key to the situation.

A woman, he well knew, needed all nine Perfections to become a Goddess. According to Talla, a Temple needed a Goddess to keep the magic flowing through her minions to the men of the city she wanted to control. When a Goddess died, a Queen would have to step in, get the six upgrades she needed to complement the three Perfections she would already have, and become the new Goddess.

"Ascension" was what they called it.

That was all well and good.

The point was that this required six batches of Synergist and six separate upgrades. That much was clear to everyone who cared to know about the subject. How many times had he been reminded that a man could only carry a single Discipline; that his body must Seize to the right Discipline during the upgrade ritual?

So there would need to be six rituals.

There were just too many variables, however, and Zhair'lo could resolve none of them without the knowledge that Talla and her friends were hopefully collecting.

Could the upgrades be done all at once?

He pictured six altars on one side of a room, a naked woman on each, with six men transferring magic to a seventh woman on an altar across the way. Could they go by turns, ejaculating on different parts of her body?

Did a woman require recovery time between upgrades?

The spacing between attempts at Seal Breaking seemed to suggest such delays were necessary, but there was no way the Temple women could allow month long intervals when a Goddess was ascending. If that they did, it would take almost half a year to make a Queen into a Goddess.

And what of the Synergist? Where was it kept? Who guarded it? How well? Were there multiple stores of it, each Queen or Sorceress with her own emergency stash?

Frustrated, he sunk another arrow in a straw target.

The verdict was simple: not enough information.

Zhair'lo was tired and his arms were sore. There was no shade out on the range and he'd been doing nothing but shooting for most of the morning and well into the afternoon. Deciding that enough was enough, he headed into the lodge hoping that Master Lyric would have something for him to do.

Past the neat little rows of short fences and flowers, he entered the building through its front door. There was Lyric, as always, in his small office, with documents in front of him.

"Anything I can do for you, sir?" Zhair'lo asked helpfully.

There was a pause in which the older man seemed to be choosing his words carefully.

"You look tired, Zhair'lo," he said, never glancing away from his documents.

"I'm not -", Zhair'lo started to protest, but was cut off.

Lyric did not look up when he interrupted Zhair'lo.

"I suggest you take a nap."

This was a hint of monumental proportions, but what was his Master getting at? Was Zhair'lo not doing his job properly? Was Lyric annoyed that the Hunt was a man short?

It couldn't be any of those things. As the Master of the Camp, Lyric's job was to be blunt in assessing those under his charge. He wasn't supposed to quietly harbour any ill feelings. What would be the point of that?

Continuing to read the document in front of him, Lyric raised one hand and extended a finger vaguely in the direction of Zhair'lo's room.

"Nap," he Zhair'lo entirely from his attention.

Zhair'lo twitched a shrug. What with the heat and his exertions, he probably could find a few bells of sleep. It wouldn't kill him to get some rest. Possibly, if he was very lucky, this extra layer of tranquillity would let him get through to Talla.

The afternoon was pleasant, so when he reached his room, he left the wooden shutters open. A soothing breeze played over the trees in the distance, causing the drapes to billow occasionally, and the fragrance of lilacs wafted up from the somewhere below. It really was one of the most refreshing places he had ever had the good fortune to live and he was going to regret at least that part when it came time to join the Fighters - whenever that was going to go through.

Zhair'lo lay on his back, calmed his mind as much as he could, and reached out for Talla. As much as he tried, however, she clearly wasn't in a state of mind to communicate.

Eventually, his exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep.

-===================-

Talla had access to no such tranquillity.

Today, the military trainers in Form had decided it was time to move on from the bow, with which she had shown a level of skill superior to her sisters, to the bo staff.

"In combat," the leathered commander intoned as she stalked across the line of girls, "your staffs would be tipped with blades. For today, it will be dangerous enough to let you wield a simple, tapered dowel."

Forming up in lines the girls did as a force of habit by now. Every one of them knew which line to stand in and how far she was from the front of that line. The fact that they were lining up in front of straw dummies mounted on wooden blocks, rather than stalls in an archery range, changed nothing in that respect.

By her reputation with the bow and arrow, the four others in Talla's group had long since decided to let her stand at the front of their line. Next to each dummy, holding a pair of sticks just about as tall as the girls themselves, stood an instructor.

"Should the Temple ever come under attack," the commander called out. "Your duty will be to stand on the walls and loose arrows into our enemies. In the unlikely event they breach our walls, you will take up a staff. Today, you will learn the simplest attacks. You will go over them again and again until they are perfect."

She heaved a last sigh, almost as if she was disappointed in them in advance.

"You may begin."

There was an instant increase in the amount of chatter as the individual instructors took over, handing the bo staffs to whomever was first in line.

Talla was no longer surprised at the change in tone. Where the commander had been all about bluster, scolding and a frankly frightening level of barely controlled violence, the instructors were much more like actual teachers.

'Okay,' she admitted to herself, 'more like the teachers who carried whips in their belts, but teachers all the same.'

"Hold the bo like this," the woman said, placing one of her staffs in Talla's hands. "The simplest move for you to learn is the thrust. If you imagine a dagger at the end of staff, the goal is to plunge that dagger directly into your enemy."

The instructor stood with her legs shoulder width apart and her right side toward the dummy. She pulled the bo back at chest height until her left arm was extended as far as it could go and her right fist rested between her breasts. With a sudden twitch, both her arms drove the staff point first into the dummy.

"That's the goal," she warned. "Don't expect to be able to land that straight off. One step at a time. Once you master the arm motion, I'll teach you to use your legs to get more momentum."

Patiently, she took Talla through the steps of holding the bo, keeping her fists clenched tightly, followed by the proper way to pull it back, holding it against the bare, upper part of her breasts, and finally the technique for crisply sending it forward.

It was obvious, Talla realized, that there was no aqueduct of knowledge flowing into her brain this time. Zhair'lo had clearly not imparted any skill with this weapon. Perhaps, when he joined the Fighters, he might have some advice to send her way.

As it was, she wasn't spectacular with the gods damned stick. She wasn't even good with it. The shaft felt heavy and awkward in her hands. The movement to take it back along her body and send it forward wasn't coming naturally - she kept wanting to swing it away from herself instead.

"Good for a start," the instructor said. "Rest your arms for a bit. Next!"

'Good for a start' was an exaggeration. At least Talla felt so until she looked around and saw that the rest of the girls were no better.

'This is how they've felt for the past several days,' she realized. 'Useless and uncoordinated. Robbed, by the Temple, of the grace and skill that should be ours by nature.'

Her shoulders were sore, but their tension dissipated while she waited for her second turn. When the bo came around to her again, she was a little better, but her shoulders got sore much more quickly. She was made to practice the thrust a few more times before being taught how to make a double slice.

"Remember, the goal is to cut with the tip of the blade, slashing sideways for the opponent's face or throat. Don't wait to see if the first blow strikes - immediately swing the opposite end back to other side of the face."

The Form woman demonstrated the technique, delivering two jarring strikes to the straw dummy in quick succession. She nodded to Talla, indicating it was her turn to try.

Attempting to use a bo was one of the most frustrating experiences in Talla's life. Here was this Officer, striking like death itself into the heart of the straw dummy, and Talla couldn't replicate her motions to save her life.

'Literally,' she thought, 'I literally couldn't do this if my life depended on it.'

If nothing else had ever made her understand that a frontal assault on the Temple, or even on a single Goddess, would be pointless, this would have made the point crystal clear.

The other girls, taking their turns, were no better.

'You've stolen this from us,' Talla thought. 'And you'll dole it back out to us, sprayed onto our bodies with a load of semen, if we're good little girls.'

She was a giant, unstoppable waterwheel through the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon. But it wasn't water that flowed over her. The entropy that powered her was the inexorable downward flow of a river of pure anger. She pushed herself past the point the instructor expected of her, repeated the motions over and over again until there seemed to be blisters not just on her hands but in her mind as well.

By the end of it, perhaps, she felt a bit better about her ability to stab an oncoming adversary.

"You seem quite determined," the instructor said, as they neared the end of the day's training. "There are many powerful warriors among Endowment. Perhaps you aspire to be one of them."

With exhaustion keeping her head down, Talla could only look up with her eyes through the stinging sweat that blurred her vision.

"Do you know Shanata?" she breathed back to the Form woman.

A knowing look came into the older woman's eyes.

"Many here know that name."

"She's my sister," Talla retorted, and stabbed the staff one more time into the straw dummy before walking to the back of the line.

The other girls gave her a wide berth as she passed them. Talla didn't care for that, but she was gratified to hear the next girl in line having to grunt with considerable effort to pull the staff back out of the target.

Maybe, just maybe, if she got angry enough, she might eventually get the hang of this. Her lips hardened.

Talla much preferred her seemingly natural ability with the bow and arrow.

-===================-

Zhair'lo slept through most of Talla's frustrating afternoon and was never the wiser to her struggles. Quite to the contrary, he woke up feeling refreshed and hungry.

When he went downstairs to the common room, he found that the rest of the men who had been out on the range were back inside. Because the main body of Hunters were out on a Hunt, the remainder of the lodge's inhabitants had managed to fit around one large dining table.

"Just in time, Zhai," Lyric waved him to the empty seat at his right.

Even though the gears in his head were just starting to turn, Zhair'lo immediately realized something was odd. The first indication was that dinner was well in progress and yet no one had come to get him. Nor did anyone remark on the fact that he was rudely late to the table.

The second, and far more jarring, oddity was that they had saved him a privileged seat despite his tardiness.

Zhair'lo's empty plate was passed across the table from one pair of hands to another so that it could be loaded with a broad sampling of the many dishes Is'ka had created for the evening. Fully loaded, the shallow wooden vessel was back on his place mat before he could even sit down.

"Eat, Zhai," Lyric advised cordially.

The man was an enigma. Normally so strict, what was getting him to relax the rules this evening?

Even in his slightly dazed state, munching down his food quickly in order to catch up to everyone else at the table, Zhair'lo found the conversation to be almost intentionally light. It was no more than typical Hunter talk. To discuss one's own exploits was not polite, so naturally the men were taking it in turns to tell humorous, daring or crude stories about each other.

For a moment, Zhair'lo found himself wishing Kenji were here instead of out on the Hunt. Kenji was the only one, after all, who knew a story about Zhair'lo.

He berated himself for a moment. That wasn't proper thinking for a Hunter, was it? Instead, he should be thinking of stories he could tell about others. Such was proper etiquette.

Though Zhair'lo racked his brain for such an anecdote, he could come up with none that involved anyone else at the table, for there was also an unwritten rule that stories are told only about those present.

As the plates were cleaned off, Zhair'lo having caught up, Is'ka disappeared into the kitchen. Lyric nodded to one of the men at the far end of the table, which was his cue to extinguish several of the nearest torches.

With the table now lit only by the distant fireplace, it was Lyric who spoke.

"Now, Zhair'lo here."

His words came in that mildly sarcastic, slightly critical way that always succeeded in drawing chuckles from those listening.

"He came to me out of nowhere, a red scroll and an assignment. Some kid, looking for something new."

Master Lyric was making it sound as if Zhair'lo had come to the camp by his own request. It wasn't that he had joined the Hunters on purpose, although he'd certainly taken to it once he'd seen the scroll. But he couldn't argue with the fact that he'd been looking for something new.

"I've seen all kinds of eager in my time. Competent and not. Flash in the pan and the slow blue flame of pure alcohol. I've seen a tonne of naturals come my way in the years I've been training men to Hunt."

A wistful look overcame the old man, as the firelight glistened in his eyes. There were, Zhair'lo realized, a great many more years behind those eyes than a normal lifetime could have put there. What, he wondered, had this man seen that so added to his age?

"It has not been my experience, however, to meet someone so young, so nimble and so thoroughly determined to make himself an expert at the craft that I teach."

Zhair'lo found himself suddenly captured in the gaze of those shadowed yet shining eyes. Unable to turn away, he merely gazed back at the man.

'What's going on back there?' Zhair'lo wondered at the old man's eyes. 'Am I disappointing you by leaving?'

For a moment, his resolve to join the Fighters wavered. Wasn't Lyric's Camp the perfect place to live? The room, the breeze, the camaraderie? Wasn't this what every man wanted? To take his ease in the evening after a hard day of work? To share stories of past accomplishments over a pint of ale? To wait for the arrival of women by night?

But Zhair'lo didn't want women. He wanted Talla specifically and he wanted to break the grasp of the people who stood between the two of them.

His will hardened, and so perhaps did his gaze, because Master Lyric's expression tilted to a resigned smile.

"We hear that he took a deer down by putting an arrow through the side of its neck. Here, gentlemen, we have a man among us who will take our craft well outside this house and deliver it far and wide."

The men greeted this with a rousing cheer and pounded their flagons of ale against the ancient and much abused wooden table. The mood lightened considerably as Master Lyric took his own pint in hand and raised it over his head.

"Zhair'lo M'han," he intoned warmly. "Long may he run."

Zhair'lo felt his cheeks redden. No one had ever raised a toast for him.

"Long may he run!" the men echoed back and everyone, Zhair'lo included, took back a draught of alcohol.

There was a short space of time, immediately following the lowering of the flagons, when Zhair'lo might have said something. 'Thank you', perhaps, or a longer devotion demonstrating his gratitude to Master Lyric and the assembled Hunters.

It would have been easy, given the dim lighting, to say a few words - any words at all - but he was interrupted as a hushed, expectant silence fell over the men and all attention suddenly turned to the kitchen entrance behind him.

A place was quickly cleared in the centre of the table as Is'ka passed a tray over Zhair'lo's head. Upon it were several clay dishes, each no wider than the palm of a man's hand and no taller than three of his fingers. Most notable were the low, blue flames that burned on the surface of each dish's contents, and the small blue sparks issued from underneath the flame.

"A little whiskey, a little sugar," Is'ka explained.

"Seems a waste to burn whiskey," one of the men remarked to a chorus of chuckles.

"Better to caramelize the sugar," the chef chided. "Sacrifices, sacrifices."

"What is this, Is'ka?" Zhair'lo wondered aloud. "I've never seen it before."

"Dessert, young man," Is'ka answered, sprinkling more sugar into the flames. "A recipe I learned from a traveller a long time ago. He called it a 'flambé' of some kind. I could barely understand the man, as it happened, but we both understood how to use a kitchen."

As they watched, the flames dwindled and burnt out. Is'ka handed the small clay pots around the table, starting with Master Lyric and Zhair'lo, and going around from there. Zhair'lo was surprised to find the container cool despite how long the flame had been burning in it. The surface of the dessert had turned to a glistening layer of smooth sugar.

"It smells delicious," Zhair'lo remarked.

"Dig in, then," Is'ka declared as he took his seat. "I don't make this very often, given the amount of work it is."

"And the whiskey!" someone piped up.

Is'ka shook a crooked finger down the table. "You're drunk enough already, boy."

The dessert was delicious, a blend of eggs and milk topped with caramelized sugar. Another toast was offer to the chef.

"Gentlemen," Master Lyric called out. "To the kitchen, so we can have this place in order before the women arrive."

Chairs scraped and bodies rose. A dozen men could make quick work of clearing a table and all were soon gathered in the kitchen. At Is'ka's direction the dishes, plates and pans were scrubbed, cleaned and dried in less than a quarter of a bell.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 20



"Just in time," Is'ka said as he looked out the window. "They look to clear the house tonight, I think."

Zhair'lo had to stand up on his toes to peek out the window over Is'ka's shoulder. He was certain he saw oranges and yellows but the scant few torches that dotted the laneway didn't cast enough light for his eyes to separate white cloth from yellow. Still, it looked like enough women.

The rest of the men were taking it in turns to quickly wash up in preparation.

"Good enough, boys, good enough," Is'ka waved them off. "Just let the dishes dry. Can't be hanging around in the kitchen when the women walk in the door, can we?"

There was some good natured laughing at this, of the sort Zhair'lo had always seen among men who knew they had company lined up for the night. The small crowd filtered into the common room just as a pounding came at the door.

It was the obligation of the women to push the door open. Since they were automatically welcome anywhere they went, there was no need for a man to "allow" them into any building.

The women began to casually fill the raised dais around the door while the men, a step down, waited around the fringes.

Oranges came first, followed by yellows and, squeaking in at the very last, was a gaunt girl whose white clothing was a only a shade lighter than her skin. Zhair'lo hoped the poor girl's complexion was a trick of the light - Deirdre really didn't look well.

He watched her carefully as the higher ranking women called out names. Deirdre never raised her eyes to meet his and the women around were discreetly keeping an eye on her, as if they expected her to ... to what? All Zhair'lo could see was an obvious aura of concern permeating the area around the white-clothed girl.

Eventually, however, her protectors had to call out the names of their own men and, with furtive backward glances, leave Deirdre and Zhair'lo alone in the common room.

The girl appeared to be panting a bit. Was she nervous? She stepped down from the raised entry and leaned against the back of the chair Zhair'lo had only recently vacated.

"Are you okay?" Zhair'lo asked.

She nodded, hesitated a bit, and finally shook her head.

"I think I didn't eat enough."

A reassuring wave of certainty came over Zhair'lo. Hunger, of all the problems that he might have faced this evening, was a situation he could remedy. Thinking back to everything he'd been told about being Served, he tried to remember if there was a rule against snacks.

"C'mon," he beckoned, and led her to the kitchen.

He looked around for something quick.

"Fresh bread with chutney," he announced, and pointed the girl to a stool.

"Thanks," she sighed, seeming to deflate as she sat down.

Eyeing the slice of bread on the small plate he gave her, she looked up with a bit of worry. "What's chutney?"

"It's like jam," Zhair'lo smiled. "It's good, really. I've been here with Is'ka so long, I've forgotten how many new foods he's shown me."

Brushing her short hair away from her face, she took a bite and quickly nodded her appreciation.

"Good, right?"

She mumbled an agreement and he watched as a bit of colour started to come into her face. From a carafe, he poured two cups of water - figuring she would be more comfortable if he wasn't just staring at her while she ate - and handed her one.

Zhair'lo pulled a chair out from the small kitchen table, set it at a conversational distance, and put his feet up.

"Bit nervous?"

"Yeah," Deirdre admitted between tiny mouthfuls. "I can't eat when I'm nervous."

He left unsaid that she must get nervous fairly often to look the way she did. What mattered, clearly, was that she was more relaxed for having actually met him.

"A lot of girls worry about their first time," he sympathized.

She swallowed carefully before speaking.

"Some of us worry almost every time."

"Oh."

"But you're the Seal Breaker," she asserted, as if that settled the matter.

"One of 'em, yeah."

"So I'm not your first virgin?"

"No," he reassured her.

Zhair'lo was working hard to keep his tone light and matter-of-fact. Whatever problems Deirdre might have, he wasn't going to solve them by putting any pressure on her.

She seemed to relax a little more as she swallowed little bites of bread.

"This is really good," Deirdre remarked.

"Told you the man's impressive in the kitchen."

There was another pause.

"V'shika said you were good to her."

"Tell her I said 'thank you'," he grinned.

"But V'shika's kind of odd."

Zhair'lo tilted his head in acknowledgement.

"I've found people only look normal until you get to know them."

"That's true," she said. "Are you normal?"

That hit a bit close to his heart. He dearly wanted to keep Deirdre from turning into one of the Admirer types.

"Except for the accident of being able to crack Sealed Virgins."

"Twelve thousand men in this town," she pointed out. "Only three of you who can break seals. That's not normal."

"I guess not."

She eyed him curiously as she chewed another mouthful.

"Would you rather be normal instead?" she asked.

Zhair'lo had to take a moment to think about that.

"Honestly, no," he told her. "I met a girl once - hers was the first Seal I broke. She told me what it was like to have to wait. I'm glad I can help and I couldn't do that if I were 'normal'. Whatever in the nine hells 'normal' is, anyway."

Deirdre drifted away for a bit, even as she thoughtfully chewed on her bread. Washing down the last of her snack, her attention came back with a sigh.

"It is pretty tough for us in there."

"I can only imagine."

As if for the purposes of experimentation, Deirdre hesitantly stood up. Her eyes still bore the slightly dark markers of several sleepless nights and her skin still seemed to be stretched too tightly across her cheekbones, but at least she seemed steady and there was colour in her face.

"Thanks for the food," she said, extending her hand. "I don't even know if we're allowed to do that."

"What? Feed you if you're hungry?"

"No," she chided. "Eat together. Men and women."

"Oh."

He'd been thinking of the rules for Service; about being indoors and staying in his bedroom; about second and third times around. But what she said was true. Men and women never took their meals together.

"Well," he said, grasping her hand. "I didn't eat and we weren't sitting around a table, really, so I'm sure it's fine."

He snuffed out the little torch in the kitchen and led her through the empty common room.

"Besides," he pointed out. "It's not like there's anyone left to catch us."

"You've been here a while?"

"A few weeks."

"Those men were pretty large," she said.

"Yeah, I'm the kid around here, that's for sure."

She paused a moment, stopping his forward progress.

"That's not what I meant."

"Huh?"

"I meant that you're new at this, like me."

"Oh, I guess I am."

Zhair'lo didn't think it was a good time to brag about bringing down a deer. Instead he quietly ushered her into his room and lit a candle on his dresser.

"What's that smell?"

"Lilac," he said. "There's a huge bush of it just under the windows."

She walked over to the window and stood up on her tip toes to look down into the darkness and inhale deeply. He could just make out the soles of her sandals under the length of her pure, white skirt. She cut a fine shape, with her back bare except for the laces that held her top together.

"I've never lived in a place this nice," she said wistfully. "You must want to stay here forever."

"I kinda do," Zhair'lo admitted.

She turned to face him and brushed her short bangs aside.

"There's nothing like this inside the Temple," Deirdre moved toward him. "It's almost like they want to make us even more eager to go out and Serve. It's the only way we'll ever see big, grassy fields ... or rivers ..."

Her eyes were downcast as she approached him. Part of Zhair'lo wanted to meet her halfway, but for some reason he just stayed where he was, just inside the door.

" ... valleys full of flowers ..."

She had worn some kind of perfume; a strong floral scent mixed with the chutney to form some intoxicating synergy. The power of it grew with proximity.

" ... or just a garden with fresh vegetables growing in it."

Deirdre was all but touching him now, her eyes on his chest.

Zhair'lo put a very tentative hand on her bare hip and waited for reciprocation. There was a very long, silent pause.

"I'm afraid," she said.

"Of me?"

"Sex, really; the whole thing."

"Oh."

Zhair'lo scratched his head.

"Let's sit down, then," he beckoned her over to the bed.

It took a bit of doing, but he managed to get a couple of pillows at her back so she could rest against the headboard while he propped himself up on his right elbow and faced her from the side. He hoped it wasn't too intimidating; she had the open side of the bed and he was against the wall.

Should he say something? Illya had been afraid of him, probably for reasons different from Deirdre's, but what had he said to her?

It didn't matter, for Deirdre spoke first.

"Sometimes I think it was my fault," she offered, staring over the footboard. "All those failed upgrades."

"You think you did something wrong?"

"Because I didn't want it," she turned to look at him. "I made it fail because I didn't want it."

"You didn't want to get upgraded at all?"

"I didn't want to have sex at all."

"Whoa."

She turned away again, twisting her lips helplessly.

"Yeah."

Zhair'lo had seen a lot of different attitudes in his short life as a Seal Breaker. Talla had tackled him. Natta had worshipped him. Nadine had shown up with demands. Illya had been afraid. V'shika had been turbulent.

But Deirdre ... she just didn't want to have sex?

That was a new one.

He harkened back, very suddenly, to that strange trial he'd been put through, chasing naked women around a track and being denied by them. What could he really do about this?

The answer came back very simply: nothing.

"Well, you shouldn't leave too soon," he advised, sitting up. "Otherwise they'll know."

Deirdre turned to look at him with a puzzled expression, a very strange effect with her cheeks so sunken.

"But you'll have to talk to someone in the Temple," he rubbed his chin. "I've never heard of anything like this, so I don't know if they'll let you just ..."

"Zhair'lo."

"Huh?"

She blinked at him and sat up so they were face to face.

"I didn't want to Serve anyone until you came along."

Before he could completely take that on board, she rushed forward to plant a quick kiss on his lips and backed away thoughtfully.

"Oh."

She hummed acknowledgement.

"Maybe I'll just let you finish talking," he concluded.

"Yeah, you should."

"Okay."

"I mean, really," Deirdre rolled her eyes. "To be here tonight, I had to specifically choose you, and pick the first possible night allowed ..."

"Should have figured that out."

Zhair'lo noticed, even through his mild embarrassment, that she had relaxed. Once again, they reclined in his bed. Deirdre went on speaking.

"I didn't want to have sex. And I kinda felt like I was pushing back against the upgrade. Every guy they tried on me just seemed so ... so ... uncaring. Or maybe just unaware."

Zhair'lo kept his mouth shut this time, letting only a slight murmur escape his throat.

"Then you came along. You seemed different. You actually noticed me as a person, instead of ... of ... I can't help but say this ... instead of target practice."

He felt his throat lurch at this, but kept his silence.

"Yeah, I know," she rolled her eyes again. "This is a hunting lodge, isn't it? You're an archer?"

Zhair'lo held back his mirth as best he could.

"Yes."

Deirdre seemed ready to laugh, but the moment faded and she was staring off at the wall again, her fingers steepled over her bare belly. She pressed her fingertips together, then bent her hands inward so the entire lengths of her fingers were touching, but her palms weren't.

Zhair'lo watched with concern as she forced the blood away from the already pale flesh of those fingers. He found himself unable to sit idly by and reached out with his free hand to touch her fragile digits.

"Easy," he whispered.

Deirdre closed her eyes and sighed. He felt her fingers relax.

"I still don't know that I want to be part of ... this," she jerked her chin up in the air. "Going out; Serving all those men."

There wasn't a lot Zhair'lo could say at this point.

Certainly, if there was ever a fruit ripe for the plucking, it was Deirdre. She wasn't happy with Temple rules, with protocols, or with the official doctrine for sexuality. She would make an excellent member of Talla's team. On top of that, this would be the perfect moment to make that push.

And yet ...

'And yet, I'm going to leave you be.'

It wasn't a difficult decision. Pulling her into the conspiracy would be shameless manipulation. Deirdre was weak right now and he would be doing nothing but using her if he dragged her along. Her problem wasn't with the Temple - it was with her own body, her own very fragile body.

On the one hand, taking the decision away from her seemed wrong, too. She was an adult and ought to be given the opportunity.

But he also looked at the way her body trembled, the pallor of her skin and the obvious fact that anxiety had driven her to near starvation. Those factors told him that he had no business even making the offer.

'I'm calling this one for you, Deirdre. There's way too much between you and your own health before you can start worrying about the rest of us.'

With that settled, Zhair'lo moved on to more immediate matters.

"Sometimes," he braved. "Sometimes you just have to take things one night at a time. One moment - one breath, even."

Deirdre turned to look at him with an expression that was somehow both stunned and expectant.

"Just forget about the future?"

"Just take the moment you're in," he agreed. "If you don't know what you want from tomorrow, then just live right where you are."

A blank look overcame Deirdre's face.

"So tell me," he went on. "What is it you want out of right now?"

"I -"

There was a long moment of silence in which Deirdre did nothing but blink, her mouth working as if she meant to start speaking but couldn't get the first word out.

"Here?" she finally stammered

"Yes."

"Right now?"

"Yes."

"You."

Zhair'lo raised an eyebrow

"What about me?"

"That's what I want."

"You're sure," he checked.

"I don't know what I'll want tomorrow," she whispered not at him, but at the darkness. "I can't see past right now."

Zhair'lo realized that this was honest. Deirdre was a girl living in constant fear of the future. She never knew where she was going and was afraid to want anything lest it be the wrong thing. Trust, not just in others, but in herself, was not an emotion she had ever mastered.

"We'd better do it right, then," he told her.

"Yeah."

It became, in Zhair'lo's mind, a very tenuous moment. For all that Deirdre had made a decision, she was still the most fragile creature the nine gods had ever deposited upon his bed. Some part of his hunting instinct told him that a move too sudden could frighten her off and make this experience into exactly the sort of thing she didn't need.

'It isn't about me, tonight,' he realized. 'I don't know if it ever has been ... but tonight it definitely isn't.'

His hand was still on hers. What was his next move? To touch her body? Probably not. He feared to break her with the least pressure, to send her bolting off into the forest like any other frightened doe.

Instead, Zhair'lo took her right hand and gently drew it to his face. It was an invitation, as plain and open as he could make it. Her fingertips touched his cheek, making him tingle. The pressure was so light, he scarcely imagined any human could create a lesser sensation.

Deirdre traced a line to push his hair back over his ear and continued to the back of his head.

From deep inside memories that weren't his own, there came the voice of an older woman, saying, "It's always best to start with kissing."

It must be that all women received the same training, for Deirdre closed her eyes and turned her head, reaching out for him with her pale, pink lips.

There had never been, in his short life, a kiss so gentle and so fragile, so frightened and so frightening. A butterfly might have landed on his lips and left a more formidable trace. Her tongue, frail and nervous, darted out to trace along his lips and went back into hiding. He returned the gesture, and though he attempted to use equal force, he knew he was doomed to fail in that regard.

"I'm not doing it right, am I?" she asked suddenly.

He opened his eyes and was surprised to find hers welling with tears.

"There's no wrong way."

"I just - I want this - I do. Maybe if you just put it in."

It was rash, that last offer, and he'd been around long enough to know better than to take her up on it. If the rest of her was as nervous, dry and dehydrated as that kiss implied, it wasn't going to work down there anyway. Nothing but pain lay along that path.

"Just try to relax," he said. "You don't have to hurry."

She seemed to shrink away from him, even as he wrapped her in his arms and pulled her in closer.

Something like a sob escaped her mouth.

"It's never going to work," she declared.

"Of course it will," he consoled her. "Look, there's a thing I can try."

Fearfully, she turned up to look into his eyes.

"Lips, right?"

She nodded.

"And you're sure you want this?"

Another nod.

"Alright. Just lie on your back, then."

Trembling slightly, Deirdre did as she was told, easing herself onto his pillows. Zhair'lo slid himself out from under her, gently letting her legs come to rest on his bed. He knew this was a tenuous undertaking, but he was counting on the sensitivity of the recently upgraded parts of her body to get her through.

Conveniently, the bed was the right width for her to lie across it, with her cheeks just on the edge. Deirdre watched nervously as he unlaced her long, white skirt and let it lie under her, draped down to the floor like a blanket.

When Zhair'lo placed his hands on her tightly closed thighs, he felt the trembling that the flickering dimness of the candlelight had failed to reveal. Gently, as if he were only suggesting it but not forcing the issue, he pushed her thighs apart.

Deirdre acquiesced, exposing her smooth genitals to his eyes. There was nothing obvious, from the outside, about her upgrade. Zhair'lo knew from experience that would be the case. If he wanted to see something from this vantage, it would be a Pussy girl he wanted.

There was no use rushing into things. He lowered his head and touched his lips to the inside of one thigh. His hands, still resting on her knees, felt Deirdre's body shiver at that first contact. Moving across, he kissed the inside of her other leg.

She watched every movement Zhair'lo made, crossing back and forth whilst slowly moving upward - slowly closing upon what, thanks to her, he could only think of as his "target".

When he ran out of room, he softly blew a breath of air across her quivering mound. Deirdre shuddered and clamped her legs around his head for a moment before relaxing again.

"Easy, now," he advised.

Still watching his every move, Deirdre nodded.

He reached forward and, using the same tiny amount of force she had used when she had kissed him, pushed his lips against the place where her flesh parted.

Despite his cautiousness, she let out a gasp.

'It would be easier,' Zhair'lo thought, 'to get a squirrel to feed out of my hand.'

Zhair'lo knew that the way forward was fraught with peril. Move too quickly and the squirrel would dart away into the forest, for a bell at least, perhaps forever. Still, he felt he had a duty to try. He let his tongue out of his mouth, just a bit, and slid it up her slit. Somewhere under there was her clitoris. If the upgrade had worked and if she was the least bit aroused, he ought to hit it - or at least put a bit of pressure on it - somewhere in his sweep.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 20



Deirdre closed her eyes and sighed. Suddenly, the tension in her body was gone.

Zhair'lo stroked her again with his tongue, increasing the depth of penetration by the tiniest margin.

"Yes," she hissed, her body going completely limp.

The spot having been found, he didn't dare move. If clitoral stimulation was working, why risk jabbing her vagina with his tongue and throwing everything off? She was a Lips girl, after all, so he'd made the right calculation.

By the fifth stroke, Zhair'lo could feel her clitoris hardening under his attention. He took his hands away from her knees, an awkward position anyway, curled his arms around the outside of her thighs so he could use his fingers to gently part her lips. Deirdre's clitoris was engorged. There was no question, from his experience, that she'd received a double upgrade. Her inner lips, as well, were swollen.

Open as Deirdre was, it was easier now to work her parts individually to see what she liked best. He quickly discovered, however, that just about anything worked. Left to right was as good as up and down. Darting movements, as long as they were kept light, were as good as gentle swirls. Nothing seemed to make her as happy, though, as gently suckling at her clit.

Occasionally, Deirdre would feature him with a low murmur of approval, but Zhair'lo needed none of that to recognize how happy she was to find herself functional in his bed.

The first sign of real passion came when, whilst sucking on her little nub, Deirdre pushed her hips up into his face. Zhair'lo rode the tiny movement out easily and quickly adapted to her rhythm, pushing down as she pushed up but taking care not to pull her lips too far apart with his fingers.

It was, as with everything with Deirdre, a delicate thing. There was no question of the contrast between the strange paleness of her skin against the healthy tan of his. Now that she was naked, neither was there any question of her bony frailty - especially as he held her hips in the palms of his hands.

In spite of what Zhair'lo regarded as extreme fragility, Deirdre thrust against him. Frightened to hurt her but eager to please her, he replied with equal force.

Her hands, unoccupied until this point, suddenly slipped into the dirty brown locks of his hair. Her fingernails caught his scalp for a moment before her fingertips found a proper grip. Next, she wrapped her legs around his neck.

Deirdre pushed with her fingers and squeezed with her legs. Zhair'lo let her. He would be loathe to let a Form girl do such a thing, given the strength available, but with Deirdre he had no reason to fear.

His mouth pulled on her clitoris, reasoning that her escalation of force was an indication of the stimulation she needed. The moment he did so, her body tensed around him. A moan escaped her lips - a very long moan indeed, rising in pitch as she shook her hips against him.

Tension built in Deirdre's stomach and he felt her holding her breath.

"Gah!" she shouted.

This announcement was immediately followed by the telltale sensation of her genitals twitching around his face as she clung on to him for dear life.

Lightly panting, she released him from the grip of her legs and her eyes opened again.

"Where," she started, but had to gasp for air.

Zhair'lo wiped his face off on the back of his hand and sat up straight, stretching his spine. His bed, he realized, wasn't at optimum height for this sort of thing. It had never seemed to be a problem for the girls who had gone down on him. But then, erections were conveniently pointed upwards, weren't they?

"Where did you learn how to do that?"

"Someone asked me once," Zhair'lo shrugged. "So I tried it."

"They never mention that in classes," Deirdre whispered, her eyes wide with shock. "It's all about pleasing you and then meshing."

"That's weird," he said. "No one ever teaches us anything at all."

Deirdre's eyes narrowed as if she were trying to focus on this thought, but her expression quickly glazed over.

"Do you think I'm ready?"

"Your body is," Zhair'lo nodded confidently. "Are you?"

"Yes," she confirmed. "Now."

He had to acknowledge that her enthusiasm seemed authentic, even if there was still a lot of wariness in her voice. Though her legs were spread in unspoken invitation, some of the wariness was on his side.

"You want to be on top?" he hesitated.

"No," she said. "Just like this."

The bed might be a bit too low for licking a girl, but it was just the right height for what was coming next. Once his shorts were on the floor, he took a position over her and let his erection touch the place where her lips parted. Zhair'lo noticed immediately that it was warm against the underside of his shaft, and he felt Deirdre's whole body shaking underneath him.

The tip of his erection slid down her lips to where they were spread naturally by the angle of her legs. She gasped as he touched her entrance.

Their eyes met and Deirdre inhaled, bit her lower lip and gave him a last nod while she held her breath.

Zhair'lo pushed.

It might have been difficult. It wouldn't have been for lack of moisture. He had definitely taken care of that. But it could have been tight. There could have been rings of tensed muscles at any point inside her. It was especially possible for her body to have involuntary seized up somewhere inside as an after effect of the orgasm.

But none of those things happened. The entry was smooth, moist and tight.

...

The mesh came on in a very strange way. There was no doubt he'd pulled her along. She was definitely present in the mesh, but her will was so weak ...

"So full," she hissed, letting out the breath she'd been holding.

Yes. He'd filled her up in more ways than just physical. The girl was like a fog around his mind, flitting in and out, cluttering his view for a moment and then whizzing around behind him with the next gust of wind.

Arousal? Yes, Deirdre had that. Zhair'lo could still feel the tingle of her last orgasm and feel the echoes of his own impending release bouncing back off her mind.

He could feel, alongside the arousal, her desire for him.

'But so very weak,' he realized.

It took Zhair'lo a moment to figure out this had nothing to do with him. It was something deep inside her. Since he had physically penetrated her, the mesh let him plumb the depths of her mind, too.

Deirdre didn't feel she deserved happiness, at least not where sex was concerned. Since so much of life in the Temple revolved around sexuality, this was more than a little disconcerting.

On top of all that, Zhair'lo found his eyes being diverted from her body, but he couldn't understand why. Some urge was turning his head this way and that - anything but to look at her. It was a very strange feeling, because the two of them weren't otherwise moving. He knew better, after all, than to start shoving his penis around while Deirdre's body was still getting used to his presence.

And yet, every time he tried to look at her, that instinct caused him to turn away.

It was not, he realized, his own instinct.

It took a lot of effort, especially considering how weak she otherwise seemed to be, but Zhair'lo managed to override Deirdre and look her in the eyes.

'Why do you force me away?'

Her eyes turned away from his and down, while the red shame in her cheeks filtered through the mesh.

'Ugly.'

Ugly? What an awful word. What a terrible thing to think about one's self. Zhair'lo had never felt such a scathing self-indictment before. In the face of that startling deprecation, he came to a very sudden realization: the effort to expose herself to him - to spread her legs for his lingual attention - could only have been the result of a great burst of courage.

Deirdre hated her body. That was the short version of the story and, feeling her thoughts from the inside, Zhair'lo realized how it was connected to her starvation.

He couldn't let that stand. Could he change her mind? That seemed like a huge attitude adjustment to make in one night. The best he could hope for was to put a dent in her mindset, just enough to get the pendulum swinging in another direction - any other direction.

Taking Deirdre's chin in hand, Zhair'lo gently lifted and turned her face so their eyes met.

'Beautiful,' he sent through the mesh.

It wouldn't have worked if he'd said it out loud. The link he had with Deirdre was nowhere near as strong as the ones he'd had with Talla, but it was a mental link all the same. Any word spoken aloud would be meaningless if it wasn't backed up by the wholehearted sincerity of the emotions of the speaker. And since the mesh was there as the ultimate arbiter of honesty, it made the most sense not to speak at all when the concepts were as simple as this.

Deirdre didn't believe him, at least not wholly. The mesh told him that instantly. But there was a crack in the foundation of her self hatred, and that was something.

What was beauty, anyway? Did it make you a better person? Zhair'lo had certainly been taught the opposite by every Temple instructor he'd ever had. Beauty was an accident. For a woman, at least, it was a perfectly repairable circumstance if nature hadn't tossed quite the right qualities in her direction. Zhair'lo distinctly remembered the teacher who had taught him that exact lesson, right down to the shrug with which she had dismissed the very idea of getting upset over appearances.

That caused him to squint a moment, because he was very sure that this memory was not his. Why in the names of the gods would any female teacher have given him such a lesson?

Still, the point had sunk home and he tried to pass it on to Deirdre: beauty was irrelevant and fleeting, a quality no more or less important than the size of one's breasts or the colour of her skin; what mattered was the actions she took.

It seemed that Deirdre had heard this lecture, for he saw her eyes roll just the slightest bit. He wouldn't win the argument that way.

'Nine hells, then,' he thought. 'I'm already inside her, which is the hardest part.'

She twitched, underneath him, as if she sensed something about his resolve.

'The evidence, dearest girl, is all around and inside you. If you weren't beautiful - if I didn't find you attractive - would any of this work at all?'

Zhair'lo knew that it couldn't be said aloud. There was something about this insecurity, this shame, that could barely be understood in the darkness of night. Never mind trying to shine the light of day on it, the slightest word spoken in its direction would send it deeper than anyone could ever dig. The place for this battle was inside the clenched muscles of her vagina and the more tightly clenched repository that was her mind.

Withdrawing his erection very slowly, he felt a protest from the inside of her body. A tunnel so recently filled for the first time wanted nothing to do with a sudden vacancy. He pulled back anyway, until the ridge of the head of his penis hit the tight ring around her entrance. As the mesh wouldn't let him pull himself out any farther anyway, this was the point at which he started pushing back in.

Opening her up again, for she was clenched as tightly as she had been for his first thrust, he beamed over the link as much happiness and satisfaction as he could.

Frail and desperate, Deirdre lapped up every bit.

For a moment, it felt to Zhair'lo almost as if he could heal her entirely, but the ever present shadow of the Temple fell over him, knocking him down from his vain perch.

'You're just not that important, kid. Don't let it get to your head.'

If nothing else, though, it was working for now. Deirdre and Zhair'lo, for this brief interval of time, had happiness. She was, for the first time since she had discovered her own sexuality, happy with her body. For his part, Zhair'lo was glad that he was pleasing her without hurting her.

There was no question, though, from either of their nearly unified perspectives, that the risk of damage to her weakened body was foremost on his mind.

"Am I so fragile to you?" she whispered.

There was no point lying to someone while meshed.

"It frightens me, yes."

"Maybe I should have been Form."

The word 'blasphemy' burned a path through Zhair'lo's mind, though surely no one had taught him, or any other man, the sheer heresy of thinking that the gods had failed to direct Deirdre to the right Discipline.

"Because that would make you stronger."

It sounded harsh, but he was only echoing her thoughts.

"If I could have strength ...", Deirdre wished.

"Then have it," Zhair'lo told her, and injected ice into her veins.

He felt it, too, whatever it was he had done. A tingle went up her spine, making every hair on her body stand on end. Her eyes hardened, daring as they had not yet dared, to stare directly into his.

Next, Deirdre wrapped her legs around his back and pulled him - painfully pulled him - deeper inside. Zhair'lo knew that she was stretching herself.

"I will have strength," she declared, her eyes watering.

The pain washed over her resolve like water over a marble statue. It did not, however, flow so easily over Zhair'lo, who seemed to be feeling Deirdre's pain more than Deirdre did.

"Very tight," he breathed.

There was something about the way she was forcing herself forward, both in body and mind, that combined in a overwhelming way with the sheer physical stimulation around his erection. Zhair'lo could take very little of this.

Deirdre relaxed her thighs, allowing him to withdraw perhaps a centimetre, before tightening again and forcing him against the very end of depth.

Wincing with pain she could no longer ignore, she repeated the gesture again and again.

"I. Will. Not. Be. Weak," she insisted, punctuating each word with a thrust.

It occurred to Zhair'lo, very briefly, that he might have injected a little too much ice into her, and that the arrival of this invulnerable core of marble might have been his fault.

A moment later, however, all thoughts were blissfully erased from his mind as Deirdre's determined self impalement brought about their climax. The statue was no more. She became a living, breathing, moving mass of flesh and bone, twisting and contorting as half of her tried to run away from his spasming erection and half of her tried to jam him in more deeply.

As the mesh dissipated, two things happened at once. The first was that he got less and less of a sense of Deirdre's body and mind. The second was that the mesh's ability to mask pain faded, too.

With a panic, Zhair'lo began to realize that they had done a lot of damage to her insides. There hadn't been a lot of friction, but the way she'd thrust against him had opened her up in a way she was going to regret very soon.

'Two fingers in,' a voice in his mind said, reminding him of how the girls were told to masturbate in order to make their first nights easier.

"Two fingers in" wouldn't have covered this kind of brutal expansion.

Zhair'lo felt panic rising in her as his erection spent its last twitch and the mesh faded away into nothingness. Gently as possible, he withdrew from Deirdre's body, hoping that was the right thing to do for the pain she was in. She seemed to acquiesce, curling her legs up into her stomach and laying her head against his chest.

He embraced her, feeling her trembling in his arms. There was no point asking how she was, knowing rather intimately what the honest answer would be.

"I don't think I can do that again," she whispered. "Not tonight."

"That's okay," he assured her. "That's fine."

Of all the damned things that could have happened; of all the things that could have gone right or wrong, the one thing he had wanted to avoid was damaging this fragile creature who had come to his bed.

'Damn it,' he thought.

"I'll be okay," she promised. "It feels better now."

It might have been a lie. Deirdre still seemed to be wincing.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wanted ... I wanted it not to hurt you. Of all the ..."

"No."

The sudden determination in her voice shocked him.

"What?"

"I did that, not you."

"I could have stopped -"

"No," Deirdre repeated firmly.

With considerable effort and no small amount of wincing, she propped herself up on her elbows so she could look at him.

"I did that," she said. "I wanted to be strong, so I pushed myself -" another wince "- maybe a bit too hard."

She curled up into his chest again.

"I'm an adult," she said softly, as if she didn't quite believe it. "I'm an adult now."

With one arm trapped under Deirdre, Zhair'lo pulled a blanket over their naked bodies with his free arm before embracing her again.

"Anything I can do?"

She shook her head.

"I can feel it relaxing now," she said. "Maybe in half a bell I'll be okay to walk home."

There was no way, Zhair'lo realized, that this girl in his bed had the experience to make any estimate like that. Nine gods, he did not feel good about this.

"I'll be stronger for it," Deirdre declared.

"I hope so. That was rough."

Deirdre took a deep breath and started stretching her legs out, sliding them past his until their bodies were lined up smoothly against each other.

"It was what I needed," she pushed away from him. "I don't know how I'll feel when I wake up. I don't know how this will change me, or if I'll be the same person tomorrow morning that I was yesterday morning. But this was something I needed to do."

"It will change you," Zhair'lo offered. "But you'll still be the same person."

Deirdre appeared to consider this before acknowledging the wisdom of it with a tilt of her head and returning to the shelter of his arms.

There was a spell of silence, gods knew how long, before she spoke again.

"I really wish we could do it again."

"I really don't want to hurt you again."

"Oh," she agreed. "I'm definitely done tonight - I think I might be bleeding a bit."

Zhair'lo winced. He'd never had that happen before.

"I just meant that I trust you," she sighed contentedly. "I couldn't have done it - wouldn't have pushed myself with anyone else. It would be nice to Serve you again, without all that."

He could only nod.

"You must get a lot of virgins, being a Seal Breaker."

"Yeah."

"Do most of them do it more than once?"

Zhair'lo didn't want to answer that either. It felt like pressuring her, but he trusted in her resolve to recognize the importance of her own health.

"Yes. Two or three times."

"Maybe we'll meet again," Deirdre sighed.

"You all make your rounds," he replied, thinking of Talla and how they could have occasionally had each other, quite legally, if they'd been more patient.

Her head twitched suddenly.

"Have you ever been Served by same woman twice?"

Zhair'lo stammered a moment. What a question to ask, right while he was thinking of Talla.

"I-"

But she interrupted him before he could get more than a word out.

"Of course not," she lowered her head back to his chest, withdrawing her intense glare, "Hasn't been enough time yet."

She yawned and they lay in silence once more.

"I wonder if there are lots of men like you," Deirdre said longingly.

"I have no idea," he replied honestly. "It seems to me no one at all is like me."

"I feel like that too," she said. "Maybe everybody does."

"Maybe."

An odd scraping and tapping pattern came from the hallway.

"Some of the girls are leaving early," Deirdre translated. "I may as well go."

"You okay to walk?"

She sat up gingerly.

"I'll manage," Deirdre winced once more and gathered her clothing.

Zhair'lo rolled over to watch her fasten the white pieces of fabric to her body. Two laces later, she was ready to go.

She looked down at him, her narrow features cast with a sudden ominous strength in the flickering light of the room's single candle. Deirdre knelt by his bedside, sitting on her heels to bring her face level with his, and took his face in her hands so she could kiss him very gently.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 20



"Thank you," she said.

There was nothing more to say, then. The door creaked open slightly and she disappeared out of view.

Zhair'lo was in the middle of contemplating whether that had been, on balance, a good night or a bad one, when he heard a gruff voice interrogate someone in the hallway.

"All done in there, Mistress?"

There must have been, in addition to Deirdre, an Officer in the hallway. Why else would a man that age use that mode of address?

But no, it was Deirdre's small voice that answered.

"Yes."

"Good night then, Mistress."

With his door still open a crack, he saw a sliver of the man before the pounding on the door began.

"Zhair'lo M'han?" he called out.

"Ho," he replied, wondering what this could be.

"Get dressed and gather your things."

The door was pushed open and a large, beige knapsack was hurled into the room at the foot of his bed.

"What's this about?" he asked, pulling on his shorts.

"You applied to become a Fighter, didn't you?"

"Yes ..."

"We're here to bring you to the barracks."

With that, he pushed the door open and four very large men walked into his room.

"Let's get going, kid," one of them said.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 21



Beneath the watchful gaze of the four Fighters, each of their silhouettes showing a sword hilt over their shoulders, Zhair'lo quickly packed everything that was his in the backpack they'd given him. He didn't have much in the way of personal belongings and he didn't know anyone who did. Still, there were a few things he wasn't going to leave behind.

Because not only would those two pairs of women's underwear raise questions, they were also treasures. The first pair was Talla's, left behind the very night the two of them had lost their virginities to each other. The second tiny, white triangle had belonged to Illya and held its own significance.

Each of those articles of clothing were folded up tightly and tucked into the pair of shorts in the deepest part of his single drawer dresser. It was easy, even under the eyes of the men who stood behind him, to secret everything together into the backpack.

Zhair'lo turned to face the man who had pounded on his door.

"That's it?" the man asked in his gruff voice.

"Yes."

"Yes, sir," gruff voice corrected.

"Yes, sir," Zhair'lo straightened.

"My name is Sergeant Yung. I'll be in charge of training you and the other recruits. Two of them are waiting outside. We have a fourth to pick up and then we'll go find the women."

Sergeant gestured toward the hallway, past the man who was holding the door open.

"All you need to know for now is that you do as I say and you call me 'sir'."

"Yes, sir."

The large man nodded, a wry grin on his face.

Zhair'lo formed so many impressions of Sergeant Yung so quickly that it was hard to sort them all out. Obviously, he wasn't a guy who messed around. His demeanour made Kurran, Kenji and every Master for whom Zhair'lo had ever worked seem like a gentle sheep. Yung had that same dark look in his eyes that Master Lyric got when he talked about his past, only he seemed to carry it as a permanent fixture to his personality.

Sergeant Yung also had no desire to impress anyone. The way he stood, spoke and even the way that he waved his hands around demonstrated a simple, self-assured confidence. He trained people to fight and was damned good at it. There was no need to bluster because he was utterly certain that his competence would speak for him.

The walk down to the empty common room wasn't long enough for Zhair'lo to analyze the man any further than that. They were soon out in the cool night air with two more Fighters and two dazed, sleep deprived boys who had to be the other recruits. They were older than Zhair'lo, but only by a couple of years.

Sergeant Yung briskly introduced them as Renzi, a worried-looking, blonde haired kid about ready to puke, and Kit, a boy with hair a bit darker than Zhair'lo's, who seemed wearily resigned to putting up with whatever they had to do tonight. In contrast to the Fighters, neither of Zhair'lo's fellow recruits had the energy to give him more than a nod of greeting.

It turned out that Fighters didn't walk anywhere - they ran. Renzi, by dint of his nausea, was least prepared for this. Kit seemed to be in okay shape but didn't have Zhair'lo's ease on his feet. The small group quickly passed the women on their way back to the Temple. Deirdre caught his eye very briefly, and twinkled a faint, worried smile at him.

Sergeant Yung and his men found it easy to talk, even while Renzi and Kit were panting with exhaustion. Their banter, however, was of little use to Zhair'lo as it consisted mainly of arcane terms that made no sense to him. They seemed to be comparing the benefits of various weapons, ranging from swords and axes to bladed staff weapons and such. Zhair'lo had no idea what a "flail" or a "maul" might be, but these terms were of great interest to the sword-carrying men, so he filed them away in his head for later reference.

As time passed, Renzi and Kit stumbled less. Their breathing was as laboured as ever, but they had otherwise resigned themselves to their fates.

Zhair'lo, what with one thing and another, had long ago adjusted to running great distances and had a lot more brainpower available for considering his surroundings. For one thing, he quickly realized that the conversation around him was a bit of a put-on; a show for the recruits. There was a faint pretence that the larger men were ignoring the three who straggled along behind them, but Zhair'lo knew that was nonsense. The goal was to put them in their place by showing them how weak, ignorant and inconsequential they were. It was as if the fighters were saying, "This is your life now. You need to become like us. You have a long way to go."

Zhair'lo felt himself absorbing their diction and manner, just as he had at Lyric's camp and Harzen's farm before it. He would find out what made these people tick and learn it well enough to imitate; to take it into himself. That was the way the Temple had forced him to operate, moving from one place to another as often as he had. If Zhair'lo hadn't been good at sliding himself so neatly into so many different communities, he never would have lasted so long nor done so well. He felt assured that he could do with these men what he had done with every previous group.

It wasn't long before the entire entourage came to a stop outside a blacksmith's shop.

Two of the Fighters, the dourest pair of the lot, stayed outside and kept a watchful eye on the alleys and approaches to their current position.

The wary way that they scanned their surroundings set a chill running down Zhair'lo's spine and settling in the pit of his stomach. These men were so accustomed to violence and danger that they wouldn't let their guards down even in the confines of the city. What danger was there here? When had anyone ever worried about an assault inside the limits of Gern?

Zhair'lo realized there was nothing logical about their behaviour. It was entirely an instinct.

'And I'm going to end up like them.'

After a moment, he forcefully amended his thinking.

'I want to end up like them.'

This was his way forward. He reminded himself that the decision had already been made.

One of the watchful men, Zhair'lo didn't know either of their names, cast a cynical gaze over Kit and Renzi, leaning on their knees and panting. The man's eyes slid over the ground and found Zhair'lo standing upright. Though breathing heavily, at least Zhair'lo wasn't doubled over and looking ready to vomit.

"You run a lot?" the man grunted even as his eyes returned to their paranoid scanning.

"Some," Zhair'lo set his tone to match the other's gruff terseness.

The Fighter nodded with what might have been a faint whiff of approval.

"You'll run more."

After that curt exchange, the boys might as well have turned to smoke and vanished into the night air for all the attention the older men paid them.

Zhair'lo thought it might be a good time to talk to his fellow recruits. Renzi was in no shape to talk, but Kit seemed to be catching his breath.

"Hey."

"Hey," the darker haired boy acknowledged.

"Feeling better?"

"A little."

"Where'd they get you from?"

Kit took a deep breath before gasping out an answer.

"Bakery. West end."

Zhair'lo wondered if the short, almost rude way that Fighters spoke to each other was a stylistic choice or just a force of habit from being out of breath.

"How long you ... been Hunting?" Kit asked.

"Not long," Zhair'lo said. "Was out at a Farm before that."

Renzi perked up at this. His face had gone from pale green to a flushed red.

"Men's work, that is," he muttered. "What else you do before that?"

Because, obviously, boys started working at age twelve and "men's work" couldn't start until eighteen.

"Blacksmith," Zhair'lo said. "Roofing. Some others."

"Get around a lot, then," Kit seemed impressed.

"Yeah."

Zhair'lo knew the smattering of apprenticeships he'd been through was unusual, but most of his age mates reacted to the idea with confused shrugs. It was clear such an education wasn't desirable. The odd time, Zhair'lo would get a sense people looked askance at his competence. From a certain point of view, he wasn't building up a repertoire of skills but failing to measure up at everything he did.

Zhair'lo made sure such points of view never lasted long. At every job, he set out to prove to his detractors that he was capable of whatever tasks they set before him. The moment he reached any level of competence, however, he would find himself whisked off somewhere else.

Renzi's attitude was something different from any reaction Zhair'lo had experienced in recent memory. The boy actually seemed to be upset. Until the advent of his discovery as a Seal Breaker, there had never been anything in Zhair'lo's life that would inspire someone to any of the varying shades of green between envy and jealousy.

But Renzi couldn't know that Zhair'lo was a Seal Breaker, could he?

Zhair'lo had never had to endure any negative feelings over his particular talent at transferring magic. It hadn't been discovered until he was among much older men at Harzen's Farm, where maturity had surely prevented such pettiness.

The path of Zhair'lo's thoughts was interrupted when Sergeant Yung burst suddenly out of the front door of the blacksmith's shop.

"Alright, boys," he commanded as his entourage emerged into the street behind him. "It's time to go fetch our women."

"This one's Z'rus," he jerked a thumb at a wide-eyed, red faced boy behind him. "These are Renzi, Kit and Zhair'lo. Now let's move!"

Renzi cast one last, foul look at Zhair'lo before the whole bunch were off and running again. Now that he was fully and properly awake, with the brisk night air filling his lungs, Zhair'lo had even less trouble keeping up with the Fighters and had enough energy to spare to pay more attention to them.

The two dull ones who had stayed out in the street earlier were running slightly ahead of the pack, carefully scanning every side alley, awning, crate and open doorway. The conversation, which was little different from before, now appeared to be even more meaningless.

The Fighters, Zhair'lo realized, weren't paying attention to what they were saying. It was a form of hollow banter, much like the friendly way little boys had of insulting each other. It took no brainpower because the attacks and replies were so well known to everyone involved. Their intellectual devotion was, instead, on the environment around them and the dangers it offered.

What dangers, though, he couldn't say. It must have been a long bred instinct that drove them thusly. Would they let their guards down as they came to the very gates of the Temple?

Apparently, they would not.

Instead, the six men formed up in to two neat rows of three in front of Form's small gate. The front row, with Sergeant Yung in centre, stood stiffly facing the gates. In the back row, the two dull men faced outward, scanning the approaches.

Technically, there was a third row even further back, but it seemed a bit of an insult to count the four desperately panting boys as part of the assembly.

Having taken these positions without so much as whispered order, the men simply waited, Hunter-like, for whatever would happen next.

Zhair'lo looked at streets around him while his fellow recruits panted. He had never seen the city so quiet. Was it after twelfth bell already? There was no wind, nor any scuffing of feet. No horse wheels creaked anywhere. There was only the sound of four boys breathing heavily, and they might be the only livings things in the city.

A grating noise broke the silence and jarred his nerves. Twisting his body around, he saw the trellis of the small gate opening to permit a group of women to exit.

The first three out were in a type of armour that Zhair'lo regarded as ceremonial. It just didn't make sense to wear a leather skirt that stopped above the knees and a top that left the mid-riff bare. Sure, it might hold some kind of allure - more than cancelled out by Renzi's retching noises off to his right - but there was no way a sensible person would go into battle like that.

The women were adorned with weapons that were far more serious than their armour. Each carried a pair of daggers in scabbards at her hips and a bow with a quiver full of arrows on her back.

One thing Zhair'lo didn't doubt, however, was that these were women of high rank. They might even be Officers, though he wouldn't be able to tell unless he saw what style of orange clothing they wore when they weren't in armour. All he knew for sure was that they were tall and sported rock solid muscles from calf to shoulder and all points in between.

Behind those three, almost invisible in the muscular shadows of their sisters, were four slim girls in the tiny skirts and tops of Initiates. If someone forced Zhair'lo to guess, he would have hazarded that two of them were Tight and two were Iron, based on the strength he saw in their thighs and bare abdomens.

One of the women walked up to Sergeant Yung, who remained stiffly at attention.

"You have Command?" she asked.

"Aye, Mistress," the reply came back sharp as a blade.

"Take us to the Barracks, then."

"Aye."

He swivelled on one foot to face away from her and toward the male half of the contingent. His next words came out formal and far more forceful than any previous instruction.

"Move out, boys!"

Immediately the three men in the back row lurched forward and set off at a jog. They instantly passed Zhair'lo and the recruits, who jerked forward and tried to keep up. A moment later, he found the four girls in white effortlessly running alongside him.

Zhair'lo gave one glance backwards to see the armoured women behind him, followed by Sergeant Yung and the last two male Fighters. He stumbled, just slightly, and decided to keep his eyes forward.

"Save your energy," the Initiate beside him whispered. "It's at least five kilometres. No stopping."

So he looked clumsy, did he? In front of new people?

"Done this before?" he asked cynically.

"No. I'm a recruit, just like you."

'Just like me', he thought, 'except they've given you information I don't have.'

They weren't travelling much faster than before, so he blanked out his mind as he had before and started to ponder the things he'd heard.

The woman, probably an Officer, who had spoken to Sergeant Yung, had asked him if he had 'Command'. He'd said that, yes, he had command, and she had then given him orders. That didn't seem right. If he had 'Command', in the sense Zhair'lo understood the word, why wasn't he giving the orders to her?

A grimace crossed his face. That didn't make sense either. In Zhair'lo's experience, men only gave orders to other men, not to women. He couldn't picture a way for even the mighty Sergeant Yung to shout an instruction at the formidable trio of Officers and elicit anything but a sneer.

'Command' must mean something special that pertained to Sergeant Yung, but not the women who told him what to do.

The Initiate who'd warned him earlier came up close to him again as they jogged.

"Bree," she said.

"Zhair'lo," he replied, hoping they were introducing themselves.

"Where ya coming from?"

"Hunting."

He could see, then, that people who did a lot of running would develop short and less courteous ways of speaking.

"You?"

She turned her head a bit, letting him catch a wry glint in her brown eyes as she looked at him in surprise.

"Fighter training."

Of course. What else would she have been doing? It meant she had a head start on whatever they would do next.

Zhair'lo kept his eyes low, lest he stumble and embarrass himself again. Nothing but legs pounding on cobblestone. He couldn't help but notice the cool, bare length of well muscled thigh trembling only a handspan a way from his own.

"You good with a bow, then?" she asked.

He looked up.

"Yeah. You?"

Their eyes met for a moment and he caught a look of surprise from Bree, but whether she judged him arrogant or merely confident, Zhair'lo couldn't say.

"So-so," she turned her eyes forward. "I'm Tight, not Iron. I'm better with the staff."

The Discipline of Tight, Zhair'lo well remembered, did the legs all the way up to the ass and the hips. Iron worked the abs and the upper body. He'd never seen anybody use a staff and he couldn't help but wonder how having strong legs would be of any use.

Bree was uncomfortably close and he couldn't help now but to think, as he watched her shoulder length, light brown hair flow behind her, that he'd only been Served the one time before Deirdre had called the night to an end. There was no doubt in Zhair'lo's mind, hearing the steady breathing rhythm of the girl next to him, that Bree was good for more than one mesh.

Looking around surreptitiously, it seemed to him that while the men and women were mismatched, the boys and girls had managed to pair up nicely. The other girls had hopeful, encouraging looks on their faces, half begging the other boys to keep up. A sideways look at Bree confirmed that there wasn't even a hint of anything other than complete confidence in Zhair'lo's legs.

High praise, from a Tight girl.

He tried to guess how far they'd run. They were already outside the tallest of the buildings near the Temple and into the shorter ones that hosted one-floor operations like blacksmiths, soapmakers and bakeries.

Zhair'lo thought they might have run a kilometre already, but he couldn't be sure. The track they were on was one of those he might have used to reach Lyric's Camp if he'd been on his way home. Would they actually run past the big lodge?

No. With a change of direction that was jarring only to Zhair'lo, they shifted off the main road on to a much less used side path. It would have been nice, in a strange way, to say one last goodbye to the place on his way by.

It suddenly occurred to Zhair'lo to remember the evening's dinner: the uninterrupted nap; the seat of honour; the toast and the very fine dessert.

They'd been saying goodbye to him and he'd been so dense he hadn't even realized it.

"Long may he run," Lyric had said, and the others had echoed.

Run, indeed, for they must have known exactly what was in store for him this night.

He took another look at Bree, flying along beside him as if the touching the ground was some minor inconvenience. On his right side were the other pairs. The boys clearly had been given no inkling of what was waiting for them, while the girls seemed to know the track just as well as they had the day Zhair'lo had been subjected to that abominable test of theirs.

Knowing the track seemed to the Temple's way of keeping men on their toes.

"Bree?" he kept his voice low.

"Yes," she replied, the tone of her voice letting him know there was nothing wrong with them talking.

"You know the place we're going?"

"South Barracks."

That was a name, certainly. He took a few hard breaths before going on.

"You been there?"

"Never," she admitted. "Just seen it on a map."

There were maps, after all. Zhair'lo had seen quite a few, but they got distinctly fuzzy at the edges long before mentioning things like "Barracks". There were arrows labelled with things like "To Turiksa", "To Beshenna" and "To the Sea".

"You must have better maps."

She smirked sideways at him before answering.

"You will too, now."

They passed quite suddenly beyond the range of the city's outdoor torches and were running with only the moonlight to guide them. It took only a moment for Zhair'lo's eyes to adjust, but even then he had to admit that running seemed more treacherous. The group seemed to slow down a little in recognition of this, despite the smoothness of the dirt path.

"I've been here before," Zhair'lo remarked.

"This path? I doubt it."

"We cross it when we go on a Hunt."

"Oh, right."

Bree didn't seem impressed, but at least it passed the time. While running this slowly might keep the other three boys from falling over, it was downright boring for Zhair'lo. Had they hit two kilometres yet? He fervently hoped so, for he doubted very much that any of the women were going to liven up the run by undressing.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 21



He doggedly ran on, occasionally checking Bree's stamina. A Tight Initiate would have the legs, but only a bit of the breathing power that came with an Iron upgrade. He was fairly certain, from her eyes and hair, that she hadn't taken a Facial for her optional upgrade. Still, surveying his own breathing and comparing it to hers, he knew he would be no match for her in any race.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Zhair'lo saw one of the other boys stumble and fall.

Sergeant Yung was on him instantly, yanking him up by his belt and shoving him on.

"Up you go, Renzi," Sergeant Yung ordered.

There was no hint of mercy in his voice, only wry condescension. This sort of thing, his tone of voice suggested, was what he expected of the idiots he was forced to train.

Zhair'lo couldn't decide what to call this odd grouping of soldiers and recruits. The lead element certainly qualified as some sort of formation, but the haphazard bunch in the middle ruined any sense of dignity that might have been accorded by any passing townspeople. In behind came Sergeant Yung and the others, taking the role of something between a shepherd and a whip-cracking Carter.

'A herd,' he thought. 'We're a herd. There's no other word for it.'

Sheep or dogs, whatever they were, they ran. Renzi certainly dogged on, and very soon Kit started to stumble.

"Not much farther," Sergeant Yung would remind them occasionally.

None of the boys ever responded to this encouragement - if indeed it was meant to be encouraging.

Somewhere around what Zhair'lo estimated to be the end of the fourth kilometre, Bree decided to speak with him again. He noticed that, while her breathing wasn't what he would call "laboured", there was an abruptness to her speech that hadn't been there before.

"You're holding up well."

"Master Lyric ... makes us run."

"We expect a lot less-" she jerked her head to the boys behind them. "-from you lot."

'You lot', in this case, meant 'men in general'.

"Most jobs don't need running," Zhair'lo defended. "Temple probably ... wouldn't want it anyway."

Bree jerked her head very suddenly toward him, revealing how flushed her face was.

"What? Why not?"

"Same reason most ... can't learn weapons, I guess."

She flipped her head away from him to concentrate on the path ahead and wouldn't say another word.

Zhair'lo wondered if he'd said something rude, though he couldn't imagine what. Didn't every man recruited to join the Fighters or the Hunters have to pass the same test he'd been through? He couldn't see how it could be otherwise. There was no way it was big a secret, what with the fact there were Virgins and Initiates involved in administering the test.

So what was with Bree? A sidelong glance only told him that her face was flushed. Was she finally running out of energy?

It was several more minutes before he began to make out a dim light ahead.

"Is that it?" he asked.

"The palisade," Bree replied nervously without looking at him. "Must be."

The word didn't mean anything to Zhair'lo, but the herd began to slow as they came into a clearing in front of a solid wall of vertical logs, each log sharpened to a spike at its skyward tip. Torches lit the top of the wall, which extended some fifty metres to the left and right. A well worn path led up to a gate made of wooden slabs and it was to this gate that the men at the head of the column led the herd.

"Who goes there?" came a male voice, shouting from above the gate.

From behind Zhair'lo, a voice boomed out.

"Yung, returning with new recruits."

"Sergeant Yung," the gate guard called back down. "Laconis. Ether. T'rok."

Passwords, Zhair'lo realized. From the way they were yelling the nonsense words out for all to hear, they must be good for one use only.

"Porell. Retch. Varides."

The moment the last word was out of Sergeant Yung's mouth, a heavy thud could be heard and the gates began to open.

Zhair'lo spared one last look to his side to check on Bree. Her face, more clearly visible with all the torchlight coming from the walls of what must be 'the palisade', was definitely flushed. He couldn't believe that this little run had somehow worn her out, but the look on her face seemed very suddenly desperate.

The gates creaked to a stop after they had opened just wide enough to admit them three abreast. The herd began moving forward again and, while the other recruits lagged behind, Zhair'lo and Bree followed the lead element in, his left arm brushing against her right as they squeezed through. There was a sharp inhalation from her and she moved away from him, her eyes focused straight ahead.

Now inside the wooden walls of the palisade, Zhair'lo took a moment to look around. It wasn't as big on the inside as he might have guessed. The outer walls were higher than most of the buildings on the inside, so he could make out the general shape of the place as a square about a hundred metres aside. Were they disposing of triangles altogether out here, or was it more that this was a place run by Form, which preferred a different shape?

Regardless of philosophies, the inside of the fort had a much more temporary and makeshift feeling than anything he had seen in either the town of Gern or the small bits of the Temple he'd been allowed to see. Hundreds of torches lit the area so well he could see almost everything was made of wood, including the ramparts that ran along most of the outer walls.

The buildings on the inside, though a few had corner columns of stone, were mostly wooden and utilitarian in nature. Although there was a clear path from the wooden gate through which they had entered to a similar gate in the opposite wall, it was clear that the internal structures were built whenever and wherever they were needed.

There was an archery range to his right, with targets set up at 25 and 50 metres. Further on, there was a small stable that might hold half a dozen horses.

On the left were more conventional buildings that had the look of either being smiths or kitchens, based on the multiple stone chimneys rising out of each building.

While Zhair'lo was trying to guess at the functions of the various structures, he failed to notice the breakup of the herd until he found Sergeant Yung standing in front of him.

"Recruits! Follow me!"

It was then that Zhair'lo noticed how beat the other boys were. A groan of complaint rose from three male throats. Bree, red faced as she was, made no such complaint, but pursed her lips and shook her head as if she knew what was coming.

"There'll be none of that," Sergeant Yung warned them in a dangerous voice. "You're mine now and this Barracks is no place for whining. Consider that your first, last and only warning."

Without another word, he trotted off to the left, in a narrow alley between two of the chimney laden buildings that Zhair'lo had tried to identify earlier. The odours emanating from the structures easily filled up his lungs in the narrow space. At least one of them, he now knew, had to be a kitchen. He was glad not to be hungry.

Beyond the alleyway, they passed into an open space with a number of squat wooden structures of various sizes arrayed around it. It was to the smallest of these that Sergeant Yung led them.

Pushing the door open while remaining standing outside it, he waved them in.

"Eight beds. Eight recruits. The candles are lit. In you go."

Zhair'lo stopped completely. Even the slight amount of fear he'd built up around Sergeant Yung failed to propel him any distance.

Women and men ... sleeping in the same room?

"In. You. Go."

This was directed not just at Zhair'lo, but at the group as a whole, who were all standing with stunned looks on their faces. The darkening of Sergeant Yung's voice put a spike of adrenaline into Zhair'lo's chest and he found himself jerking forward, just behind Bree, moving to go through the doorway.

Bree, as it happened, was held up at the doorway and pulled aside, Sergeant Yung's hand on her shoulder, as the other seven passed in.

The interior was as simple as it could be. The floor was wooden, reminding him rather heartlessly of the halls where Form dispensed its justice. There were four small beds on each side of the room, with just enough space between them for a tall, narrow wardrobe. At the far end of the room, which was not very far at all, there was a long desk that ran the length of the wall. The pair of candles that burned on this desk were the only light sources in the room.

Zhair'lo having been the first into the room, he found himself pushed toward the farthest bed as the others came in. Imagining that he might be living here for a while, he sat down on the bed in the right hand corner. The wardrobe, just past the bed, was open and empty, so he hung his backpack on the hook at its back.

Behind him, the door slammed shut. Thinking it might be Sergeant Yung with more orders, Zhair'lo stood up immediately.

It was only Bree though, with an unreadable expression on her face, staring at him and him alone through the flickering candlelight.

He raised his eyebrows in lieu of asking the obvious question. It just wasn't worth wasting breath at this point.

If either of them had been looking around the room, they'd have realized that all eyes were on Bree. Clearly, she had something to tell them and, equally clearly, they knew it.

"We're not to sleep until the candles burn down," she said, never taking her eyes from Zhair'lo's.

It was dark-haired Kit who spoke up.

"So what do we do?"

"We cycle," she said, walking across the room, ignoring everyone else in it.

The girls reacted to this, turning to stare at the boys. For their part, the boys merely looked confused.

Bree, her cheeks still flushed red, came to stand before Zhair'lo. Her expression softened and her eyes fell to his chest for a moment. When her eyes came back up, they were wide and she spoke in a whisper.

"This is what I wanted anyway. Since we started running."

He clued in quickly what that mean, based on how close she was standing and the look in her eyes. But "since we started running"? That, Zhair'lo decided, was a pretty deceptive way of stating it.

'You didn't warm up to me that quickly,' he thought.

He had a brief moment in which to consider when the first signs of arousal might have shown up, but she was already on him, forcing him back on the bed that he had taken for his own.. Mouths mashed together awkwardly as sweaty bodies collided. Her midriff was bare and her top was tiny. Once she'd pushed his shirt out of the way, they were skin to skin over most of their upper bodies.

"Here?" he asked, his voice somewhat muffled, as he nodded his head at the others in the room.

Zhair'lo knew what the rules were. He'd had them not from any teaching he'd been given, but out of Talla's mind. Service was done in privacy: one woman Serving one man. There was a derogatory term that Talla knew for what was happening now, but because he'd never heard the word spoken, it was only a concept in Zhair'lo's brain. Whatever the word was, it was coloured in Talla's mind very much like the slur "monogamy".

Bree pulled her mouth away from his, letting their foreheads touch as she gasped for breath. She shrugged and closed her eyes for a moment.

"It's different here," she whispered. "I'm just following orders."

Purpose seized her, and she opened her legs to straddle him so that her skirt spread over his hips. He felt the smoothness of her underwear sliding against the mild erection he was building. She ground against him while they kissed. It was a sloppier kiss than he was used to. They were both exhausted and it was taking its toll out of their technique.

"I want to be the first to mesh," she declared.

So prodded, Zhair'lo glanced to his left at the other pairs and immediately turned his gaze back to Bree. He decided that he really had no desire to watch other people fucking. It was a curious thing. He'd seen other men naked when they went swimming or bathing and that had never bothered him. But while hundreds of women might watch an Upgrade, men were never permitted. In fact, his link to Talla made him one of the few men in Gern who had any such images in his head at all.

Zhair'lo was not, therefore, quite comfortable with the idea of seeing another man's erection, nor with seeing other people having sex. Fortunately for this strange distaste, none of the other guys were out of their shorts yet.

On the other hand, Bree was not going to be delayed for something as trivial as Zhair'lo's semi-flaccidity. She dismounted and made quick work of the laces on his shorts. There was no facade of patience here. Her head went down and the entirety of his semi-erect penis found a warm haven inside her mouth. There were no facial upgrades; no fancy tongue motions. To make up for this, Bree was desperately eager and set a head bobbing pace that left her light-coloured hair flailing behind her.

Zhair'lo worried for a moment that his body might have run out of blood. Could that happen? Had too much of his vital fluid been used up in all that running? Would he now be unable to fuck the poor girl in front of him who so badly wanted to Serve?

But he needn't have feared. He was a healthy eighteen year old who had only had sex once this evening, and that had been hours ago. Bree's ministrations soon proved successful and she was forced to back off her complete inhalation of his member.

"Good," she said, stroking it with her hand.

"You?"

"Dripping the whole time we were running," she said. "Look."

She then flung her panties, which she'd somehow removed while sucking on his cock, at his face. He lifted it with his right hand and held it in front of his eyes. As evidence of her arousal, the candlelight shining through the translucent wet spot in the crotch was convincing. While he examined her clothing, she was mounting him. Without further ceremony, she lined herself up with his erection and slid him inward.

...

Bree was a runner.

She absolutely loved running.

If she had somewhere to go, she ran.

If they were supposed to walk, she showed up late so she had to run to catch up.

Bree always took the long way around.

She was running even when she was fucking - because that was what she did; she didn't "Serve". She fucked. She preferred to think of it that way.

Having sex with Bree was like running.

And not just running, but running when you're already exhausted from running.

When the pounding in the calves makes your legs threaten to seize up. When your sides hurt. When your heart and lungs are burning.

That's when Bree felt her best.

And that's how Bree liked her sex.

This was her world, running with the Fighters, and she had a good, strong man to run alongside her.

More than just her world.

This was her heaven.

...

The mesh shuddered.

Zhair'lo had never felt a thing like that before. Meshes didn't do that. They were just supposed to build up until orgasm was reached, but this one had unmistakeably -

...

There it was again.

The only time he'd ever felt troubled in a mesh was the time he and Talla had accidentally had sex at the same time, but with other people.

This was not at like that.

If Bree was aware of it, she paid it no heed. She had her hands on his shoulders now, holding him down and using his upper body as an anchor to torque against his lower body. Whatever else might have been lost to exhaustion, this was an effective technique. He hardened inside her, even as the mesh shuddered for a third time.

"Everyone's in," she whispered.

Against his better judgement, he risked a glance to his left. In two of the beds across the room, and one in the far corner on his side, the girls had indeed mounted the boys, just as Bree was riding him. All were naked, top to bottom, except Bree, who was only now stripping off her top.

Zhair'lo was surprised that it didn't bother him too much to see the other men, although it might have been different if their erections hadn't been thoroughly buried and out of sight.

Bree touched his cheek to turn his face back to her.

"It's okay," she said. "They're all in now."

With so much blood in his erection, it was only then Zhair'lo made the connection. The shuddering he had felt - that had been the other meshes engaging?

"We can feel them?"

Bree's eyes widened even as her vagina clamped tight around the base of his penis.

"You felt that?"

"The mesh ... shivered."

Her nostrils flared, in anger or excitement or arousal he couldn't say.

A moment later, however, she fell forward and sunk her teeth into his neck, causing him to shout in alarm. Her skirt, the only piece of clothing in the room that was still attached to a human body, was flung aside.

"My ass," she hissed a plea through her teeth.

"What?"

"Spank me," she said. "Please!"

A chill ran through him, at least as bad as the trembling of the mesh.

"Come on!"

Could he do this? Had Talla really excised the demons that had haunted him when she'd made him take her bent over that camp table? How important were Bree's needs?

She bit him again, much harder this time. The pain was palpable. She might be drawing blood.

Without thinking, he reached around behind her and lashed out with his right hand to swat her cheek. Through the mesh, a rewarding wave of pain of pleasure came from her body into his.

Bree moved her mouth down toward his shoulder and sunk her teeth in again. If she was changing spots, that was nothing to Zhair'lo. He let loose with another strike to the exact same spot on her flesh and was rewarded with a tightening around his cock. 

Her head rose then, pulling her teeth away from his skin, and he saw that the muscles in her neck were taut with tension.

"Again," she whispered through clenched teeth. "One more."

Her entire body, from her monumentally powerful legs to the muscles in her face, was completely locked up in a rictus of pain and pleasure unbearably mixed together.

One more, she wanted?

He cracked his palm once more on her taut rear. That wave of pain was enough to send them both over the edge.

It was an odd feeling, as his erection tried to pulse inside a tunnel that remained so tight. He was sure that Bree was having an orgasm, but it seemed to be the case that no part of her was twitching in time with the pulses that fired semen into her depths. Instead, she merely clenched him in a death grip, which was actually making it difficult for him to ejaculate.

Then he felt the shuddering again.

It was as if his orgasm, and her orgasm, were echoing back to them from far away.

'It's the others,' she whispered into his mind, 'we pushed them over the edge.'

'They feel us?'

'We feel them,' she answered noncommittally.

...

And then it was broken.

Bree, the runner, had finished her race.

"I hope we have enough time," she panted, "to come back around again. That was the best."

Bewildered, Zhair'lo could only stare at her as she pulled herself off his spent member. He'd run into loads of different women and his experience had so far indicated that there about as many sexual fetishes as they were human beings. Bree was yet another: a girl who wanted to fuck competitively, who viewed it a sort of sport.

She winked at him as she stood, forcing a crick out of her neck, and grabbing her discarded clothing before turning to walk down the length of the small room.

Zhair'lo watched her go, gorgeous muscles trembling all the way up her legs to the red spot he'd made in pleasuring her with those three strikes. He'd survived that at least, and hadn't even hyperventilated.

Reaching the bed at the front of the room, Bree evicted its female occupant, a girl whose features Zhair'lo couldn't make out in the candlelight. Not completely recovered from sex, the girl in question wobbled to her feet and went across to one of the other beds.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 21



Rendered emotionless by the ordeal, Zhair'lo watched disinterestedly as the eviction process circulated around the room and a naked, pale skinned girl rotated to his bed.

"Are we supposed to start right away?" she asked, sitting down beside him.

"I ... uh ... I dunno."

She was a slim girl, like all of Form, and her strength seemed to be in her abs.

"Call me Del," she cast a distracted look toward his penis.

"Zhair'lo. Some call me Zhai."

Del looked up at him, then threw a worried look over her shoulder.

"I'm worried they'll walk in," she said.

"You don't like being watched?"

"Naw," she shrugged. "Just that we're suppose to be, y'know, fucking, but we're not."

Another look of concern at his flaccid member.

"Oh."

What kind of recovery time did other men have anyway? He could usually go three times in a night, and maybe doing it with different girls would get him to four just with the novelty of it. But there was still a certain amount of down time.

"You think we'd get in trouble?"

"Maybe," she scratched her chin. "There wasn't a lesson about this."

Zhair'lo thought that Del much preferred when there was a lesson that explicitly told her how to handle a situation. He wondered how much of Fighter training would meet with her approval.

"You Iron?" he wondered aloud.

"Plus one in Facial," she nodded.

He looked her over more closely. The eyelashes and the softness of her hair told that story, though Zhair'lo wondered why she'd taken Facial over Tight, if Fighting was really her game.

"Well," she resolved, "at least I know what to do with you."

There was a marked difference, Zhair'lo soon realized between the sucking one could get from a Facial girl and the kind that came from anyone else. He'd probably never noticed before because he'd never had them so close together for comparison. His loins began to stir as her tongue swirled.

She pulled off him for a moment, caressing his testicles.

"I can taste Bree on you," she remarked before going back to work.

An image came into his mind, of Del and Bree taking turns, back and forth, on his cock. Del with her mouth; Bree with her pussy. It wouldn't work, of course. Once he penetrated Bree, he'd be stuck in a mesh ... unless they used one of those potions on him. Still, the image, spurred by Del's matter of fact comment, sent a surge to his genitals.

Del let out a muffled grunt and came off his erection again.

"I do good work," she smiled.

For her encore, she stroked him with her hand while swirling her tongue around only the head of his cock.

"Okay," she said. "If we can get you inside me, I'm sure we'll be good."

He acknowledged this wearily.

It was a sign of their mutual exhaustion that they weren't going for any level of anticipation or delayed gratification. They needed to achieve penetration solely to obey the rules and stay out of trouble.

"We're a bit ahead of everybody else anyway," she pointed out with a jerk of her head.

Indeed, the other three girls were also kneeling on the floor to apply their oral talents. Zhair'lo was thankful the candlelight didn't show him much of what he didn't want to see anyway - two of the girls were blocking his view and Renzi was too far to his left be in his field of vision anyway.

He was so distracted, his erection was half way inside Del before he noticed she had straddled him.

...

Del was not a runner.

She much preferred to march.

Sex was a thing to be done in order.

An erection was coaxed into existence.

A vagina was penetrated.

Arousal was increased through simple, rhythmic grinding motions.

Orgasm would eventually be reached, for the pleasure of both involved.

If someone showed her something new, she might or might not incorporate it into her Standard Way of Serving Men, but nothing would change the fact that there was a procedure and she would follow it.

Was she happy to be the first to get her man inside her?

Yes. It proved that the Standard Way was working and that she was right to stick it with while allowing for the little changes that were perfecting her methodology. She was also proud of her Facial upgrade. Clearly, it had been the right decision for tonight.

Del did not want to be spanked. When she realized that Zhair'lo had no desires in that direction, that he was only reaching around her back to get a nice firm grip on her cheeks, a surge of relief came through the mesh.

Also unusual for a Form woman, he noticed that she had breasts. Not even half an upgrade's worth, but still, a small pair of naturally formed breasts that deviated from the flatness of the general population in this room. It was probably the largest pair Zhair'lo would see for some time, given how things were going.

Del, her interest piqued, slowly lowered her chest to his face.

Playfully, he tongued her nipples, one at a time.

There was no great surge of physical joy from her, but she felt his pleasure echoing back and let him continue.

"Do you think I should get them done?" she asked softly.

"Point, you mean?"

Del nodded lazily, enjoying his attention in a strange, non physical way.

"Of course, Point," she said. "Endowment would get in the way."

Her disparagement of breasts was so automatic, so simple and thoughtless, it was almost as if it was one of those phrases that children were taught to repeat.

"One Endowment upgrade wouldn't be that big a deal," Zhair'lo defended. "I've seen lots of different sizes."

Del took a thoughtful pause from her grinding, looked at him, then resumed.

"Maybe. How many do you think it would take to get in the way of a bow?"

"I know a girl with four," he said. "She's pretty sharp."

She pushed one of her breasts into his mouth again.

"But the nipples," Del crooned. "Imagine a nice pair of hard, sensitive nipples."

The eager sound of her voice, along with the nipple he was sucking on, pushed him a little; made him harden inside her.

"The nice thing about nipples, you see," she explained wistfully, "is that they're small and out of the way. And yet ... so useful."

Deep inside her, as she worked him around with her hips, he felt his erection twitch.

"Not yet," she warned. "Let the others at least get started."

Zhair'lo raised his eyebrows doubtfully.

He had always considered it the most magical thing in the world that the gods could give them simultaneous orgasms. Well, perhaps that was the second most magical thing. The first was orgasms themselves. But he knew, from long experience, that orgasms could totally happen solo. On top of that, he considered it extraordinarily fortunate that, once two people started having sex, they were linked together right through to climax.

And now, Del wanted to coordinate four such couples? Eight people in all?

That seemed to be asking a hell of a lot of the universe, really.

"It worked the first time," she replied to his raised eyebrows. "Just let it wash over you if someone else goes first."

Being Served by Del was relaxing, in a way. Zhair'lo only had to sit back, knead away at her cheeks and suckle at her breasts when she occasionally brought them close. Del was content to work his body this way.

Slowly, the others joined. He felt the mesh tremble as each couple got themselves going. From off to his his left, Bree was getting herself spanked again. Zhair'lo figured that must be her thing, whomever she was fucking.

"There we go," Del approved quietly. "All in order."

"I don't know how many more of these I can do," Zhair'lo admitted.

"Yeah. That's why I'm taking this slow. Save your energy. I'm pretty sure we have to go around at least one cycle."

Nine gods.

From his left, Bree was crooning and demanding more force from Renzi. Two loud, slapping sounds later, Zhair'lo felt something rush over Del and himself. Bree and Renzi were coming, and Del's vagina was clamping down, unavoidably drawn on by the irresistible force of someone else's orgasm.

Zhair'lo might have been able to hold off, but he didn't think it wise to even try. If there was going to be any more tonight, he was taking Del's advice and saving his energy. He let it flow, just as Del did, expelling some probably inconsequential amount of semen inside her. The twitching was there - and there was no doubting the power behind it - but he had to be dry at this point, didn't he?

A new feeling overcame him. It was something he hadn't felt in a while.

Zhair'lo's eyelids grew heavy and his shoulder grew weak, letting his arms drop to the surface of the bed. Quite suddenly, more than anything, he wanted to sleep.

As Del slid off him, Zhair'lo felt his body finally give up and consciousness slipped away from him.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 22



A loud crash echoed through the room as it's wooden door burst open.

Zhair'lo, entirely disoriented, woke up with a start. Where was he? 

'Oh, right - the Fighter Barracks.'

They'd been told to stay awake until the candles burned down. The candles were not burned down, and yet he had definitely been asleep. How had that happened?

'No matter.'

A girl he didn't know lay next to him, her naked back toward the door. She was gently stroking his flaccid penis and trying to wake him.

Over her deeply tanned shoulder, Zhair'lo could see Sergeant Yung and two leathered women standing at the door. Yung was hammering away at a cooking pan with some kind of metal spoon.

"Anybody asleep in here?" he shouted.

Murmurs of denial came back.

"Better not be."

With a condescending smirk, the three of them left the small room and slammed the door behind them.

A moment later, it was hard to believe it had actually happened.

"Thanks for the cover," Zhair'lo said. 

The girl, her hand still trying to bring life to his member, nodded shyly.

"Can't see how it would be good for any of us," she said. "May as well stick together."

"Zhair'lo," he turned to face her properly.

"Tara."

Tara seemed almost as tired as Zhair'lo felt, which made it hard for him to get any idea what she was really like. He tried to imagine the sort of impression she might have of him, dozing off when he should be having sex.

Sliding a hand down her back, over her right cheek and down her leg, he tried to figure out her Discipline.

"Tight? With one in Iron?"

Tara nodded appreciatively.

"You can tell?"

"I did a lot of upgrades -"

"- and a lot of Virgins," she taunted.

It was the first sign of any personality so far.

"Yeah. A lot of virgins."

He wondered if she could hear the difference between the two words.

"Well, I hope I don't disappoint you," she snarked. "I'm long past breaking in."

Zhair'lo tried to look into her eyes to see what sort of attitude she had, hoping to figure out how he should respond, but all he saw was a solidly belligerent front.

"I'll just have to shove it in deeper, then," he replied.

"Oh," she let out a theatrical gasp. "We'll just have to work you a lot harder, if that's what we're going for."

Tara twisted around to put her back to him, then reached around to pull his penis between her thighs.

"Doing it from behind is how you get it deeper, you know?"

Keeping her legs spread, she began gently slapping his cock against her bare mound.

"Nice," he complimented, running his hands over her warm, hard stomach.

"Yeah. Iron's alright," Tara said.

"No Facial for you?"

"You'd like that wouldn't you?" she asked as she rubbed his hardening shaft across her entrance.

"Like what?"

She leaned back and purred an admonishment over her shoulder at him as she enclosed him within her thighs.

"Coming in my face."

"Ah."

"Have you come in a lot of faces?" she purred. "How many?"

Zhair'lo had to think about that.

"Quite a few," he breathed. "And a mouth or two."

"Delicious, I'm sure."

Tara was completely slick, with the juices leaking out from between her lips having thoroughly coated her thighs. Zhair'lo tried not to think too much about the nature of what was lubricating his cock.

"Time to get you inside me," she called back, a matter of fact tone in her voice. "I can carry you from there."

Zhair'lo wouldn't have considered himself quite ready at that point, but given the state of her vagina, he didn't imagine his semi-flaccidity would prove too much of a hindrance.

With a sly movement of her hips, Tara shifted her body upward. The slippery grip her thighs had on his cock changed the angle, setting him perfectly against her opening. Another shift, and he felt himself easily enveloped by her soft, wetness.

...

As the mesh took hold, Zhair'lo felt himself harden and her tighten around him.

Tara really was a belligerent pain in the ass. It was the only way she knew to relate to people. If she couldn't be playfully annoying, she couldn't be anything at all.

Also, she was a lot more into this multiple-partner thing than Zhair'lo was.

Or at least her arousal was higher.

For a moment, he considered the relevance of the ease of the extra sexual encounter he had on his record for the night. What might it be like for the Renzi, Kit and Z'rus, who might have had more eager partners earlier in the evening?

"Pay attention, jackass," Tara muttered.

She had noticed his wandering thoughts.

Zhair'lo jabbed forward, feeling the muscled hardness of her cheeks digging into his pelvis.

"Nice and hard, huh?" she said.

From her thoughts, he could tell she meant her ass, not his erection.

"I love a good grind," she added, twisting her hips into him.

Zhair'lo snaked hist left arm under her body to hook around her chest. The right hand he put on her hip to pull her in tighter. Tara murmured appreciatively.

"The thumb," she whispered.

"Huh?"

"Where your thumb is ... on my ass."

He looked down at the way he had grabbed her, with his fingers wrapped around her hip bone and his thumb digging into the muscles of her cheek. Was that what she meant? The mesh told him, yes, exactly that. He jabbed his thumb deeper into her flank - she moaned.

"Harder."

The pleasure of this harsh massage technique washed back over him. Tight girls always made him tense, what with their need to be spanked.

"Grind my ass," Tara demanded. "Dig way in there."

The only way Zhair'lo could manage any more force was to close his fist and push his knuckles into her flesh. Her muscles began to yield and he could feel an odd sense of relaxation overcome both of them.

"Madra Zen, that's nice," she said, as if he couldn't feel it himself. "Don't know why I'm so tense."

Zhair'lo winced. He knew the tension wasn't her fault. He'd felt himself lock up the moment he'd recognized her Discipline. Even with the previous encounter behind him, he still worried he might seize up if Tara asked him to -

"Pound me," she pleaded.

Nine gods.

"Just use your fist."

Keeping his knuckles pointed at the hollow of her cheek, he raised his fist away from her body and brought it back down.

"Oh," she crooned. "Again."

With that demand came the mental clarification: 'Harder'.

He brought his fist down on her flesh and felt the wave of numb relaxation shoot down her thigh.

The light in the room flickered suddenly and gently faded toward darkness. It was an obvious enough change, even through the mesh and their exhaustion, that they both twisted around to look at the desk behind Zhair'lo. One candle had gone out. The other was nearing the end of its life.

Relief flowed through them both for the ordeal was nearly over.

When they turned back to their former positions, Zhair'lo found that Tara's muscles were tightening around him, although he had to admit that the little twisting motion they'd just added to the mix might have hardened him as well.

He didn't need to hear her demands at this point. She was arching her back to get her hips aligned as far away from him as he could, to deepen his penetration. There was a certain sense in which Tara was exposing her ass to him, and he could feel that, too. Which did she want, he wondered?

Zhair'lo decided to go with the fist.

The first strike to her rear was rewarded with a glorious wave of numbness and relaxation that spread down her thighs, past her knees and almost to her toes.

'Awesome,' was Tara's verdict, coming over the link.

Again and again he thumped his fist down against her cheek, feeling her body tremble with every impact. Even as her legs went numb, though, her vagina tightened around him.

As orgasm approached, the last candle flickered out and they were cast into darkness.

"One good slap," Tara pleaded. "Let everyone hear it ..."

Zhairlo understood this was her thing. He could feel her need to perform. Tara wanted to be seen and, if making a visual spectacle of herself was prevented by darkness, she at least wanted to be heard.

Tara wanted everyone to know she was doing it right. And having her man spanking her meant that he was aroused, attracted to her, and being properly Served.

In the darkness, he raised his hand. She felt his body shift and knew by the way the bed moved exactly how far away that hand was. She knew, too, by the way his mind shivered, that the palm was open. Anticipation swarmed through the mesh. Her muscles, wrapped around his erection, tightened even more.

Zhair'lo's hand rushed down. Tara held her breath, fighting to hold off their orgasm.

There was a loud crack as palm met cheek. Tara screeched as Zhair'lo grunted and fired a stream of semen into her belly. Her upper body twitched suddenly, so her back came up against his chest. But with Tara numb from the waist down, Zhair'lo had to hold her hips in place with his right hand so he could keep thrusting into her. His left hand, meanwhile, was crushing one of her breasts against her chest.

Semen continued to spurt into her long after he thought it should have stopped. How much could he produce, really? He wondered ...

But he couldn't wonder very long. He was soon empty, both in mind and body. Extricated from Tara's genitals, with the darkness around him, it took him only seconds to fall asleep.

--===================--

Lying in bed, Talla awoke with her thighs tightly clenched and the middle finger of her right hand embedded between her lips. She'd been dreaming and masturbating in her sleep. Her finger was soaked and her legs were numb.

Without thinking, she pressed her clitoris down hard, toward her vagina, and a rewarding wave of pleasurable relaxation moved through her lower body. Some ghost pressed against her rear and she felt a real wetness leak out under her thighs.

One more squeeze of her clitoris ... her finger touched the ring of her vaginal entrance ... she shuddered as an orgasm washed over her.

Delirious, she fell back asleep.

She would only have a vague memory of the episode when she woke up.

--===================--

Sergeant Yung was there - again - with the cooking pan. Zhair'lo couldn't believe it.

Very early daylight crept in around the edges of the blinds. Was it even sixth bell? How long had they been up last night? Surely it had been well past midnight before the candles had gone out.

A shock of fear went through him. He was still wrapped around the naked form of Tara, her hip and one of her small breasts still in his hands, his penis trapped limply against her cheeks.

'Women and men should not be sleeping together!' some foreign memory shouted desperately inside his mind.

No one slept much longer anyway. Sergeant Yung was at the doorway, gleefully hammering away with his metal spoon as older men and women moved quickly through the room, shouting at all of them to get on their feet.

Disoriented, hungry and slightly sick, they were herded out of the room. Tara had the sense to reach for her clothing, but even those tiny pieces of fabric were not permitted - they were knocked out of her hands by a woman who shoved her toward the door.

Naked, they found themselves outside in the light of dawn. Lightly clothed Fighters and armoured women pushed them along the alleys to a building made of stone with giant cisterns built high above it.

Inside, the place was nothing but an exterior wall and a network of pipes and spigots hanging from the ceiling. Levers were flipped and ice cold water dumped over naked bodies. Zhair'lo shook with cold, but at least he was awake.

When the blast of water ceased, there were bars of soap, handed to the female recruits.

"Wash each other," one of the women ordered, "then get your asses back to your Barracks."

There was no time limit given, but no one wanted to tarry either. Tara was on him immediately, lathering him with the rough soap.

"Ever Primed?" Zhair'lo asked.

Tara actually smiled, breaking through the vague aura of terror that permeated the room.

"I don't think that's what we're going for here," she laughed, soaping up his penis.

"It would take a lot of sucking to get me going," he admitted with a tilt of his head.

"I doubt it," she admonished.

Having finished his legs, she handed him the soap and turned her back to him, sliding her cheeks against his soap-slippery pelvis.

"No time for that, I bet," Tara said, surrendering to his hands.

Zhair'lo muttered his agreement and washed her hair, as quickly and savagely as she had done his, before proceeding down her body. Her back was first, then her breasts. There were little dimples in one of her breasts, arrayed around the nipple, depressions in her skin that he traced with his fingertips.

"That was you," she said.

"Huh?"

"Last night ... uh ... this morning, I guess. You're more of a boob guy, I guess."

His squeezing had done that, during their orgasm?

"Sorry."

"S'alright," she said, sounding offended. "You feel it, you go with it. The mesh would have told you to stop if it was a problem."

Kneeling down as she had before him, Zhair'lo washed her lower body. Tara supported herself on his shoulders so she could lift a leg and let him wash between her cheeks. She parted her lips, too, so he could gently rub a bit of soap around her entrance.

Without warning, she kicked the lever that doused them in another bracing load of ice cold water. He stood up quickly and found himself facing her. Apparently without thinking, Tara clung to him under the freezing onslaught.

"Hah!" she yelled out, tucking her head into his chest.

Another kick of the lever ended the flow of water and she moved slightly apart from him. They kept their faces turned down to let the water run off their heads without getting in their mouths. Tara's nipples, he noted, were hard as rocks and a delightful shade of dark red.

She caught him looking, then scooped her little breasts up in her hands, squeezing until the little red nipples were trapped between thumbs and forefingers.

"I'm sure we'll get to fuck again, later," she taunted.

'Insatiable,' Zhair'lo judged. 'Clearly.'

A moment later there were clothed people in the showers again, yelling and shoving, turning on cold water for those who hadn't rinsed yet, herding them all back to the room in which they'd slept.

On their beds were new clothes.

Zhair'lo's eyes widened as they took in the shining brown leather.

There was a set of real, fighting armour on each bed.

That small stack of leathers floored him even though he knew it wasn't the serious kind of armour. It was knee length shorts for the boys and knee length skirts for the girls. The girls' tops, additionally, were the kind that left the mid-riff bare.

'Utterly impractical; ceremonial,' said one part of his brain.

'Official,' said another part.

Clothing had never meant anything to Zhair'lo. Sure, women showed up in different colours and styles, but he'd never noticed those until he'd started noticing women in general. Through quizzing Talla and the many other visitors to his bed, he had a pretty shrewd notion of the relationship between clothes, colours and rank. But for himself and other men, clothing had never been any colour other than the various shades of beige and never a style except what function demanded. The outfits for Hunters, for example, were designed with extra straps for a bow and a quiver. Zhair'lo had never found it remarkable.

This, however, was a uniform. He'd known the word for a long time. He must have seen Fighters before and someone had said the word, because the word came to his mind the moment he saw the outfit on his bed. No other occupation, at least for men, had a uniform. The closest were the cloth aprons of the bakers and butchers and the heavier aprons of the smiths.

"Get dressed," Yung popped into the room out of nowhere.

The top was snug, but laced in places at the shoulders and sides so that he could move easily. The shorts were slightly looser around the waist and crotch, but tight around his thighs.

"Look at the left breast of your uniform," Yung went on. "Pull the flap up and tie it in that position."

Zhair'lo did so and found a hollow circle of white fabric tightly stitched into the leather.

"That circle means you're a Recruit. You don't fight - not yet. You stay out from underfoot in an emergency. You let marching soldiers pass you. If you hear the horn blow, you stay out of the way."

"The horn, sir?" Renzi twitched in confusion.

"You'll hear it later," Yung cast a sideways glance. "It's used if we come under attack."

Zhair'lo gulped. He didn't think he'd ever heard any such horn, but the look on the Sergeant's face seemed to suggest, at the very least, that Sergeant Yung had heard the horn a number of times.

"While you're inside any Barracks, you keep that rank patch visible," Yung warned, tapping the black Chevron on his own chest. "Outside - in the wild or the city - you keep it covered. It's nobody's business. Clear?"

"Yes, sir!" they chorused back.

"Good," he sneered. "Let's step outside."

It seemed to Zhair'lo, as they all scrambled through the door, that Sergeant Yung spent his life in a constant state of very mild disappointment.

A short distance away was a small square of grass, perhaps ten metres a side, surrounded by wooden buildings with slightly raised, awning-covered wooden porches. At the backs of these porches, leaning up against the walls of the buildings, were arrays of wooden weapons. The fact that Zhair'lo could identify only a handful of them caused his eyes to light up: here was something new to learn.

'You're going to teach me how to destroy you.'

Sergeant Yung began positioning them in the centre of the small space, forming two rows of four with the boys across the front and the girls two paces behind them.

"This is how you will march when we are four abreast," he said. "Remember your position. You will always form up in this exact way, left to right and front to back."

Zhair'lo looked to the left to see Renzi, to his right Kit and farther to the right Z'rus. Bree was at his back, with Tara to her left, a girl named Zia on her right and Del the farthest to the right, behind Z'rus.

"If it is necessary to walk two abreast," Yung explained. "Zhair'lo and Kit will step forward -" a jerk of his head drew them two paces toward himself - "and Renzi and Z'rus will fall in behind."

A wave of the Sergeant's hands was enough to push the boys in line.\

"As you continue to march ...", Yung trailed off, drawing all four boys forward, "Bree and Zia will come with you while Del and Tara fall in behind."

What followed was the most tedious experience of Zhair'lo's life. Sergeant Yung marched them around the inside of the Barracks, through every alley and little road the place had, all the time shouting out "Left! Right! Left! Right!" to keep them synchronized. Periodically, because of either the narrowness of an alley or merely because it pleased him, he called out an order such as "Two abreast!" or "Four abreast!".

After one bell of this nonsense, he called out "Ready! Halt!". When they failed to come to a synchronized stop, he had them start up again, called out another halt - and another, and another - until they got it right.

When he was satisfied with this, he started them marching again.

The good part, Zhair'lo realized, was that he would have the entire layout of the Barracks memorized in no time. Sergeant Yung was intent on making them march up and down every single road, path and alley the fort contained, and he seemed to want to do this for bell after bell.

When the tenth bell rang out, he immediately called for a halt.

"Good," he said. "Now, when I order 'Attention!', you bring your feet together, your hands go flat to your sides and your eyes go straight ahead."




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 22



"ATTEN-SHUN!"

Simultaneously, all eight recruits snapped their heels together and clapped their hands to their sides.

"Do NOT look at me," Yung admonished as he walked past them. "Look straight ahead and ignore everything around you. When you are given a weapon to carry, you will learn how to stand while holding that weapon. For now, those arms stay straight and those hands stay flat at your sides."

He came around to stand behind them, daring someone to move. Speaking from where they couldn't see him, he began to explain more terms they would have to know and how they should react to them.

Zhair'lo tried to hold it all in his head but there was a nagging voice in there, too, demanding to know the point of this tedium. A rebellious part of him wanted to shout, 'Fuck this!' and walk out, but he was able to restrain himself for two reasons. The first was that all of this nonsense might, somehow, be an integral part of what made a man into a Fighter. He'd done a lot of seemingly stupid things while learning a lot of different vocations, but everything always came together at the end. Every weird exercise or mental task ended up being relevant. The other thing that kept him in place, his spine straight as a rod, was the fact that this was the shortest path to reaching whatever enemies the Temple regarded as its most dangerous.

Holding a smirk inside, he wondered if the Temple realized its most dangerous enemies were really on the inside.

It occurred to him, standing there in the sun, unfed since the send-off dinner at Lyric's Camp the night before, to think of the two Fighters who watched over the recruits last night, while Sergeant Yung had gone to get Z'rus. They had stood still, just like this, patiently waiting and alertly surveying their surroundings.

'Calmness under physical duress does matter, doesn't it?' he thought.

"Fall ... in!" Sergeant Yung called out. "The mess hall is the building on your left. You have half a bell to eat before you return here. Enjoy."

--===================--

The Goddess of Gern rubbed her eyes at the sun that slanted in past the black curtains in her bedroom. Sleeping on her side did not agree with her as it always left her shoulder sore. Somehow, the eleven upgrades she held in Strength, alongside the eleven from Iron, utterly failed to alleviate this problem.

Yet, with a uterus full of baby-to-be, sleeping on her back had ceased to be an option weeks ago.

'Won't be long now,' she kept telling herself.

At thirty-five, however, this pregnancy was a lot more difficult than her previous two. There were the Perfections to make the ordeal easier - and the attendants from Pussy who dutifully arranged black-cloth pillows multiple times per night. But she was old, and probably not long for the world once this child was birthed.

Perfections weighed heavily on a body, more so even than pregnancies.

With a sigh, she acknowledged that she was done sleeping and hoisted herself out of bed.

As bare feet touched cold, black marble, the attendants from Pussy appeared out of nowhere. They were young women with fresh bodies, naked to match the nudity in which she slept. They placed her loose, black robe around her shoulders and led her to the bathroom.

"Is your Mistress here?" she asked as she waddled.

"Yes, Imminence," one responded.

One of the other benefits of being pregnant as a Goddess was the closeness of the facilities. Even here on the third floor, a woman of her station merited a cistern of water and a private commode. It didn't make up for the rest of the discomfort, but it was a nice touch.

"Send for her," the Goddess commanded. "I will only be a moment."

It never took long to void a bladder so compacted.

When she came out of the bathroom, the Sorceresses of both Pussy and Within were waiting for her. Pussy was naked. Within wore only her white physician's smock, with its pockets for various tools, ointments and potions. The smock was open at the front, however, showing that she was respecting her superior's nudity.

"Never far, are you?" she said to Within.

"No, Imminence."

"Well, have a look, then."

The Goddess lay down on the bed and spread her legs so that Within could kneel on the floor and examine her.

"And?" the supine woman asked, not getting up.

"Tonight, perhaps," Within said. "Tomorrow morning at the latest."

The Goddess merely stared at the black cloths which formed a kind of roof over her four post bed.

"Everything is ready?"

This was a question for Pussy.

"The merchant caravan is set to travel, along with an Endowment woman who has kept her milk up", the other Sorceress responded.

The Goddess sighed wearily.

"Very well, then," she said. "Let me be about my day."

--===================--

Talla wasn't finding swimming to be as easy as others made it look. She'd gotten a good read on a basic breaststroke, but wasn't comfortable treading water for any length of time. Mostly, she went to the pool house to meet with her co-conspirators. Since she was early, she'd decided to jump in the water early to cool off from a long morning of bow and bo staff exercises. They had started practising formations today, which had mostly resulted in girls hitting each other with their bo staffs.

Turning over on her back so her bare breasts could take in the cooling action of the light breeze that drifted over the surface of the pool, Talla decided that she would not be any part of a military assault on the Temple. Not that such a thing had ever been part of the plan, but she'd definitively ruled out her competence in that area today.

With her nipples delightfully stiff from the cooling effect of evaporation, she rolled back over and came to the edge of the pool. She grabbed the lip of the pool and, just as she prepared to lift herself out, she found she was staring directly into the bare mound of someone sitting cross legged in front of her.

"V'shika," she said.

V'shika was looking off into the distance behind Talla. The sad look on her face made Talla turn around, thinking that there was a beautiful woman swimming there that was provoking some sort of the envy in her colleague.

But no one swam in the water where V'shika stared.

With the ease that came from her single Strength upgrade, Talla pulled herself up over the edge of the pool and sat next to V'shika.

"What's up, sister?"

"We don't have much of a chance," V'shika heaved a sigh.

"Can't be that bad," Talla said. "Let's find a private spot."

Scanning the room, she noticed not only an empty bath, but also Zoe and Tina stripping off their clothes near the pegs by the entrance. In short order, all four naked girls were in one large tub, huddled together.

"Spill it," Zoe told V'shika. "You look pale as death."

Which, given the Within girl's dark complexion, was a bit ridiculous.

"I've looked into how they make ... the stuff," V'shika explained, refusing to actually say 'Synergist'.

"And?"

"It takes about two weeks to make it from the raw plant," she said. "They have to dry out the leaves for a couple of days. Then they get soaked in some kind of acid."

"Some kind?" Talla asked.

"They don't get specific," V'shika replied dully. "At least not with somebody wearing white." She sighed depressively and shrugged.

"Ah."

"So they soak it in this acid for a while, and then they boil off a whole lot of water. After that, it goes into a cauldron and they poor in a tonne of some special sugar and they cool it down."

"We're not trying to produce the stuff, V'shika," Talla pointed out. "So we don't need perfect details on how it's made."

"The problem is where they keep it," V'shika went on, her voice now so flat it made Talla cringe in fear. "Once the sugar is added, it gets really thick and it absolutely has to stay cool. Absolutely everybody seems to know that - it's no secret at all."

"It's been pretty cold every times it's been on my body," Tina pointed out.

"Exactly. Everybody knows it."

V'shika took a deep breath.

"So there's only one place where they keep the stuff, in a deep, cold vault under Within. The room is so far underground that it stays cold, which preserves the Syn ... the stuff."

"You're sure there's only one vault?" Talla asked.

"Yeah," V'shika said. "I mean, they could be lying to me, but it's pretty expensive to dig that deep, y'know?"

"So what's got you so glum?" Zoe asked.

"The guards," V'shika said. "That place is so heavily guarded, it's ridiculous. I'm talking about multiple, locked, brass doors. We are not ever going to sneak in there to steal that whole supply. If we try to knock out a single shipment, all they'll do is send another shipment."

"They'd be way oversupplied," Talla nodded. "No reason not to be."

"But all the same," Tina pointed out. "One supply. One route to the Goddess."

"So what?" V'shika blew a breath up through her hair.

"So it's something," Zoe insisted. "Talla and Zhair'lo will figure something out."

Talla still felt that Zoe's confidence in her and Zhair'lo was very misplaced. All they'd done so far was gotten Talla's ass whipped once and then piled together a bunch of disaffected, low-ranking people. As far as actual action against the Temple, there was a big fat zero in the points column.

Outwardly, however, Talla tried to radiate leadership at everyone. At the moment, that consisted mostly of proudly holding her chest above the water line while appearing pensive.

"We'll work on it," she said and, a moment later, "How long does it last if you let it warm up?"

"A few bells," V'shika said. "They usually have to bring up two separate batches, one after the other, when they do upgrades."

Talla rubbed her forehead.

"But a delaying action won't work either," V'shika said. "Even if you could, I don't know - engineer something to fall on one group of them and block them off, they'd just send another."

"Engineer something?" Talla asked.

"Yeah," Zoe said. "That's you, right? Endowment? The builders and engineers and what not."

"I suppose."

That was her field. Talla was supposed to be learning a lot on the subject, but she was currently stuck with a bunch of Endowment and Sweetness Virgins learning the basics of defending a Temple wall.

"I don't think I can 'engineer' a wall to fall in anyone's way," she admitted. "But, like you said, that wouldn't work anyway."

A thought struck her.

"I wonder, though," she said suddenly. "About the roof of this vault."

"You think you could collapse the whole thing?" Zoe asked eagerly.

V'shika perked up at this.

Talla tried to picture any of the underground rooms she'd been in. They were usually supported by massive stone pillars that were left behind when the room was carved out. The engineers in Endowment had a pretty shrewd notion of how much stone was needed to support a certain amount of roof. She remembered seeing arches and such, all carved out of stone, but there were also rooms supported by timbers.

"I'd need to know what the room looks like inside, I think."

A dismissive breath of air issued from V'shika.

"No chance of that," she said. "No one anywhere near our rank ever gets in that place."

"What's the closest you've been?"

"They let us walk down this long tunnel that ends at the outermost door," V'shika shrugged. "There's a tiny window they look out of. When they opened the door, I could see a door farther in and a room full of guards, but they wouldn't let us in."

"Anything else you remember?" Zoe asked.

"Just that it was damned cold," the Within girl shivered involuntarily. "Thought I'd got a Point upgrade on the way down there. Gods awful draught."

There was a collective sigh.

"Sorry," Talla said, sinking into the water until it touched her chin. "Did you say there was a draught?"

"Of wind, yeah," V'shika said. "So?"

Talla smiled.

--===================--

Zhair'lo stared directly in front of him, toward the far end of the barracks where the spiked, wooden wall touched the sky. In his peripheral vision, he caught Sergeant Yung returning to watch over them. They'd been standing at attention for over a bell, now, watching the sun go down very, very slowly. The Sergeant had been rotating various of his men through to keep watch on them. That way, the real Fighters could have a break while the recruits grew stiff and delirious.

It had gone on so long that Zhair'lo had developed an internal monologue.

'Lunch has been skipped,' he thought. 'That ought to be mentioned, if someone is taking notes.'

He kept his eyes steady, even as he felt his body begin to swim.

'I don't think any of us are sure what would happen if we moved. But we don't dare.'

There might be some punishment, after all.

'I think I can feel Renzi started to actually wobble. I've decided not to look at him as it wouldn't be conducive to my long term success.'

Zhair'lo furrowed his brow slightly.

'I seem to be using bigger words the closer I get to exhaustion.'

"At ease," the Sergeant whispered.

The recruits let out a heavy sigh and relaxed their stances so their feet were shoulder width apart and their hands were clasped behind their backs.

"You may walk quietly back to your quarters now," he said.

'None of us dare to ask about dinner,' Zhair'lo narrated.

The eight of them walked slowly and stiffly back to their quarters. Having spent not just the morning but also the afternoon marching around the Barracks, they knew the way perfectly. With Bree and Zhair'lo leading, by dint of stumbling in a slightly more capable fashion than anyone else, they entered their tiny room, each eliciting a sigh of relief at having escaped even the last of the dwindling sunlight.

"Women at the back," Sergeant Yung ordered. "Stand in front of the desk and face the wall."

Exhausted into submission, the four leather clad girls obeyed without any argument.

"Zhair'lo?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Anybody you haven't fucked yet?"

"Sir?" Zhair'lo turned to look over his shoulder.

Sergeant Yung, towering over the four boys crowded into the narrow aisle between the beds, looked at him with a raised eyebrow. He clearly would not be repeating himself.

"Zia, sir."

"Go stand behind her, then."

Zia was at the far left end of the desk. While Zhair'lo took his place behind her, she looked over her shoulder, alternating the target of her studious gaze between him and the Sergeant who was, one by one, going through the other boys and directed them to the their places.

"Good!" Sergeant Yung shouted. "Now, men, remove the skirt of the woman in front of you."

A strange chill ran through Zhair'lo. The girls weren't quite standing cheek to cheek. The room was, after all, wide enough for a small cot on each side and a aisle down the centre. The desk was almost as wide as the room. They could probably have eight or nine couples into the space if they'd been prepared to touch each other.

"Did I stutter?!"

It was Sergeant Yung's favourite line when they hesitated to follow his orders.

"Do it," Zia hissed at him.

Jarred into action, Zhair'lo reached for the ties at the sides of Zia's skirt, unlacing first one side and then the other. When the laces loosened as far as her hips, he carefully slid the leather over her sweat-tacked flesh. The smell of the square they'd sweltered in and the heat of the afternoon were upon her.

'And Nine Gods ... the legs.'

"Good," the Sergeant did not conceal his sarcasm. "Now when you're done fucking each other, hit the showers and get to the mess."

With that, the veteran Fighter marched out of the room and shut the door.

For a brief moment, the boys looked at each other before, by some unspoken mutual agreement, they turned their gazes away and never looked back again.

"Madra Zen," Zia hissed a curse. "I'm too gods damned dry."

"Turn around, then," Zhair'lo told her.

"What?"

'To be honest,' he thought, 'I'd just like to get off my feet.'

Rather than explain anything to Zia, he gently turned her around and pushed her naked butt up on the desk.

"Spread your legs?"

"I ... okay."

If she couldn't figure out where this was going, she couldn't possibly have been an Initiate. Her rank meant she'd been Serving men for over a year, didn't it? So why was she looking at Zhair'lo with that dumbfounded expression?

As if she was sleepwalking, she opened her legs to him, placing her feet on the table next to Bree who was bent over the desk on Zhair'lo's right. Bree looked over at her quizzically, but Zia was 

too busy staring vacantly at Zhair'lo.

Willing himself to have enough saliva to make this work, Zhair'lo knelt on the hard wooden floor, wrapped his arms under her thighs and started tonguing at the insides of her splayed lips.

"Hm!" Zia squeaked before squelching the involuntary noise from her throat.

Zhair'lo stopped immediately and looked up at her warily. The sound was so odd that even Bree turned gave Zia a sideways glance.

"Keep going," Zia insisted quietly with a small nod of encouragement.

"No one's done this for you before?"

Zia's eyes found the ceiling for a few heartbeats before she could meet Zhair'lo's eyes again.

"I'm Iron," she said, as if that explained everything.

"So?"

"So," Bree put in helpfully. "No one thinks to try that with us Form girls."

Zhair'lo shrugged and went back to work. The salty taste of her sweat was palpable, along with the musty, oiled scent of the leather skirt she'd been wearing. There had been no underwear; no absorbent layer of cotton, between armour and flesh.

"Oh, Madra Zen," Zia sighed. "Where have you been?"

Zhair'lo hadn't done this in a while, but he didn't find it hard. Zia was quiet but also clear in indicating which tongue and mouth motions worked best. Since she was so new to it, he used the absolute minimum amount of pressure. It was mostly a matter of stroking her clitoris as quickly as he could while letting his saliva drip down her slit toward her vagina.

Lubrication was the goal, wasn't it?

It had seemed so initially, but Zia began to moan.

"Zhair'lo," she murmured in a panic. "Zhair'lo! I - I - Oh, Nine Hells, I - I'm coming!"

Zia was well past being bothered by the fact that everyone was watching her jam her crotch into Zhair'lo's face. Not one to stop a girl in the middle of an orgasm, Zhair'lo pushed into her with as much of his strength as he thought she could bear for as long as he felt the muscles of her entrance twitching around his chin.

Drops of sweat on her forehead, she leaned to pull his head against her hard stomach.

"Zhair'lo," she whispered. "Madra Zen ... Zhair'lo."

He tried to remember the first time he had done this. Had it been Yua who had almost wrenched his neck off? This had been much less life threatening.

"Are you hard?" she whispered.

"Oh, yeah."

"Good, good," Zia was still dazed.

She slid off the desk, planting her feet carefully before turning her back on him.

"Quick," she said. "While I'm wet."

Wet, yes, but she was also exhausted. She let her upper body collapse on the desk in front of her. Zhair'lo, aroused significantly by causing and witnessing her orgasm, had to work carefully to get his leather shorts off without damaging himself. Once his erection was clear of his clothes, however, he slid up against her wet hole.

"Ready?"

"Oh, yes."

He pushed and slid easily into her.

...

Zia was not what he'd been expecting.

The few moments he'd spent licking her were not typical.

Zia wasn't a runner. She wasn't in Form for the rules. She didn't care to write laws, enforce them or catch people who broke them.

Zia wanted to fight.

She loved looking at weapons. She loved using weapons. She couldn't wait until it was her turn to use them on the enemies of the Temple.

Not that she had any special hatred for such people - Zia just wanted a good excuse to kill someone unequivocally bad. She needed something to get self righteously violent about.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 22



That chilled Zhair'lo and he hoped she couldn't see inside his head to know how disturbed he was.

None of this matched up with the impression of Zia he'd formed on the outside. He'd taken her by surprise, was all. She'd be back to normal once she got over this odd sexual experience.

No wonder she'd stared at him.

Sex was a thing she did because it was an obstacle between her and weaponry.

She wanted her hands on weapons.

Moreover, Zia wanted to be a weapon.

That was enough to be going on with, as far as Zhair'lo was concered.

He knew well that this was not an ally in his war against the Temple, for Zia did not like nuance. The Temple was good and it's enemies were bad. This philosophy made it easy to decide whom she could use weapons against. She would brook no argument in the matter.

It was enough to continue to fuck her.

Because the two of them having sex stood between them and their exceedingly divergent goals.

'Your vagina,' he thought, 'is between me and the people I seek as allies. Just as my erection is between you and the same people, whom you seek to kill for your pleasure.'

When, being a girl with a Tight upgrade, she demanded that he spank her, he had no problem with it. He was well past the point where that bothered him. He was going to be Served by a lot of Tight girls, and Iron girls with Tight upgrades, which meant a lot of spanking he was just going to have to get through.

'It really doesn't matter anymore,' he thought, and had a hard time imagining how it ever had.

When orgasm came, it was strange, filled with an extra layer of euphoria because Zia was already riding a strong wave of pleasure from her previous orgasm.

If Zhair'lo was really pulsing semen into her, he couldn't say. There was nothing he could see, as deeply buried as his spasming manhood was. He might be entirely empty, twitching away while expelling nothing at all.

But it was satisfying and, when it was done, there was a cold shower, which was at least twice as satisfying.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 23



"I think that was a contraction," the Goddess whispered.

"Imminence?" a young woman's voice replied out of the darkness.

One of the Adepts was always awake and alert, even when the Goddess slept, and while it was difficult for the Goddess to see her attendant, the blue sparks that twinkled off the older woman's eyelashes and the tips of her hair made her easy enough to find.

"I think it's beginning," the Goddess reiterated.

The bed sank slightly and there was a sound of bare flesh sliding along silk as the younger woman sought the hand of the older.

"You think, Imminence?"

"A pulsing in my belly."

There was a thoughtful, perhaps critical, pause as the third bell past midnight began its quiet ringing. People existed who needed to know the time of night, but there was no need to waken the whole city.

"When did you birth your last child, Imminence?"

It was politely worded, that question, but it carried a careful hint of doubt.

"Some ten years ago," the Goddess earnestly wished the younger woman could hear her eyebrow rise in disdain. "Why should that matter?"

"I gave a child to the Temple less than a year ago," the Adept answered. "I would humbly suggest what you felt was not a contraction, Imminence."

The Goddess let out an indignant breath.

"It may have been years, my dear, but I think I would ... AGH!"

Sparks flew from her hair as she attempted to double over - and failed.

"Imminence?"

A sharp inhalation was followed by a slow exhale.

"Yes."

"That was a contraction, Imminence."

The Goddess coughed faintly in an attempt to regain her dignity.

"You may summon Within."

"Promptly, Imminence."

---===================----

Tina couldn't possibly be skipping along behind Talla, given where they were, but it certainly felt that way.

"We're gonna be exhausted in the morning," Tina pointed out gleefully.

Talla nodded and held her torch aloft so she could look farther down the tunnel

The thing about sewers, though, was that they were the most uninspirationally designed structures ever built by a woman. It was as if the women who'd laid them out knew exactly how much respect would be paid to them over their entire existence..

"Sad story," Talla replied as she made a chalk mark on the wall.

"How come you always mark the walls on your left?"

"So the marks'll be on the right on the way back," Talla shrugged.

"Huh?"

"Right. Returning," Talla explained. "Both start with 'r' so it's easy to remember."

"Oh."

The passage they'd come from, barely wide enough for Talla to stretch her arms out, had ended at an intersection where it was dumping its water (they'd decided it was better to just call it "water" and leave it at that) into a trough at least as wide as two women were tall.

"That's got to be it," Talla grimaced.

"Gotta be what?"

"The main output line," she told Tina, nodding toward where the wider tunnel vanished into darkness. "That'll run underground right out of the Temple and come out in the river down by the farms somewhere. I bet there's some huge metal grate - maybe even several of them - to prevent anybody coming in that way."

"So we go that way?" Tina pointed down the long passage.

"We have to go up the hill, toward Sweetness." Talla shook her head and turned to face the opposite direction.

"This is going to take a while, isn't it?" Tina sighed.

"Most likely," Talla admitted ruefully. "I had no idea how many forks were involved in this mess."

Tina's lips twisted.

"I don't suppose there are any maps or anything we could dig up?"

"Maybe," Talla was doubtful, "It seems more like they trenched these things when they built the Temple, then just built over top of them."

Tina put a hand on her bare hip thoughtfully.

"So it looked good from the top, and that was it? To hell with future planning?"

"As long as they had regular places where they could dump, uh, water into the system, and they marked them from above, that might have been good enough. Honestly, this doesn't feel very well planned out at all. Way overdesigned, in fact."

"So how long do you think it'll take to find this ... thing you're looking for?" Tina asked, the first hint of worry in her voice.

Talla looked around the tunnels, trying to picture all the forks and mergings, spreading out like branches of a tree, always reaching upwards.

"Six nights?" she guessed. "Maybe more if we're really unlucky. But V'Shika gave us a good idea which direction to go, right?"

"We'll need more parchment, for sure," Tina pointed out.

"Yeah," Talla agreed. "The first thing to do is find a bridge across this, uh, trough."

They'd been careful, so far, to keep their sandals out of the continuously flowing streams of liquid occupying the centres of the passages they were exploring. The larger trough, however, was well beyond their ability to leap.

"You think there's a bridge somewhere?"

"Oh, yes, I'm certain," Talla lied.

"Okay," Tina said. "But we'll find the bridge and then go back. It's way colder down here than I expected."

Talla smirked and began walking upstream.

"That's because," she explained, "there's a breeze."

---===================----

Sergeant Yung kicked the door open exactly as the sixth bell began to ring out.

Zhair'lo had lost count of the number of days he'd been in training. Weeks, had it been? In his dreams, he was excited about something but he couldn't remember what. The only certainty was that he was being very clever.

When the shouting started, his dreams were washed away (like water flowing through an underground tunnel?).

"Up and at it, Recruits!" the Sergeant called out. 

Zhair'lo found himself entangled with a naked woman. Which one was it? Tara. He liked Tara the best as far as sex went. Bree was always in a hurry, Del was rote boring and Zia's bloodlust creeped the nine hells out him. Although, if he wanted to talk about anything, Bree was pref-

"You've got a patrol in half a bell, moving against the clock!"

The Sergeant had told them the previous day that they had graduated, in a way, from the confines of the palisade, to being allowed to take runs with the patrols. When you ran with the Fighters, the reward for becoming tougher was a job harder than the last one. None of them ever seemed satisfied with the strength or speed they had.

Zhair'lo had decided he could respect that.

Tara had hopped out of bed before he'd even finished gathering his thoughts. 

"That's the least comfortable sleeping position I've ever managed," she winced, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

She wiggled into her leather skirt as Zhair'lo stood up and reached for his own leathers.

"You sure it wasn't the - uh -"

"As if!" Tara protested. "How hard do you think you spank anyway, boy?"

The proper response to this, he knew, was to snap at her ass with his belt, but he was interrupted when Sergeant Yung called out again.

"Move, Recruits!"

Belligerent playfulness set aside temporarily, Zhair'lo laced up his shorts as he watched Tara put on her white, cotton top and then slide her arms through the upper part of her armour.

"Tie me up?"

Zhair'lo reached across the bed to fasten the toggles that held the back of Tara's top together. She could have done them herself, but it was faster to have someone else do it. He slipped his own shirt on and was throwing the leathers on top of that as they headed out the door.

"C'mon, Kit," he whispered at the last Recruit, stiffly getting out of bed.

"Fuckin' hurts, Zhai," Kit protested, rotating his shoulder.

Kit had taken a fall the previous day, during an afternoon run.

"We're just running today," Zhair'lo pointed out. "I'm sure it'll loosen up."

There might be push-ups, but there was no reason to mention that. Also left unmentioned were the purplish bruises on the outside of Kit's shoulder. He probably couldn't see them himself, without a mirror.

Sergeant Yung, for his part, was ignoring how long it was taking Kit.

"How's the shoulder?" he asked casually, without looking over.

"Alright, sir," Kit replied quickly. "Sure it'll be fine, soon."

"Good, good," the Sergeant muttered. "Get some breakfast and move out."

Gingerly, Kit put on his armour and walked with Zhair'lo over to the mess hall.

"It's just stiff after sleeping," Zhair'lo advised. "You'll see. It'll be fine once you're moving."

The mess hall was full of Fighters when they arrived. Most of them weren't armoured, favouring various shades of the same beige work clothes that were worn in the city. The difference here was that there were women wearing the same browns and off-whites as men. Zhair'lo had long since gotten used to the idea of men and women eating together - the first night, when they'd all been fucking in the same room, had put him well past caring about that.

As he sat down with the other Recruits, he realized how much his attitudes had changed since he got here. Privacy was irrelevant, discarded into the first ditch along the way with all sorts of notions of propriety, courtesy and complicated sexual interactions.

That was all fine, though. The thing he couldn't get used to was the noise.

Fighters, they had all discovered over the last couple of weeks, were loud and boisterous. They didn't talk to each other at mealtimes; they shouted. They laughed at high volume and made rude gestures - even between men and women.

Setting quickly to work on the ham and eggs already laid out before him, he compared the Barracks to his other accommodations.

Everywhere else he had been, from the bakery to the blacksmith to the farm, there had been a staid, controlled atmosphere. The farmers could be heard to cheer, occasionally sing, and slap each other on the back, but they were nothing like the Fighters. His time with the Hunters, who had to take second place in terms of sheer lethality, had led Zhair'lo to figure that his colleagues in his present occupation would be even more constrained. Their attitude, at least during the time when they were off duty, had been shocking. These people were trained, with the permission of the Temple, to use the deadliest of weapons?

The most unbearable effect of the noise was the feeling of not belonging. Zhair'lo and his fellow Recruits didn't yet carry the boisterous air of the veterans. The eight of them sat at their table, nervously eating their food, watching all of the raucous frolicking around them.

'At least we feel excluded together,' Zhair'lo thought.

"Ready for the run?" Bree nudged him eagerly.

"Damn straight!" Zhair'lo replied, casting his voice as loudly as he could. He winced as his voice failed to lay a finger on the ambient noise in the room. The right attitude had to be in there somewhere.

"What is it they talk about?" Bree added, looking around the room, clearly thinking along the same lines as Zhair'lo.

"I can't make out a single word with all the noise," he admitted.

"If we knew what to say to each other, we could be like them."

Zhair'lo could only nod and finish his food.

It didn't seem like enough time had passed, but Sergeant Yung was already standing, having polished off his breakfast.

"The Patrol against the Clock will leave in five!" he shouted over the din.

There was a modest cheer of acknowledgement before the crowd went back to normal. Chairs and benches scraped against the floor and Fighters - the real ones, not the Recruits - made their way out of the dining hall.

Once those authentic paragons of soldiery had exited, the Recruits followed.

The change in behaviour, as they made their way to the armoury, was pronounced. The two squads, sixteen Fighters with equal parts men and women, marched confidently and quietly once they were outside. The armoury, its door wide enough to admit them four abreast, was soon full of lethal, intense human beings diligently preparing for battle.

As they were already dressed, Zhair'lo and the other Recruits waited in the street. They formed two lines outside the crowded armoury, with Zhair'lo at the front of the boys and Bree at the front of the girls.

Sergeant Yung, the first to be fully armoured in neck to toe beige leathers, began handing short swords out to Zhair'lo. Meanwhile, a female Fighter was handing bows and quivers to Bree.

"Keep your weapons in their sheaths," he warned. "There's no trouble out there that any of you are ready to be involved in."

'And yet,' Zhair'lo thought, 'you would never send us out defenceless.'

"Authority on this patrol is held by Ji'ann," Sergeant Yung nodded to a tall, dark-skinned woman at the centre of the crowd of veteran Fighters. "But I have Command. If anything happens, she'll figure out what to do and I'll call out orders. You got that?"

This question was asked quietly, not shouted, so the response was a series of nods from the four boys.

"If, however, you find yourselves in the centre," he warned. "And she gives you the orders, that means you have Command, and you call out those orders for her."

There was a pause, then, as he let that sink in.

"You hear me?!"

"Yes, sir!" they shouted back.

So 'Authority' was what women had, and 'Command' was what men had. The woman in charge would make the decisions and a man would call the orders out. Zhair'lo couldn't fathom that delineation. Surely the women, with their many-times upgraded lungs, could shout as loudly as the men. He could only shrug.

The last weapon the Sergeant handed out was a bow and a quiver of arrows. This was for Zhair'lo. Of the male Recruits, he was the only one with any weapons training at all, so it made sense to give him the weapon he could actually use. If a battle found them, he would be the only one with any clue how to fight. The other three boys hadn't been taught anything at all. On top of that, Zhair'lo noted with pride, he was being given the same weapon the female Fighters got.

Lacing the quiver to his back, Zhair'lo considered the inexperience of the other boys. How long had they all been here without receiving any weapons training? It was all marching, standing and fucking. It seemed that the Fighters considered it far more important to instill discipline in them than to teach them the ways of war.

'Discipline,' he thought, 'is not what I came here to learn from you people.'

"Move out!" the Sergeant ordered.

In a moment, the three squads began marching with the eight Recruits now firmly in the middle. While they might not take precedence entering or leaving a dining hall, they would by no means be placed in the rear position in any formation that went out beyond the palisade walls.

Four abreast, they marched neatly through the wider boulevards of the Barracks until they arrived at the south gate - the one that faced away from the city of Gern and its Temple. Sergeant Yung stopped to converse with the gate guard, a conversation that lasted only a moment and, to Zhair'lo's ears, consisted entirely of nonsense words. He concluded that they were exchanging passwords for later use.

"Gate clear?" Yung shouted up to the men on the wall.

"All clear," a man's voice replied.

"Cover patches!" Yung ordered, and twenty-four people loosened the ties on the small patches over their left breasts, covering their rank symbols.

"Open the Gate!"

There were four guards, two men and two women, at ground level. Two of them pivoted the horizontal wooden locking beam, lifting it to a vertical position so that the left half the gate could be opened by the other two guards.

The opening thus made was only wide enough to permit two adults to exit side by side, even though Sergeant Yung's group - or was it Ji'ann's group? - was clearly arrayed four abreast.

"Move out!"

Without any further word, the men in the front squad slid easily into a two-abreast formation, followed by the women, the Recruits and the rear squad.

'We do that well enough,' Zhair'lo thought, a tick of pride putting a smirk to his smile.

The moment they were clear of the gate, Sergeant Yung gave the order to return to four abreast. With a few more orders, he had the three squads spaced out so that the women and their bows had a clear view and good firing angles at anything that might cross their paths. A copious amount of space was left between the two veteran squads and the protected (Zhair'lo tried not to think "coddled") squad of Recruits in their midst.

When they hit the ring road that ran a wide circumference around the city, they turned left. It was, after all, a counterclockwise patrol they were running. It would be five kilometres or so, non-stop, to the way-station.

---===================----

"How long has it been?" the Goddess muttered through gritted teeth.

"Only four bells, Imminence," Within responded.

An attendant with a cold washcloth wiped sweat off the Goddess's forehead.

"You're doing very well, Imminence," the attendant put in.

The Goddess twitched an eyebrow at the younger woman, who disappeared to refresh the bowl of water in which she'd been soaking the cloth.

"She's learning," Within placated her superior. "Intends to be a physician herself, despite her start in Pussy."

No one in the small bedroom was clothed. Given the level of privacy that women could count on, women in labour were generally naked unless they became cold - which was very rare. Since this particular woman was a Goddess, the same state was imposed on everyone around her.

The Sorceress of Within sat comfortably in a small, black-cushioned chair, her legs crossed and a vague look of disapproval on her face. The Goddess meanwhile, waddled back and forth across the floor between the bed and the large, ebony dresser across the room.

Another contraction struck, freezing her in place.

"They're much closer together," Within observed. She waved at her medical kit and its array of potions. "Do you want something for the pain? Before we really get into it?"

The Goddess's eyes bugged out for a moment, the wind knocked out of her, and had to wait for the breath to respond.

"Eleven upgrades in Within?" she looked at her disciple haughtily. "I should think not."

Within made the pretence of having been chastised, but the expression on her face became more bemused once her Mistress turned to waddle in the opposite direction.

---===================----

"You alright, Talla?"

Talla squinted warily at the girl who had called her name. She tried to recall her name. Nessa, was it? They were gathered outside Form's gate, waiting to be admitted for their day of the fighting lessons.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You look a bit tired," Nessa worried. "You been sleeping okay?"

"I slept alright," Talla offered a white lie. "Just a bit of a cramp today."

In truth, she hadn't slept more than a couple of bells, what with all the underground exploring. She realized that if she tried to do that every night, it would start to show. Her adventures in that regard would require a bit more spacing.

That did not, however, explain the twitching muscle spasms in her stomach.

---===================----

"You gotta problem, Zhai?" Bree hissed at him, not entirely kindly.

"Whuh?" he grunted back to her.

The forward squad of Fighters was running a good ten to fifteen metres in front of the Recruits. It only gave them a modicum of privacy for whispered conversations.

"You keep lagging," she pointed out. "Hold steady."

Zhair'lo hadn't noticed until she pointed it out. He had been trying to ignore, for some time now, a nagging cramp in his side. As he focused on it, he put his fingers to the spot where he felt pain. There should have been tension in that muscle, if it was causing him so much trouble, but it was soft and pliable instead.

'It's not my pain,' he realized. 'It's Talla's.'

Ahead of him, at the periphery of his awareness where the four women of the forward squad were running two paces behind the men, he heard one of the women grunt out something that sounded like an order.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 23



"Halt!" Sergeant Yung called out. "Close up! Hornet!"

Neither Zhair'lo nor any of his fellow Recruits knew what "Hornet" meant, but they all understood the order to "close up". With only ten metres to cover, they raced up to the women and found themselves immediately surrounded by two circles of Fighters; an inner one made of women with bows drawn and an outer protective layer of sword-wielding men.

"What did you see, Aloe?" Sergeant Yung called over his shoulder, never taking his attention away from the section of forest he faced.

One of the women along the north side of the path, the side facing the city, lowered her bow and looked past the swordsmen in front of her.

"Someone crossed this path," she said. "There are footprints. Thin, bare feet. Possibly a young boy but probably a woman. She was walking unevenly, possibly carrying a poorly balanced load - or maybe injured - I can't tell for sure."

"Well spotted, Aloe," a deep, female voice said.

Zhair'lo whirled around to see that it was Ji'ann who had spoken. He had never heard a woman speak with such a low tone. Her voice almost seemed to warble and roll, despite the fact that she had only spoken three words.

As she continued to speak, Zhair'lo marvelled at the sound.

"I don't see any sign of pursuit, do you?"

"No," Aloe agreed.

"It can't have been more than a bell since the last patrol," Ji'ann said. "So she can't be far. We'll have to go in and find her."

"Through that?" Kit whispered apprehensively.

Zhair'lo didn't think the forest in that direction would be too hard to track through, but he'd spent a lot of time chasing game with the Hunters. Kit, apparently, had a different impression.

"Do you want send anyone on to the waystation?" Sergeant Yung asked. "We're expected in a quarter bell."

Ji'ann thought about this a moment.

"Send two pairs," she decided. "The rest - and the Recruits - stay with us."

Sergeant Yung wasted no time, picking out two male and two female Fighters to send on. In a flash, the four of them were off.

"Wow," Kit gasped, watching them run. "I guess we're really holding them back, huh?"

Sergeant Yung turned to the Recruits so sharply that Kit jumped back, expecting a rebuke. The Sergeant, however, had no time for anything like that.

"Listen closely. Finding people who have violated the city's territory is one of our most important responsibilities, but it's not one you've been trained for. You stay in the middle, just as you have so far, and watch your step. A forest is nothing like a road."

He spared one glance at Kit and gave a smirking nod at the boy's shoulder before going on, "Not that you've even got roads figured out yet."

"Form up!" he called out, turning away from the Recruits.

The patrol reformed with six veterans in front and six behind the Recruits. Zhair'lo couldn't tell if these were the same who had been in front and behind earlier, or if they had silently resorted themselves upon the loss of four of their fellows. Either was possible with this bunch.

The one called Aloe, though, was definitely in front. Zhair'lo could hear her talking to Sergeant Yung.

"She certainly wasn't trying to hide. Either in a panic or delirious. Anyone could follow this trail."

"Lead us, then," Ji'ann said.

The forest was easy for Zhair'lo. As much as the Hunters might spend most of their time sitting in a blind or a tree, waiting for prey, they also navigated a lot of dense forest. He got through nimbly, while his colleagues frequently let out grunts and moans of complaint.

"Stupid thorns," Renzi remarked, only minutes later.

Difficult though it was to stay in formation as they were spread out by the topology of the forest floor, Zhair'lo still knew where to look for Renzi. The boy was to Zhair'lo's left, where he always was. Renzi frowned at Zhair'lo and gestured to his legs, which were already covered in angry, red scratches from the tops of his boots to just above his knees. The real Fighters, covered as they were, had no such problems. Looking around for the rest of the Recruits, he saw that the girls, while a bit more nimble, were fairing little better than Renzi. Kit and Z'rus, meanwhile, looked worse.

"Just step on the branches as you go over them," Zhair'lo told him before turning back to the trail.

"We're getting closer," Aloe remarked, deep concern and eagerness mixing in her voice. "She must have been more badly injured than I thought. And she kept turning around to see if anyone was following her."

"No sign of blood, though," Sergeant Yung pointed out, following closely on Aloe's heels.

"No, but the footprints are getting much closer together. She was badly hobbled."

The forest was getting thicker, slowing down even the veterans as they had to contend with fallen trees and sections of dense, impassable brush. As a consequence, the entire group had squeezed up to within whispering distance of each other.

"There!" Aloe shouted, and then, in a hushed whisper, "Nine gods!"

"Guard Six," Sergeant Yung called back.

Zhair'lo was peripherally aware that the six people remaining in the rear squad had turned about to face back the way they had come, a watch against potential pursuit. Zhair'lo's attention, however, was almost entirely on the pile of rags with a human face that had nestled itself into the crook of a tree. Zhair'lo had never seen a human being so damaged. Half of her face - he was pretty sure it was a woman - was bruised into purple. Only one eye could open properly and it was staring at them in wild-eyed fear. It was obvious, from that frightened look, that the woman was incapable of moving - she would clearly already be running if it was up to her.

Aloe waved her comrades back and went down on one knee beside the woman.

"It's alright," she said, her voice going softer than Zhair'lo had ever imagined it could. She removed her leather helmet before adding, "You're safe now, with us."

Aloe's soothing voice had an immediate effect: some of the wild-eyed panic in the woman's expression dissipated. The ability to manipulate people with her voice, Zhair'lo knew, was one of the benefits a woman gained from Facial upgrades.

"Can you speak? Do you understand me?"

Even under the pile of rags that was her clothing, Zhair'lo could see by the set of woman's shoulders how quickly Aloe was getting through.

The woman nodded slowly and mumbled a word that might have been, "Yes."

"What's your name?"

"Merelda."

"Merelda. is the baby alright?"

Zhair'lo started. He had taken the woman for slightly overweight, what with the dirty clothing distended over her belly. So enraptured had he been by her damaged face, he hadn't spared a glance to notice that there was a very small child, heavily swaddled, constituting the majority of her girth. The woman herself was rather thin, almost unhealthily so.

"I think so," Merelda replied. "He didn't hit the baby."

Ji'ann took a break from scanning the forest to step in behind Aloe. "Who did this to you?"

Merelda twitched slightly, hearing the deep voice and seeing the larger woman looming over her.

"M-my husband."

Zhair'lo's mind went blank, the way one's mind does when someone randomly throws syllables together and parks the combination in the middle of a sentence. "Husband" was a verb, rarely used, referring to the managing of a group of animals. He'd only ever heard the word used when playing board games. What in the names of the nine gods was a thing or a person doing with such a title?

"He thought the child was not his!" Merelda sobbed. "But it is his! I swear it is!"

"Monogamy," Ji'ann spat before stepping away to give Aloe and Merelda more space.

Zhair'lo felt his brain twitch. 'Husband' went with 'wife' then, did it? Talla had known the latter, but not the former.

"It's alright," Aloe said, her voice calm as a stream of water trickling over a smooth, wide ford. "It doesn't matter whether it was his or not. He had no right to do this to you."

Merelda's breathing became more regular again.

"How is your foot? May I see it?"

From out of the ragged clothing, Merelda painfully extended a dirt-blacked limb covered with purple bruises and red rashes.

"We can splint the ankle, but you should not walk any farther," Aloe said. She turned to Ji'ann, "We'll need a stretcher then, too."

Ji'ann was still facing away, keeping an eye on the forest. She merely turned her head toward Sergeant Yung and gave him a small, upward tic of her chin. That was enough for him to start calling out orders.

Machetes were drawn from backpacks and the men set to work hacking up tree limbs. Small pieces were handed first to Aloe, who fashioned them into a splint and went to work tying up the woman's shin and ankle. Separately, a pair of longer and stronger tree limbs were hewn and laid out. A pair of brass bars, with clamps on their ends, appeared from somewhere, to be fastened to the limbs. A blanket was stretched over and wrapped around this three metre long rectangle and pinned underneath.

Zhair'lo was impressed by how well the Fighters had optimized this procedure. They carried just enough pre-made equipment with them to get this working very quickly, and had a stretcher arranged next to the injured woman in only moments. Aloe, for her part, had completed and fastened the splint at the same time.

"What's going on up there?" Kit asked, forcing Zhair'lo to tear his eyes away from the scene. He hadn't realized that the others were far enough behind him that they couldn't see what was happening.

"We've found an injured woman," he explained. "They've made a stretcher for her and her baby."

"Baby?" Bree winced.

"Yeah. Super tiny."

Aloe was speaking again.

"You'll have to let me carry the baby, Merelda," Aloe asked. "The stretcher is too narrow."

It surprised Zhair'lo that the woman surrendered her baby with only the tiniest bit of reluctance. Maybe it was the smooth tones in Aloe's voice; maybe it was desperation of her situation.

"Have you given the child a name?" Aloe asked, in a suspiciously casual, conversational sort of way.

"He was to be named after his father -"

Ji'ann's deep timbered voice cut in, almost too sharply, "He deserves no such honour. I advise you to choose another."

Aloe's eyes turned toward her superior, imploring her toward gentleness.

Merelda closed her eyes, gritting her teeth as two of the Fighters lifted her onto the stretcher. She gasped when Ji'ann and one of the men grabbed the end poles and lifted her off the ground.

"I choose?" she caught her breath.

Aloe spared one handle from the bundle of sleeping baby in her arms to reach out a hand and touch Merelda's wrist.

"You are in our city. You crossed the line back on that road. Here, it is a woman's choice to name her child."

It seemed to Zhair'lo, as the stretcher passed him, that Merelda had never even imagined such a responsibility falling to her..

"I - I couldn't-"

"Did you carry the child for many months?" Ji'ann spoke over her the massive bundle of muscle that was her shoulder.

"I -"

"Did you go through the pain of childbirth?"

"Yes, but -"

"Then surely your effort is the larger," Ji'ann finalized. "Give the child the name of an honourable man."

As the other Recruits stood with their mouths open in shock, Zhair'lo couldn't resist but to follow along with the stretcher as they made their way back out of the forest. How would this play out? For her part, Merelda was wincing theatrically, probably stalling for time.

"An honourable man?"

"Yes," Aloe said, smoothly cutting in before Ji'ann could frighten the injured woman any further.

Merelda closed her eyes thoughtfully and Zhair'lo tried to judge the tumult of emotions warring across her face. It was such chaos, though, and with her face so battered he could read nothing.

"Willow," she said suddenly.

"Pardon?" Aloe said.

"Willow."

"Like ... the tree?"

"Yes."

"Is that a common name where you are from?"

Merelda only shook her head and closed her eyes.

---===================----

"The head is crowning, Imminence," Within said, her voice flat and clinical. "Once or twice more, at most."

The Goddess, standing partially bent over with her hands on her bed, looked over her shoulder to glare at her Sorceress, trying not to take her anger out on an innocent bystander.

Every jerk of her head and twist of her body was throwing blue sparks from every piece of hair on her body. She could feel the force of her life flowing out of her - the Perfections taking more than their usual toll in this time of extreme stress.

She sensed another contraction on its way, hard on the heels of the last one.

"Ready, Imminence," an Adept whispered. "Count, now."

The Goddess gritted her teeth and pushed, while the Adept counted.

"Teh. Ren."

The damned Adept was counting too slowly, that was the nine-rutting-gods-damned problem.

"Ya. Po. Ji."

Eleven upgrades or not, this was the most difficult childbirth of her life.

"Yit."

And she'd already had three children, an accomplishment in itself.

"Mar."

This had better be the last contraction.

"Su."

Where in the nine hells was that baby?

"Ni."

Did it want to be born or not!

"Jek!"

"Gah!" the Goddess shouted as relief flooded her body.

"I have the baby," Within announced, completely unnecessarily. "A boy."

An attendant was at hand to quickly wipe the baby down, even as the Goddess rolled over onto her back on a set of pillows laid out to let her recline on the bed. A few heartbeats later, the baby was laid upon her sweating, golden chest.

With the natural rooting instinct of a freshly minted human being, it found her nipple easily and began suckling.

"His skin is gold," she remarked.

"Apply traction gently," Within was saying. "The placenta will ease out with the next few contractions. The breastfeeding will help with that."

She looked up at the Goddess, momentarily bewildered.

"Sorry, Imminence?"

"The child's skin," the Goddess repeated, smiling down at the suckling infant, "is golden."

"Ah, yes. Apparently, that's normal. It will last a few hours - longer in girl children. No worries."

Her body still pulsing away as it cleaned itself out, the Goddess stroked the child.

"His name," she added, "will be Magnus."

"That will be in our records, Imminence," one of the women of Pussy said, "but you know of course that no one will ever call him by that name."

Of course not. He would be taken to another city and substituted in for a stillborn child, or one who died shortly after birth, and given the name of that child. As quickly as possible, Magnus would be separated from that child's birth mother as well. Such was the way of the Pussy genealogists and their necessary machinations.

But, 'no one will ever call him by that name'?

That was almost true.

One woman would always call him by that name, and that would have to do.

---===================----

"Talla, you alright?"

Talla was kneeling on the proving grounds in Form's square, clutching her stomach.

A moment later, the pain was gone.

Warily, she stood up, expecting at any moment, as she hit some threshold of abdominal muscle stretching, the pain would return.

When she was fully erect, she looked around in confusion. There was no trace of the pain that had brought her to the ground.

"I'm fine, I guess," she said to her fellow trainee.

But a moment later Gillian, the head instructor, was looming over her.

"You, there! What happened?"

Talla stood as straight as she could.

"I don't know, Mistress. A pain came and left very suddenly."

How many upgrades did Gillian have? Wasn't she an Officer? The woman was absolutely huge and terrifying.

"You felt this just moments ago?"

Talla hesitated.

"I've been feeling a little bit off all morning," she said. "But the worst pain came and went just moments ago."

Gillian frowned and stared at Talla for a few heartbeats.

"You are well enough now to continue training?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Be about it, then," she turned on her heel.

---===================----

Zhair'lo had a vague sense that some dramatic pain had overcome Talla, but the stabbing sensation in his abdomen was an order of magnitude smaller than what she had felt.

Proceeding with the stretcher-bearing retinue, he and the other Recruits were making their way out of the forest.

"Where did she come from?" Kit wondered.

"Outside the city," Renzi answered.

"Thanks, genius."

Renzi made a rude gesture.

"I mean, does she come from another city?"

"Not likely," Zhair'lo put in. "Were you listening?"

"I wasn't as close as you were, Zhai."

By this point, even the girls were gathered close.

"Those bruises she has are from her 'husband'," Zhair'lo turned to face them all. "Do you know what a husband is?"

"It's a title," Bree cut in, "that Barbarian men use when they take ownership of women. He's the 'husband' and she's the 'wife'."

"Husband," Del snorted. "Like we're animals and men are the shepherds."

"Crack his skull, if I get the chance," Zia put in, quite unnecessarily.

"As you can see," Tara smirked. "It's not a popular term. I'm surprised you guys weren't taught about it."

Zhair'lo held his tongue, wishing he could point out that there were a lot of areas where the Temple left men in dark ignorance.

"So," Kit spoke with a great deal of wariness toward the female members of the contingent. "Not from the city, then? The wives and the husbands?"

Tara nodded, throwing Kit an unusually belligerent sneer and making Zhair'lo think it was time to get back on the march.

Surprisingly, the veteran Fighters were not paying any attention to the Recruits, who were bringing up the rear behind the stretcher. In a way, it made sense, even to Zhair'lo: the threat, if there was one, was coming from outside the city. By keeping the eight Recruits behind the stretcher while the veterans were out front, the least experienced were the farthest from danger.

Still, Zhair'lo found it odd, after so many days of intense control and training to suddenly be without any supervision at all.

That disturbed him more than anything. How had they done that to him? Before coming out to the edge of civilization, he'd been ready to bring down the Temple. And after two (or was it three?) weeks of indoctrination, he now quailed at a lack of orders.

It was at that moment, as he set his jaw and determined that he would salvage some remnant of himself, that he heard Sergeant Yung's cry.

"Fighters! To The Fore!"

That galvanized Zhair'lo faster than lightning could have. He bolted past the stretcher bearers in order to keep up with the veterans who were sprinting to the edge of the forest. Aloe, who had been standing beside the stretcher, had already thrust the baby into the arms of Tara and was running just ahead of him. It was only then that he realized how trivial the previous jog had been for a woman like her. Her movements were the most graceful, violent actions he had ever seen a human take. She leapt over branches, hopped off logs and danced around thorn branches as if she were a wild thing - but a wild thing with a knocked arrow in her bow.

How could she move so well with her hands full? Zhair'lo knew his way around a forest, but nothing like the fighting women in front of him. For his own part he didn't draw his bow until he hit the edge of the forest, all the time wondering if this would be his first meeting with the enemies the Temple feared so much.

The first to meet his eyes were the backs of the women. They had lined up at the near tree line, half concealed, widely but evenly spaced, with their bows drawn and aimed across the wide road. In front of them were the men, swords ready, also spaced out in some kind of battle line.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 23



Without realizing he'd even reached for it, Zhair'lo found his bow in his hands with an arrow knocked to the string. He stepped up beside the nearest woman, in the centre of their line. It was Aloe who gave him a nod, relinquished her spot to him, and slipped away to his left. He understood immediately: the men were spaced out to give the women firing lanes.

'But firing lanes at what?' he wondered.

All he saw on the far side of the road was a single man, his generally pale face scratched with angry red rashes, his arms stretched out wide from his body in what had to be a gesture of surrender.

'It's very quiet,' he thought.

The Fighters weren't only watching the panicked man, but were constantly scanning the forest behind him.

"How many are you?" Sergeant Yung demanded.

The man tried to speak, but only a small squeak came out of him. He caught his breath and spoke slowly, his voice was haggard and worn out, sounding far worse than his clothing and skin looked.

"I am alone, sir."

More silence, as the sensitive ears of the women around him tried to verify this claim.

"I hear nothing," a woman on his right whispered across the line.

"Same here," another answered on his left.

"Identify him," Aloe called forward, her voice low.

"What is your name?" Sergeant Yung asked, Command taking its orders from Authority.

"Berel, sir."

"And why, Berel, do you enter the territory of Gern?"

Berel looked up and down the length of the road.

"By accident. I didn't see any markers. I'm looking for my sister, sir."

'At least,' Zhair'lo thought, 'he's taking care to be polite.'

But five - now six - arrows pointed at a man's heart could derive manners from the rudest of people.

"Have him hold there," Aloe whispered forward. She turned to Zhair'lo and added, "Go back to the stretcher and ask the woman if she knows this Berel."

"Mistress," Zhair'lo relaxed his bow and sprinted back into the forest.

Ji'ann and her male companion had found a flat piece of ground on which to set Merelda, who now cradled her infant in her arms.

"Report," Ji'ann rumbled.

"A man, who appears to be alone, is on the road. He says his name is Berel -"

"My brother?" Merelda exclaimed. She turned to Ji'ann, "Please don't harm him. He's a good man."

How in the nine hells did a woman have a 'brother'? Was this another word with a special meaning outside the city?

"He is an honourable man?" Ji'ann asked.

"Yes, yes!"

"Yet you did not choose his name for this child?"

Merelda blushed fiercely red and looked away.

"Name my son after my brother? What would people say -"

Ji'ann waved her off and turned to Zhair'lo.

"He may come with us back to the Barracks, but unarmed. Let him know we will be watching him."

"Mistress," Zhair'lo sketched a bow before running off again.

When these orders were relayed back to Aloe, she passed them to Sergeant Yung. Berel was quick to agree to these terms and Sergeant Yung took possession of the rusty machete that had been discarded in the dirt the moment Berel had realized what trouble he had found.

"You have Merelda, then? Is she alright?"

"She can't walk," Sergeant Yung explained. "But we can carry her."

"Thank you so much."

This was met with a shrug.

"We're doing it for her, not you," the Sergeant pointed out.

Berel, mystified by this comment, fell in line exactly where he was told to walk - in the midst of the front six. The stretcher, still carried by Ji'ann and one of the male Fighters, stayed in the middle of the group, surrounded by Recruits, with four Fighters guarding the rear.

It was only minutes later however, that heavy footsteps came from the road behind them.

"The clockwise patrol!" one of the rear guard called out.

Twenty more Fighters, including the four who belonged in their current patrol, formed a large escort for the woman in the stretcher, her baby and her brother.

The story of Merelda and Berel came out during the long walk back to the Barracks.

Merelda, who had been taken as the third wife of Chet, had borne him a child. The child, however, had not met Chet's expectations, as the children of his other two wives had in months and years previous. Something about the child's appearance had angered the 'husband' and he had decided that the child was not his.

There began, parenthetically, an explanation from Ji'ann on the mating habits of the barbarian nomads. Their uncivilized practice of monogamy, it was given to the Recruits to understand, naturally led to this sort of jealous guarding of mates, which led to accusations of infidelity and eventually violence.

Zhair'lo couldn't see the connection, but also couldn't see how there was any wisdom in arguing the point in present company.

Merelda told as much of the story as she could, before breaking down, and so Berel told the rest.

Chet had beaten Merelda and had seemed on the verge of killing her. Berel had arrived, drawing Chet outside the tent where he kept his wives, and allowed his sister to make a run for it, taking the baby with her.

"Would she have had a better chance without the baby?" someone wondered aloud.

"But Chet would have killed the child," Berel replied, his tone implying that the answer was so obvious as to make the question stupid.

So Merelda had run, and Chet had become angry. But it had grown dark by then, and the husband hadn't wanted to risk injury to himself in order to fetch an unfaithful wife and the "bastard" (yet another word with a special meaning). A hunt for Merelda was set to start at dawn, but Berel had left earlier, hoping to save his sister.

Chet and his minions, the Fighters were made to understand, would be coming soon with the intent of capturing and punishing Merelda.

It was at this point that Berel looked around in wonder..

"How many are your former tribe?" Ji'ann rumbled, her voice taking on the peaceful character of a gathering thunderstorm.

"Twenty five grown men, forty women and about the same number of children."

"Do they battle often?" Ji'ann offered. "Other than with their own recently pregnant women?"

"The men fight with each other," Berel said, "But not like -"

He trailed off, gesturing at the crowd around him.

The men of Berel's tribe, Zhair'lo realized, must frequently kill each other. It was the only explanation for the skewed gender ratio. That must be how they managed to take multiple wives to a single husband.

"Twenty five men will not be an issue," Ji'ann pronounced. "Are the women likely to fight on their husbands' side?"

"The women wouldn't know what to do," Berel looked confused. "When there's fighting, they just hide until it's over."

Ji'ann shook her head slowly.

---===================----

At dinner that evening, the talk amongst the Recruits was nothing but their chance encounter with the wild people and their baby. It took a while for Zhair'lo to grasp what the women already knew: that the words 'husband', 'wife', 'bastard', 'brother' and 'sister' had different meanings once one fell off the end of the civilized world.

As they were finishing up dinner that evening, chattering endlessly about the implications, Sergeant Yung called to Zhair'lo and drew him outside the mess.

"Walk with me, boy."

"Yes, sir."

"What happened today?"

Though the question had an air of accusation about it, it wasn't clear to Zhair'lo what specifically was wrong. He assumed that the enquiry was related to the finding of Merelda, so he began describing the entire journey, the discovery of the woman's tracks, right up until they found her and her baby.

"Go on," the Sergeant prodded patiently.

He described the construction of the stretcher, the woman's pain, the naming of the baby.

"And then ..."

There had been the march back to the forest and the Sergeant's call to arms.

"And ..."

He had taken his place, with his bow, in the line of women -

"Yes, that."

Zhair'lo stopped walking at that moment and, consequently, had to jump to catch back up to Sergeant Yung.

"I seem to recall, Recruit," his superior spoke to the air in front of them, "that I gave an order when I handed you your weapon."

"Yes, sir," Zhair'lo gulped.

"You disobeyed that order."

"Yes, sir."

Sergeant Yung's voice was still casual. They were out for a twilight stroll around the Barracks, weren't they?

"What happened today?" he repeated the question that had started the conversation.

"I - I don't know, sir. I came up to the line and my bow was in my hand before I knew it. I knew there was an injured woman behind me."

He shivered, remembering the bruises and cuts on her face.

"I couldn't - I couldn't just do nothing. When I stepped up, Mistress Aloe made a space for me, so I took it."

Sergeant Yung nodded and stopped walking, for they had reached the gate which faced outwards from the city - the same gate through which their patrol had started earlier that day.

"Your intent is laudable," the Sergeant folded his arms. "But I will remind you that you have not trained enough with us. Despite what Mistress Aloe may have felt about your competence when she gave you her firing lane, that lane is between two men with swords. We have signals you have not learned which indicate intentions toward sudden movements you would not foresee."

The Sergeant paused, tilting his head gently.

"I don't fancy an arrow in my back, you see?"

"Yes, sir."

A trace of a smile crossed his lips.

"But I understand your motivation. We absolutely will take care of these barbarians."

The Sergeant gave a jerk of his head toward a small contingent of Fighters, all wearing grey-green, hooded cloaks over their leather armour. Six of these were gathered around Ji'ann near the gate.

"Who are they?" Zhair'lo noticed them suddenly. They had been invisible in the twilight until he'd looked right at them.

"Rangers," he said. "Reporting to us on the location of those we seek. Rest assured. Merelda's pain will not go unavenged."

---===================----

By the time Zhair'lo reached the Barracks, the heavy action had already started. Bree was waiting for him, the only one facing the door, sitting patiently and watching the other couples fucking away with a slightly bemused look on her face. She was naked from the waist down, her skirt already on the floor

"Oh, thanks the gods," she called out when she saw him. "I started dripping just from watching the bunch of them. Get over here."

He walked past Del and Kit on the right, who were going with the traditional Form style: the woman with her feet firmly planted on the floor, her hips bent as far as they would go and the man pounding away from behind. Z'rus and Zia were two beds further down in the same position. Tara, on the left, was on her hands and knees, sideways across two cots that had been pushed together, getting it from Renzi, who was kneeling behind her.

When Zhair'lo reached the back of the room, Bree pulled him in for a kiss.

"You weren't in trouble, were you?"

"Kind of."

She undid his leather shorts impatiently.

"Kind of?"

"When they were capturing Berel, I took a place in the line of bows."

"Oh, dear," Bree frowned, more at his lack of erection than his report of action. "So were you in trouble or not?"

Bree pushed him onto the bed just past Tara, who was conveniently positioned to stare at him.

"Zhai," Tara remarked in a helpful tone. "She's going to need you a bit harder than that ..."

Renzi took this as cue to slap her on the ass. Tara shrieked in approval as Bree began applying her mouth.

"There wasn't any trouble, really," Zhair'lo told the room at large. "It was almost like he approved, but couldn't say so. I didn't really understand it. He was more worried that I might have shot him by accident."

Absentmindedly, he was getting harder.

"Well, think about it," Tara shuddered and let her shoulders and face go down to the mattress as Renzi's thrusts caused her body to lurch. "You were protecting an injured woman."

"So?" Zhair'lo asked. "We still had orders."

"Think, Zhai," Bree said as he straddled him. "If you were the kind of person who could ignore an injured woman, would you even be here?"

Just as the implications of this hit Zhair'lo, Bree impaled her very wet self on his erection.

...

This was strange.

Bree wasn't in a hurry.

She was ... thoughtful.

Aroused, yes, but the normal breathless build up to orgasm was absent.

It still felt good, but odd.

"You're troubled?"

"Ah, nothing."

"Seriously. What?"

Zhair'lo nudged her a little with his mind and he felt her relent.

"That baby," she shook her head. "That woman."

"Awful," Zhair'lo agreed.

Bree nodded, softly rotating her hips.

"I just saw a few Rangers by the gate," Zhair'lo added. "They said they've found the camp Merelda came from."

The mesh lit up, then. He felt it right in his gut.

"Really?" Tara asked, still getting thumped from behind. She lifted herself up on her elbows to stare at Zhair'lo. "Are you sure? Do you think we'll get to go along?"

There was a thought Zhair'lo hadn't considered: would he actually get to meet some of the Temple's enemies? That was, after all, why he'd come here.

"Ooh," Bree remarked, feeling a surge in his loins. "Finally got you going?"

"Guess so."

"It'd be nice to see that, eh?" Zia called to them from across the aisle. "Fighters going in and taking that guy down, swords and bows and all that."

This was, for Zhair'lo, a rather excessive amount of inter-couple banter, even by the very low standards of decency in these parts. He tried to shrug it off. They'd been fucking each other so often in this room that it barely bothered him anymore.

"I just can't get over it, though," Bree said, sullenness returning to their mess. "How could any man do that to a woman?"

He didn't know what to say to that.

On the one hand, he couldn't imagine hurting a woman like that either.

On the other hand, Zhair'lo had seen what the Temple did to its own women. And that was intermixed with his own guilt over what he'd been forced to do to Talla.

"I'm glad I was born here," Bree frowned. "And not out there."

"Amen to that, sister," Tara put in.

Somehow, that exchange appeared to settle the matter in Bree's mind, and she began to set to work grinding against Zhair'lo.

"You were really ready," he pointed out.

"Yeah, playing with myself while I was waiting."

"We were all watching," Tara put in helpfully, goading Zhair'lo. "It was very, very exciting."

That, Zhair'lo realized, was why they'd all been facing away from the door and why Bree's skirt had already been off.

"I missed that?" he complained, only half ironically.

"Don't worry," Tara promised. "Del promised to go next."

"I did not!"

"Focus," Bree called out, grinding him insistently. "I need to come."

"Sorry," Zhair'lo laughed.

There ensued some further hip rotation, which didn't appear to be working.

"You need me on top?"

"No," she said quickly. "Almost there, just spank me."

There was a hiccup in the mesh.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," Bree seemed bewildered.

"After today, though," Zhair'lo shuddered.

"Completely different!" Tara put in.

"That's not this," Bree clarified. "This is what I want for me, and it's mine to give to you."

"Oh."

"Now, hurry up!"

"Okay."

Her eagerness flowed through the mesh to him, pushing his reluctance aside. His right hand snaked around behind her and slapped her cheek.

"Harder!"

Again, he struck her cheek.

"Attaboy," Tara prodded him.

"Butt out," Bree told her. "Again!"

He spanked her over and over. 

When he got to five, she shrieked, "Nine gods!"

At that point, the orgasm she'd been masturbating for finally arrived, wrapping itself tightly around his erection and forcing him to release himself deep inside her.

"Oh, gods," Bree murmured. "I haven't done it this way in months. I didn't know it could feel so good."

She slipped off him and laid herself down by his side.

"I'll bet we get that bastard tomorrow," she whispered in his ear. "I hope we get to see it."

It was very clear to Zhair'lo, the exact sense in which she meant to use the word 'bastard'.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 24



While the Fighters and their Ranger kin plotted the destruction of a small tribe of barbarians, Talla and Yua were climbing down a ladder, plotting out a map of the sewer and drainage system of the Temple of Gern.

"Doesn't smell quite as bad as Tina said," Yua tried not to wrinkle her nose.

Talla tilted her head up, intending to give Yua a look of scorn, but found herself staring at the other girl's bare genitals instead. With a roll of her eyes, she continued climbing down the ladder.

"Do you really want to go without underwear down here?."

Yua might have shrugged - it was hard to tell from just the sounds and Talla didn't feel any particular desire to look up at Yua right now.

'Maybe later,' she thought. 'After a shower.'

Maintaining her Service schedule had been a tough decision for Talla. Certainly, easing off would have left her more time and energy for mapping out the vast, forking tunnels underlying the Temple. On the other hand, she didn't want to arouse any suspicion. There was, firstly, the danger that her superiors might find out what she was really up to. Secondly, less dangerous but more likely, they might begin to think her loyalty to the Temple was failing. Talla had the distinct feeling that the women of Form had been watching her ever since the day they'd made Zhair'lo whip her.

'But I got away with meeting him, didn't I?' she thought. 'Beat you then, you heartless bitches.'

Yua hadn't gone out to Serve this night, but Talla had, and she still had the faint feeling that a bit of semen might be dripping out of her.

They had all accepted there were sacrifices to be made, and if one of those sacrifices was walking around torchlit tunnels late at night with breasts sore from squeezing and legs weak from being held in the air so long, then Talla would gladly be the one to pay that price.

"Follow the yellow chalk marks on the left wall," Talla explained. "We'll head down to the main output pipe and than work our way up toward Pussy's domain."

Yua was still standing by the ladder, looking back up the long shaft that led up to the laundry rooms.

"Why do you suppose the sewers are so deep?"

"What?"

"The ladder," Yua pointed upward. "It's really long."

"The whole system has to slope downhill to prevent backups," Talla shrugged a guess. "Maybe that's just how deep it needs to be for everything to flow down from Sweetness."

Yua marched alongside Talla, looking for the chalk marks on the walls.

"Naw," she said. "Think about it. Sweetness is already way up high on the hill."

Talla tilted her head thoughtfully.

"Okay," she admitted. "We know there are some underground rooms throughout the Temple. They must need room for those."

"That makes sense," Yua said slowly, not quite agreeing.

Now that she knew where she was going, and was far braver for it, Talla was able to lead Yua to the main output trough within very short order.

"The smell does get worse."

"Yes," Talla agreed, looking across a wide canal. "This is the largest tunnel in the place. From here we go up about thirty metres and cross a bridge."

"Why do we cross?"

"Because the information V'shika gave us makes it look as though the Synergist room is on the left side of Sweetness, and Endowment is on the right."

"How do you keep your sense of direction down here?" Yua worried, hugging close to Talla.

"I just do," Talla shrugged. "The chalk helps."

"Yes, Mistress."

Talla could see that Yua was getting worried, but that 'Mistress', thrown in with all the usual banter, was a sign of Yua's faith.

'She's not doing this because she thinks it's a good idea,' Talla realized. 'She's doing it because I think it's a good idea and she trusts me.'

The other point, however, was that the only one who really needed to be down here was Talla. She was the one with the 'direction sense' and the wherewithal to navigate the subterranean maze. Tina, or Yua, or whomever else she brought along, was there to keep her company. Oh, she could pretend to herself it was for safety, that two women in the sewers could cover one another in case of injury. But, when she had an honest moment, Talla admitted she just didn't want to be down here alone.

'It's gods damned dark is what it is.'

Talla squeezed her body along the wall and felt a twinge in her hips that made her wince.

"Spanker?" Yua asked.

"What?"

"The way you're walking," she clarified. "Somebody spanking you tonight?"

"No," Talla rolled her eyes. "Just one of those guys who likes the same position over and over again."

"Ah."

"Here we are," Talla pointed to a stone bridge hanging over the canal.

Whoever had designed the crossing had meant it to last. It was an arch made of solid stone blocks, each one a wedge with the whole assembly held together by a central keystone. The rest of the sewers might seem to be arranged haphazardly, but the bridge had been done by a woman with her head on straight.

'Or, possibly, a woman who never, ever wanted to come back down here again.'

"No danger of this thing falling into the water," Yua remarked.

"No," Talla agreed.

They began their march up the left bank of the free flowing trough.

"Where are we now, you think?"

"Under the Goddess' domain," Talla replied. "We'll follow this up a couple hundred metres into Sweetness and hopefully find a branch that takes us farther left."

Yua gulped.

"We'll get back in time, though, right?"

"Oh, yes, don't worry. The important thing is being able to find our way back to Endowment. But there's only this one bridge, so that shouldn't be too bad."

They walked on in silence.

"Kinda funny, isn't it?" Yua asked.

"What's that?"

"Did you ever think finding your way back to Zhair'lo would mean crawling through this muck?"

"Gotta hit the bottom before you come out on top?" Talla asked. "Is that how it goes?"

"Guess so."

"I think I hit bottom when they made him whip me. Can only go up from there."

Another lengthy silence.

"What was it like, when you saw him again?"

Talla hesitated. On the one hand, everything about sexuality she had ever been taught by the Temple made openness with other women mandatory. She should be willing to tell Yua every detail, so they could learn from each other. These were Temple teachings, which made Talla suspicious, but she had no intention of discarding the few good lessons the Temple offered out of juvenile contrariness.

On the other hand, the relationship she had with Zhair'lo was special. There was an undefinable emotion, a feeling for which she had no word, which made it separate. Talla felt she could still go out and Serve the boys the Temple sent her to Serve. She could still enjoy their penetrations, just as Zhair'lo most assuredly enjoyed the girls he was with. These held no meaning to her. But the meshes with Zhair'lo and the way she felt about him were something else.

The conflict occupied Talla's mind for so long, there was time for Yua for to make a small coughing noise.

'In a way,' Talla thought, 'I owe it to you to say something on the matter.'

Yua, Tina, Zoe and everyone else in her conspiracy had put their asses on the line for her, after all.

"It was a bit crazy," Talla said. "Something electric happened when we touched."

"Electric?"

"A bolt of lightning, literally," Talla went on. "Threw us on our backs. Blew out the fire."

"Wow. What is with you two?"

"I -," Talla stammered, stopping suddenly at the bottom of a short series of steps, "I really don't know. But there's no one else like him, no mesh like the ones with him. I feel ... I feel ..."

Yua held her torch high as Talla turned to face her, a completely lost look on her face.

"There's a closeness," Talla fumbled for words. "It's a feeling where I want to have sex with him, but sex isn't enough. I want - I want him to be deeper inside me than sex can go."

Talla turned around and started walking again. It was a moment before Yua followed.

"I like Zhair'lo," Yua offered. "He was nice, and he broke my Seal."

"Yeah?"

"And it seems he's pretty special, too. I mean, having sex with him was really good."

Talla shrugged.

"I'm just saying," Yua stammered. "I don't feel that way about him - or anybody."

Talla felt uncomfortable suddenly.

"Yua," she stopped the other girl with a raised hand.

"Yes, Mistress?"

They all knew better than to use that title where anyone could hear them. Talla had long since decided to accept it, though always with a warning glance whenever they were in public. Yua, however, used the title noticeably more often than any of the others, even if it was just whispered in the baths.

"I don't ... I don't own Zhair'lo, okay?"

"What?" Yua looked confused.

"It doesn't bother me that he's Served by you and other girls," Talla explained.

The two girls stared at each other for a moment before Talla realized that she'd misunderstood Yua.

"It's not that," Yua said. "It's just that I don't - I don't have anyone the way you and Zhair'lo have each other."

"Oh."

"I mean," Yua stammered. "There's just you, really."

"Me? You're jealous because I have Zhair'lo?"

"Let's get going," she insisted, her face suddenly quite red. "I'm getting cold."

Talla shook her head once to clear it before nodding in agreement. They really didn't have any more time to waste. Whatever was troubling Yua could wait until they were done and out of the sewers. Holding her torch high and moving slowly, Talla surveyed the branching tunnels arrayed before her.

"Based on what V'shika told me, and the angles I could stake out from the surface, the place we're looking for is just to the left side of Sweetness's triangle."

Yua followed silently along, her torch bobbing only slightly.

"We'll stay as close as we can to the central tunnel and see if we can find a branch maybe fifty metres up or so."

"How can you be sure?"

"I can't," Talla admitted earnestly. "I'm just guessing based on a look I took from one of the three storey buildings in the central triangle. V'shika gave me the location of the entrance and the length of cavern underneath it."

"So we could be doing a lot of exploring?"

"Yeah," Talla sighed, "But we've got a couple of bells, right?"

---===================----

"Imminence?"

Groggily, the Goddess awoke and searched the darkness for the source of the voice.

"Yes?"

A slim, naked woman, was covering a candle with her hand so the light wouldn't shine in the Goddess's eyes. Instead, the light shone and reflected off her bare, pinkish flesh.

"The child is awake," she said. "Will you nurse or should we -"

"I will nurse Magnus," the Goddess said immediately, feeling the rush of milk to her breasts. "My milk will leak otherwise."

Relieved of her abdominal burden, she had been able to sleep on her back the last night, a blessed relief. Still, the moments with her child were more precious than sleep and as she only had a few such days, she intended to make the best of every moment.

As she sat up in her bed, a second woman, guided by the candlelight of the first, brought Magnus to her.

"He already seeks milk from my breast," the woman smiled, watching the baby mouth at her nipple. She chided him lightly, "Nothing there, baby."

"Indeed," the Goddess tried not to sound offended. It was her intention to give this child the best start she could. What could be better than the milk of her own body? Not only was she his mother, she also had breasts imbued with dozens of upgrades.

No one else would nurse her child for as long as she could help it.

---===================----

"Talla, wait."

"What?"

"What's that?" Yua lowered her torch to angle the light into a side passage.

Talla looked down the narrow alley. A little ways in, she made out an even narrower cutting which, upon inspection, contained a steep stairway.

"It goes down pretty deep."

From the top of the stairway, Talla gave a glance back at the water rushing past their feet on its way to the main trough.

"It turns at the bottom," she peered into the darkness. "Nine hells, it must go around and underneath that trough."

"Why would they do that?" Yua asked.

"I can't imagine," Talla scratched her head. "But there must have been a really good reason to go that deep. We have to check it out."

Careful, and ever mindful of the condensation that collected on every surface, Talla and Yua walked down one stair after another. Twelve steps were enough to reach the bottom, where the passage turned right and went under the trough.

"I don't fancy going under a sewage trough," Yua wrinkled her nose.

"It doesn't look to be leaking," Talla said hopefully. "And it barely smells here at all."

"The tunnel looks small," Yua shied back.

Small was an understatement. Talla had been trying, with some success, not to imagine what a collapse would do to them. She continually reminded herself that these passages had every signature of having been over designed for their waste water draining purpose. Hopefully, the structural design was similarly overdone.

The first thing they noticed, ducking their heads to cross under the trough, was the breeze that rushed through the tunnel.

"Nine gods," Yua shivered. "I could cut glass with my nipples."

They entered a space so large that their eyes couldn't make out the far end in the torch light, at least not right away.

It was just tall enough for the two of them to stand up.

"Look at the floor," Talla said. "This place was carved out of the rock, not laid from quarry stone like upstairs."

"So?"

Talla shrugged.

After some investigation, they found the space they were in to be a circular room with a rough, stone floor and a square pillar in the middle made out of smooth, quarried, rock. They stowed their torches in sconces that had been mounted on the walls near the entrance and examined the pillar more closely. The sides of the pillar, central point of interest, had openings near the floor.

"What's the point of that?" Yua asked, pointing at the square, thirty centimetre gap between the floor and the bottom of the pillar.

Talla got down on her stomach to examine the space. Yua knelt next to her, quickly found the floor too rough for kneeling, and squatted down on the balls of her feet instead.

"It's not a support," Talla whispered, more to Yua's crotch than her ears. "It's an air vent."

"An air vent."

Talla carefully extricated her head from the pillar and sat up, smiling.

"The Synergist has to be kept cool, doesn't it?"

"V'shika said ... oh!" Yua shouted.

"Sh!" Talla glared at Yua.

"Sorry."

"This vent probably goes straight up to the room behind all those locked doors," Talla pointed out. "Shout loud enough, someone might hear you."

"This late at night, even?" Yua worried.

"I imagine it's guarded night and day. This is how they control us, after all, right?"

Yua nodded, realization still dawning on her face.

"This is why you were so excited about the draught of wind?"

"Yeah," Talla's face fell.

"What's wrong?"

"Look at it," Talla waved her hand. "That's way too small a space for even you to fit into. Plus there's a grate at this end, probably at least one or two more up there somewhere."

"Oh," Yua sighed. "This isn't the back door you were hoping for?"

"No."

Sitting on the cold, stone, floor, Talla took a moment to reflect.

"The smell isn't as bad, here," Yua pointed out.

"Makes sense," Talla agreed. "They probably configured the whole system so there'd be fresh air where they needed to draw it."

"Or the Synergist room would smell awful."

There was another pause.

"Could we break through there somehow?" Yua asked.

"No chance," Talla shook her head. "You start making that kind of noise down here and this room will be full of Enforcers in no time."

She shivered, a memory racing through her mind of a hasty, painful invasion of her body when a group of such people had burst in on her and Tina.

"We'll have to think of something else, then," Yua tried to be confident, laying a hand on Talla's knee. "You will think of something, I'm certain."

Talla ran a hand through her own hair.

"I'm glad you trust me so much," she tried not to let her cynicism through.

"You're my, Mistress," Yua breathed, the way she always whispered when she said the forbidden word in public. "Of course I do."

"Are you alright?" Talla peered at her friend.

Yua gulped.

"I - uh," she stammered.

Talla tilted her head to show patience and understanding and put her hand over Yua's, which was still resting on Talla's knee.

Yua turned her eyes away for a moment, took a deep breath, and spoke.

"Nadine won't talk to me anymore, you see."

"I'm afraid I don't see," Talla shook her head.

"We were Sealed together, right?"

Talla nodded.

"And we, ah, had each other."

"Oh," Talla felt realization dawn on her this time. "And now -"

"Now that I hang around with you ..." Yua trailed off.

Nadine had abandoned Yua, although Nadine probably had a different opinion as to who had done the abandoning.

"You Serve often, don't you?"

"It's not the same," Yua replied. "When I joined your - when you tested me - I thought, well ..."

There was an embarrassed silence as Yua refused to finish her sentence.

"You thought?" Talla prodded.

Yua glanced around in the darkness, hoping perhaps that someone would rescue her. She seemed halfway to tears.

"I thought we would do that a lot," she blurted out suddenly, squeezing Talla's knee.

"Oh!"

Yua lowered her eyes.

"I didn't realize it was only that once -"

"It's not - it doesn't have to be -"

"I just ... what?"

"It doesn't have to be just that once," Talla said as earnestly as she could.

In all this time, it had never occurred to Talla that girls might be joining her for any reason other than their desire to avenge themselves against the Temple. Yua might have actually joined because of some feeling she had for Talla herself. And all this time, Talla had been completely neglecting that feeling. Had Yua been looking for time alone? Had she been looking forward to this late night adventure?

"Wait," Talla peered into Yua's eyes. "Is that why you're not wearing underwear?"

Yua nodded dolefully.

"Oh, Madra Zen, come here," Talla opened her arms and pulled Yua in before she burst into tears. "I'm sorry, Yua, I didn't know."

"It's alright," Yua gasped. "You didn't know."

Yua was curled up, facing sideways, with her right shoulder tucked between Talla's breasts.

"I should have realized, though."

They sat in silence for a while, as Yua got control of her breathing and slowly nestled deeper into Talla's cleavage.

"Yua?"

"Mistress?"

"Are you, ah, aroused now?"

Another sad nod.

"Down here, on this stone floor, in the cold?"

Yua nodded into Talla's chest.

Comfort cast aside, there was a simple problem in the way.

"I'm not ... quite ready," Talla admitted.

"It's okay," Yua said eagerly. She looked up into Talla's eyes, the water evident in her own, "I can help you."

"Oh ... I -"

Before Talla could say anything, Yua was pushing her on to her back.

"You've done this -?"

"Before?" Yua asked, pulling Talla's underwear down. "Yes."

Talla let out a brief noise of dismay, but surrendered to the smaller girl's ministrations and opened her legs.

"You have the most beautiful breasts," Yua simpered, moving her head between Talla's thighs. "But we're the same down here."

Half a breath later, Talla felt the barest trace of a tongue pressing at the cleavage of her genitals. All was hidden beneath the small skirt she wore.

She shuddered as she felt the little tongue dart against her clitoris.

"Right there, Mistress?" Yua whispered.

Talla hissed in the affirmative and the tongue plunged between her lips.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 24



"Hah!"

Yua knew her way around a woman's genitals. How often had she done this sort of thing for Nadine? Had Nadine reciprocated the same way?

Talla looked down the length of Yua's body. She lay flat on her stomach, which was probably more comfortable than kneeling, but her legs were spread wide enough that her skirt was pushed up above her cheeks. Her hands, meanwhile, were under Talla's skirt, poking and prodding.

A wet finger made circles around Talla's entrance, asking permission. Almost involuntarily, Talla rolled her hips and opened her legs, offering silent consent. A finger began pushing its way into her body while the tongue moved around in circles.

Yua shifted suddenly, prodding Talla a little more deeply, eliciting a small cry of surprise which quickly turned to pleasure. Sensing this, Yua began rhythmically poking at Talla's insides, never going straight in but rather pushing into the sides of Talla's tunnel.

Back, front, left, right - the pattern went on, a little dance that matched the one going on around Talla's clitoris.

"I'm ready," Talla said, not quite lying but in a hurry. "Come up here."

Yua's eyes peered up over the hem of Talla's skirt as her finger froze.

"You don't want me to finish you?"

"We can mesh. Isn't that what you want?"

Yua brightened at this, though Talla couldn't figure out why.

"I forgot," Yua admitted. "We always used to take turns."

Without removing her finger, Yua carefully moved until she and Talla were facing each other, their legs interlocked so there remained only enough space between their stomachs for their hands. As Talla slid her hand along Yua's belly, Yua stopped her.

"Take off my top, Mistress."

Talla reached her arms around Yua's back and unlaced her top. Slimmer though her breasts were, they still fell a bit as the top came undone.

"And yours?"

Talla smiled. They were Abundance women, after all, weren't they? What was the point if they didn't use what they had?

Yua masturbated Talla, with one finger inside her vagina and her thumb making warm, wet circles around her clitoris. Yua's eyes, however, were focused narrowly on Talla's cleavage. With twice the number of upgrades, there were necessarily twice as many laces around the back of Talla's top. As each was undone, her heavy breasts fell just a little.

A gasp of relief came from Yua's pursed lips as Talla's chest was bared to her. Never ceasing in her fondling, Yua lowered her head to Talla's left breast and gently began to suckle at her nipple.

"Nine gods, Yua," Talla murmured, and meant it. There were certain things that another woman was simply going to be better at than any man ever could be - things that you could only get right by knowing them from the inside in a way that the mesh couldn't teach.

Talla managed to snake a hand around and under Yua, reaching down between the dark-haired girl's thighs. A wetness greeted her fingertips, leaking out of her lips, obvious before she'd made the slightest penetration.

"You're ready, aren't you?"

"Oh, yes, Mistress," Yua murmured around a mouthful of breast.

With moist ease, Talla slid her finger up inside Yua.

...

Anguish

Loneliness.

Poor Yua.

Men weren't women and she'd learned to like women.

She'd liked Nadine.

Nadine was gone.

She liked Talla now. She could mesh with Talla. She would go where Talla went.

Yua hated the Temple, too.

But she cared more about Talla than hating the Temple.

And something else...

... oh, no!

No, no, no!

---===================----

Something was tingling deep in Zhair'lo's mind. Barely conscious, he felt a presence he hadn't felt so strongly in a long time.

Talla was there, warm and fuzzy. He felt her body, pressed against him, tasted the sweat on her breasts as he suckled at her nipples. He bit down, gently, coaxing an erection from those little nubs even as he felt a hardening between his legs.

She wasn't here, though, and he wasn't with her.

Zhair'lo awoke then, somewhat groggy, and surmised that he'd been dreaming.

"Hello," Bree murmured over her shoulder.

His erection was pushing between her bare cheeks.

"You have enough energy?"

"Guess so."

Bree squirmed against him, causing more blood to rush to his groin.

"Aren't we supposed to cycle? I just Served you."

Zhair'lo shrugged against her back.

"Does that even matter, here?"

Bree had not stopped wiggling and now turned her ankles and knees so her cheeks spread for him.

"Probably not," she agreed.

"Wouldn't want to wake anybody else up."

Bree murmured agreement. "And I'm up now anyway."

"And wet," Zhair'lo pointed out, teasing the head of his manhood against her entrance.

"Always."

Zhair'lo knew there was no point waiting. The middle of the night was not the time for fancy, time consuming games. Bree shifted her hips. Zhair'lo pushed.

...

Oh, no!

No, no, no!

Talla!

Yua?

Zhair'lo!

...

Too much was happening.

How had this even started? They were so far apart. They had barely sensed each other's previous sexual encounters since he'd gone out to live with the Fighters. Was Talla closer?

...

No. I'm in the sewers under the Temple.

Fucking?

With Yua. It's a long gods-damned story.

Some other time.

...

So it had been Yua's mouth on Talla's breast, had it?

Yua and Bree, meanwhile, were in turmoil. They'd never felt a mesh like this before. Too many voices and too many emotions were driving them crazy.

...

Who is that with you?

Bree. She's a Fighter.

We have to get them through this, before they tear us apart.

Again.

I know. Are you close?

Just started. You?

Closer. Yua's been working on me.

Okay. Try to ignore us. Maybe if you can come ...

Right

...

Yua and Bree, however, were not pleased. They probably didn't sense anything directly, but the extra presences in the mesh were so foreign to them that they fought like wounded animals to tear at the extra bonds.

'Calm down,' Zhair'lo projected, hoping Bree would feel it.

"Weird," Bree said aloud.

"It's okay," Zhair'lo murmured.

---===================----

With her right hand working Yua's vagina as deeply as she could, Talla used the left to push Yua's face into her breast.

"Bite down, my sweet," Talla crooned. "Let me feel you."

Teeth sank into flesh and Yua's finger matched Talla's for depth.

"Two fingers," Talla begged, "or three if you can do it."

The mesh wouldn't let Yua's finger all the way out, but she extracted it far enough to slide two more fingers in next to it. These were all pushed inside Talla, widened her entrance. Talla clamped down as hard as she could, willing the pressure and the pain in her upgrade-sensitized breasts to bring on her orgasm.

'This has to be it.'

"Make us come, Yua," Talla whispered. "Harder."

Three fingers pumped in and out of Talla's dripping tunnel, even as Yua and Bree tried to tear at the mesh binding the four of them together.

"Yes, yes!"

Only a little longer and they'd be free.

Talla's eyes bulged as the orgasm came on. She felt her vagina clamp down painfully on Yua's fingers and something exploded inside her, causing Yua to sit up straight in panic and look Talla directly in the eyes.

There was a flash of blue light and a blast of ... something ... issued from their bodies. Whatever it was nearly blew out the torches they'd left racked on the wall sconces. Yua's body went limp, even as the two of them twitched through their orgasms, muscles spasming around fingers.

Talla could see, from the bleary look in Yua's eyes, that the girl was fading fast. It seemed only the involuntary nature of the mesh was keeping her fingers inside Talla. The moment the orgasm was over, Yua slumped against Talla's bare chest and her hands fell limply to the floor.

This was a disaster.

It struck Talla immediately that the blue flash of light was strikingly similar to what had happened the last time she and Zhair'lo had met.

'And how many people did that knock unconscious?'

Panic set in for a moment.

"Yua!" she shouted. "Wake up! We can't stay here!"

The only explanation was that her link with Zhair'lo had caused this. But they weren't out at some camp in the middle of nowhere. They were under a gods-damned Temple full of the highest ranking women in existence.

'It's the middle of the night, though, right?'

Zhair'lo was unconscious. She could tell the link between them was still there, but he was clearly out. There would be no advice from that quarter.

'I'm naked.'

They couldn't go anywhere without clothing, could they? That had to be the first priority.

Gently as she could, she laid Yua down on her side. She stirred for a moment when her breast touched the cold stone floor, but her eyes only fluttered.

Talla's top and panties were thrown on in a hurry. Yua hadn't worn anything under her skirt.

"Yua!" Talla hissed. "Wake up!"

"Uh", Yua muttered back groggily.

"I need you awake! We have to get out of here."

She pulled Yua back up to a sitting position, but her spine had only slightly more integrity than a sack of potatoes. It was enough, however, that Talla was able to put Yua's top on.

"Up you get. Now!"

That last loud hiss in Yua's ear was enough get her eyes open. Talla hauled her up on her feet, grateful for her Strength upgrade but wishing she had some Tight to go with it.

'Oh, for some legs.'

With one arm under Yua, Talla reached for the torches they'd left on the wall.

"You have to carry a torch. We can't leave anything here."

Yua nodded limply, taking one torch and letting Talla take the other. Together, they hobbled sideways through the low tunnel and over to the stairway.

"Get your feet under you, gods damn it."

How much time did they have?

---===================----

"Imminence?"

"Was that an earthquake?" the Goddess enquired of the darkness around her.

"Ah ... no, Imminence. The earth did not quake."

Gern was not built near any fault lines. There was no reason to doubt the stability of the Temple's foundation.

"Something moved."

From a room nearby, a baby mewed plaintively.

"Bring me Magnus."

"You only just fed him, Imminence."

"Indeed. Now bring him to me."

"Imminence."

She heard the sliding of bare flesh across silk and a movement that was probably a bow. A moment later, a candle was lit and a naked woman with luxurious hair decorating the triangle between her legs brought a crying baby to his mother.

"He is not hungry, Imminence," the Adept insisted. "He does not try to suckle."

"Magnus can't smell milk on you, first of all," the Goddess replied. "Second, I agree that he is not hungry. It's the wrong kind of cry."

If the Adept thought it odd that the Goddess was claiming to be able to translate baby noises, she kept it to herself.

Once in his mother's arms, Magnus quieted down. He latched to her golden breast, but took no nourishment because he wasn't searching for food, but rather comfort.

"The gold in his skin is almost gone," the Goddess remarked, "but something of my magic remains in his blood. He felt what I felt."

"There was no earthquake," the Adept insisted, a note of worried determination in her voice indicated that she feared for her career path. "I was fully awake."

"It wasn't an earthquake."

Where had the feeling come from? It had hit her in the back, for certain. How had she lain in bed? On her side, with her back to Sweetness.

But the feeling had come in strangely. She tried to imagine the topography of the Temple, with Sweetness up the hill. Had it come from inside the Temple, or over the hills beyond it? The feeling had come in so low.

Someone powerful had done this, but the only people who had ever given her this feeling were Zhair'lo and Talla. Zhair'lo was out with the Fighters, far off on the opposite side of the Temple, and Talla was in Endowment, nowhere near the source of this feeling.

Whatever it was, it could only be people having sex somewhere, which could not possibly be as important as comforting the baby in her arms..

When Magnus had fallen asleep again, she handed him off to the Adept to tuck back into his crib.

"Thank you, dear."

"Imminence," the woman replied with a light bow.

It wasn't long before the Goddess fell back to sleep.

---===================----

"Of course I felt it," the Queen of Sweetness insisted to the messenger. She pulled her red silk nightgown around her and tied it at the front as she spoke. "And you may give Pussy the same message I sent to Lips. It felt like something came out of the earth and hit my spine. I have no idea what it was because I've never felt anything like it."

The messenger disappeared almost instantly.

"You're getting a bit testy," Within advised.

"I'll feel a lot better once that child is securely away from here," the Queen snapped, folding her arms and leaning against her desk.

Within, cool as always, nodded in a strange, diagonal sort of way that spoke volumes about her opinion of her Queen.

"Subterfuge has never been our thing," the Sorceress pointed out.

"No," the harried woman in red glared at her Sorceress. How was it that Within was always properly composed and never in a hurry?

'Age,' she thought. 'She's older than me, even if only by a few years. What if we'd chosen her instead of me at the last Ascension?'

Of course it wouldn't have worked. Within being as old as she was, she'd have been Queen only briefly before the Perfections wore her out.

The Queen shook her head clear. The fact of the matter was that Within had shown up, properly dressed, at the Queen's bedroom door before either of the other Sorceresses had even managed to send a barely clothed messenger.

"What do we do about it?"

"You're asking me?" Within raised an eyebrow.

"You must have some advice."

"Go back to sleep," she said. "It could only have been caused by someone having an orgasm -"

"Hah!", the Queen retorted. "I've felt other people's orgasms. No mesh has ever made me feel that the earth was shaking!"

"That's merely a matter of magnitude and proximity," Within explained patiently. "There is no question what it was. You can either wake all the Enforcers of Form and have them search through our entire triangle for some couple engaged in an illicit sexual encounter, or you can go back to sleep."

The Queen thought about this a moment.

"Then why did you come here?"

"To advise you to do the latter. I worried you might make the wrong decision in your state of agitation."

The Queen of Sweetness put her hands on her hips and glared at her Sorceress.

"You can be a real bitch sometimes, you know that?"

Within nodded sympathetically.

"Only when I'm right."

---===================----

Talla and Yua, meanwhile, had been stumbling through the sewers, following Talla's chalk marks back toward Endowment.

"We going to make it?" Yua muttered.

"I don't know," Talla said. "It depends when and where they start searching. We have to get back to the Endowment side of the Temple, quick as we can."

"Uh-huh..."

They needn't have worried, at least not about any immediate danger.

Every single guard in the levels above them was unconscious.



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 25



A blast of cold water washed over the naked bodies of Zhair'lo and Zia, whisking away the sweat and fluids from their respective sexual encounters.

"Today's the day," Zia overflowed with eagerness as she soaped up his body. "I hope they let us come."

For once, Zhair'lo didn't have to hide his feelings. He was just as eager as the rest of the Recruits showering around him to meet these barbarians, if not for exactly the same reasons.

He couldn't care less whether this 'Chet' lived or died. People who beat up recently pregnant women weren't any allies of his. But what of Berel? If the rest of the barbarians were like him, could they be the allies Zhair'lo wanted? Could they be the enemies the Temple feared?

Whoever they were, they didn't sound like a large group, nor particularly well organized, but they might know others. Zhair'lo was on the scent of something and he was as eager as any hound.

"I'm going to get an extra lecture, I bet," Zhair'lo said, returning the favour and running soapy hands over Zia's back.

"On the subject of not using your weapon?"

"Aye."

Zhair'lo planned to follow that rule to perfection today. He wanted to meet these people, not kill them. He could only hope that they would surrender quickly enough that most of them would be spared. It wouldn't be easy to find a way to talk to them, but he was prepared to act on any opportunity.

'And the more they capture, the better my chances of getting one of them alone.'

His thoughts were interrupted when he was doused in a second blast of cold water. Zia had decided that they were done with the shower, which had more to do with her enthusiasm about getting to breakfast.

"Come on. Come on, you idiots," she urged the less enthused Recruits. "Briefing!"

Everyone knew about the upcoming briefing, which had been promised at breakfast, but none had the childlike giddiness that had Zia whipping her clothes back on without even bothering to towel herself off.

Feeling somewhat obliged to keep up with Zia, by way of having paired with her in the showers, Zhair'lo dressed as quickly as he could - though he at least dried himself off wherever leather would be touching his skin.

"Come on, already," Zia taunted him, taking over the lacing of his leather top.

As much as she might want to head off to the mess for breakfast, she didn't want to go alone. The moment she had tied up his leathers, she grabbed Zhair'lo's hand and pulled him out of the showers.

"I don't think they'll start yet," Zhair'lo pointed out.

"I'm not missing this," Zia waved him off with her free hand.

She only released her grip when they passed through the doors into the mess. They snatched up trays of scrambled eggs and ham from the ledge between the dining room and the kitchen before finding seats at the otherwise empty table reserved for the Recruits.

"You know what these things are like?" Zhair'lo gestured toward the small dais from where, presumably, the briefing would be lead.

"Basically," Zia shrugged. "They'll tell us what they've found and who gets to go."

Zhair'lo considered her word choice: 'gets' to go.

As many times as she'd Served him, Zhair'lo had never gotten used to Zia's blood lust. His goal was to avoid getting killed while bringing down the Temple. He accepted the existence of risks in a task of that magnitude. Combat, however, was something to be avoided until it was necessary. For Zia combat was the whole point. She accepted the risk because the adrenaline rush was the purpose of her life.

Bree and Renzi filed in to the mess next, followed by the rest of the Recruits. None of them were as eager as Zia, but their eyes were all alight. Even, Del, the pragmatic one, seemed to have developed an icy glare.

It wasn't long after the last of the Recruits sat down that the doors opened once more.

"Attention!"

Whipped well into shape, Zhair'lo and his comrades were on their feet as quickly as any of the veterans.

Walking through the doors, down the centre aisle of the large mess hall, was a man that Zhair'lo could only describe as "grizzled". There was a hardness in his eyes and a toughness to his skin that made Zhair'lo feel, if only for a moment, that this man could go into battle without bothering to put on armour. In that instant, it seemed as if his flesh was simply too thick to yield to a blade.

On the man's chest, Zhair'lo saw the rank insignia: two horizontal black bars with a black star between them.

'Master Kendrick,' he realized suddenly, as if it hadn't been obvious.

Arriving at the dais, Kendrick turned to face the assembled crowd and used one hand to brush his short hair back over his right ear. It was not a gentle gesture.

"Be seated," the left side of his mouth curled as he spoke.

Swiftly, quietly, they sat.

If the idea of fighting the women of the Temple in some kind of frontal assault had frightened Zhair'lo, combat with this man absolutely terrified him.

'He's killed people,' Zhair'lo's eyes went wide as he stared at the Master Fighter. 'He's killed a lot of people.'

"Yesterday, we had an incident," Kendrick's voice was hard and quiet all at once, and it rolled with a brogue Zhair'lo associated with the people of the far north.

"Ji'ann's and Yung's squad discovered a brutally beaten woman, her infant child and a man she called her brother. Under interrogation, we have determined the truth of her story and intend to eliminate anyone who was involved in harming her."

"To that end we'll be sending four squads, along with our new Recruits, to complete this assignment."

"These barbarians have wandered too close to our city," Kendrick waved a finger of warning. "The women of this tribe are unlikely to fight and will be welcomed into the city and become the responsibility of the Temple. Any men who aren't killed will be given the choice of joining us or dying."

Zhair'lo got the chilling feeling, from the casual way Kendrick gave these last instructions, that they'd been spoken, word for word, many times before.

The dark eyed master Fighter suddenly stood up taller, pushing his shoulders back even farther than usual.

"Barbarians are at your gates!"

A roar came back from the veteran Fighters.

"Stand on the wall! Or the City falls!"

Master Kendrick turned to his side and nodded to Ji'ann before stepping off the dais and taking a spot against the left side wall. It was a mark of the man's presence that Zhair'lo hadn't noticed there were four people arrayed behind him on the dais. Ji'ann and Sergeant Yung took up the left side of the stage, while a pair of rangers, one of each gender, took up the right side.

Zhair'lo had never noticed before that Ji'ann wore the Black Star badge of a Chief, one rank above Sergeant Yung.

"The Rangers will give details in a moment," her voice rolled over them. "What we have, as far as we know, is a small village of about sixty people. One of them, whom we imagine to be the village chief, will be killed on sight. We anticipate the rest will surrender immediately thereafter, but we will not hesitate to strike down anyone who shows any belligerence. The strike will be timed for the early afternoon, so we have the advantage of sunlight."

Ji'ann looked around the room.

"My squad, Sergeant Yung's, Chief Malak's and Sergeant Kelli's squads have been selected. We will be taking the Recruits with us, so let's all set a proper example for them."

Anywhere else, this might have been a joke, but no one laughed. Zhair'lo had a strong suspicion it wasn't a joke.

"Hera?"

"Chief," the blonde haired female ranger acknowledged.

Zhair'lo couldn't be sure of this woman's rank.

Hera's badge was a single green Chevron, which could mean anything. White chevrons, numbering one, two or three, marked the ranks of soldiery. A black chevron was the mark of a Sergeant. Where did the rangers factor in this lot?

As the ranger woman took the centre of the stage, what struck Zhair'lo more than the lightness of her hair was the power of her eyes. They were sharp and grey, the eyes of an eagle perpetually on the hunt. It wouldn't surprise him, based on that and the high, sharp nature of her cheekbones, if it turned out she held a large number of Facial upgrades.

'Does night vision come with those?' he wondered.

Hera's voice, even more strangely, was a whisper, but it was a whisper that filled the room.

Zhair'lo listened eagerly, hoping to get his first glimpse of the enemies of the Temple.

"We used Berel's information to locate his tribe," she told them. "We counted twenty men of fighting age and five more that might wield a sword if they had to, but they are no threat to us. There were no bows in evidence and the swords they had were of low quality. Many were rusted."

Their swords were rusted? Zhair'lo had known they were a small force ... but rusted swords?

"They do, however, carry these swords around at all times. It seems to be in the nature of the men to constantly test each other, sometimes resulting in violence and death. That's the simplest explanation for their skewed gender ratio."

They used their crappy, rusted swords to kill each other?

"Based on Berel's information, Seh'tin kept watch over the section of the road where Merelda had crossed into our city's limits. He can report the most recent incursion."

The male ranger, who also wore a single green chevron, stepped forward. His brown hair and medium brown skin blended easily into his greyish-brown cloak, a much smoother transition than that of his companion. But then, they wore hoods, didn't they? Hera's blonde hair would be well covered when she was on duty.

"I encountered a small group of barbarians," his voice carried a quiet confidence that bordered on arrogance. "From cover, I watched as they crossed our road on Merelda's trail and found their way to the spot where we found her. From that point, they argued for some time. It was obvious that they found the numerous sets of footprints very confusing. Eventually, however, they did determine that Merelda had backtracked. There was some discussion - I had to keep my distance, unfortunately- as to whether a neighbouring tribe had kidnapped Merelda alive or merely taken her dead body away."

"They think that Merelda was running intentionally to find this other tribe?" Ji'ann interrupted.

"No, Mistress," Seh'tin gave her a slightly ironic bow. "I don't quite understand how they surmised it, but they seem to believe that Merelda was kidnapped directly out of their camp."

"They think someone is stealing recently pregnant women?" Sergeant Yung asked, mystified.

"Quite," Seh'tin replied. "If the barbarian men had been under the impression that Merelda had run away, that is not their current theory. They have decided, instead, that Merelda was impregnated by some member of another group and has been subsequently captured by said tribe."

"She's property," Zhair'lo blurted out.

It seemed that hundreds of pairs of eyes suddenly focused on him as he bit down on his lip and cursed himself for speaking. It was Master Kendrick who broke the silence.

"Indeed she was, lad," his voice rolled. "But no longer."

"Begging your pardon, Seh'tin," a youngish male voice called from the back, "But if they think Merelda was a victim of another tribe, why did they beat her up? And why chase her now?"

"It is foolishness," Ji'ann stepped to the fore of the dais. "People such as these judge that her pregnancy by another man is her failure. They undoubtedly seek not to recover her, but to recapture her and punish her as an example to other women."

Zhair'lo heard the disgust in Ji'ann's voice, but remembered also, the Temple was not innocent in regard to punishing people to set an example.

"As if it should matter whose child it is," Zia hissed next to Zhair'lo, jarring him back to reality.

Ji'ann had already stepped into the background with a nod to Seh'tin.

"They were good enough at tracking to follow her course across our road and back onto it. However, the frequent use of that road by our patrols made it impossible for them to figure out, from there, where she had gone."

"Although I could not find a concealed place from which to hear the whole of their final conversation, it seemed that they had decided to regroup with the rest of their tribe and come for Merelda another day."

"Aye," said Master Kendrick. "That day will not arrive for them."

There was an entirely heartfelt round of dark laughter that greeted this statement.

Seh'tin nodded to Ji'ann, who stepped to the fore again.

"What it means," she said, "is that we'll have the whole lot of them in one place this afternoon. It's possible they'll be preparing to attack what they believe is another tribe. It's not likely they'll see us coming."

Ji'ann nodded again to Hera who, for almost half a bell, described the outskirts of the barbarian camp using a series of large, crudely drawn, paper maps. Much of it was incomprehensible to Zhair'lo. He understood the maps she presented but only figured out what the small symbols she had drawn on them were if she named them while pointing at them. He managed to get only a general idea of the little village they'd be attacking.

Merelda and Berel's tribe lived in small gulley, unprotected by any walls. It seemed that they moved frequently and lived in fairly mobile, tent-like dwellings. Several fires dotted their current campsite and a large dwelling, which doubled as an armoury, was central to their layout. This, it was made clear, was where they expected to find the tribe's leader.

"The length of his beard is enough to identify him," Hera said. "No other man, it seems, is permitted to have as long as beard. If you kill him early in the battle, it should be much easier to disable the others."

A memory twitched in Zhair'lo's mind when he heard the word 'disable'. He'd heard it before, if not with his own ears. It meant neither 'kill' nor 'injure', but was being used for an entirely different purpose. He grimaced, trying to pull the meaning out of his brain, but nothing came. Possibly Talla didn't even know the proper meaning of the word.

Hera went on, explaining the shape of the land and highlighting both cover and dangerous terrain. In one area were thick thorn bushes that could hinder their progress. In another were low hills which would allow a quiet approach.

When Hera finished describing the barbarian village, Ji'ann was ready.

After Hera's lithe body and quiet whisper, Ji'ann's size and thundering voice rolled over them. She began immediately laying out a deployment pattern. Archers would come in from behind cover from the north - the side nearest Gern. Two other squads would come from the west and east. They would not move in until the horn sounded. The horn - it was explained for the benefit of the Recruits - indicated that those with swords would be in the mix and that one must be more cautious in what was behind the target of one's arrows. This was mentioned in case the Recruits actually needed to use their bows which, Ji'ann made clear with a glare, would not happen.

"Master Kendrick," Ji'ann nodded when she was done.

The formidable man took centre stage again.

"I'll remind you that there a number of children in this village, so you'll watch where you point your bows," his deep voice warned. "There are a number of boys that ought not to have been taught to fight, but might be handed a sword anyway. Frighten them if you have to, but they shouldn't be so difficult that you need to kill them."

There was a grumble of uncomfortable assent to this statement.

Zhair'lo wondered what could be done with such children. Would they be moved into the city and entrusted to some Master to keep in line? Would they be ready for an apprenticeship? What if they didn't like it or even rebelled? Could they be a source of new dissidents for Talla and him?

"You'll kit up in one bell," Kendrick told them finally. "Good luck and good hunting."

"Aye!" they chorused back to him.

'Aye,' Zhair'lo thought. 'You fear these wild ones so much, thousands of people are dedicated to fighting them. I can't wait to meet them.'

---===================----

"We had unconscious guards in the Synergist tunnels?" the Queen of Form looked around at her underlings. "How?"

It was a nervous group of women that gathered in a circle about her desk. Officers in charge of the Enforcers were on hand, as were the Sorceresses of Tight and Iron. Scribes stood ready to take message and relay orders. A few Virgins and Initiates, on the outskirts, stood stiffly at attention, lest one of their mistresses grow thirsty.

"That is unclear, Highness," Sonja was the first to reply. "It appears to be the same ... effect that struck the Hunter's Camp many days ago."

"In other words," the Queen raised an eyebrow, "we have no idea."

The Sorceresses of Iron and Tight, in their olive drab sashes and skirts, stood on either of their Queen, arms folded under their breasts, both steaming with a need to take action and neither having any idea what to do.

Iron spoke first, "When was this discovered?"

Tight nodded toward one of the Officers, "Fin'la found them."

"Sixth bell, Mistress," the Officer, still in her light leathers, spoke up. "I found them myself when I took my squad to relieve them. Fearing both thievery and some type of poison in the air, I went in first while the others waited a safe distance away."

"All were unconscious?"

"Every single one, Mistress," she straightened her orange shirt. "They'd dropped wherever they were sitting or standing. From the bruises, I'd say they'd fallen very quickly - they'd had no ability to brace themselves."

"We need someone from Lips or Within," Iron turned to the two next to her, "someone who knows poisons."

"I've never heard of anything that can act that fast," Tight pointed out. "But maybe they have something."

"If they do," the Queen snorted, "they'd better be keeping a cork in it."

Several people gulped.

"What of the sewers?" Sonja put in thoughtfully.

"The sewers?" the Queen asked.

"There is still a shaft down to the sewers, is there not? I haven't drawn that duty in a while but -"

"Yes, there is," Fin'la said. "It is required to keep the Synergist from spoiling."

"Could some gas have come up from the sewers?"

All eyes turned to the Fin'la, who was clearly fighting not to shrug in dismay.

"I have no idea," she said. "That would be question, I think, for the Endowment women?"

"Any other ideas?" the Queen's voice sharpened.

When no response came, she spoke curtly.

"Sonja, you will go directly to Endowment and find someone with knowledge of the sewers. Take several women with you, Enforcers with as many Iron upgrades as possible. String yourselves out in case there is a poison or foul gas in the air. I don't want to lose all of you."

With a nod, the Queen dismissed the Adjudicate, who departed with a quick bow.

"Fin'la, what is the health of the guards?"

"They are unwell, but recovering in hospital."

"Interrogate them as best you can," the Queen instructed. "Figure out, at least, the last bell they remember hearing."

"A moment, Highness," Tight interrupted.

"Hm?"

"Fin'la," Tight asked. "Have you spoken to any of the women who were rendered unconscious at the Hunter's Camp?"

Fin'la looked thoughtfully in the air for a moment.

"No, Mistress."

"Good," Tight nodded. "Then interview your guards first and - afterwards - compare it with Sonja's notes about the others."

"Keep her unbiased," Iron nodded sagely.

"Highness, Mistresses," Fin'la bowed and exited.

"We'll need someone to visit the Sorceress of Lips, as well," the Queen put in, casting her eyes about for a volunteer.

The hands of two Officers went up.

"They both have several Lips upgrades," Tight pointed out.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 25



"Then both of you can go," the Queen ordered. "Be off."

Two more disappeared.

"The rest of you, about your business."

Bows all around, and the Queen was soon alone with her Sorceresses, all three of them still standing with their arms folded, none of them looking at anything in particular.

"What fresh hell is this, I wonder?" the Queen asked.

Her Sorceresses could only shake their heads.

---===================----

Tina sank into the tub, slithering down between Talla and Yua. Under the guise of dunking herself in the water, she slid down the entire length of Talla's body and, finding her thighs closed, rose up higher to kiss one of her nipples under the water.

"What gives, Mistress?" she whispered when she cleared the surface of the water.

"Trouble, maybe," Talla kept her voice low.

Tina only raised her eyebrows and drifted across to the middle of the tub to face Talla and Yua.

"I found what I was looking for," Talla said. "A vent leading up to the Synergist room."

"Probably," Yua pointed out before returning to a tired silence.

"Probably," Talla admitted. "Although it's exactly where V'shika thought the Synergist room would have to be."

"That sounds like good news ,though," Tina said suspiciously, cupping one of her breasts with a wince.

"Biter last night?" Talla asked.

"No, he just sucked on it really hard," Tina's eyes widened, "you should have seen how long he made it get."

Talla and Yua winced in sympathy.

"Anyway, your vent?"

"I was hoping it would be a way in to the Synergist room," Talla gritted her teeth.

"No luck?"

"It's too narrow and there's grate in the way that we could never get off."

"Unless," Yua put in wearily, "we wanted to make enough noise to alert every guard up there."

Tina nodded thoughtfully.

"That's alright, though," she said. "We'll make another plan."

The other two girls shrugged guiltily.

"What else?" Tina asked.

"We were kind of, fooling around," Talla cast her eyes downward. "And that ... thing ... happened, like it did with Zhair'lo."

Tina's eyes widened.

"The thing with the lightning? That happened with Yua?"

"Zhair'lo was there, too, in my head. So was some girl he was fucking out at the Barracks. Yua and ... and whoever she was almost tore us apart again. But I got Yua to make me come and we got out."

"But the lightning?" Tina asked.

"I don't know what it did," Talla looked worried now. "We think we knocked people unconscious with it last time."

"And you did this under the Synergist room?"

Talla nodded.

"Are you sure you didn't leave anything behind?"

"We're good there," Yua said. "Chalk and both torches."

"It's probably fine, then", Tina put in, uncertainty tainting her voice. "They won't even know anyone was down there. There's nothing connecting you to it and even if they put guards down there, so what? We couldn't have used it anyhow."

Talla tilted her head back and forth thoughtfully.

"I guess so."

She couldn't quite, however, get the trembling feeling out of her stomach.

---===================----

"You've got a bell to rest up, Recruits," Sergeant Yung told them once they exited the mess hall. "I don't recommend fucking. Might want to save your energy."

"Aye, sir," they murmured back.

"Sergeant Yung, sir?" Zhair'lo asked as the others drifted off to their sleeping quarters.

"Zhair'lo?"

"Where's Berel, sir?"

"Sleeping."

"This late in the morning?"

Sergeant Yung twisted his lips, a gesture of uncertainty Zhair'lo had never seen on the man's face before. His gaze lingered on Zhair'lo eyes, then traced a line down to the rank badge on his chest. It seemed as if he couldn't decide what to say.

"We got all the information we could from him," the Sergeant said finally. "He'll be tired for a couple of days."

"So he won't be going with us?"

"No. Definitely not," the Sergeant seemed on the verge of smiling. "Now get some rest."

"Sir," Zhair'lo nodded and turned on his heel.

He was still wondering what Sergeant Yung had been unable to confide in him about Berel when he entered the darkened building the Recruits had for sleeping quarters.

"He's mine!" Zia yelled out.

'Oh, Madra Zen,' Zhair'lo sighed.

Of course Zia would be horny now, just before a battle.

Zhair'lo's eyes hadn't even adjusted so he was only aware of vague shapes in the various beds. Was everyone else fucking, despite the Sergeant's warning? Zia dragged him to the middle of the room and pushed him to sit on the foot of the nearest bed.

"Shouldn't we rest?" he asked.

"Nothing doin'," Zia said.

"Look I know you're horny -"

"I'm not."

"What?" Zhair'lo's voice went up an octave in surprise.

"I'm just not, okay?"

As his eyes adjusted, he realized that the rest of the beds were occupied by individuals, not couples, and that they were all turning to face him.

"I can't stand having debts," Zia said, unlacing his shorts.

"Debts?"

"Owing people things."

"I know what debts are, thanks."

"Well," she said, taking his testicles in one hand and his semi-rigid penis in the other, "We're going into battle today, aren't we?"

"With you so far," Zhair'lo spoke slowly as he peered into her eyes.

"And we could, possibly, die, right?"

Zhair'lo tilted his head thoughtfully as Zia gave the tip of his shaft a wide tongued lick.

"Not likely, from our position -"

"But possible."

"But possible," he acknowledged.

"And I owe you," she said. "And I'm not going to my death in debt. The slate will be clean; the toggles will be level."

"Toggles?"

"It's a girl thing," Bree put in from the next bed on his left. "They used to give us toggles as awards for services and special acts of heroism. Women could trade them, or lend them out to their sisters for special events."

"But you have to give them back," Tara, on his right, added. "It's really important to level all your debts."

"Okay ..."

Zia leaned over and took his half erection in her mouth.

"I still don't get ..."

"She owes you," Bree said in exasperation. "When she was dry, you licked her to make her wet."

"So what?"

"You made me come," Zia came off his cock long enough to say. "And it was really, really good."

"And then you meshed," Bree added, as Zia's mouth was full again. "And you both came."

Comprehension, slow in coming with all the blood missing from his head, finally dawned on him.

"So I'm, like, one orgasm short?"

"Basically."

"And you're all gonna ... ha! ... watch?"

"Yeah," Kit put in from across the room, "we're all too smart to fuck when we know we have a big run coming up."

"Thanks, jackass."

"No probs, brother."

"You can rest right after," Tara assured him. "We have lots of time. Won't take long anyway."

"For the Goddess's sake, Zia," Del spoke for the first time from her corner of the room. "Take off your clothes or you'll get them stained."

"Really, Del?" Bree asked.

"Think about it, Zia," Del rose up indignantly, "How would you feel going into your first battle with drops of come on your uniform?"

Zhair'lo was getting a bit unnerved by all the chatter. It was one thing when everyone was fucking in the same room, but quite another when they were all watching him. This made it different from doing an upgrade. In the Augmentation Chamber, there were strangers, off in dark anonymity. Around him today were his brothers and sisters.

"Just swallow it," Bree said. "I'm sure I emptied him out last night. Can't be much."

Tara hopped out of bed and knelt behind Zia.

"I'm afraid, Del, prissy as she is, is right this time," she said, unlacing Zia's top.

Zia pulled off Zhair'lo's now significant erection for a moment.

"You're saying I can't handle it?"

"No," Tara said, stripping Zia's top off and casting it aside before reaching for the skirt.

"The skirt, too?" Zia sounded irritated.

"He was naked when he did you, wasn't he?" Del put in.

Del, thought Zhair'lo, would be the only one to both remember and care about that sort of thing.

"Besides," Tara whispered in Zia's ear, "You want to do right by him, don't you?"

There was a mystified look on Zia's face as she rose up slightly on her knees so Tara could unravel her skirt.

Wearing just her white panties, Zia continued to stroke him very slowly.

"What do you mean?" her voice was suspicious.

"Um?" Bree nodded at Zia's waist. "Naked is naked."

With an impatient sigh and roll of her eyes, Zia stood up and yanked her underwear down to her ankles.

"Are we good now?" she looked at Zhair'lo, who could only shrug innocently, leaving her to redirect her ire at each of her three sisters in turn, who nodded. "So I can suck him off, then?"

"But he doesn't want to come in your mouth," Tara whispered, circling around now on the bed behind Zhair'lo. "Do you, Zhair'lo?"

She knelt, pressed her body against his back, and wrapped her arms around him so she could grope at his chest muscles.

"Do you?" she repeated.

"I, uh -"

Zia looked up at him expectantly, even as she bobbed up and down on his erection.

"He's a Seal Breaker, Zia," Tara hissed. "Didn't you know?"

"Oh," Zia mumbled around his cock. Her gaze fell from his eyes down to the base of his erection just under her nose.

"What's a Seal Breaker?" Renzi asked.

Zia was now pumping furiously at his cock, leaving only the tip in her mouth, which she lavished with her tongue.

"It means he's a guy they bring in to give Virgins their first upgrade," Tara explained, still pressed against Zhair'lo's back. "It means he comes a lot. It also means he really enjoys coming ... all over ... skinny ... little ... girls."

She leaned very close then, her lips touching Zhair'lo's right ear.

"How many faces have you splattered, huh?" she breathed, tonguing his ear lobe.

"Dunno," Zhair'lo gasped back honestly. He was well beyond being able to count.

"Would you like to come in one more?"

Zhair'lo was panting, feeling his orgasm approach. He looked down and found Zia's wide eyes looking up at him. Her eyebrows twitched, offering. He nodded his head, accepting.

She took him out of her mouth and left the tip of his erection pointing at the bridge of her nose. For one last moment, her eyes met his before falling cross-eyed to look at narrow slit at the end of his shaft. Then, in a final act of acquiescence, she closed her eyes.

With one hand gently cupping his testicles, she pumped madly with the other.

For one rapid heartbeat, Zhair'lo held back to savour the moment, and then released his body. His loins spasmed, launching forth a wet, runny, string of semen. The pulsing of his muscles was just enough to overcome Zia's control. Instead of hitting her squarely on the bridge of her nose, his erection strafed her face from left eye to right, the liquid sliding out of the orbit of her eye and wetly down both of her cheeks.

"Ha!" Zia shrieked in surprise, pulling back slightly.

Her movement gave his second volley a new target, hitting her squarely on her upper lip. Zhair'lo noticed, even in his state of ecstasy, that there was a significantly different effect when Synergist wasn't involved. The clear syrupy liquid tended to act as a sort of barrier, containing his semen and preventing gravity from having any great effect on it. Now, with Zia on her knees and her face uncoated with syrup, he could watch his semen sliding down her skin. By the time his third volley hit her nose, the dripping from the first had run off her face, over her collar bone and down to her breasts.

A desultory fourth volley twitched out onto her breastbone. It was still runny enough, however, to run down Zia's bare, sweat-tacked stomach toward her genitals.

Zia took his erection back in her mouth and continued to milk the last out of him.

"Holy fuck, Zhair'lo," Tara admired quietly, stepping back momentarily. "Is that how much come you pump in to me?"

"That's a rhetorical question," Del said. "You don't need to answer it."

Zhair'lo took a deep breath before saying, "I know what a rhetorical question is."

Zia slipped her underwear off her ankles and used it to wipe her eyes clean, but she didn't come off his penis until she was sure he was done.

"Madra Zen," she said, looking at her underwear and the mass of semen in it. She then looked down at her body: the lines of semen on her breasts and stomach; the small pool collecting in the triangle between her thighs and her bare mound. "No wonder you're a Seal Breaker."

With a degree of careful effort, she managed to find enough dry spots on her little panties to clean herself up.

"Alright, then," she said finally, a breath of relief escaping her lungs. "Toggles are level."

"Sure," Zhair'lo agreed, although he'd never felt any debt had been owed.

Even though he knew it wasn't his bed, Zhair'lo fell backwards and almost immediately fell asleep.

---===================----

"Reports already?" the Queen of Form asked.

"Yes, Highness," the Officer in front of her desk replied. "We described the layout of the Synergist room to the Sorceress of Lips. She was very clear that she knows of no poison that could take out so many women, so far apart, without one of them being able to give a warning to those farther away. They would have had to be at an extremely low level of alertness for such a thing to happen."

The Queen twitched slightly, wondering if that was some kind of insult.

"Go on."

"Mistress Sonja reports that the Sorceress of Strength believes the ventilation in the sewers to have been designed correctly to avoid any such problem. If some poison or potion had been dropped into the sewers, it is unlikely to have released a poisonous gas in such a way as to cause problems for the ventilation shaft in question. Regardless, Strength has sent three of her Engineers into the sewers, with a contingent of Enforcers, in order to inspect the general area and see if some damage or fault can be found."

The Queen nodded sagely. The Discipline of Strength, though it was in Endowment, had always seemed like kin to her. They were better, at the very least, than the effete dancers and singers she had for neighbours. For the most part, she could admire the hard-nosed scepticism and sensibility of her far off sisters.

"Strength also pointed out that, while the incident at the Hunter's Camp may seem similar, there is nothing uniting the two events except what we believe to be sudden bouts of unconsciousness. The naturally available gases and poisons of the two environments are mutually exclusive and, given that no one appears to have taken advantage of either situation, it's unlikely that any unnatural agents were used to cause our people to pass out."

That much, the Queen could agree, was true. Every vial and vat of Synergist was perfectly accounted for. Neither had the people at the Hunter's Camp missed anything other than the chance to have sex with each other.

"And Fin'la?"

"Still conducting her interviews, Highness."

So everything was, at least, in motion. Being a Queen meant having a lot of power to order people around, but it also meant a lot of waiting for them to get back to you. With a wave, she dismissed the Officer.

---===================----

Next door, the Sorceress of Facial was standing near the front of her own Domain, looking out over the balconies of her neighbours. Long green panels of translucent fabric, pinched at the waist, drifted down to varying lengths around her knees. She pushed her blond hair back over her right ear and leaned toward the Officer next to her.

"What are they all frenetic about this time?" she asked H'reena. "This is a bit more armour than we usually see, isn't it?"

"A bunch of their Enforcers guarding the Synergist were knocked out last night," H'reena replied, equally unconcerned.

"That would be upsetting. Do they know who did it?"

"They don't even how it happened, or if there is a responsible party."

"Even though the same thing happened before."

"Even though," H'reena nodded. "Although they don't know about the Little Girls and their games."

'Little Girls' was the phrase they used to describe the younger, lower-ranking women who arranged the switching of Service assignments. The Little Girls believed that they operated in secrecy, and they mostly did.

"An edge we have over them, I suppose," the Sorceress admitted. "But still, shouldn't they clue in by now?"

"They don't see the links we do," H'reena said. "You have Zhair'lo and Talla, aching to be together so much that, even after being punished for it, Talla is willing to risk switching assignments to get back to him."

"Which was obviously associated with the last bout of unconsciousness," Facial continued. "So clearly, they should be wondering where Talla and Zhair'lo are right now and where they were last night. Even if they didn't figure out about the assignment switching, they should still be watching those two. "

"Zhair'lo is out with the Fighters now," H'reena pointed out. "And they think their barbaric punishment and aphrodisiac fixed Talla."

The two women looked at each other and shrugged at the naivety of their neighbours before returning their gazes to the balconies before them. There was a long pause as they watched two squads of Enforcers race down opposite sets of stairways.

"This isn't going to get any better if they don't smarten up," Facial said finally, and made to return to her desk.

---===================----

Upon being nudged, Zhair'lo awoke feeling refreshed and, as he had never undressed in the first place, moved quickly with his fellow Recruits to the armoury.

At the lead of the column of male Recruits, he was, once again, given a bow rather than a sword like his fellows. As he made to take the bow, he found Sergeant Yung holding it tightly. Their eyes met, briefly, and Zhair'lo understood the wordless warning as well as any lecture that would have take a hundred times as long.

"We've got three kilometres," Sergeant Yung spoke so his voice carried only to the male Recruits. "Your armour is lighter than ours, so you shouldn't have trouble keeping up. The Rangers have marked the trail, but you won't see the markers. You eight will be the third squad in line, so all you have to do is follow along and not be too loud. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," the murmurs came back, quick but without the usual bluster.

"Good," Yung nodded at them.

There was a dark look of concern bringing his eyebrows lower than usual, but it faded as he stepped away from and addressed the group at large.

"Form up!"

A moment before Zhair'lo had felt himself surrounded by a wild tangle of muscle, leather armour, without coherence or organization. The next instant, squads had lined themselves up in front of and behind the Recruits. This army so formed was a fluid, living thing that adapted to its environment. And if that environment included a group of Recruits who barely knew how to march, then so be it.

"Move out!" Sergeant Yung called.

If they had been a liquid, flowing around the Recruits, they now became a living thing, a snake, slithering through the Barracks. They squeezed themselves through narrower alleys, widened to take up more space in the thoroughfares. Zhair'lo felt the pride of those around him, the sense of unity with their brother and sister Fighters. They were now part of this living animal, even if they could do little more than walk.

'We can't fight,' he thought of his fellow Recruits. 'When it comes down to it, only five of us would even know what to do with our weapons and even then we'd only know how to act as individuals. We're allowed on the battlefield only because they think these barbarians will offer little to no resistance.'

Zhair'lo personally had higher hopes for the barbarians. The reported state of their weapons wasn't encouraging, but they had an armoury and a degree of organization. Sometime during the morning, he had convinced himself that their tendency to fight one another meant that they were strong and keen for battle. Today, they would probably be overwhelmed and forced to surrender, but he would learn much from them anyway.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 25



Passwords were exchanged and the gate was opened. They were soon in the open air. It felt refreshing. Zhair'lo had never realized how closed-in the town felt until he'd moved out to Harzen's Farm. From there, he had gone to Lyric's Camp, where they sometimes spent days out in the forests, waiting for prey. The Barracks, by comparison, nearly induced claustrophobia. It seemed to Zhair'lo the place needed to be expanded and soon.

By contrast, the area outside the Palisade was wide open. Better yet, he'd be leaving the boundaries of the city of Gern today, something he'd never done before. The road, that heavily patrolled path that marked the edge of what the Temple claimed for itself, was the farthest he'd been before. There was an entire world out there, made out of Temple Cities and barbarians and nine gods knew what else. Zhair'lo knew he'd only seen a tiny fraction of it.

He also began to realize, as they cut away from the road and entered into the woods on the south side of the city, that exploring that world on foot would take a lot of time. For this route, the Rangers who had gone ahead of them had done a good job of picking a path through the trees. In fact, they probably knew the forests around the city very well, which brought a question to Zhair'lo's mind. When the entire army had to bunch up to fit through a narrowing of the path, he found himself close enough to Sergeant Yung to speak.

"Sergeant?"

"Zhair'lo."

"How did these people manage to build their camp so close to Gern's borders?"

It spoke, to Zhair'lo at least, of a fair degree of stealth. If the Rangers hadn't noticed the camp, it was either well concealed or ... or what?

"We think they only moved in a few days ago," the Sergeant replied. "Possibly they were wandering until Merelda went into labour."

"So they built the camp that quickly?"

Sergeant Yung smirked before he turned away. The army was able to spread out again, ending the conversation before Zhair'lo could get an explanation of what it was that the Sergeant had found so humorous.

When Zhair'lo thought of a 'camp', he pictured the semi-permanent tents, well maintained clearings, roasting pits and campfires that the Hunters had built up. There was no way that such an arrangement could be brought together in the short time that the barbarian tribe must have had available. Still, he couldn't wait to see what they were up against.

It wasn't long before the column came to a halt.

Hera appeared, her grey-green clothing cloaking not just her bright, blond hair but her entire existence up until she felt like showing herself. Zhair'lo heart jumped as he realized how close they must be to the enemy camp.

"They are, as of yet, unaware of our coming," she spoke in that same quiet voice. "From here on, I advise a slower speed. The flanking units should start moving around now. The archers should follow me in."

Ji'ann gave a nod and the group split up.

"Recruits," she said quietly. "Stay behind the archers."

The archers, Zhair'lo soon discovered, were the only units left to see. Sergeant Yung was there, with a few other swordsmen Zhair'lo didn't recognize, but everyone else had disappeared into the forest.

'Madra Zen, they're good,' he thought. He couldn't even hear them.

Following the oversized squad of archers, who were following Hera, Zhair'lo led the rest of the Recruits forward.

At a gesture from Hera, Sergeant Yung and the swordsmen at the head of the squad dropped to the ground and began crawling up a small hill. Behind them, the archers did the same and, without a thought, Zhair'lo followed suit.

Over this hill, then, were the barbarians, the vicious men who kept their swords at hand in order to battle each other on a daily basis. From where he crouched however, there was nothing to see. Too many veteran Fighters were in his way. As he watched however, the female archers were spreading out to take up the entire width of the hill, leaving gaps in their midst. Sergeant Yung and the three swordsmen also spread out across the top of the hill.

Just four swordsmen to screen - Zhair'lo counted - twelve women?

Sergeant Yung turned back to face those downhill from him, his eyes searching. Suddenly, he and Zhair'lo locked their gazes upon each other. Quietly, the Sergeant beckoned him forward.

Zhair'lo creeped, quietly as he could, keeping his head low, to a place on the grass lying next to the Sergeant.

"Sir?" he whispered.

"Let's take a quick peek," he said. "And tell me what you see."

Stunned for a moment, Zhair'lo crawled farther up the slope to its top. With the Sergeant at his side, he caught the first glimpse of the camp of the Temple's enemies.

"Back down!" Yung hissed.

Startled, Zhair'lo ducked his head immediately.

"Tell me what you saw, as best you remember it."

"Squalor," Zhair'lo replied instantly, his eyes wide with shock and his chest cold and empty.

The Sergeant looked at him.

"This is no time for jokes."

"It's not a joke," Zhair'lo shook his head clear. "Well, they're a joke. They've only got one real tent. Everything else is square sheets of canvas with the corners tied to trees. No privacy at all although I guess it keeps the rain out."

The minor members of the tribe must be spending their nights under the relatively poor protection of those canvas sheets. The central tent, a circular affair with a centre post, was the only structure in the entire camp he couldn't see right through.

"Yes," the Sergeant was growing impatient. "They're barbarians. What did you expect? Now, the people. Tell me what you saw of our enemies."

"Dirty," Zhair'lo picked the salient and outstanding factor, "They look weak, disorganized. There are no sentries -"

"Numbers?"

"Fifteen, maybe twenty men," Zhair'lo said. "But they don't appear to have swords on them. If that tent is their armoury, we could wipe them out before half of them could even lay a hand on a weapon."

Hadn't Hera said they walked around with their swords on them at all times? That certainly wasn't the case right now, was it?

"They were carrying swords," the Sergeant corrected.

"What?"

"Very short ones. The only ones they have. Did you see the leader?"

A man with a long beard?

"No."

"If anyone has a decent sword, it'll be him."

"If?" Zhair'lo asked.

"Probably all rusted relics," Yung looked at Zhair'lo carefully. "You look almost disappointed."

"No, I just - uh -"

Yung smirked again, as he had before, and Zhair'lo understood now what he'd meant with that arrogant smile. 'Sword' and 'camp' were words with a particular meaning for someone who'd had the kind of tour of Temple life which had been Zhair'lo's experience. His preconceptions, however, were not necessarily the norm for the rest of the world.

This was the enemy of the Temple? These were his potential allies? These dirty, emaciated specimens of humanity? Why, they'd probably find life under the Temple's rule to be a vast improvement over the crap they lived in.

"This won't even be a battle. They should just give up."

"Ideally, yes, Zhair'lo. We train hard so we win overwhelmingly and quickly."

"What if they were better?"

"Then we might have to starve them out. Hit their resources. Divert their water. Kill off their food supply. Find some way to weaken them."

"But not these ones?"

The Sergeant inhaled very gently.

"Indeed not. Now get back with the Recruits and stay behind those archers."

Instruction time had ended. There was work to be done.

"Yes, sir."

Even as Zhair'lo backed away, Yung and his three swordsmen rose to their feet on the summit of the rise and the archers took up their places crouching a little behind them, their arrows knocked to their bows.

"Hello!" the Sergeant bellowed.

There were panicked female screams followed by more masculine voices shouting out in anger. The women immediately ran away from the source of conflict, scooping up children along the way and taking shelter inside the main tent. Despite having heard Hera's prediction, Zhair'lo was shocked by the utter subservience of the women. How could they just step aside and leave everything for men to handle? Again, it was entirely outside of his experience.

"Where," the Sergeant's arrogant voice cut through all the shouts and screams, "is the man named Chet?"

Zhair'lo was able to watch through the gaps between the archers. There was a sound of canvas being whipped aside and a large, long bearded man appeared from a gap in the fabric of the central tent. Barefoot and shirtless, he wore only a dirty pair of shorts. Brandishing what could only be called a sword if one were generous, he shouted back at Sergeant Yung.

"Who comes into my camp!"

"Are you Chet?" the Sergeant shouted back.

"Damned right I am, and this is my -"

An arrow, released from Ji'ann's bow, went whistling past the Sergeant's shoulder and struck Chet in the centre of his chest. Men shouted, not aggressively but in panic, and another arrow whistled, striking the bearded barbarian leader in the belly.

Chet fell to his knees, an uncomprehending look on his face.

"Merelda sends her greetings," Yung called out.

A third arrow struck the man in the forehead. His life gone from his body, he fell sideways.

The men in the clearing, shocked by the suddenness of their leader's demise, had fallen into silence. Their swords were raised, somewhat vaguely, and they all faced the party of Fighters on the hill. They were not, Zhair'lo noted with a detachment that made him feel like a physician, getting themselves into any kind of formation.

Ji'ann chose this moment to take the horn tied to her belt and give it one long, hard blow.

From the bushes on either side of the camp, more Fighters appeared with their long, shining swords at the ready. Behind them, women stretched their bows.

Sergeant Yung gave the twenty or so men below him a moment to take this all in.

"You're surrounded," he said. "This battle is over. Surrender now and you will not be harmed. Resist and you will die."

The men looked around at each other and Zhair'lo could feel their already pathetic will fading. It was no surprise - to him, to the other Fighters, or probably to the barbarians themselves - when they began dropping their 'swords' to the ground.

The swordsmen on the flanks quickly moved in to surround those dirty fools whom Zhair'lo quickly dubbed 'prisoners'. There was no fight left in them, if there had ever been any. Their weapons were taken aside and they were grouped in a corner of the camp, under one of the large canvas tarps. Enough of Gern's swordsmen kept an eye on them that there was no chance of them escaping - or causing trouble.

"Aloe," Ji'ann ordered quietly. "See to the women."

"Mistress."

So it was Aloe's job to be the soft voice of reason once again? She had worked wonders with Merelda. What was it she would say to these women?

At the Sergeant's beckoning, the Recruits passed the dead body of the barbarian leader and moved into the midst of the camp, between the cordoned off prisoners and the circular tent where the women and children were concealed.

"That," Sergeant Yung intoned, "is how we like our raids to go. Minimal risk. Minimal death. No injuries."

Zhair'lo watched as Aloe stood outside the opening to the tent. Two of the swordsmen were in front of her, carefully pulling back the canvas while holding their swords at the ready.

"What's she going to do, sir?" Renzi asked.

"Talk to the women," Sergeant Yung's tone did not invite further questions.

Aloe went in to the tent and the Sergeant went on discussing the battle

"The key is to present to them a united, organized force. They've never seen anything like us and the initial shock is usually enough to take all the fight out of them."

"Do they ever fight back?" Zhair'lo looked at the sorry lot huddled under the canvas.

"Oh, yes, I'm afraid. I've been in more battles than I can count."

"Why do they bother, though?" Renzi asked. "They haven't a hope of winning."

"They're men," Zia pointed out. "Proud and not very bright."

"Things don't always go well," the Sergeant cut across Zia without correcting her. "And even the most surprised people don't always capitulate. We try to shock them into silence - even if it means killing their leader - keep them confused, then present them with a show of force."

He gave a grand wave to the battlefield.

"But sometimes they choose to fight," he shrugged. "We are ready if they do."

'Far more ready,' Zhair'lo realized, 'than these are.'

He couldn't imagine a squad of Gern's Fighters just standing in their places if they were suddenly set upon. These barbarians were a sad bunch, doing little more than crumpling under pressure. The only good thing that could be said of them was that they had chosen the best course for themselves. Given the quality of their weapons, and whatever training they might have from fighting each other, any resistance they had offered would truly have been useless. Gern needn't have sent even half the Fighters that were present.

Sergeant Yung then took the Recruits on a short tour of the battlefield, showing them in person what they had seen on Hera's maps. He carefully explained the reasoning behind the placement of each of the squads, the way firing lines had been kept open. With the number of bows available, and proper distribution of targets, there would scarcely be a barbarian alive after the first volley of arrows.

Zhair'lo noticed that the Sergeant was being remarkably casual where time was concerned. Fighters were normally all about tight schedules and precision. Yet here they were, with prisoners sitting on the ground, spending maybe a quarter of a bell on a lesson could be easily delivered back at the Barracks.

In the middle of a sentence, Sergeant Yung stopped speaking. His attention had been distracted by movement behind the Recruits. Zhair'lo turned and saw Aloe exiting the tent. They were too far from her to hear what she spoke to Ji'ann, but obviously things were going well: Ji'ann gave an approving nod. The swordsmen held the flaps of the tent back and the women and children began to file out into the open.

They were still frightened, but they weren't the screaming, panicking mess that Zhair'lo had observed less than half a bell ago. The women, he noted, walked carefully with their children in tow. One of the men shouted out a name, but he was quickly silenced with a threat from the swordsmen. Zhair'lo couldn't be sure whether the shouted name had been male or female. Had he been shouting to his 'wife' or one of the children?

Or, like Berel, could he have been shouting to his sister or brother?

The captured women, for their part, basically ignored the men. A group of Fighters made up of equal parts men and women escorted them out of the camp and back along the path that led to the Barracks.

"What will be done with them?" Zhair'lo asked.

"The Temple has ways of ... integrating women from the outside," the Sergeant replied.

"But they've never been upgraded -"

"Don't worry, Zhai."

If the other Recruits were bothered by this, they said nothing. It seemed that they were all still in a state of shock.

Sergeant Yung left them to confer with Ji'ann. Zhair'lo strained his ears, but could barely hear the conversation.

"Take care of them here?" Ji'ann asked.

"Filthy," the Sergeant answered. There was something inaudible and then, " - have to carry them back."

Ji'ann nodded in agreement. "March them back, then? Fix them at home?"

"I think we have enough room," Sergeant Yung was speaking more loudly now.

"Give the orders," Ji'ann said, more formally now. "Let's get back home."

The Sergeant gave a slight bow and turned toward the prisoners.

"Round up!" he called out.

The Fighters scattered about the clearing came to attention and surrounded the prisoners even as the Sergeant came to stand in front of them.

"You men will be escorted back to our Barracks," he said. "You will be permitted to become citizens of Gern if you do as you are told. It will be a far better life than you have here. If you don't wish to comply-", he waved vaguely at Chet's body, "-if you make any attempt to escape you will be executed on the spot."

He let that wash over them. There was barely a twitch. If any of them had an opinion regarding their being separated from the women and children of their tribe, they kept it to themselves.

"Good," the Sergeant added. "Stand up and get moving."



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 26



Zhair'lo eyed the pathetic lot of prisoners stomping and stumbling through the forest in front of him. He thought they'd looked haggard back at their camp, but the glaring sunlight of high noon made their filth all the more obvious.

"That's the best they have?" he shook his head.

"You sound disappointed," Sergeant Yung appeared at his side, his eyes never wavering from the dejected group of men.

"Well, look at them," Zhair'lo waved his hand. "They don't even look well fed, sir."

"You're right about that. Hunger is most likely what drove them into our territory and contributed much to the speed of their surrender."

A ray of light pierced the forest canopy, illuminating the trunk of a tree that blocked their path to about the height of a man's waist. Zhair'lo watched as the prisoners laboured to roll their debilitated bodies over it, a stark contrast to the Fighters who hopped atop it and back down the other side like wolves on a hunt.

"So there are bunches that fight back?"

The Sergeant tilted his head thoughtfully, as if wondering where Zhair'lo was going.

"Occasionally."

"Because there must be over a thousand Fighters in Gern, right, sir?" Zhair'lo asked as he vaulted the tree trunk.

"A great deal more than that, Recruit, counting all the men and women, the Enforcers, Guards, Fighters and a few Rangers," Yung replied, taking his turn to hop the trunk.

"So why?"

"Why what, Recruit?"

"Why are there so many Fighters when it only takes a fraction of you to wipe out people like this?"

The Sergeant, keeping to the pace of the laggard prisoners, only half turned his head to look at Zhair'lo sideways with one eye.

"Such things will be made clear to you, Recruit," the Sergeant's voice had gone cold. "These are not our only problems."

"Yes, sir," Zhair'lo twitched in response this dismissal and slowed his pace to drift behind the Sergeant.

He shortly found a stone-faced Zia marching next to him. The girl was shivering, which was ridiculous given the lightness of the forest canopy and the way the sun shone down at them so warmly. Zhair'lo realized she had approached him intentionally, separating herself from the others on purpose.

"You okay?"

"Y-yeah," she stammered, her eyes focused on the ground.

This wasn't the first time Zhair'lo had seen a girl acting like Zia. It was odd to see it here, on the dappled green floor of a forest instead of a bedroom, but he knew that when a girl had something on her mind, the thing to do was wait and let her get it out.

"They just killed that guy," she blurted out, her eyes unfocused as if she was still seeing the body.

"That's what Fighters do," Zhair'lo kept his voice as even as possible, wondering what had happened to Zia's bloodlust.

"I know," Zia reached into the air and tried to grab something imaginary in her fists, "and it happened right in front of us."

"Yeah. I've never seen anyone die, either."

Frustration gripping her, Zia twisted at her dark brown hair with one hand.

"I feel like I missed it."

"Missed it?"

Zhair'lo had to wonder if Zia was disappointed by the quality of their enemies, or horrified by the sight of someone dying. Maybe she was even surprised by her horror?

"Like it happened and – and I wasn't really paying attention."

"I was a little underwhelmed too," Zhair'lo admitted.

"Underwhelmed, yeah," Zia jumped so quickly it startled him. "I expected a battle. Something heroic, y'know?"

"None of that, today."

"No," she sighed, her eyes glistening. "No."

Zia drifted off inconclusively, occupied with her own thoughts, and Zhair'lo soon found himself surrounded by the other female Recruits, deep in a conversation turning into an argument.

"-was clearly nursing, Del," Bree threw her arms up, palms in the air. "It doesn't count."

"They weren't all nursing," Del protested stiffly.

"What's up?" Zhair'lo interrupted.

"Del's all upset about the barbarian women," Tara explained. "Because they had tits."

"They're not supposed to get that big," Del made her argument to Zhair'lo as if he had some authority for arbitration, "without being upgraded."

"I – I hadn't noticed," Zhair'lo admitted. "There was a battle going on, wasn't there? More or less?"

Del twisted her lips at his sarcasm, which just about topped out her emotional range. The other male Recruits, sensing the conflict, had caught up and were leaning in with interest.

"Any woman nursing a child gets bigger boobs, Del," Bree was clearly repeating her argument for the benefit of the boys just starting to listen in.

"Besides Merelda's baby, there was only one other child young enough to be nursing," Del argued. "And those people were nearly malnourished."

"Not the ones with the big boobs," Renzi held up a finger. "Those two actually looked a bit overweight. The clan leader's favourites maybe?"

"The brain on you," Bree raised her eyebrows to look carefully at Renzi, as if she'd never seen him before.

"Did he grow a cunt since last night?" Tara asked, pulling on the waist band of Renzi's shorts.

"Stands to reason, doesn't it?" he batted Tara's hand away. "The clan leader had several 'wives', so they'd probably get first dibs if food is short."

"How big would you say they were?" Del interrogated Renzi.

"The women?"

"Their tits, obviously," Tara put in. "I take back what I said about you having a vagina."

Renzi bit down on a retort and turned to Del, "I – uh – how do you measure them?"

"Upgrades. How many upgrades?"

"I dunno. I was never a 'Seal Breaker' like jackass over there," Renzi indicated Zhair'lo with a nod. "Maybe he knows the sizes."

"Well?" Del turned to Zhair'lo.

Zhair'lo racked his brain but couldn't for the life of him remember, in the gaggle of departing women, noting any significant cleavage amongst all the dirty rags.

"I could tell you if I saw them," he said. "I've done enough upgrades to know anywhere from one to five or so."

He could also, he realized, tell a Sorceress from a Second, but there wasn't any point rubbing that in at the moment.

"C'mon, then," Del said and started jogging away.

"What?"

Running backwards, she beckoned all of them on with a stern glare.

"We can catch up with the women," she said. "Let's go."

Flush as they were with excitement, the battle having failed to use up their supply of energy, they raced through the forest. It was easy to pass the sad group of captured men and soon they exited the cover of the canopy. Travelling was simpler out in the open and it was much easier to see the target group of women. There was no objection from the various squads of Fighters they passed. As long as they stayed somewhere between the front and rear groups of the moving army, and didn't wander back into the forest, they would probably be ignored.

"Okay," Del asked. "What do you see?"

The women, in striking contrast to the men they'd left behind, looked upbeat. Zhair'lo had noticed the fear and panic that had overtaken them when the Fighters had first shown up. After the battle, when Aloe had brought them out, they'd carried a dark but determined air about them. Now, as he looked at them carefully – and as the Temple women continued to encourage them – some of them could be seen to crack very meek smiles as they happened to turn their faces toward the Recruits.

"I can only see their legs and shoulders from back here," he pointed out. "It looks like they've all got two or three Tight upgrades."

"Madra Zen, he's right," Bree agreed. "Do you think they could outrun us?"

"No," Zhair'lo assured her. "They'd run out of air. Look at them. They're barely managing this march."

The Recruits moved up alongside the sheltered crowd of barbarian women. Their clothing was ragged and heavily torn up. He could more than make out the sides of their breasts from his position – he could in fact see little bits of aureola and nipples peeking through here and there. The breasts he could make out were pretty much the size of Talla's.

"You're right, Renzi," he said aloud. "The two that look a bit overweight? They're carrying what look like three or four Abundance upgrades and a couple of Strength. Can't see Point very well, from the outside, though."

The Fighter women began to look suspiciously at the Recruits, which they took as their cue to quietly slink back into the moving column.

"So weird," Bree whispered. "I mean, I know they gave us stuff in our food to hold us back – y'know, to keep us out of trouble 'til we're eighteen – but those women ..."

"Have pretty big tits, yeah," Tara said. "I didn't think that could happen without the Temple."

"You wanted big tits?" Kit asked her.

"No!" Tara's offended cry came out so zealous the others laughed.

"Not worth it, anyway," Zia's voice was stone cold as it cut through their banter.

The others quieted down in response to her tone.

"Even if I wanted a pair that big, I wouldn't want to live in shit like they did. We did them a favour, killing their leader. We set them free so they could live with us and be real people. They won't have to obey that dead pig on the ground, won't have to get beaten by him whenever he feels like hurting them. They can be whatever they want now and they have to know that's better than what they had."

There was a stunned silence in response to this. What she'd said hadn't been surprising; it was the philosophy of the Temple abbreviated and distilled to justify both combat and murder. What struck them was the cold disgust in Zia's voice.

She didn't say another word until they got back to the Barracks.

-----------===================-------------

Standing by the fountain in the Goddess's central square, Talla and Tina watched as V'shika approached.

"What in the nine hells did you do last night?" V'shika whispered, her eyes wide with glee.

"Why?" Talla looked panicked and started walking. The other two followed her.

"They're going nuts," V'shika accused, sidling up close to Talla. "There are Enforcers all over the Synergist tunnels. Squads of them. In and out all morning."

"Nine hells," Talla hissed. "That's our fault. Sorry."

V'shika, however, smiled.

"That means you found it, right?" she asked.

"Yes, but it's useless," Talla held out her hands with their palms down and patted the air in a calming gesture. "It's sealed off so tightly from underground, we'll never get through that way."

"Don't worry," V'shika would not give in to Talla's disappointment. "We still know where it is. That's gotta be good for something."

"You think so? I think Yua and I wasted a lot of time and nearly got ourselves caught."

"So what?" V'shika asked. "So they whip you again. What if?"

Talla stopped in shock, forcing the other two to turn around to face her.

"That doesn't bother you?" she gaped at V'shika. "Do you know how much that hurts?"

"No," V'shika shrugged. "You expect to do what we're doing without any pain?"

There was a long pause before Talla replied.

"No, I guess not. But I'd still rather not let them figure out what we're doing."

"And," Tina put in. "Getting caught trying to break into the Synergist storage would be a pretty strong indicator of our plans, don't you think?"

"Nah," V'shika shrugged. "People have tried to steal the stuff before, just to get themselves upgraded on the sly. That's why security is so tight – and why it's run by those humourless dolts from Form."

"Have people stolen Synergist before?" Tina's eyes narrowed on V'shika as she spoke.

"Yeah," V'shika shrugged, "but not for decades. They used to be pretty casual about it, y'know, since they knew it didn't work for very long once it got warm."

"But not lately?" Tina asked.

"Nine hells, no."

"We'll have to think of something else," Talla declared.

As they were approaching the gates of Endowment, it was time for their small group to split up.

"We're back training in Form tomorrow," Talla told V'shika. "We can meet in the baths after. I think Zoe can be there, too."

"Aye, Mistress," V'shika winked and departed.

"She frightens me," Tina looked over her shoulder at V'shika's dwindling figure.

"She's on our side, at least."

"Yeah," Tina acknowledged. "Having her against us would be worse."

They passed in thoughtful, slightly depressed silence all the way through the Bronze gates and the courtyard that led into Endowment Hall.

"Where are you tonight?" Tina asked as she pulled out her assignment card.

"South end, just over the bridge at a Mill by the river. You?"

"Quarries, again," Tina sighed. "It always takes me a day to get that smell out of my nostrils."

"Yeah, what is that?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, I don't know about you," Talla inhaled deeply. "But I could really use somebody tonight."

Tina stood up on her toes to peer at Talla's card.

"Somebody named Taust?"

"I don't see how his name matters."

-----------===================-------------

The Queen of Sweetness gazed as the stack of documents in front of her. It seemed that the stack never got smaller, no matter how quickly she tried to work through it.

Everyday kinds of criminality remained her responsibility, along with the drafting of laws and punishments to combat the spread of anti-social behaviour. Add to that her obligation to manage the Temple's military, and she generally had a full day. She was glad, in a way, that the women in Facial rarely bothered her. They were off producing their objects of art and singing their songs, presumably for the greater glory of the Temple, and the Queen contented herself with the luxury of ignoring them.

But even without any intrusions from the artists, her responsibility toward the signing and sealing of documents would never end.

"Highness," a Virgin in white announced. "Fin'la has returned."

The Queen beckoned toward the girl but did not look up from a disbursements sheet she'd been examining. "Send her in."

Shortly, Fin'la stepped up to the desk and bowed. Pale skin and long brown hair entered the periphery of the Queen's vision, and already she knew no good news was coming. Her disciple's demeanour did not brim with eagerness.

"What have you found?"

"Nothing," Fin'la's lowered her eyes in dejection.

"Care to elaborate?" the Queen chided, finally looking up to meet the Officer's eyes.

Fin'la, in her orange blouse and tiny bottom, folded her arms tightly under her breasts in a desperate attempt to stave off a shrug.

"There is nothing I can report," she unfolded her arms so she could begin ticking off her fingers. "One: I interviewed those from the Hunt. Two: I interviewed the guards from the Synergist room. Three: I discussed the matter with Sonja. There is nothing to discuss. None of them remember anything. There was no remarkable odour; no feeling of dizziness or lightheadedness. They experienced no headaches after the events. They had no common experience at all, except for extreme exhaustion upon being woken."

Fin'la let out an exasperated breath through her nose.

"There is no reason, in short, to link the events with each other or with ... with," she paused, her voice edging with frustration, "with anything at all!"

The Queen took this in stride, tapping her fingernails on the hard wood of her desk.

"Is there any record of anything striking people unconscious so quickly?" the Queen asked.

"No," Fin'la shook her head in disgust.

"And yet, in a very short period of time, we have two such events?"

"Yes," the Officer stared at the ground, twisting her lips.

"Then I believe, regardless of the chemical environments, we should proceed on the basis that the events are linked," the Queen firmly took control of her Disciple. "Your next step is to find something, or someone, in common to the two events. Any guard, any Enforcer, anyone at all who could have been in both places."

Fin'la looked up with a gulp. This was no small task.

"So I have to get a list from the Hunters?"

"Indeed."

"And we already have the names of all of the women who went out that night."

"Yes."

"I should compare that to ... what? All of the guards on duty in the Synergist Chamber?"

"All of the guards, anyone involved in delivered Synergist that night, anyone upgraded. Find a thread Fin'la. Find something that ties these things together."

The Officer took a deep, thoughtful breath.

"Good," the Queen noted. "You're done wallowing in self-pity, then?"

"Sorry, Highness."

The Queen hummed her acceptance.

"Anything else, Highness?"

"No, that will be quite enough for now."

Fin'la bowed and departed in a flash of long brown hair.

-----------===================-------------

The eight Recruits were sitting in the cool darkness of their quarters, as ordered, waiting for the Sergeant to appear. It was early in the afternoon and they were hungry, but they'd been sent here, their stomachs growling, and ordered to wait until called for.

"What do you think he wants to talk to us about?" Kit ran a nervous finger along his jawline.

"Hopefully some real weapons training," Z'rus let a bit of a sneer into his voice. "Hate to get into a real battle like we are now."

Zhair'lo tried to imagine how he would have felt if he'd had to go out there unarmed. He'd been handed a bow, which he knew very well how to use.

"What do you mean?" Zia asked. "They gave you swords."

Renzi looked at her oddly. "We've never been trained to fight."

"But ... really? Isn't there some basic training you get?"

"That's only for the women, Zia," Bree explained. "Didn't you know?"

Zia shook her head.

"So you guys went into that battle ..."

"Basically defenceless," Z'rus finished for her.

"Madra Zen," she whispered.

"They can't leave you like that for long -" Del started to say, but was cut off as the door opened.

The door opened, letting in a blaze of reflected sunlight and showing the silhouette of a large man. As their eyes adjusted, they recognized Sergeant Yung and those sitting rose to greet him, but he waved them back to the foots of their beds.

"So."

They waited, sensing that a Lesson was coming.

"You saw us kill a man today."

They greeted this with more silence. As the rules for receiving a Lesson dictated; one spoke only when asked a question; and one answered quickly.

"How do you feel about that, Recruit?" the Sergeant rounded on Kit.

"Sir?"

"Have you ever watched a man die before?"

"No, sir."

"So how do you feel about that?"

"Had it coming," Kit shrugged. "Didn't he?"

Murmurs of agreement filled the room.

"No argument," Sergeant Yung agreed, his expression patient.

"Still," Z'rus spoke out of place. "Dead guy."

"Dead guy," Sergeant Yung echoed, putting a bit more emphasis the first word. "We do as little killing as we possibly can, but we also never let any of them get away to cause us problems later."

He let that sink in for a couple of heartbeats.

"You want to be a Fighter, there'll be a lot more of that."

His sharp eyes surveyed them and not a single one of them returned his gaze. All eyes focused thoughtfully on either the floor or the ceiling.

"If you want to talk to me," he opened his arms wide with their palms up. "I'll be around. If this isn't the job you thought it would be, let me know before tonight. Tomorrow we'll begin weapons training. Other than that, you'll be with the clockwise patrol leaving at the first bell after noon."

The Sergeant let himself out of the room without another word. The door closed behind him.

"I don't see the problem," Tara's voice seemed completely sincere. "These people may not have been attacking us, but they're as much our opposites as they could be. Like I'm gonna be sad one of them took an arrow in the face."

"I wonder what they do with the rest of the men?" Renzi asked.

"Yeah, where did -?" Zhair'lo reply was cut off.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 26



"I don't have a problem," Zia said, her voice still icy. "Assholes like that guy are the reason I wanted to be a Fighter in the first place."

"Exactly," Kit said. "What's Sergeant Yung worried about?"

"That we'll feel weird about seeing a dead body, I guess," Del shrugged. "It is kind of creepy."

"But the guy was an asshole," Zia reminded her.

"Yes," Del acknowledged wearily. "But corpses of assholes can still be creepy."

Zia dismissed this with a contemptuous snort as she stood up and walked away from the others toward the back of the room.

Zhair'lo searched his feelings, trying to find some sensation he could associate with watching those three arrows sink into a man's flesh. There was nothing. He'd never known Chet, except as a story told by someone else. It was no more emotional experience than watching Kenji put an arrow through a deer.

Shouldn't he have some reaction? He'd just watched another human being die and he couldn't drum up the slightest bit of sympathy. It probably helped that the man had been marked for death long before they'd started marching that morning, but still ...

"This is what I came here to do," he said aloud. "Master Lyric warned me that this was part of being a Fighter before I asked to join."

"Yeah," Bree jumped a little too quickly to agree. "No real surprise."

Zhair'lo looked around the room, examining each of his fellow Recruits, and could find no hint of deception or concern among them. They seemed, to his eye, to be supremely indifferent to the deaths of the Temple's enemies. For himself, Zhair'lo only felt disappointment. Somewhere, out there, were the Temple's worthy enemies; the enemies that required a force of thousands to fight. These dirty nomads had emphatically not been of such quality. But who were the enemies worth fighting? What had Sergeant Yung been talking about?

"I wouldn't mind actually learning how to use a sword," Kit pointed out.

"Starting tomorrow," Z'rus added, the barest hint of eagerness laced with frustration evident in his voice.



Talla left the Temple with a group of Endowment women. The Mill to which she was headed was staffed, it turned out, by a fairly large number of men.

"A Mill needs twelve of us?" she asked the most senior member of the group.

The woman, an Officer in a top so transparent it had to be contraband, brushed back her blonde hair to look at Talla.

"It's more than just a Mill," she laughed, blue eyes sparkling in the torchlight. "It also serves as a station for a large group of Carters."

With a wave of her hand that set her large breasts undulating beneath her sheer top, she added, "We'll be meeting up with Sweetness and Form before we even open the doors."

'Just like out at Zhair'lo's Farm, then,' Talla thought.

Zhair'lo was very much on her mind, her senses telling her this was the general direction of his Barracks. She twisted her lips, knowing there was no chance of having him tonight. She would have to satisfy herself with this boy Taust as a target for her frustrations. She hoped to all nine hells he was up to it.

"You seem eager," the Officer smiled as she ducked under the awning of a bakery.

"It's been a rough couple of days."

"Really?" the response was almost sarcastic.

"Bow training," Talla explained quickly. "Kinda tense. Haven't been sleeping well."

The Officer gave a knowing nod as they navigated through a maze of empty barrels left for the Carters to return in the morning.

"Some good, exhausting Service will fix that," the older woman's voice was full of assurance. "Ride 'em as many times as you can. Use up all your energy, then a nice walk back home for fresh air. You'll sleep like a baby."

"Really?"

"I know those Form women can be a bit trying," the Officer was looking off in the distance now, perhaps wistfully imagining her own upcoming encounter. "But they mean well. How come you're doing it now, instead of when you were a Virgin?"

The clothing, of course, had given Talla away. She'd been meaning to purchase something a bit more ambiguous as far as indicating her rank went, but the shortness of her present skirt left no doubt of her rank.

"I never really was a Virgin," she explained, nodding at her breasts. "Jumped ahead because of uh ... these."

"A lot of that going around with the new Seal Breakers," the Officer noted. "How many more weeks of training do you have?"

"Three left, I think," Talla said. "They keep changing it. They said we have to learn a few field manoeuvres next."

"The good news is that you only have to go through all that nonsense once. We all do. After that, maybe once a year they call you back to make sure you still know which end of the bow is which."

Talla found it strange to hear an Officer speak so casually about something that ought to be a serious matter.

"You aren't worried about ever having to fight?"

"No, dear," the woman in orange laughed, setting her breasts in motion again, "that's not terribly likely. It's not as if we're living on the frontier, is it?"

"No, I guess not."

There was a frontier, then, that was dangerous. That admission was significant.

Talla had been getting a lot of negative vibes from Zhair'lo today, and even with their proximity, she couldn't get a clear picture of the source of his bad mood. It certainly didn't portend danger.

She huffed out a breath, wondering what he was making of her feelings for the last day or so. Had he even noticed? It seemed to her that he was heavily preoccupied with his own problems. Whatever he was doing, it wasn't sex, at least, but that was all she could tell for now. Maybe once his mind calmed down -

"And here we are," the Officer announced as they rounded a bend in the road. "Sweetness and Form got here ahead of us."

The women of Form were the easiest to spot. While the Sweetness women could dress well, it was the Form women who pushed the extremes in both directions. The women of Iron and Tight, sticklers for the rules, never deviated from the precise lengths and dimensions of clothing for their ranks. Was their clothing snug over their taut muscles? Absolutely it was. But was it garish or translucent. Never.

Facial, on the other hand, could be spotted instantly. If it wasn't for the colours, their costumes would have had almost nothing to do with their ranks. Women in orange were wearing skirts made of thin strips of fabric without anything underneath. Others, in yellow, seemed to be wearing only their underwear instead of the appropriate grass skirts. The ones who had significant breasts seem to take great glee in leaving parts of their aureole exposed above the cuts of their narrow, bra-like tops.

It was while Talla was staring at one such woman that another girl, a little taller than herself, hooked Talla's arm.

"Fancy seeing you again," the girl spirited Talla away from her sisters.

Her eyes were sharp and seemed lighter in colour, and her cheekbones had taken much away from the roundness of her face, but Talla still recognized her.

"Lacy?" Talla asked, just to be sure.

"I look a bit different now, don't I?"

"A bit, yeah."

"Had another upgrade," Lacy said proudly. "Another load in the face and suddenly you don't recognize me."

"You make it sound so easy," Talla laughed.

"What? A boy coming in my face? It's not a big deal."

They were a bit farther away now, and Lacy lowered her voice.

"You are 'Talla' tonight?"

"Yes."

"Okay, good," she said. "Didn't want to give anything away."

"I couldn't do any of that without you anyway," Talla pointed out.

"And not with us either," Lacy sighed. "Not you, at least, sorry."

"What?"

"After the last time, the other girls are a bit scared," she whispered to Talla. "Jenni went through an awful interrogation because of all that weirdness."

"Oh, yeah."

"And now they're going crazy again because more guards fell asleep down in the dungeons somewhere. We're having to lay low for a bit."

Talla had no intention of trying to set up another clandestine meeting with Zhair'lo anyway.

"That makes sense," Talla agreed. "Do you normally try to set up more than one meeting like that?"

"No," Lacy shook her head. "Everybody gets a shot when we can do it, but if you want a second one, you'd have had to wait anyway. We can't be obvious about it."

Lacy the conspirator disappeared suddenly, replaced by the slightly dippy Lacy. Every ounce of cleverness disappeared in favour of the face she now showed.

"Who you seeing tonight?" she asked, her voice gone giddy and foolish.

"Someone named Taust."

Lacy's vivid eyes sparkled in the torchlight as they lined up to enter the doorway behind a crew of women in yellow. The girl looked even more obviously changed now that Talla saw her in the semi-clarity of the light from the Mill's front porch torches. Not only had her roundish face sharpened, but her almond shaped eyes were clearly veering from brown into hazel.

The Facial girl finally shook her head. "Name doesn't ring a bell, but I'm sure he'll love your tits regardless."

"You can normally remember all the guys you've Served?"

"Memory's good," Lacy tapped her temple with one finger. "Comes with the Facial upgrades."

The girls remained with their arms hooked together, Lacy leaning on Talla's shoulder just as she had the day they'd met so long ago. The older, higher ranked women went first, calling out the names of their men. Talla watched the room slowly empty out and realized that they'd be clearing the place right out for the night. Lacy didn't seem to notice, preoccupied as she was with slipping a hand under Talla's skirt. An exhalation that was nearly a moan escaped Talla's lips and she felt her body squirming at the touch. She would be wet when she went to bed.

Looking out across the tables where the remaining men waited, she wondered which one of the boys was Taust. Was it the skinny blonde one? Or maybe the black haired one with the deep eyes? There were so many here of the right age it was hard to tell. Talla glanced sideways at her sisters and found many dressed in white coming to Serve them.

Oddly, however, none of the other women were calling out names.

Lacy pinched Talla's rear.

"What?"

"They're waiting for you," she whispered. "Get on with it."

"Why? I'm only an Initiate," Talla took another look around her. "There must a Neophyte here somewhere."

"Doesn't matter," Lacy said. "Clothing tells lies at night. They see your boobs."

She gave Talla an affection smack on the ass and propelled her to the front of the dais that represented the foyer of the common room.

"Taust!" she called out, still feeling out of place to the fore of women who had years more experience than she did.

In the dim lighting, she saw a tall boy twitch and make eye contact with her. He kept the sides of his head shaved and maintained a long, dark hair neat pony-tail with what remained on top of his head. Talla noticed the gangly way he rose from his seat, as if he was at some awkward stage of growth, not yet used to the length of his limbs.

He paused, midway through his first step toward her, and raised a thoughtful finger in the air. Turning back to his table, he grabbed a half empty green glass bottle and a pair of long stem glasses.

"Fancy a drink?" he asked, crossing the floor to her.

She let his gentle accent roll over her. His "fancy" sounded like "fawn-see".

"What is it?" she gestured to the bottle.

"Wine," he said. "We made it from a overage of cranberries."

"Cranberry wine?" Talla worried as he hooked her arm and led her away. "How does that taste?"

"Delicious," he assured her, then mocking lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone, "we sugar it to the nines."

She couldn't keep herself from giggling.

"Something tells me you're a few drinks ahead of me," Talla admonished, trying to decide if she really wanted to drink alcohol. Her experiences thus far, which mostly came later in the evening when she was with women, had not gone so well. "I don't want you getting too clumsy."

"Fear not, fear not," Taust promised, leading her gently up a set of stairs. "I can function perfectly well on my back."

"Really? Working in a Mill? I might have to report you for laziness."

Talla understood very well what sort of man she had tonight. He was a playful idiot, or at least liked to pretend to be one. She had seen more than enough of those on the female side of things to recognize the type.

"This is more than a Mill," he whispered, ushering her through a door. "We are also Carters, Brewers, Wine-makers and -"

"None of which you can accomplish lying on your back," she pointed out curtly.

"I was getting to that," he raised a finger, interrupting the lighting of a candle.

"My apologies."

"The wheel can also be used to churn a laundry tub," he said. "The manipulation of which is often done from underneath, where cogs are oiled and wood is fed into the fires."

"So you're responsible for laundry -?"

"Which involves sliding around on my back. But I much prefer wine making, to be honest. The fragrances are easier on the nose."

With this, he poured her a glass full of the sparkling red liquid and bade her to test it with a wiggle of his eyebrows.

"Smells nice," she said and took a sip. "Nice. Fizzy."

"Mm, the 'fizzy' is actually bad," he poured himself a glass. "Too much and they'll blow the corks right out of the bottles. One must be careful. It's the most gods awful mess in the cellars when that happens."

Talla hummed an acknowledgement and took another sip.

"That's how you get ants," he added.

She laughed again, helplessly, wondering if the alcohol was already getting to her.

"Now," he reached behind her to lay his glass on a dresser, "regarding this 'being on one's back'."

"Yes," she moved closer, relinquishing her own glass to his hand.

"Which way do you prefer?"

"I'm not too partial," she kept her chin down but looked upward into his eyes. "But I'm worried about you falling over."

Their noses touched and the fruited scent of the wine came strongly with the heat of his breath.

"It's alright," he smiled. "The important part of me is sure to be upright."

"We'll see ab-"

He kissed her before she could finish her sentence, kissed her with lips wet and sweet from wine. Talla closed her eyes, sinking into the lust that was overwhelming her. A night of panicked fear and a day of frustration vanished in a tingling wave that sizzled down to the base of her spine. She could run away from her rebellious plans for the next couple of bells; drown herself in the arms of this winemaker.

Their lips parted, foreheads touching as they caught their breaths.

Taust's eyes opened, looking down between them.

"Those are the largest breasts I've ever seen."

"No, they aren't."

"I think I'd -"

"You haven't actually seen them yet," she pointed out. "Can you manage to untie me or is that asking too much?"

His arms slid upward from where they had rested on her hips and found the knots she'd made earlier that evening.

"One ... and ... two," he counted, letting out a sigh as her breasts relaxed a little.

"Now," she said, shifting her shoulders so the loose cloth fell from her chest, "these are the largest breasts you've ever seen."

"Indeed," he breathed, sliding his right hand between their bodies to gently cup her, his thumb resting just under her nipple. "I never thought myself a breast man."

"I've changed a lot of minds," she admitted, letting playful guilt into her voice.

"One imagines," he said, squeezing firmly and crushing her breast against her rib cage.

Talla moaned, her eyes closing involuntarily, and their mouths found each other again. She hadn't drunk much, but it was suddenly her hands that were struck clumsy, fumbling around at his back for the ties on his shorts. Taust squeezed harder, digging his fingertips into the augmented muscles behind her breasts. She felt her arms alternate between tingling and numbness. The boy might never have seen breasts so large, but he knew what it was to be Abundance.

'Or possibly,' she thought, 'he just likes to squeeze tits really hard.'

The latter seemed more likely.

His shorts, loosened at the waist, caught on the tip of his erection. He made a complaining noise into her mouth and she shifted her body to slip the clothing clear and down to the floor.

Gently but quickly, he turned her around and pulled her body against his. His erection pressed against the fabric of her skirt and nestled between her cheeks. Over the front of Talla's naked chest, his arms crossed and his hands gripped both her breasts. She pushed out with her upper body and back with her hips, grinding against his penis as his fingers squeezed her breasts. The rhythm of his hands, tightening and loosening, felt as if he expected he could force milk to issue forth from them.

"Are you hard enough?" she goaded.

By way of response, he pushed into her.

"You like it like this?" he whispered and bit into her neck.

"Anyway you want it," she breathed, "just keep milking me like that and stick it in."

Taust's right hand drifted away to her waist while the left continued clenching at her breast. He didn't bother untying her skirt but instead pushed it's fabric up and out of the way.

Talla felt him back away, just enough to let the tip of his erection draw down between her cheeks. She bent her knees out, spreading herself for him, letting him slide until he was underneath her. With one hand on the dresser, she leaned over and used the other to push his twitching manhood between her lips, parting them and enjoying the delicious feeling of the edge of his foreskin rubbing against her clitoris.

"Wet, indeed," he murmured.

Taust could no longer whisper in her ear, given how she was leaning over, but he could still reach around and cup her breasts.

"Do you want to fuck me, or not?" she called out.

"Yes," Taust hissed back.

"Then squeeze like you mean it."

He crushed her breasts against her chest and Talla felt his thumbs and forefingers twisting at her nipples. She moaned, low and primal. Enough things had gone wrong today. She desired neither thought nor kindness, compassion nor gentleness. She wanted a ragingly hard cock forced up inside her.

"Now!" she announced, pushing the head of his erection back from her clitoris toward her sopping wet entrance.

Taust, sufficiently aroused, pulled down savagely on her breasts and pushed into her body to all his depth.

'A mirror,' Talla thought. 'I would love a mirror right now.'

She said nothing of her desire for such luxury, but instead leaned over the dresser until her shoulders were level with her ass, arching her back to give the most stress to the manhood inside her and letting Taust's thrusting shake her breasts back and forth.

"Nine gods, yes," Talla shrieked. "Harder!"

Taust held on to her hips, yanking back as he thrust forward. Talla felt the pressure this was creating on her insides, as if he were probing her and opening her up. She had never felt such a strong to have her body treated so roughly.

The only downside to this whole affair was that, given the intensity of their interaction and the level of arousal she'd brought into the room with her, there was no way it could go the distance.

Taust, as she'd demanded, was hammering away at her rear. Talla now had to brace both her forearms against the dresser to prevent being driven headfirst into the piece of furniture. Finally, with a grand thrust and upward twist, she felt his orgasm take her away. He left himself buried deep inside her as their bodies shuddered, his expelling semen into her depths, her body leaking her own fluids down the inside of her thighs.

"Nine gods," Taust heaved himself on to the bed after he'd slid out of her.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 26



Talla, standing topless and leaning against the dresser to guard against the failing of her wobbling legs, turned to face him, watching him through the short mess of sweaty brown hair that hung over her eyes.

With a gulp of air, she straightened and reached for the wine glass at her side. By some miracle of the dresser's construction, neither glass had spilled.

She took down a mouthful of the fragrant liquid, half-emptying her glass. Her eyes never wavered from Taust's, who returned the gaze with some mixture of astonishment and exhaustion.

Talla replaced the glass on the dresser and touched the side of her knuckles to her lips to wipe away the wetness left by her mouthful.

"Not done with you yet," she began to approach him.

"Might need a couple breaths," Taust's eyes widened warily.

"I can work on you," she promised.

'If it didn't matter to an animal rutting in the field, why should it matter to me?' she thought.

Talla was an animal that night. She had decided to be such many bells before, and Taust just happened to be in the way. Crawling up on the bed, she lowered her head to his dwindling member and took the whole thing in her mouth. He tasted of semen and her own flood of juices. Whether he was the citric scent of Zhair'lo, the wooden taste of Shen or the ash of J'ree, she couldn't say. The wine in her mouth overruled almost everything else.

"It might take ... a while," Taust warned.

Talla took her mouth off his cock, holding it with one hand, and said, "I have all night and a great many tools at my disposal."

A girl of Facial might have brought him around more quickly, but Talla was determined all the same. She would ride this boy over and over again until he could not be wakened, never mind aroused. If that meant a mouthful of her own juices, so be it.

"Good gods, Talla," he whispered.

"Yes?"

"Those breasts ..."

She lifted herself up. Was he a breast man after all?

"These?" she asked, turning her body side to side. She didn't look down at her body, and she didn't need to feel the sway of her breasts either. The oscillation of Taust's eyes told the story well enough.

What was she doing, after all, wishing to be a girl of Facial? She was of Abundance and ought to be using what she had.

Keeping her eyes on his, she lowered her body until her nipples hovered just above the skin of his thighs. Bracing herself with her left hand, Talla used her right hand to trace circles around one of her areola and then the other. Taust's mostly flaccid member, laying over his lower stomach, seemed to harden at this.

Talla smiled, seeing that her body was doing its job for her. While she couldn't stand the Temple's philosophy, there were a few benefits to Temple life for which she was thankful. Her breasts were not included in that list, for certainly they had given back only a fraction of what they'd stolen. The lessons they'd taught her, however, often came in handy. It was at rare times like this that she felt any gratitude at all toward them.

She wanted to have sex again, soon, and her man wasn't ready. But the Temple had taught her what to do, and she knew the next, patient step in bringing forth his arousal.

With a gentle motion that completely focused his attention, she drew her index finger to her lips. While Taust's gaze was drawn to her finger, her attention was on his eyes. That finger slid down her chin, over her throat and down to her breasts.

Enraptured, Taust watch as her thumb joined in to gently squeeze the tip of her nipple. She rolled it around with light, twisting motion, pretending to close her eyes so she could look down to check on that state of his manhood.

'Coming right along ...'

Talla reached for Taust's hand and drew it to her left breast. Her hand went back to the right.

"Gently," she whispered, and started twisting and squeezing at her nipple again. Taust, following along, did the same to the left. He might have been a little bit rougher than she was on herself, but she could let that go. After all, it meant he was ready for the next step.

She gently squeezed her aureola and pulled her breast away from her body, distorting its shape slightly. Biting her lips, she nodded to Taust, letting him know he should do the same.

Talla moaned, feeling the exquisite pleasure of her body being stretched.

When she released her grip, he did the same and her breasts fell slightly and found their normal positions.

Smiling demurely, she turned her body a bit to the right and lowered her chest until the now hardened nipple of her left breast touched the base of his shaft, between his testicles.

Taust moaned in appreciation as she slid that hardened nub up the length of his stiffening member.

Back and forth she went, one breast and then the other, pushing a little harder each run up his cock. Taust could only lie back and hyperventilate. Soon, she pushing the whole mass of her breast against him, feeling him turn to rock under her care.

"Ready again?" she asked.

Taust, his mouth too dry from the heaviness of his breathing, managed a nod.

Talla dangled her breasts on either side of his erection, which now stood out from his stomach, and twisted her body side to side so as to strike his penis over and over again. As a last treat, she crouched down so she could use both hands to squeeze her breasts together, engulfing him completely.

Her breasts had completed their work, and done it well. She crawled upward, sliding her body so the tip of his erection traced a line down her navel to the bare, wet lips that were its proper target.

Taust wait, mouth half open, as she slid herself into position and pushed her body down on him.

...

At the moment the mesh took hold, she sadly realized that he would not go more than twice tonight.

It meant that she had to make the most of this time, because it was the final act of Service.

And it couldn't last long, either.

Frustration overcame her.

She'd meant to drown herself in this night, put all her troubles behind her with a good, hard round of Service.

A deep breath came almost automatically, the answer to all frustrations and anxieties.

It wasn't Taust's fault. 

He was who he was.

Maybe he'd had a rough day, too.

Men were people, after all, just like women.

She would make the best of it she could, even if his energy waned.

In fact, she would have to be quick.

Their climax would only diminish in quality the longer they waited.

With a somewhat sombre resolution, she began grinding him with her hips..

"Grab my tits," she whispered, and felt a twitch of surprise through the mesh. What had caused it.

"You like my tits?"

Affirmation washed over her.

It wasn't, she realized, the breasts themselves, but her language.

"Squeeze those big tits really hard," she murmured in his ear. "Show me how bad you want it."

The orgasm wouldn't take long, especially considering it was their second, but at least it would be hard.

"Let me feel you inside," she hissed.

"I – uh – I," he stammered.

"You what?" she asked, tainting her voice with innocence. "You like it inside me? Inside my little cunt?"

It was the word that overtook him, that one last word that overwhelmed his reserve.

Taust went off inside her like a fire cracker, a sudden, unheralded explosion in her belly which proceeded to launch itself up her spine and back down.

It cracked only twice more before he collapsed.

...

Taust's eyes were already closed when the mesh dissolved.

Talla, still pinned on his erection, took a deep breath before gentling herself out of her state of impalement.

There was no semen dripping out of her this time. The poor exhausted guy probably hadn't had time to properly recharge, but she'd gotten two orgasms out of him at least.

She put her clothes back on, glad for the lack of underwear. It meant the air could cool off at least the outsides of her well worked organs. Before leaving, she downed the last of her glass of sweet wine and blew out the solitary candle in its cradle on the wall.

As Talla slipped out of Taust's bedroom, she was glad to see the common room was dark. They'd clear the place, after all, and so she suffered no embarrassment for leaving her Service so early. Surely the other women would be a couple of bells yet. Part of her had wanted to wait around for Taust, for a sense of duty told her that a woman ought to do so, just in case her man awoke ready for more.

But the mesh had laid out the facts for Talla in a way more clear than the stars in the night sky she surveyed when she stepped out the front door of the Mill. Taust was done, and there was nothing more for her to Serve.

'Zhair'lo, I miss you,' she thought, desperately.

'I know.'

There he was, inside her head, his mood sombre but calm.

'Where are you? What's wrong?'

'Not much, really. You seem angry.'

Images came from her mind to his. Frustration with Taust, mostly.

'You've had a bad day?' he replied, seeing past the problematic Service.

'We found the vent I'd been hoping for,' she told him, 'but it's sealed against intrusion.'

Talla showed him an image of the underground cavern and its heavy metal grates. Somewhere, far away, something twitched in Zhair'lo's mind.

'What is it?' she demanded.

Their connection wavered uncertainly.

'I don't know. That set up looks weird. Reminds me of ... I don't know what. It's not important. You're right that you can't get in that way.'

'I know.'

Zhair'lo understood now why her encounter with Taust had been doubly frustrating.

'What are you doing?' she asked.

'Should be sleeping. Right here with Zia.'

'The crazy one?'

'Yeah.'

Mental long distance masturbation was out then.

'Today was tough on her, too.'

There was a series of images from Zhair'lo, then, giving a precis of the battle.

'Not much, were they?' Talla noted.

'No. Pathetic, really.'

'I was worried about you getting hurt. Now I'm thinking going out there was a waste of time.'

Zhair'lo's mind gave a funny hiccup.

'I hadn't even thought of that.'

'Then why were you so ... sad, was it?'

'I saw a man die ... I saw a man killed today ...'

There was a long pause. Several heartbeats passed. Talla wasn't sure she should prod, but she did.

'And?'

'And it didn't bother me.'

'He didn't seem like a very nice person.'

'He wasn't. But still.'

Zhair'lo was worried about his humanity.

'After what we've been though, I'm sure you're a decent person, Zhai.'

She felt him taking a deep breath, which became a yawn.

'Sorry, Talla. I can't stay awake any longer.'

'I know, my sweet. Rest up.'

A faint note of compassion and gentleness wafted over the link and Zhair'lo was soon gone.

She had been concentrating so much on Zhair'lo that she hadn't moved from the front porch of the Mill. How long would it take to walk home? How horny was she? She had no desire for feminine socialization tonight, so she could just skip the Hall and go home to masturbate. It might take too long. Was there a good place to hide somewhere in the bushes nearby?



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 27



Zhair'lo awoke to the ash grey skies of a cold pre-dawn, only vaguely remembering his telepathic conversation with Talla. It was Zia, after all, whose bed he shared. Curled up behind her, he eyed her naked body over her shoulder, her slim breasts gently rising and falling with each breath.

The faint smell of sweat from the mandatory exertions of the night before tickled at his nose. Anticipating the weapons lessons ahead, he knew he wouldn't get back to sleep, so he gently extricated himself from his companion and slipped out of bed.

He wouldn't need his armour to go to breakfast, would he? No, probably not. Clothes in shirt and shorts, he slipped out the door.

For the first time, the Barrack felt like home to Zhair'lo. He had graduated, regardless of any impending lessons or rituals, from intruder to resident. Sure, he hadn't fought in any battles yet, nor even begun weapons training, but he could move around inside the Barracks at his leisure, just as he had in any of the dozens of places he'd lived before.

Hunger owned his list of priorities and the mess became his only plausible destination. The sun peeked mournfully at the horizon as he nodded his way past a quartet of guards and entered the mess. It was unusual to have the mess guarded like this and it made Zhair'lo uneasy.

Once inside, however, he noticed a small group of men, looking more grey than could be justified by the light that filtered in from the distant horizon, sitting in a dark corner of the mess. Apart from them sat another man, clothed in the same manner, but looking brighter perhaps due to the way the light struck the table he had taken for himself.

Zhair'lo knew this couldn't be all of the prisoners they'd taken and he wondered what had been done with the rest.

As he swept toward the kitchen, he watched the lone man carefully. Zhair'lo got the distinct impression from the way the larger group cast dark eyes his way that they kept away from him purpose, as if he didn't really belong.

Taking his tray, Zhair'lo made a decision. If the guards at the door wanted to stop him, they could do so and he could feign innocence.

He took a place opposite the man and, to avoid appearing aggressive, a little off to the side so they weren't staring directly at each other.

How, Zhair'lo wondered, did his people greet each other?

With a mental shrug, he spoke, "Zhair'lo."

"Is that your name?" the man heaved a sigh.

When Zhair'lo nodded, he added, "I'm Saren. Were you there yesterday?"

"Yeah."

So far so good. The Fighters standing guard at the doors ignored him.

"How you guys doing today?" Zhair'lo thought it would be a polite question.

Saren shrugged in that pathetic sort of manner Zhair'lo would forever associate with the lamest group of barbarians he could ever expect to meet. "Better fed than we would have been if you people hadn't come along."

"You all looked pretty hungry."

"You have no idea," Saren twitched an eye toward his fellows in the corner. "What'd you do with the others?"

"The others?"

"The other half of our 'tribe'," he spoke the last word with a lot more derision than Zhair'lo would have ever used to describe his own colleagues.

"You don't know where they are?"

"No, don't you?" Saren shook his head. "You guys took 'em away in the middle of the night. Haven't come back."

Zhair'lo realized Saren had no idea of Zhair'lo's lowly rank and consequently expected Zhair'lo to have some inside knowledge.

"You haven't killed them, have you?" Saren's tone turned accusatory, perhaps because of the guilty look on Zhair'lo's face.

"No, I doubt it," he quickly raised his hands, palms out, to reassure the former barbarian. "You were made a promise, after all."

"Promises are important to you people?"

"Yes," Zhair'lo replied instantly.

An image of Nadine, riding him in his bed back in the farmhouse, flashed in his mind.

"But you don't know where they went?"

"Not my area," Zhair'lo tilted his head sympathetically, "Maybe they've found jobs for your friends."

"Friends?" Saren gave another sideways look at the grey lot. "Do I look well befriended?"

"Ah ... no."

Saren returned his focus to his plate of food and carefully took another mouthful.

"You don't get along with the rest?" Zhair'lo prodded.

Saren chewed for a moment, a dark look coming over his face, "No."

They sat in silence for a while, neither looking at the other, and ate their food.

"You expecting us to do work for you?"

"What?" Zhair'lo asked.

"Use us, like slaves."

"Slaves? I - no - I mean, everyone has to do work. It's only fair."

This wasn't the first time Zhair'lo found himself in the unenviable position of having to defend a way of life he'd rather destroy. But honesty forced him to admit that Saren and his grey friends in the corner would find a far better life with the Temple.

"What if we don't want to work for you?"

"I - uh," Zhair'lo stammered to a stop.

The straightforward question stumped him. What did the Temple do with men - or women - who simply refused to work? Had he ever even heard of such a thing?

"It's never come up," he told Saren.

"Really?" Saren rolled his eyes. "You've never had one lazy lout that had to be kicked into doing his fair share of work?"

"Not any one I've ever known," he shrugged. "I mean, if you don't do your job properly, they say the women stop coming."

For a moment, it looked like Saren's heart had stopped.

"What?"

What had he said? For some reason the blood had drained from the man's face.

"What?" he echoed.

The two of them stared at each other in bewildered silence.

"The women stop coming? Like they stop feeding you?"

Zhair'lo stared back at him.

"The women don't feed us," Zhair'lo spoke slowly. "We feed ourselves. Except maybe here where the men and women live together."

Saren appeared completely baffled. He seemed about to assault Zhair'lo with further questions when the guards entered the mess.

"Alright, you lot," one of the Fighters called out. "Time to head back to your quarters."

Staring at Zhair'lo, Saren stood and filed out with the rest of the prisoners.

Alone, Zhair'lo finished his breakfast. Noticing that neither Saren nor any of the grey bunch in the corner had returned their trays, he collected those and returned them to the kitchen counter before leaving.

Looking up the long alley leading toward the showers, he could see the rising sun casting a pinkish yellow glow on the horizon. The bright colours washed away the dull blue-grey that had been the day's theme so far. By the time he reached the showers, both he and the entire day were considerably more cheerful, a feeling enhanced by the presence of his fellow Recruits.

"There you are!" Zia accused, yanking him under the faucet. "Get undressed and soap me up."

"Yes, ma'am."

He shucked off his shirt and shorts just in time for Zia to douse him in cold water. Not one of his fellow Recruits now crowding around him, as far as he knew, had so much as taken up the offer to talk to Sergeant Yung - never mind to quit their joint quest to join the Fighters.

"Where in the nine hells did you go?" Zia asked over her shoulder.

Zhair'lo wondered when it had become a tradition that the boys washed the girls first.

"Got hungry early," he muttered. "Couldn't get back to sleep."

"I get that," Zia admitted with a tilt of her head.

As she spread her legs so he could wash between her cheeks, a sudden glee came to her voice. "I bet they'll teach us the knife and sword, too."

She turned to face him with her arms raised as he stood up. Unashamed of her nudity, she eyed him curiously.

"You can already use a bow, though," she peered at him. "Why are you so eager?"

Lathering up her shoulders, slim breasts and hard stomach, he considered this for a moment.

"If I'm gonna fight," he pointed out, gently rubbing soap over her bald mound, "I've gotta learn where to stand and when it's safe to loose an arrow."

"Don't you know that already?"

Satisfied with the cleanliness of her genitals, Zia hit the lever again, dumping another load of cold water over her body.

"Not really," Zhair'lo replied, when he thought her ears were clear again. "I was a Hunter, remember?"

Taking the soap from his hand, Zia smirked. "You've never had to engage a whole herd of deer at once?"

"I've never seen them in a battle formation, that's for sure."

But, then again, he thought, their rather pathetic enemies hadn't been much more difficult than a herd of deer, had they?

Zhair'lo closed his eyes as Zia ferociously scrubbed at his hair.

"You ever think about getting a proper Fighter's hair cut?"

"Nah, long as it isn't past my shoulder."

The style popular among the older men, especially the Fighters, was far shorter than the way he liked his hair. Now that he thought about it, most of the women had shorter hair than he did.

Zia began working her way down his body, spending an unnecessary amount of time washing his penis.

"Nine gods," she muttered. "I want to jerk you off every time I see this thing."

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Zia?" Bree asked as she walked past them toward the towels.

"Nothing!" she protested. "He just comes so much ..."

"We have training!" Del rebuked, also having finished her hygienic obligations.

"Yeah, yeah," Zia muttered under breath, "I wasn't really going to ..."

At that point, she kicked the lever that poured a generous amount of water over his soaped up body.

Zhair'lo could say this much for Zia: she had recovered very well from whatever reticence she had experienced the previous day. He didn't understand what had bothered her, whether it had been the battle, the sight of death or the weakness of the enemy, but a night of sex and a morning shower had, by all appearances, cleared it up. Whether or not she was alright on the inside, he had no idea.

As much as he cared about her, Zhair'lo knew it wasn't his problem, nor his place to pry. If Zia had wanted to talk, she would have said something last night between sex and unconsciousness. If she needed to say something later, she was free to do so at any time they weren't training.

Without any discussion, they other Recruits waited until Zhair'lo and Zia were dressed before heading out to the mess. By the time they arrived, other Fighters had taken up several tables and the room was nearly full. They took their meal trays quickly - Zhair'lo electing only to grab a tall tin cup of water - and sat down.

"So what do you think we learn first?" Renzi asked.

"Swords, I bet," Kit rolled his eyes. "What else?"

"The girls, too?"

"Women use bows in combat," Del paused only a moment in the precise slicing of her chunk of ham.

"You think they won't teach us anything else?" Bree put in.

"We've learned to fight with staffs, too," Zia said. "Why not swords? The fighter women definitely carry short swords."

"Might as well teach all at once, see?" Renzi said.

Zhair'lo thought back, trying to picture the Fighter women when they'd gone outside the Barracks. He was certain they hadn't carried swords while on patrol and he hadn't paid attention to how they'd armed themselves for the raid on the barbarian camp. Now that he thought about it, though, every woman had carried a short sword on her hip. In fact - he held a particular image of the Ranger Hera in his mind - some of them had carried two such swords.

"Fighting with a short sword will be different, though," he said aloud, not to anyone in particular.

"What?" Zia asked, stunned.

Shaken out of his reverie, Zhair'lo took a sip of his water.

"You could hold one in each hand, for one thing," he explained, setting his cup down. "For another, the reach would be completely different. Faster, right? But shorter."

They digested this, along with their food, and no one spoke for a while.

"So do you think we'll start learning together?" Renzi wondered. "Or are we going to have separate instructors?"

A lot of speculation followed, most of which didn't interest Zhair'lo. He wanted to learn how to use a sword, not be subjected to a lot of guesswork on the subject. He did find it odd that, in spite of their multiply upgraded strength, the Fighter women carried short swords. Was this to reduce their encumbrance, given they carried a bow and a quiver of arrows? Would a full size sword be too awkward?

He tried to picture how combat would work, with the women firing their arrows from behind the men. Then what would happen? If a large group of barbarians reached the line of men, did the women join in? Or were they accurate enough to fire their arrows into a melee?

That sounded stupid to Zhair'lo, but he didn't imagine himself an expert on the subject.

"C'mon," Zia prodded. "We're to wait for Sergeant Yung in the practice field."

The other Recruits wolfed down the remainders of their meals and quickly returned their trays. Once they exited the mess, they instinctively fell into a loose version of their proper formation. Zhair'lo was pretty sure they weren't doing it consciously. Renzi just naturally ended up on left, with Kit and Z'rus on his right. The girls fell in behind, where they belonged with bows and arrows they weren't currently carrying.

The chatter went on until they turned a corner and had a look at the practice field. At that point, all conversation ceased.

Neatly arranged in a small arc stood a set of vertical wooden logs, each about the height and size of the trunk and legs of a human body. Attached to each of the trunks, at different angles, other thinner pieces of wood poked out, clearly meant to simulate arms. Sergeant Yung and several soldiers of lower ranks waited patiently in the centre of it all. 

"Form up!" the Sergeant called out.

They rushed to make their two rows directly in front of him.

"Good," he surveyed them. "Today you're going to learn how to swing a sword."

He began walking along the front of their line.

"You should expect two things by the end of this day," he stopped to stare directly at Kit. "The first is that your sword arm will be very sore."

The Sergeant began walking again until he found Zia's spot.

"The second is that you'll know how to kill someone standing as still as log."

Everyone knew better than to laugh.

"Each pair of dummies in front of you has been built to simulate an enemy soldier in a specific attack or defence posture. You will take one of the wooden swords and follow the orders given by the instructor standing nearest," the Sergeant intoned, walking between the lines. "Move now."

In the manner of soldiers doing things in the most direct and simple way possible, the eight Recruits moved forward to stand in front of the dummies nearest them. Zhair'lo and Bree found themselves facing twin, headless wooden statues which had their arms raised in the air.

"Take a sword," the female soldier standing between the two dummies gestured at the wooden swords leaning against the trunks. "This is how an opponent will appear if he is raising a heavy sword over his head with the intention of crushing your skull. He might also be wielding a club, warhammer or axe. The important thing to realize is that even if you strike a killing blow, you still have to get out of the path of the falling weapon. Now ..."

Zhair'lo didn't miss a single word of the woman's level headed instruction. He was confident his fellow Recruits would follow their instructions with a fascination as deep as his own.

And Sergeant Yung hadn't been kidding. By the time the bells of noon rang, and Zhair'lo had rotated through all four station countless times, he could barely feel his arms.

-===================-

"Tell me what you're seeing," the Sorceress of Pussy spoke very softly.

Maksa looked up from her papers, blinking slowly, refocusing her eyes on her surroundings. The underground records room had the same appearance as always. The flagstone floors would never change and neither would the torches lighting the space from their mounts on the ends of the countless bookshelves full of genealogy scrolls. Ever present, the background to all of it, a damp, nipple-stiffening cold suffused the room, bringing a feeling that neither clothing nor fire pits could ever relieve.

The Sorceress, her elbows resting on the opposite side of Maksa's large work table, peered carefully at her disciple.

"I've been trying to understand what drives the Heroes, the Catatonic and the Enraged."

"Of this I am aware, Maksa," Pussy replied, her voice still gentle. "What do you see?"

"Nothing," Maksa waved a dismissive hand at the tallies and scratches on the sheets in front of her. "There is no pattern I can discern, from father to son, even among multiple generations, that explains where our foremothers went wrong."

"And yet you keep looking."

"It's a matter of logic, Mistress," Maksa bit her lip in frustration. "There is a pattern. I know it. I can - I can feel it."

"As you felt the pattern among the Virgins?"

"Yes. And I was right about that," Maksa seized this moment of triumph.

"Disturbingly so, yes," Pussy admitted.

Maksa inhaled.

"I feel I'm grabbing half the problem."

"Pardon?" the Sorceress raised her eyebrows.

"Have you ever tried to pick up a large box with just one hand?" Maksa flexed her fingers in the air in between the two women.

"What do you mean?"

"Mistress," Maksa looked up now, her purplish grey eyes spearing the Sorceress. "When you pick up something small, you can grab it in one hand. But as the things you want to pick up get bigger and bigger, it gets more and more and more awkward, until you just have to use the other hand to hold it comfortably."

The Sorceress, still leaning over Maksa's table, tilted her head in acknowledgement.

"I feel like I'm trying to pick up the largest box ever with just one hand."

"Frustration," Pussy pronounced, summoning all the wisdom she could into her voice.

"Yes," Maksa replied drily, looking down at her work.

It was then that it hit her.

"Mistress," she said, her eyes coming up to narrow on her superior.

"Yes?"

"When Temples have fallen, that's when we know - when we really know - which men are which?"

"We have the semen test ..."

"But really, we proved out the semen test because we've seen Temples fall and, separate from that, we've taken men away from Temples to test them?"

"Indeed."

"Madra Zen," Maksa slapped her forehead. "So what of the women?"

Pussy stood up and folded her arms. "What of the women?"

"I've been so stupid," Maksa let her voice almost go to a whine. "Oh, nine gods, that's the other hand. Is there any difference in how the women behave when a Temple falls?"

"I - how would we - they all defend the Temple, of course," Pussy indignantly raised herself up to her full height.

"Do they?" Maksa glared. "According to whom? Who measures that? If a particular woman just curled up in a ball and hid under her bed, who in the nine hells would even know?"

"Details are assigned, I'm sure of it," the Sorceress stepped back uncertainly from the table. "Under martial law, things become extraordinarily strict. I've never heard of any woman becoming Enraged and attacking another woman."

"They don't have to go that far," Maksa sighed. "But that has to be the other factor. We've been trying to breed the men for one thing: Heroism against Enraged. Meanwhile, we've been trying to breed the women for what? The ability to take upgrades? The requirement for more powerful Goddesses?"

The Sorceress appeared to be having a dizzy spell. She caught herself on the table before she fell. It occurred to her, quite suddenly, that the woman in front of her sported a frightening intellect.

"What are you saying?"

"Our breeding programs may have been working against each other. Unless we can find a way to differentiate the women from each other in terms of their contribution to the Enraged men, there's no point doing any further meddling. We could just be destroying ourselves with ignorance."




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 27



"Madra Zen," the Sorceress whispered as she closed her eyes.

"Has the Temple of Gern ever fallen?" Maksa asked.

Her eyes still closed, Pussy shook her head.

"What Temple fell most recently?" Maksa asked. "I need one that's near here."

"We would have to check records," Pussy opened her eyes very slowly. "But I believe it was Beshenna, although it was quickly restored."

"How long ago?"

"Nearly two centuries."

"I'll need to requisition some records from them."

"You shall have it," the Sorceress stood more firmly now. "You shall have all you need for this purpose."

-===================-

After six hours in the sun, going over spear fighting basics and then practising maintaining a phalanx, Talla and her fellow Virgins and Initiates stumbled out of Form to make their laborious way across the Goddess's Domain.

The mood, as she and V'shika joined up with Tina, was on a downward spiral.

Talla had felt so clever, not just to have divined the presence of the Synergist room's secret vent, but to have found the gods damned thing. And her cleverness had fallen to pieces, like a sweet smelling coffee turning bitter when it hit her taste buds.

"We're done," V'shika sighed, her bare shoulders slumped as she slouched along on Talla's left.

"It's not that bad," Tina gave a suspicious glare across Talla's body from the right. "Yesterday you were a lot happier."

"I was too optimistic," V'shika shrugged. "Do you have any ideas now?"

"Talla will think of something," Tina said hopefully. "You will, won't you?"

Talla tried not to roll her eyes, but failed at that, too. Scrubbing her hair with fingers still dusty from the training in Form, she took a long time to think before responding.

"We need to be clever," she said. "And I'm all out of clever right now."

"To be clever," Tina pointed out, "we need to know things. We don't know enough yet, so we learn."

The other girls failed to respond to this in any way at all.

"Think about this," Tina demanded. "You two have only been part of the Temple for, what, a few months now? You've barely learned anything and you already hit on one weak spot, right?"

Talla acknowledged this with a sarcastic grin while V'shika kept her eyes down.

"So we learn more," Tina insisted, her voice lowering to a determined whisper. "Read all the books you can. Study all the history you can. We'll read about Temples that have fallen and see what weaknesses they have - who exploited those weaknesses and how."

There was tic in Talla's chin, then, although she didn't meet Tina's eyes.

"A daunting task you've set," Talla whispered weakly.

But Tina saw the ice slowly returning to her friend's eyes.

"Spoken like my Mistress," she replied.

-===================-

On any other day, the predictability of being Served by Del would drive Zhair'lo nuts. Today, though, when his arms were killing him and his brain knew Del had a simple programme for being on top, he contented himself with the pairing.

All eight of them had stumbled into their quarters exhausted after a day of sword training. It spoke well for the harshness of the first day that the five kilometre patrol to the nearest way station, followed by the obligatory return march, had been the relaxing part of the day. Zhair'lo wasn't sure he could do a pushup at this point, never mind manage a proper hip thrust from such a position.

Zhair'lo entertained the idea that, since the girls all had at least one Iron upgrade, they could probably withstand being collapsed upon. A quick look around the room told him that none of them wanted to risk it.

Regardless of their exhaustion, at least one round in bed was required. No one had given them such an order, but habit died hard.

Del leaned her face over his, step thirty-seven or so of the girl-on-top program, so they could kiss. Her arms had no more strength than his at this point, so she braced herself on her elbows to keep from smashing their faces together.

A tingle ran through the mesh as their tongues met. While Zhair'lo found it pleasant, it was ecstasy for Del with her single Facial upgrade.

"Curious choice," he said, when she pulled away to bat her eyelashes at him.

"What's that?"

"Facial."

Del shrugged. "You take what you can get sometimes."

Then she kissed him again, much more gently, as if to make a show of what her talents delivered.

"It's only a drag for you," she said, "if you're really into spanking."

"Not really my thing," Zhair'lo cast his eyes aside.

"Bree and Tara are Tight," Del said. "I'm sure you give them what they need."

"And to you what you need."

He wasn't so weak that he couldn't put his hands to the back of her neck and pull her down so he could reach her ears with his lips. Sucking gently on her ear lobes, he felt her throat vibrate in response. Deep inside her, muscles tightened around his erection.

This, then, was the right spot for Del.

Zhair'lo let his tongue poke out from between his lips. Playfully, as if tickled, Del tried to pull away, but he held her as he traced a line around the edge of her ear.

She cooed loudly in return, a sharp contrast to harsher grunts around the room. When Zhair'lo began to nibble on her ears, Del started giggling uncontrollably. For a breathless heartbeat, he wavered uncertainly upon his course of action, but he felt her vagina suddenly clamp down on him and she let out a screech of joy.

As she came, and the orgasm echoed through him, he bit down on the ear that she pushed into his waiting teeth. He didn't relent, chewing continuously on her flesh as he expelled himself inside her.

When she collapsed on his chest, a laugh came from the next bed.

"What the hell was that, Del?" Bree intruded.

"Nothing," Del's buried her red face in Zhair'lo neck. She added, in a whisper, "That was new."

"Yes."

Zhair'lo went to sleep well assured that he had made some small contribution to Standard Way of Doing Things that Del would probably someday make into one of those books the women were always reading.

-===================-

Later in the night, long after the Recruits had passed out, Saren lay in the bunk provided to him by the soldiers of Gern, pondering his future in the comfort of beige pillows and neatly folded off-white blankets.

It hadn't been clear, at first, that he merited a future. While they hadn't gone to the trouble of killing him, they hadn't enlightened him regarding his fate either. All day long, soldiers had been coming in pairs - one of each gender - to remove his tribemates from their shared cell. The cold, logical part of his brain judged it unlikely they were being put to death as Gern had demonstrated its abilities in that regard and yet had refrained from killing anyone other than Chet.

No, they were doing something to the men, one at a time, and they would eventually come for him. Knowing he couldn't affect his circumstances, he waited, trapped inside this stone building with its heavy, wooden door locked from the outside.

But neither could he sleep and so he stared at the sand coloured ceiling, watching the light of a lone candle flickering away in the night.

Consequently Saren experienced both joy and fear when, shortly after the bell had chimed eleven times, he heard the heavy latch being removed from the outside of the door.

The heavy oak slid smoothly past its stone casement with barely a creak and a woman clothed in ornate orange robes slipped into the room.

When Saren propped himself up on his elbows, he realized that these Temple women forced him to reevaluate the way he thought of half the human race.

Even if the woman had been standing still, she still exuded obvious, external qualities he would have noticed from a hundred metres away. She sported muscles that hadn't been built from hanging laundry, hefting a frying pan or any of the standard female duties. Aside from that, her blonde hair shimmered in the candlelight, a level of gloss that would never show on a woman unless she was as clean as these city women tended to be.

But if he only observed her standing in one place, he knew he wouldn't get even half the story. From the moment she stepped into the room, Saren felt her confidence in the length of her stride and the width of her stance.

Briefly, he sensed a sneer in the way she turned her chin up to look down at him. An instinct twitched inside Saren and made his stomach lurch with fear. In a flash of insight, an image of Chet filtered into his mind, their old leader with his penchant for leering down at everyone in a style of condescension he seemed to own. Saren realized in a moment of honesty that this woman, in her loose and scant orange clothing, merely held her head level, as no woman in his experience ever had. Doing so, however, exceeded his experience with women by so much it had triggered thoughts of old Chet.

"Your name is Saren," her voice flowed out of her in a gentle sigh.

He watched her eyes, trying to see through them to the person behind. In those hazel circles with their wide darkness-dilated pupils, there brewed a thick potion of sympathy, kindness and an emotion that looked much like duty. She sat on the bunk next to him, the panels of orange fabric that made up her clothing split to bare her thighs, leaving her a place to rest her clasped hands. In the candlelight, her skin was a tanned bronze.

"Who are you?" Saren sat up to face her.

"My name is Valtoza," her voice breathed patience. "You must have questions?"

"I suppose," he scratched his temple thoughtfully, "I want to know what you plan for me."

"You are not worried about your fellows?"

"Not particularly," Saren grimaced. "Though I wonder if you've seen Berel."

"Berel and Merelda are both in our care. You were friends?"

Saren wondered what sort of game all this entailed: a woman coming in here, mostly naked, and playing with him like this.

"Yes," Saren said. "Almost like brothers. We were planning on leaving that lot."

He jerked his head dismissively toward the door, the assumed general direction of his fellow tribesmen.

"But you did not?" her voice contained no hint of judgement.

"He wouldn't leave without his sister," Saren's lip twisted in frustration. "And then the whole thing fell apart and Chet -"

"Chet is dead," Valtoza cut across him swiftly. "We don't put up with that sort of thing. Not in general, and especially we don't tolerate men who beat on pregnant women."

"Yeah, I was there."

"Indeed," she inclined her head and her expression softened once more.

"So where are they?"

"Berel is resting," Valtoza leaned forward earnestly, her shimmering blonde hair bringing with it an intoxicating bouquet of fruit scents. "When he awakens, he will find a place in Gern. Merelda and Willow are also doing just fine. We expect her foot to heal in time."

Saren felt dizzy for a moment and twitched his head to clear his mind.

"Willow?"

"Her baby."

"Ah."

They paused for a moment, looking into each others' eyes.

"And will you find a place for me in your city?"

"I expect so, yes," she nodded serenely. "There is a place for every man and every woman."

"That sounds like a phrase you use often."

"That everyone has a place?" she asked. "Yes. It is an Axiom. Do you not have such sayings where you come from?"

"Not so much," Saren shook his head. "Chet was more of a 'do such-and-such or I'll kill you' kind of leader."

"Ah. How sad," she blinked slowly at him and let her expression drift from sadness to a faint smile.

"So you're here to do what?" he turned his head a bit to the side to peer at Valtoza. "You want to figure out what I'm good at so I can work for you?"

She shook her head and the smile playing across her lips strengthened.

"I am here to ... Serve you ... to share a bed? How do your people say it?"

Saren started at that.

Next, he coughed politely to cover for it.

"You have been with a woman before, in that way?"

"I ... no ... I have no wife," he tried to hold on to his composure. "Won't your husband be angry?"

Valtoza's smile, as breathtaking as the rest of her, nearly spilled into laughter.

"There are no husbands and wives here. No one owns anyone."

"And if I put a child in you?"

"That will not happen," her voice became stern and knowing. "Women have children when they want to and only then."

"Some magic?" Saren twitched suspiciously.

"Something like that," she assured him.

"So ...?"

"I think," she eyed him curiously and her expression softened, "that you are separate from the others."

"What gave me away?"

"Your attitude, your diction and your relations," Valtoza twisted her lips. "In that order."

"I've never really managed to stay in one place," Saren admitted. "I don't get along well with most of the people I run across."

"Yet they accept you rather than drive you out or kill you."

"I'm useful," Saren tilted his head and twitched one eyebrow.

"I'm sure we'll find out later," Valtoza brushed all conversation aside with a wave of her hand. She moved to sit in the scant space beside him on his bunk. "Perhaps you should lie on your back. I will try to be gentle."

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words issued forth. Instead, Valtoza's hand touched his shoulder and firmly pushed him backwards. Saren couldn't be sure if he gave way so easily because of her strength or his shock.

"It's better this way," she began unlacing the beige shorts the soldiers had given him. "There will be no bad habits to unlearn."

"You're actually going to -"

"Yes," she said. "It is our way, as you will see."

She reached around behind her neck to undo a clasp. Layers of orange cloth, individually nearly transparent but opaque in combination, slid gently over her flesh, falling in a pool around her waist as they slowly revealed her breasts.

Saren let out a gasp. In his life, he'd seen many breasts, mainly as a consequence of the low quality garments available to his tribemates. It meant little to him to catch such a glance through threadbare cloth or cleavage displayed by a low-hanging shirt. Valtoza, however, had a fine, hard body, and though her breasts were not the largest he had ever seen, they were smooth, held high by her chest muscles, and tipped with a fine pair of sharp, pink nipples planted in a wide, unblemished areola.

"Huh," he repeated, gulping.

Her fingers traced gentle lines over his plain white underwear, stroking the erection that was coming unbidden.

"It is good you are not shy," she said.

"Neither are you," he pointed out.

"No one here is shy about such things."

"You don't say."

She stroked him a while longer, first with one fingertip, then two.

"You should touch me, too," Valtoza pitched her voice strangely, in a way that delivered instruction without conveying insult. Zhair'lo would have recognized the tone instantly as one used by the Temple's teachers, but Saren had never met women who knew how to give directions.

Carefully, unsure of any of the rules or mysteries that went between men and women, he extended one hand to touch her bare waist. Her skin was smooth around her stomach and touching it sent a chill up his arm.

Valtoza smiled in a way that let him know both her appreciation for his touch and her desire for greater boldness. Her hand, busy between his legs, now surrounded his erection with thumb and forefinger, still moving gently along its length.

Saren slid his hand up from her waist to touch her ribs and from there to press gently at the outermost swell of her breasts. When Valtoza blinked slowly and murmured in response, Saren took it as permission to slide his hand over her breast, his palm gently touching her nipple, which stiffened as she shivered.

"You understand very well," she said softly, tightening her grip.

"Do I? Maybe by accident," he continued making soft circles over nipple.

"There is wisdom in using the smallest amount of force necessary."

That, Saren decided, was probably one of the Axioms she'd spoken of earlier. It ought to be, at least.

Impatience seemed to overcome Valtoza as Saren noticed that her face had reddened. She slid his underwear down his legs and set his erection free. With an enthusiastic smile, she slid down the length of the bunk to sit beside his knees. It took her breasts out of range of his hands, but allowed her to lean over his erection and look at it closely.

At least that's what Saren thought she was doing, right up until her tongue snaked out of her mouth and traced a meandering route from the base of his shaft of to the tip.

He let out another gasp and felt his penis twitch, lifting itself away from his stomach to lightly tap Valtoza on the chin.

"Ah," she said in wary surprise. "We'd better get that inside quickly."

Valtoza stood up beside the bunk suddenly, the flowing orange sheets of fabric that had covered her chest slid further down, overlapping with the pieces of cloth covering her lower body. There was only one other clasp to undo and the whole ensemble floated down, drifting gently around her body like a collection of auburn maple keys spinning about their stem.

Saren didn't have any breath left with which to gasp, but merely stared dumbfounded at the nude woman before him, the neat patch of blonde hair between her legs matching exactly with the hair on her head. He'd caught glances of women down there, too, but none had ever been as clean and smooth as what he saw then. A part of him was glad he'd never taken a wife.

In a moment, she had straddled him.

"I believe you are ready," she breathed, her small breasts swinging lightly before his eyes.

"I believe that, too," he choked out.

"Good."

Saren had no idea what to expect in this regard. The anatomy of a man aroused he well understood, for he could satisfy his own body. As to what transpired between men and women, he had only a vague idea of structure and angles, for he had joined and left many tribes and not everyone cared for privacy.

So when Valtoza pushed herself down and he felt her wet lips part around his erection, he shivered in anticipation. She engulfed him, hot and wet, and full of ridges both hard and soft along the tunnel into her belly.

Then a tingling hit him in a way which he could not adequately describe.

It started between his legs, travelled up his spine and started to work inside his head.

Emphatically, he knew he was not experiencing an orgasm. He knew this because he'd given himself such in his times of need and there was none of the spasmodic jerking, nor the feeling of sudden relief.

This was something other.

He felt himself go away and come back, even as he remained aware of the gyration of Valtoza's hips and the sensations of her insides twisting and squeezing at his erection.

Insides his head, she pushed his thoughts around. He could feel himself ... changing, or maybe ... being changed. Valtoza was a rake and a hoe, toiling at the garden in his mind. There was no pain, as of the grinding of digging, but he was conscious of the gentle touch of a weed pulled, a furrow ploughed and a seed planted. Still, a part of his mind resisted, rejecting the change. But he could no more resist it than soil could resist a plough pulled by a dozen oxen.

Valtoza carried out alterations, and Saren felt it, but only for a moment.

Then his thoughts were occluded, his vision went white, and he knew nothing for a long, long time.

-===================-

The next day, while Saren slept, the Recruits ran.

Zhair'lo thought a day of mere running would be a relief , so the amount of pain sore arms caused while running double patrols surprised him.

The following day was consumed by further sword training, slashing and stabbing at wooden dummies again. If he tried hard enough, Zhair'lo could imagine that his increasing strength made the second day easier.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 27



Their days were like this for a week and there was nothing for any of them except burning in their lungs, aches in their arms and a determined but weary round of Service every night.

-===================-

For Talla and her coven, the week went no better. She spent her days with V'shika, Illya and the other Virgins practising phalanx manoeuvres with the women of Form and every free moment until she had to go out to Serve reading in the Library.

Temples, she learned, did Fall - and the books always capitalized the word. The Librarian, a rather gentle Adept in her late thirties, took a liking to Talla for her devotion.

"Interested in Fallen Temples, are we?" she'd asked on the first day.

Talla, well prepared for curiosity regarding her own curiosity, had replied very earnestly, "It helps with the training in Form - to know why it is we're fighting."

If you're going to learn to fake anything, she had decided, the best thing to fake was sincerity.

From that first encounter, the Librarian had been exceedingly helpful in finding Talla all of the records, tales and legends available.

Language had changed over the centuries, despite the earnest attempts of the Temple to freeze it in place, and linguistic drift slowed her pace.

Worst of all, the translated information didn't always make sense. The records described clearly mythical stories, featuring dragons breathing fire at the command of wild men. The thrown spears of the women of Form, the stories said, tore such beasts from the skies and bolts of lightning launched forth from the High Officers of the Temple took care of what remained.

Talla wished she could be so naive as to believe such things.

Even if she wanted to believe in dragons, it never turned out such things had the capability of bringing down a Temple. The women defending it always beat the beasts back, though hundreds of them ended up turned to charcoal and ash.

'I don't have a dragon,' she thought, 'and I have no desire to burn my sisters regardless.'

The realistic accounts weren't particularly helpful either.

Of all the ways for Temples to Fall, an invading army of wild men came up as the most common. The men rarely succeeded against Temples older than fifty years. Once an area had been pacified longer than that, no army within marching distance that could do it damage.

But again, Talla commanded no barbarian armies, regardless of Zhair'lo's forays in that area.

The discovery of subtler means was her goal.

Goddesses had been assassinated. The histories mentioned this, distributed amongst the tales of lightning bolts and inexplicable building collapses. Women sometimes became angry with each other and, in contest for Ascension, Queens fought. Talla found this curious, for she had always heard that the decision was easily made: in stability Sweetness; in expansion Endowment. Why should they fight, when Goddesses served so little time anyway before the weight of the Perfections drove them to early weakening and death?

But they did fight, and the books contained no clear record of the issues at hand. Parchment, the Librarian would remind her when she asked, had not always been so cheap. There might be a disagreement over a new technology, or the disposition of a certain remote group of men, or possibly the way that the people who lived in the city were treated.

It excited Talla that the High Officers of the Temple cared enough to start a lethal battle amongst themselves over the privileges of the people around them. The Temple, it turned out, was not some monolithic entity bent on making her life miserable.

And if, after a Goddess died, the Queens fought for Ascension, there was always the chance that one of them could lose a Sorceress too. This was how some Temples Fell.

Again, though, Talla had no way to get Queens to kill each other. Still, if one were to count dragons, she had found three different ways to attack a Temple and she'd only been at it a week.

So she read more histories, stopping only for dinner and reading more until she had to go out to Serve.

The stories always went on to describe the chaos that followed the collapse of the Goddess's power: unbelievable nonsense about the men of the city turning wild and killing each other before turning on the women of the Temple. Talla didn't quite put such tales in with the myths of dragons, but she was too wise to believe that the boys she had sex with almost every night of the week would suddenly attack her.

In the end, each story had a happy ending, with the necessary Conduits coming in from remote cities to restore the Perfections and let a new Goddess Ascend to the Obsidian Throne.

'When I make this Temple Fall,' she thought, 'I'll make sure to destroy the throne. I never want to be ruled again.'

There was a dogged relentlessness about her. Amongst the repetitive tales, the quest she had set herself often seemed pointless, but she reassured herself that accumulating the knowledge of the library gave her the best path forward.

-===================-

For Maksa, the week was frenetic.

With the permission of her Sorceress, she prepared a list of requests to be sent to Beshenna.

The biggest question to ask, "What data did Beshenna have?"

Not knowing what her sisters of another city held in their records, she was forced to take guesses and ask more questions. Every time she thought she had the right set of questions, however, she realized an important item she had missed, or a word choice that had been ambiguous.

Maksa had her numbers and her charts. She could take guesses as to how various lineages of women fared when it came to producing Heroes, Catatonics and Enraged but that was taking her measurements at one remove from their true sources.

She really wanted to know how women acted when a Temple fell, but the exact nature of the differences between their normal actions and their actions during a Fall had to be left to the discretion of the people who held the records.

'Find me every report on any odd behaviour of women during the Fall of Beshenna in 788,' she wrote for what had to be the ninth time. 'The most important records are those relating to criminal court proceedings and genealogies of any women who were found to have committed unusual crimes during the three weeks before the Temple was restored.'

Maksa would write on like this for some time, trying to cast as wide a net as possible in her search for the ways in which women might be affected by the strange inheritance that so deeply controlled the fortunes of men.

-===================-

By the time Maksa had finished composing her letter and had her Mistress carefully seal it for delivery to their co-conspirators in Beshenna, Zhair'lo and the other seven Recruits were beginning their second week of weapons training.

After the first seven exhausting days, they approached their practice field with a wary look in their eyes, for the wooden dummies had been replaced by their instructors, clad in thick leather armour.

"At the end of this week," Sergeant Yung promised them on the eight morning, "you'll be ready to run four patrols in a day. That would be enough, should you have the need, to reach the northeastern Barracks. For now we will curtail the patrols in favour of more intellectual exercises while we also improve your sword skills."

"Now we will find out how well you've been paying attention," the Sergeant explained. "These soldiers will now attempt to strike you, using the same attacking poses against which you have been practicing the past week."

"Boys first, girls in the second row. Let us begin."

Within a bell, it was clear to Zhair'lo that the instructors were not above using pain to teach their lessons. They weren't stupid, so they used wooden swords, but they could still deliver a painful blow to make it clear to each Recruit where his or her weaknesses laid.

Zhair'lo discovered his weaknesses were everywhere, but didn't let that trouble him. He knew they wanted to teach him to use a sword, and if they chose this method, it had to be the fastest way possible. If there were bruises, so be it. Wherever he went, whatever plan he and Talla hatched, it wouldn't hurt to own sword fighting excellence amongst his skills.

The more interesting lessons, however, were the ones they took when their overworked arms and battered bodies couldn't function on the field anymore. It surprised Zhair'lo to find that Fighter doctrine maintained that every person in the Barracks had to understand the tactics they used.

"A soldier who knows the entire strategy of the battle will fight better for the knowing," Sergeant Yung explained. "And confidence in the plan will put stone in her spine."

Fighters kept nothing from each other in this respect. Everyone went into every battle knowing the goal and the path to it. And each of them knew his or her part.

They examined maps, again and again, of real battlefields: both open places where barbarians had approached cities and closed in camps like the place where Berel and Merelda's tribe had lived.

Sergeant Yung would ask them how they would prepare for the battle. Where would the archers go? Where would the swordsmen stand? Where would reserves be hidden? They learned about the dangers of crossfire, the values inherent in high ground, surprise and drawing first blood.

When engaging larger, more powerful opponents, their instructors would describe other methods, and here Zhair'lo paid very close attention, for his intended opponent maintained a very large population indeed.

Weak spots, Sergeant Yung advised, had to be found.

A tribe might be tight on water, so a few dead animals could be dropped in a river upstream from where they drank. Another might be short on food, so repeated Hunts could starve them out. If worst came to worst, stray barbarians could be picked off until the tribe was too weak to pose a threat, but this meant killing a lot of people that could otherwise serve fruitfully in the city.

No, cutting off some vital supply was wiser, so as to drive the invaders to near starvation and offer them a hand up once catastrophe put them on their knees. More peaceful outcomes were produced that way.

At night, when Zhair'lo had finished with whomever came up in the cycle, he would converse with Talla.

She would regale him with the histories she had been reading and he would invite her to guess at the Temple's weaknesses.

'What about the water?'

'What about it, Zhai?'

'Could we poison it like they do to barbarians? Do something to that aqueduct?'

'It's insanely well guarded, first of all,' Talla replied. 'And second, we'd be killing ourselves and our friends.'

Therein laid the problem with most of the ideas in Zhair'lo's head. Each possibility suggested by the tactics used against barbarians would bring suffering on the wrong target. That was why the Synergist store was so tempting. It attacked the power of the Temple with such accuracy it would be the envy of any Hunter who had ever notched an arrow.

Both Zhair'lo and Talla exuded supreme confidence toward the idea that the Temple had a weakness. There remained only the matter of finding and exploiting it.

-===================-

Maksa knew that it would take eight days for a message and its response to make its way around between Gern and Beshenna, and that such speed required either hell-bent runners from Form or riders on horseback in both directions.

She consequently expected nothing for at least two weeks and had been surprised to have been summoned to Principia Pussy to "discuss a message". Even if something important had come through, Maksa regarded her work in the catacombs as far too important to be interrupted, an evaluation with which her Mistress agreed. Why wouldn't the Sorceress of Pussy simply tell her about the message during the daily inspections she made of Maksa's work?

These and other mysteries would hopefully be revealed to her.

As she entered Sweetness Hall, she gave the guards a polite nod and ascended the stairs to the second floor. The women on the floor, busy as always, seemed to Maksa as a little more frenetic than usual. It still hadn't been established what had caused so many women to fall unconscious that night two weeks before. Working underground, as she often did, Maksa had briefly been concerned for her own safety, but the engineers from Strength had assured her the chance of a fume of any kind getting into her work area rated as infinitesimal.

Still, she felt the quiet tension on the fine marble floor, as those women in their skimpy orange outfits went about their work.

'One day,' Maksa cast jealous eyes on their clothing, 'I'll be dressed like you.'

She paused at the top of the stairs to glance down at the single yellow sash that covered her left breast. It would have to do for now.

There were more Enforcers from Form than usual guarding the entrance to her Mistress's Offices. Maksa walked past them and through the floor of Principia Pussy, where a slew of busy women studiously ignored her. She slipped through the doors of the rearmost office where the Sorceress of Pussy held court in the waning evening sunlight.

Along with the Sorceress, six Officers and two Adepts sat on spartan couches around a low wooden table. A roll of parchment, bearing the signs of having been opened and hastily rerolled, held the centre of the otherwise empty surface.

"Seal the doors, Maksa," Pussy's voice dripped with worry.

"What's wrong?" Maksa barred the door and approached the group.

Pussy held up a warning finger before reaching down to her waist to untie her simple work skirt. Following suit, the Officers undid their skirts, after which the Adepts slid out of their grass skirts and underwear. Maksa had the easiest effort of all, removing her bottom while still standing. Satisfied that all conspirators had demonstrated awareness of the gravity of the situation, the Sorceress went on.

"We have received a message from Beshenna," Pussy waved a timid finger at a long scroll of parchment in front of her. "She has some concerns."

Two of the Officers stretched out the roll of parchment. To Maksa's eyes, it appeared to be a manifest, listing various supplies and their current and expected availabilities over the next several months.

"A code?" she asked.

"Yes, a well practised one," one of the Officers put in. "The Sorceress of Pussy in Beshenna fears that our enterprise is on the brink of being discovered."

That explained the worried looks accumulating around the table.

"Form is catching on?" Maksa wondered.

It would make sense. If there was one group of people who would absolutely abhor the genetic games Pussy was playing, it would be the egalitarian rule makers in Form.

"The Queen of Endowment, believe it or not," the same Officer tapped an innocent looking number on the parchment. "The woman has become so suspicious she nearly caught our Goddess's baby being brought in. They accomplished a narrow escape, apparently." 

"But the baby has been renamed?"

"Yes, but Pussy in Beshenna has had to be much more careful with the records," the Officer replied. "At Endowment's behest, Form has begun counting every bottle of breast milk in the nursery."

Maksa considered this for a moment. She knew from experience that the Temple kept very careful records where births and deaths were concerned. In that case, there would have to be evidence whenever a baby that shouldn't exist suddenly had to live somewhere and have parents and all the rest. She'd assumed the conspiring genealogists of Pussy would have developed a foolproof system by now.

"What of my request?"

"Your request?" Pussy replied. "It would have crossed paths with this message somewhere in the wilderness"

"I hope it won't cause problems," Maksa grimaced.

"No," Pussy shook her head in assurance. "It is not permitted for anyone but the recipient of a message to break a Sorceress's wax seal."

Maksa tilted her head, noting the green seal on this message and wondering at the need for encryption, but said nothing.

"All we can do from here is increase our vigilance," the Sorceress straightened as she spoke. "In time, Pussy of Beshenna will furnish us with details of what aroused suspicion in her city. We will be careful to make sure we do not draw attention to our efforts in the same way."

"There's nothing in there about what tipped off Endowment?" Maksa asked.

Pussy shook her head.

"I don't suppose we can let off on our attempts to build stronger Goddesses either, can we?"

The Officers, as one, looked at Maksa first, then at their Mistress.

"No," Pussy said firmly. "We can not afford that."

-===================-

In the building heat of late morning, four boys and four girls stood in a practice field, lined up as they always did. Though their arms and legs had leaned out, their hearts strengthened, and their bodies readied for a fight, none of these changes compared to the gritty hardness in their eyes.

"Recruits," Sergeant Yung sang out. "Two weeks of weapons training have now passed. What started with wooden dummies has ended with basic training against moving opponents. I do not want you to think that you are as capable as veteran Fighters, but you would probably survive a battle if we had to send you in to one."

Did eight chests rise at the compliment?

"Probably," the Sergeant emphasized. "Don't get too proud."

Zhair'lo held in a smile. This was the way Fighters joked with their own.

"Today you have a last few patrols to run," he began walking along their lines. "Out and back in both directions. When you get back this evening, we'll have a little party for you."

-===================-

Twenty kilometres amounted to a nontrivial amount of running, especially now that 'running' included an expectation of carrying real swords on their backs. The female Recruits carried the shorter swords they'd spent the latter week training with, but they also carried bows.

Zhair'lo got the worst deal of all, as his burden included both a full size sword and a bow with a quiver of arrows. There were tricks he alone had been taught for drawing one or the other. The most important warning involved never trying to draw his sword while it was sheathed on his back. The sheath only rode there while he ran. Once battle neared, it had to be shifted to his waist, which would make it easy to draw and also make his bow available.

When they came to a stop at one of the way stations, he would watch the Ranger Hera make the procedure look damned easy. Seeing her smooth movements, Zhair'lo realized how much practice and drill she must have put it into simple things like moving a sword off her back and retying it at her belt.

By the time they completed their fourth and last patrol of the day, the evening sun cast long shadows perpendicular to the wall of the Barracks they now approached.

By the end of the fourth run, Zhair'lo's legs approached rubber status. Two weeks of weapons training had certainly toughened him, but they'd never run four patrols in a single day before. Real Fighters, however, did this all the time. He glanced at Sergeant Yung, who had been with them all day. Whereas Zhair'lo was drenched in sweat, the Sergeant wasn't even breathing hard.

They slowed down when they came within hailing distance of the Barracks' south facing gate.

Sergeant Yung bellowed out the code phrases in a voice that couldn't possibly come from a person who had just finished a five kilometre encumbered run.

Relief flooded Zhair'lo as the gates opened.

"Hit the armoury and the showers quickly, all of you, and then get to the mess for some water," the Sergeant's shouted. "No time to waste. Move! Move!"

Spurred on by the urgency in his voice, the Recruits bolted forward, followed immediately by two squads of Veterans. The showers, consequently, were packed full of naked bodies. One moon ago, that many naked women would have had Zhair'lo dying for Service, but no matter how strong their legs or how massive their breasts, there wasn't enough energy left in his body to manage an erection in the first place, never mind the chill he got when Zia hit the lever to douse them both with a cold spray of water.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 27



The temperature shock reinvigorated Zhair'lo enough he managed to stay on his feet to exchange hygienic favours and nothing more. The rush inspired by their orders meant a quick and official cleaning on their way to whatever came next.

Every now and then, through the soap and water, he would catch the weary eyes of another Recruit.

'We did this,' they seemed to say to each other, and a wry grin would come to both their faces.

The Veterans, meanwhile, kept up a loud and raucous chorus accompanied by a lot more ass-slapping than he would have expected, but he'd never showered with them until today.

'And nine gods, the women ...'

The cold water, contrary to his expectations, was re-energizing him in more ways than one.

It was Aloe who caught Zhair'lo looking, his eyes lingering somewhere in the vicinity of the light fuzz of hair she kept in a neat triangular patch between her legs. Realizing her gaze was upon him, he twitched to look up at her face, but she only winked and grinned before turning smoothly away like a wet statue on a rotating pedestal.

'Nine gods. How can I be turned on after a day like this?'

The answer came to him instantly, even as Zia drenched him with another blast of soap clearing water: they'd trained him for this, just like everything else.

They towelled off quickly and starting getting dressed again. Zhair'lo found a clean pair of underwear and his leather shorts, which he laced up quickly. The laundry attendants had provided a clean, white undershirt too, but he could find no sign of his leather top.

"You got a top?" Zhair'lo asked Zia.

"Doesn't look like it," she searched the clothing rack. "Just a shirt, same as you."

Always in a rush, she had put her shirt on before she'd completely dried herself. The white fabric clung to her breasts and abdomen, wrinkling against her skin until she yanked on the hem and straightened the shirt out.

"I'm sure it'll dry off once we're out of here," she swore confidently.

As they stepped out into a world of red clouds and streaming horizontal beams of sunlight, Zhair'lo nodded in a way he hoped indicated sage agreement. Any embarrassment Zia might have felt about the moist prominence of her nipples in the cooling evening air was immediately assuaged by a combination of the evening's darkness and the sudden exodus of the other Recruits from the showers.

A brief discussion ensued about the missing halves of their armour before they headed to the mess. Copious amounts of water greeted their loud entrance and Zhair'lo noticed that, for once, their boisterousness matched any group of Veteran Fighters that had ever gathered in the mess. The thought fled his mind, however, as a low part of his brain directed him straight to the table covered in pitchers of water.

The Recruits grabbed several pitchers and cups and immediately claimed a table for themselves as more and more Veterans started filing in. Some of them had come from the showers, the same who had been patrolling with Zhair'lo and his comrades, while others were coming from elsewhere. Though just as loud as the Recruits, they moved to the water table in a decidedly more patient manner. Zhair'lo shrugged off a nagging feeling of inferiority, reminding himself that he had plenty of time and room to grow.

Besides, they were having a party of sorts, weren't they?

The room filled quickly and it soon seemed the gathering had attracted every Fighter Zhair'lo had ever met, except possibly the Rangers. He tried to imagine the blonde Ranger Hera, or her darker complexioned companion Seh-tin, hanging out with this crowd. Did Rangers ever do this sort of thing? Naturally quiet and careful, such loners didn't belong here.

His thoughts cut off abruptly as a loud voice bellowed for attention. Benches slid out and voices silenced as the entire room came to its feet.

"Master Kendrik, sir," a female voice called out.

The sturdy, grizzled man walked down the centre aisle of the mess, turning to look back at all those gathered only when he reached the single step between floor and dais.

"As you were," he growled.

They quickly took their seats and Kendrik surveyed the room. Someone from the kitchen quickly lit the three wall-mounted torches behind the dais. Another brought a small, folding table, about hip height, up onto the dais a step to the right of the Master Fighter.

"Ji'ann?" Kendrick waved his left hand at the table beside him.

"Sir," the tall dark woman walked the same aisle, carrying a stack of neatly folded leather in her arms.

"Thank you," Kendrick gave a pleasant half smile when she laid the garments down on the table.

As Ji'ann slipped off to the side of the stage, Kendrick hooked his thumbs in his belt.

"When I came to this town - he Gods know how many years ago -" there was some deep, quiet laughter at this, "I was intent on making this unit Serve the Temple better than it ever had."

"We made a lot of changes," he stared directly at the Recruits. "We broke a lot of rules. A few were even broken in a rather spectacular manner, you may have noticed."

Zhair'lo felt those cold eyes boring into his skull and had to wonder if this man had been told about his interaction with Talla. As the evening had turned to night, the darkness in the mess had deepened. Master Kendrick stood silhouetted in a pool of torchlight on the dais while the rest of the room faded away.

"We eat together. We drink together. We sleep together. And for all that, we work together far better than we did when I first arrived."

"After tonight, you eight will be Fighters. Not just that, you will be the sorts of Fighters who can win battles and - this is the important bit - survive battles. I have no desire to train your replacements, understand?"

This was funny, at least to the Veterans, who gave it a rousing cheer.

"Yeah, yeah," Kendrick politely waved them to silence. His eyes focused again on the Recruits. "You will fight. You will defend this Temple. You will survive. And you will do all of that because you are never afraid to learn more. There is no one in this room who knows everything. No one here is perfect. The battlefield will cure any woman or man of that delusion very quickly. Always be ready for a lesson."

For a moment, he pulled his shoulders back so he was addressing the entire room.

"Do you understand?!" he shouted.

"Yes, sir!" they shouted back, Recruits and Veterans alike.

"Good," he nodded and cleared his throat. "Good. Ji'ann?"

There was some bustling over in the darkness beside the stage. Zhair'lo had the vague sense that there were people over there, arranging themselves. Master Kendrick was watching them, waiting patiently, until they settled down.

"Renzi, Zhair'lo, Kit, Z'rus," Kendrick waved his right hand toward the empty left half of the stage. "Up here."

The four boys took their places facing the audience of Fighters. They lined up, thoughtlessly, as they always did when they went marching.

"Their uniforms," Master Kendrick announced.

Ji'ann stepped up to the little table and began handing out the leather tops, one after the other, to women who slipped out of the darkness. Each of the women took a place in front of the one of the Recruits, one step down. Zhair'lo decided the stage was a convenient height, for it put Aloe's eyes level with his.

"Dress them."

Smiling, Aloe leaned forward and helped Zhair'lo into his armour, tying the laces for him.

"May your sword always be sharp, Soldier," she leaned in to whisper. "And your wits sharper."

She cinched up the last lace snugly and firmly before winking and backing away.

"Soldiers," the Master Fighter ordered. "One step back."

Kendrick then called out the names of the female Recruits and repeated the procedure. Zhair'lo found himself too busy admiring the single white chevron on his uniform to make out what the women whispered into their sisters' ears as they tied their armour on.

Finally, the Veteran women walked off the side of the stage, clearing the view of those assembled.

"Barbarians are at your gates!" Kendrick cried out.

This time the new Soldiers, having repeated these words every day, knew the drill and joined their sisters and brothers.

"Stand on the wall! Or the City falls!"

"Fighters?" he asked.

"To the Fore!"

"Fighters?"

"To the Fore!"

The repeated roars shook the walls and the pounding of fists on tables rattled the tin pitchers of water.

Silence came, sudden and sharp in contrast to primal rage that preceded it.

"Never forget," Kendrick hissed into the silence. "Never forget who you are. Never forget your duty."

The silence became a deep and thoughtful meditation as a strange tension filled the room. Kendrick let this linger for a handful of heartbeats before a rare, light grin broke across his face.

"Now let's welcome these girls and boys in."

A round of applause broke out and everyone in the room began moving. Before Zhair'lo knew it, reams of people shook his hand and patted him on the back. A few more torches were lit, not enough to brighten the room, but just to make sure no one tripped over anything. From somewhere, a woman pushed a wooden mug into his hand.

Zhair'lo coughed after taking a sip. "What is this?"

"Ambrosia, Soldier," Sergeant Yung appeared at this side. "Nectar of the gods. Mead, if you'd rather."

"It smells like honey."

"It's made from honey. Drink up."

"Sir," Zhair'lo forced down another sip. It wasn't unpleasant in flavour, but it was powerfully sweet and deeply alcoholic.

Fighters still took turns to shake his hand and he slowly drifted along with the well wishes which slowly separated him from the other Recruits until a female Fighter gently bumped him into a seat. Veterans chatted with him, asking him about his last run and reminiscing about their own training. Some of them had enough years to remember times before Master Kendrick had come. These old Fighters proudly regaled him with little snippets of such ancient stories.

Zhair'lo couldn't keep up with the thread of what he heard, but tried to answer any question put to him as coherently as possible. Between the exhaustion of the run and strength of his beverage, which was getting an automatic refill every time he took a sip, his confidence in his responses reached a deep low.

Who spoke to him now? Zhair'lo tried to recall the older man's name. Cal? Callian? Callus? No, a callus resembled a blister. He tried to shake his head clear and focus his eyes. Over the man's shoulder, he saw Aloe, the sweet talking Soldier, sitting on a table and looking directly into his eyes.

He'd been embarrassed, earlier, when she'd caught him looking at her naked body in the showers, but in his drunken state he could dismiss such feelings as foolishness. Their eyes held steady contact for a few heartbeats before her gaze lowered to indicate her legs. Zhair'lo followed her down and saw that she was sitting with her legs slightly apart, her feet planted on a bench between two Fighters who faced away. Where had her armour gone? She wore the double sashes and the kind of ribbon skirt appropriate for the rank of Adept II. Most significantly, she parted the long strands of her skirt and opened her legs in his direction.

Zhair'lo gulped. Forgetting his manners and catching a glimpse of her in the showers marked him discourteous enough, but here? What about the rules? Hadn't Talla warned him about those? He felt dizzy as he tried to pull up a memory involving stars over doorways and safe places for nudity.

A sudden thought gripped him.

What had Master Kendrick said?

'We broke a lot of rules.'

Aloe's eyes drifted back up to meet his, her skirt still out of place, and he felt himself stiffen inside his shorts and armour. Zhair'lo made the sudden inference that the rule breaking had not been a single event in the past, but instead a permanent change of affairs. A goofy grin broke over his face and he felt the alcohol take hold. Across the room, Aloe slid down to the floor, the strands of her skirt falling back into place. Her eyes, not her body, held Zhair'lo in a trance as she wended her way around tables and chairs until she stood towering over him. The space between his bench and the one behind her was so small that her knees necessarily brushed against his.

"Hello, Soldier," she smiled down at him. "Feeling the strength of our nectar, are we?"

"It's good stuff," he leaned back against the table and tilted his cup up toward her in acknowledgement.

The stony old Fighter, the man whose name Zhair'lo hadn't remembered, had vacated his place on the bench. With all the dangerous intent of a venomous snake, she settled down into the empty place, somehow arranging her legs so that only one narrow strand of her yellow skirt settled between her tightly closed thighs.

Zhair'lo might have had the good sense then to gulp, or react in some other astonished way, but the power of his mead had taken him and he felt no emotion other than lust, sensed no other person in the crowded room but the smooth, muscular woman who slowly parted her legs. If a thought about rules and differences in age flitted across his brain, his lust banished it to the same place it had exiled his ability to subtract eighteen from Aloe's age.

Aloe's eyes held his as her knees touched the inside of his thighs and the yellow strand of fabric fell to hang past the light fuzz of her freshly washed mound.

With her eyes, she invited him to look down at her so she could see that the thumb-wide piece of fabric concealed only the cleavage of her lips.

"Is this what you do here?" he asked.

"It's what we do," she grabbed his collar and gently pulled him forward until their cheeks almost touched. "You're one of us now."

"What we do," he acknowledged, but had to add, "With everyone watching?"

"You've done it every night since you got here, haven't you?" her breath warmed his neck.

"In our quarters," he protested weakly. "With the other Recruits."

"You aren't Recruits anymore," she pointed out. "And it's not going to stop you now."

"It isn't?"

"It's not as dark in this room for me as it is for you," Aloe snaked a hand along his bare knee and under his leathers. "I can see what your body is telling me."

Zhair'lo exhaled as she touched him, a light tingling graze along the top of the base of his burgeoning erection.

"See?" she hissed in his ear. "You'll be fine. And you're mine, at least at first. I saw you looking in the shower."

So Aloe had claimed him, then? Zhair'lo wondered how that had been worked out with the other women. While he wondered, she loosened the ties on his leather pants.

"I saw you first, when we found Merelda," he said suddenly.

"I don't remember being naked then," she paused in her efforts.

"No," Zhair'lo shook his head to clear his thoughts as a gleam came to his eyes. "I saw you running, then, moving so fast with your bow notched and ready."

"Ah."

She laid aside his leathers.

"You gave me a place in the firing line," he looked as deeply into her eyes as he could manage in his drunken state. "Why?"

"Because you knew what you were doing," she shrugged. "I could tell."

Her explanation was incomplete, but Zhair'lo couldn't say how or why. Nor could he question her further. She pulled down his underwear far enough to let his erection pop free and brought an end to casual discourse.

"Not shy, then," she remarked, stroking him to hardness.

"We're really going to ... here?"

Zhair'lo looked around the noisy room briefly and realized that almost no one was paying him any attention, though a couple of women sitting at the table behind Aloe looked on with vaguely enthusiastic interest.

"I'm ready," Aloe smiled again. "Aren't you?"

Zhair'lo couldn't deny the fact in his lap, but the look on her face gave him pause.

"Your smile and your voice," he said.

"Yes?"

"Are you Facial?"

"Clever boy," Aloe said. "Yes, I am"

"And a Fighter anyway?"

"A story for another day," she chided gently. "But since you mentioned it ..."

Aloe's head bobbed down into his lap, taking his full size erection completely into her mouth. It shouldn't have fit, but he realized she'd angled her mouth to let the head of his shaft reach into her throat. As quickly as she did it, she came off again, glaring at him with eyes that sparkled green in the torchlight.

"Nine gods."

"Yeah," she nodded. "Now let's get this started."

Aloe stepped over his bench to straddle him. Between her sudden act of oral sex and wetness of her own vagina, it was no trouble to lower herself on to him and let his erection slide inside her.

They both moaned in appreciation.

"No mesh?" Zhair'lo peered at her in sudden worry.

"Your drink," she pointed out, as if it should have been obvious they had slipped him something. "Try not to come right away, alright?"

"Why?" he felt his worry increasing.

Aloe started twisting her hips around in gentle circles. He felt the bones in her legs grinding against his thighs.

"They'd be disappointed," she threw a graceful flick of her hair toward the women behind her.

Zhair'lo did finally gulp. In one respect, he was relieved they hadn't given him the potion for preventing his orgasm. The night running with Rh'ris, Erin and En'tha had been one of the least pleasant in his young life. On the other hand, a performance was still expected of him here.

He wondered if this would be any more difficult than doing Upgrades.

Aloe placed her hands on the table behind Zhair'lo, pushing him back and forcing her chest into his face.

'Yes,' he thought. 'Yes, it's gong to be harder.'

"We see things," she whispered down over his head. "We women of Facial. Things others don't see."

"Like what?"

"You were looking at my pussy in the shower," she said. "An aimless accident, that. You're a breast man, through and through."

Zhair'lo didn't know what to say.

"So undress me already," she hissed at him, shrugging her shoulders to make it easier.

The sashes came off quickly over her lowered shoulders. The bikini top underneath was laced once at the back.

"Abundance and Point," Zhair'lo remarked, since he needed something to say.

"Can you count them?" she murmured, pushing her hips down as hard as he could.

"Two Abundance and one Point," he confirmed, holding off his orgasm with all his effort.

"So clever," she admired, and pushed her left breast into his eager mouth.

Zhair'lo sucked up her nipple, aureola and all and began running his tongue in circles over her flesh.

"Very nice," she pulled her breast away from his mouth. "That really is your thing."

He tried to formulate a response, but she brought her lips to his and he suddenly knew the kiss of a woman of Facial. Six upgrades and all of her enthusiasm went into that gentle, deliberate meeting of flesh and Zhair'lo found himself unable to match her skill.

"Sadly," she said, breaking away with a somber dip of her eyebrows, "my time is up."

"Time?"

Slowly, she lifted herself off his erection. He felt a light but cool breeze easing its way over his cock, working its way toward the tip as he left the warmth of Aloe's tunnel.

With a wince of sorrow rather than pain, she came clear, leaving his shining erection sprouting in the air between them. The strands of her skirt fell back into place and she adjusted her double sashes so they covered her breasts again, though the small top that had been underneath was left aside.

"Enjoy your night," she wished him happily. "See how long you can last."

"How long I can last?" he wondered aloud at her retreating back. "What do you -"

"Zhair'lo."

"Whuh?" his alcohol addled brain struggled to focus on the new person who addressed him.

A black haired woman, dressed in a tiny orange garments both top and bottom, sat on the bench where Aloe had been only a moment before. He recognized her by her dark, slightly slanted eyes, as being from one of the squads he'd patrolled with today. Her name did not come to the fore of his brain and he wondered briefly if they'd ever been introduced.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 27



When she reached out one strong hand to grab his wet erection, it became clear to Zhair'lo how his evening was planned.

As she stood up, he recognized, even in his inebriated state, the rock hard leg muscles of a Tight woman. She straddled him, as Aloe had, and pushed her tiny orange bikini bottom to the side of her genitals. She then impaled herself on him far more quickly than he had expected.

"Oh, she did get you nice and wet, Soldier-boy," the woman admired. "But it's my job to make you come."

'And yet,' Zhair'lo thought, 'Aloe told me to hold out as long as I could.'

The woman's immensely powerful thigh muscles locked around his back, embedding him as deeply inside as he could go. She'd had Within upgrades, too, and he felt those working at him, squeezing and trembling up his length.

"Swelling up," she murmured. "So good. What will they say of me, that I went first and made you come? I intend to disappoint the next in line."

Zhair'lo perceived a contest in progress, and blearily accepted it in his mind. The women wanted to force an orgasm from him and expected him to do his best to deny them.

For some uncountable length of time, they strove against each other, her legs and vaginal muscles against only his willpower.

"Come on!" the woman insisted. "Give me some of that come!"

Behind her, a few more women laughed and looked on with interest as the one on his erection continue to rock and violently twist at him.

"Aggie, Aggie!" one of the women mocked her. "Time's up."

"Gods damn it," the one they'd called Aggie removed herself from his erection abruptly and without ceremony.

Behind her was another woman in yellow. This one wore a stranded skirt in the more traditional style, where the strands were thin almost to the point of being grass. Zhair'lo noted she had already exposed one of her breasts, a nice handful. She wore the single sash of an Adept and had somehow lost the bikini top that should have been underneath it.

"Name's Atiya," she said curtly, her clipped tone telling him that this was all the introduction he'd be getting.

As Aloe and 'Aggie' before her, Atiya climbed over Zhair'lo to put her feet on the ground under the table at his back and sank herself down to envelope him.

The repeated penetrations, passing the tight ring of entry three times now, took their toll on Zhair'lo. How long could he fight this? Did the contest even have a point?

'No matter,' he thought. 'If they want to test me, I'll beat them.'

It occurred to him it might not be possible for anyone but a woman to claim victory. Eventually he would ejaculate inside one of them, wouldn't he? There had to be dozens of women and only the four newly graduated Soldiers to pass around.

At the very least, Atiya didn't have any Within upgrades. A distant part of his mind, operating behind the veil of alcohol, acknowledged one upgrade each of Abundance and Strength. He felt his senses going numb as Atiya's gyrations set her exposed breast bouncing up and down in his face.

'These women,' he noted, 'are all very tall.'

Zhair'lo knew her most potent weapons were her lips, and he could keep her from kissing him if he kept his head down. But that left him staring at that mesmerizing, oscillating breast with it's dark little nipple, stiffly at attention.

A raucous roar, of male and female voices, went up from some other corner of the room and a single female voice shrieked in triumph. Zhair'lo wondered which of his fellows had fallen already.

"Hup, hup," someone called from behind Atiya.

"Damn," she resigned, ceasing her gyrations.

"That's three!" someone else called out at Atiya gingerly removed herself from his cock.

Another woman, a grey-eyed blonde wearing orange double sashes across her slim chest and nothing below the waist, stepped into position.

"Four is quite enough for you, young man," she chastised in a deeply antagonistic teacher's voice. "It's time for you call it a night."

Zhair'lo took this for bravado and the mead gave him the courage to fight off such attempts at intimidation. Her experience caused him greater fear. The double sashes in orange meant an Acolyte II, which came with a whole host of upgrades in all sorts of Disciplines. Zhair'lo's eyes told him none of those had gone to increase the size of her breasts, but everything else about her was advanced far beyond anything in his experience.

Zhair'lo nearly choked as her vaginal muscles clamped down on his erection. She did things inside her body that no woman had ever managed before. Swirling sensations greeted him, even as her hips gyrated and she forced her tongue into his mouth. An overpowering scent assaulted his nostrils.

Surely this would break him. He felt a tingling sensation at the base of his erection, working it's way deeper into his body. He felt a deep desire to let it shiver up the length of his shaft. Never had such a fine body been presented to him as a place to release himself.

But Zhair'lo didn't let go. He wouldn't have it. His hatred for the Temple was stronger than his lust.

He sank his fingers into the woman's back, clinging to her body as he would hang on to the edge of a cliff. Greeted by the abyss of failure should he give up, he rode out the insane woman's attentions. He felt his brain shutting down. Could he pass out from this effort? His vision sparkled and he started to see black dots.

'I'm not breathing,' he realized and inhaled deeply, which vanquished the black spots.

"Hup, hup," another female voice called out, and he heard a cracking sound from behind the Acolyte II.

She harumphed and dismounted him in disappointment, rubbing at her rear where the next in line had just spanked her.

From another part of the room, he heard a screech of triumph and a cheer, which was quickly followed by another. Renzi, Kit and Z'rus had all given in, then? Only Zhair'lo remained.

'Can I stop, then? Is this victory?'

But he couldn't stop and he knew it. All of his strength and willpower would deny them, because the Temple brought this to him as a contest of wills. As much as he might like the players themselves, this game didn't belong to them as individuals. The women who took their turns at his erection constituted pieces on a board, pawns to be used and discarded. His battle remained with the ones in charge, the ones who'd made the rules keeping Talla from him. Through his drunken, sexually charged haze, this crystal clear fact held fast.

He meant to win this.

Zhair'lo faded in and out as women took their turns straddling him and taking his erection inside their bodies. Occasionally, just before fucking him, one would lean down to taste the myriad juices that had been left on him. The small bits of his mind that still functioned kept track of the numbers they shouted every time a woman left him.

There was an unusually long respite after he distinctly heard the number "eight".

"There's barely anything left of you in there," a deep rumbling voice came from the dark-skinned woman who had appeared in front of him.

"Ji'ann," he mumbled in recognition, unable to remember the proper honorific for the situation.

'Should I use 'Mistress' or 'Chief' when an endless string of women are fucking me in the mess hall?' he wondered.

Zhair'lo felt no surprise when the large woman mounted him, sliding her dark skin around his body and locking him into place. As an Officer she had countless unknown upgrades which she put quickly to work. She opened her blouse to him, first burying his head in her breasts before giving him her black nipples to suckle upon.

But still, he wouldn't come. His cock had numbed from the work they'd put into him. Heavy handed vaginal twisting and turning simply couldn't do the job.

Ji'ann took his chin in hand.

"He's done, Mistress," a soft voice came in from the side. "Let him know."

A light exhale that somehow indicated respect came out of the larger woman and she stood up and off of him.

"Who, then?" Ji'ann rumbled.

"Me," the soft voice answered. "I started it."

He recognized Aloe. Sweet, soft Aloe appeared in front of him again.

"Zhair'lo," she said. "It's okay. You're done. That's nine and no one ever does nine. It's okay now. You win."

A smile crossed his lips, but he really felt like exploding, or possibly just dying.

'Dying would be comfortable,' he thought. 'Peaceful and quiet.'

Aloe knelt on the floor.

"It's okay, now, Zhair'lo," she whispered. "You can come."

The juices of nine woman adorned his erection, and he knew Aloe tasted them all when she took him into her mouth. The tight, hard working muscles of the Form women had numbed him, but the gentle tongue work of a Facial woman could bring him to orgasm.

The head of his shaft pushed at the back of her throat and he felt her tongue go wide and lively against the sensitive spot on the underside.

Zhair'lo sighed in relief. Orgasm would finally come to him.

"Poor bastard," someone said, but it was respect.

He relented then, knowing he'd beaten the Temple, at least at this one ridiculous game, and let Aloe's effort succeed.

He felt his body jerk and he grunted, feeling his semen launch itself directly into the gentle woman's throat. She didn't miss a beat, continuing to work him with hand, lips and tongue until she'd drained him completely.

"Poor thing," Aloe lamented, putting his underwear back in place.

A couple of the older men patted him on the back and a round of applause saluted him

A glass of water made its way into his hand. Zhair'lo tried to make some gesture of gratitude, but his parched throat made more urgent demands so he drank instead.

His vision started to glaze over and he stared mindlessly across several tables at a torch on the wall. It been lit near the beginning of Master Kendrick's speech, so it burned steadily now and Zhair'lo let its colours mesmerize him.

Once, a long time ago, he'd apprenticed to a blacksmith, so he knew a thing or two about fires and what fed them and why they burned. Zhair'lo remembered his old Master explaining the importance of air flow in maintaining a fire. You couldn't have a flame without fresh air coming in, but at the same time you didn't want to lose all the heat generated.

Getting air to a torch didn't cause anyone a problem, of course. The heat took the smoke and flame upwards and easily available fresh air swooped in. Campfires could be tricky, if particularly dumb campers built them in a really poorly shaped pit.

'But with the right air flow,' Zhair'lo thought, 'you could burn just about - '

He gulped down a mouthful of water and sat bolt up right.

'Talla!' he shouted in his mind. 'Talla!'

A burning pain shot back at him from over forests and Temple walls.

'Gods damn it, Zhair'lo! What the hell?' Talla's protested with a shriek inside his head.

'It's a furnace!'

'What?'

'Nine hells, Talla. It's a furnace!'

Not only did Talla clearly not understand what he meant, she also began to doubt his mental condition.

'Are you drunk?'

'Very, but that doesn't matter.'

'Then what about a furnace?'

'Talla, we've been thinking all wrong. You've been trying to find a way to steal the Synergist and you don't need to.'

'I don't?'

'No. You just need to destroy it.'

There was a pause and he felt the mill stone grinding its way around as her mind realized the conclusion he had reached.

'You just need to destroy the Synergist, Talla,' he repeated. 'And they've done half the work for you because they've built a gods damned furnace right underneath it!'



Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 28



 Edited by Ken Scades.

*****

The walls of Endowment Hall shifted and flickered as the flames in the myriad fire pits danced in all the hues of orange and yellow. The scent of incense mixed with the aromas from the overheated flesh of hundreds of women. In every colour of clothing, they had come out after a night of Service to sing and drink and regale each other with the tales of the bells they had spent with the men of the city.

Not all took in the merriment, however. Off in a corner, the unsteady light of the flames failed to beat back and the shadows and four girls in white took advantage of the relative darkness to sit with their heads together.

"Are you sure this can work?" Illya wrinkled her nose in doubt.

"Zhair'lo is sure," Talla answered firmly.

"Yeah, but, come on," Illya pleaded, turning to look at Tina and Yua for assistance.

"What?" Talla's lips thinned in frustration.

The three girls looked at each other, cringing.

Talla titled her head with impatience. "Spit it out."

Yua and Illya, by way of of refusing to look at either each other or Talla, elected Tina to speak on their behalf.

"Have you ever worked with a furnace?" Tina asked.

"No," Talla shook her head in confusion.

"So how do you know this will work?"

"I told you," Talla repeated slowly. "Zhair'lo is sure."

"And how does he know?" Tina made her voice as gentle as possible. "I mean, he's not an engineer, is he? He's a boy."

Talla's brow lowered and her eyes hardened.

"He's pretty smart," she kept her voice cold and slow. "He's been a blacksmith, a baker and he's even made roof tiles."

"I know, I know," Tina held up her hands defensively. "I'm sure he's made a lot of fires."

"Listen, Talla," Yua slipped in softly as Tina turned her eyes aside. "You're asking a lot here."

"No, I'm not! We were all willing to go down in those sewers every night to find the Synergist room's vent. What makes it different now?"

"Now we'll be carrying wood and straw," Illya mimed carrying heavy loads under her arms. "It's a lot to sneak around with."

"As long as one of us carries the wood and the other carries the torch," Talla dictated in her best Sorceress voice. "There shouldn't be any accidents."

Her co-conspirators cast their eyes down.

"None of those are the real problem, though, are they?"Talla put a heavy dose of accusation in her question.

"Talla," Tina sighed. "He's still a man. Men are really good at doing things we've already worked out for them. We do the thinking. They do the work."

The axioms the Temple taught its girl children died hard, and the one Tina had just pronounced marked one of the most fundamental divisions of labour.

"Maybe if we could find a couple of engineers," Illya supplied helpfully. "Present it to them as a problem from a school test or something. See what they say?"

"If I did that, one of them is bound to recognize the room," she took in a deep calming breath before speaking again. "Yua, am I your Mistress or not?"

Yua recoiled as if slapped . "I - I - . Of course you are."

"Illya? Tina?"

The girls nodded in turn.

"Well, then," Talla flattened her voice, using the tone she'd heard Teachers, Officers and Sorceresses use. "Your Mistress is telling you this will work . I've been inside Zhair'lo's head and he sees these things in a way I don't. He knows it will work. So I know it will work. Clear?"

"Yes, Mistress," they murmured back.

"We'll start bringing wood in tomorrow," she instructed. "The straw will go in last, since it's the most dangerous to have around. Let's do this."

Despite the worries they'd expressed, Talla found herself rewarded with resolute smiles from her companions.

------===================-------

Fin'la entered Principia Form as the morning sun's rays slanted past the horizontal blinds on the east facing windows. In her role as the investigator of the recent bouts of unconsciousness, her Queen had assigned her a privileged place in Principia Form. Her space included a bulletin board on which she had tacked numerous pieces of parchment listing those affected by fainting spells. Her Queen had also awarded her a modicum of privacy in the form of a low wall of stretched sheets of fabric, and a single assistant of the rank of Keeper. That assistant, a petite blonde girl with a perpetually bored expression, waited patiently for Fin'la to give her instructions.

'She's twenty-two, though,' Fin'la thought. 'I ought to call her a woman.'

"Sheila," Fin'la gave the woman a nod.

"Mistress."

"Our medical records have arrived, then," she nodded wearily at the piles of parchment on the desk.

Sheila hadn't touched any of the files because Fin'la hadn't left any explicit instructions for her to do so. No spark of initiative lit inside the girl and Fin'la couldn't help thinking of her in the childish form. At first, Fin'la had wanted to make a project of building her assistant a spine, but had given up the effort shortly after beginning. Some people, she had determined, the gods cast in bronze and no help could remold them.

"Let us make ourselves useful, then," Fin'la resolved aloud, setting a pile of the documents on each side of the desk. "The ones you've read go in the middle when you're done."

"Yes, Mistress."

'At last the girl has found something she'd be good at,' Fin'la held her sigh inside. 'A mountain of tedium.'

Watching Sheila set to work, Fin'la found herself annoyed that anyone could attack such pointless work with such contentment and devotion. With a twist of her lips, Fin'la set upon her own stack.

Nearly two bells into the brutal slog through the dry medical records, Sheila looked up.

"Mistress," the Keeper's voice came out flat and dull.

"You found something?" Fin'la asked.

The girl's tone made it impossible to tell if she had discovered the secret to the universe or merely needed to void her bladder.

"No, Mistress. A guest."

Fin'la looked up at Sheila to find the younger woman looking over Fin'la's shoulder. Fin'la turned around to see a woman in an Enforcer's light leathers standing uncomfortably at the edge of the small domain of her office.

From the woman's stature, with her hard mid-riff bared and her legs at stiff attention, Fin'la recognize her as coming from Iron with very little Tight. This one had obviously preferred the Facial upgrades - her hair showed a great deal of strawberry blonde.

"We have not met, I think?" Fin'la rose to greet the woman. "I am Fin'la."

"Mistress," the woman replied with a stiff awkwardness altogether different from Sheila's sheer boredom. "My name in Marissa."

"Is there some way I can help you?" Fin'la asked. "As you can see, we are quite busy."

Some battle waged behind the woman's eyes and Fin'la developed a sense that Marissa had something embarrassing to say.

"You are investigating the ... fainting spells?"

"Yes, I am. Do you know something of them?"

Marissa inhaled deeply before speaking, "May I sit?"

Perplexed, Fin'la waved the troubled woman to the only empty seat in the small space. Taking the seat, Marissa sat stiffly focused her eyes over their heads.

"Several weeks ago," she spoke with painful formality, "during one of the heat bells, I chased a girl roaming out of place."

"A trivial matter," Fin'la shrugged it off.

"I pursued her, in the worst heat of the summer, and found myself suddenly struck unconscious."

Even Sheila perked up at this.

"At first," Marissa went on, "I put it down to the fact of the heat, my recent upgrade and the weight of my leathers."

"What of the girl you chased?" Fin'la asked immediately.

"Exactly, Mistress," Marissa almost snapped back. "Endowment. Abundance. Even with everything I had against me, she should have passed out first."

With a sniff, the Enforcer returned her gaze to the walls and her demeanour stiffened once more.

"When I woke, she ran past me, unaware of my presence but still full of energy. Foolishly, she returned two days later, meeting - as it turned out by her own confession - the same boy she had met before."

"So she outran you," Fin'la steepled her fingers in front of her face, "and had enough energy left to have sex with a boy and run past you again? Meanwhile, you had passed out."

"Yes," Marissa's cold voice replied.

"She then came to meet the same boy again?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Did she have sex with him then?"

"She caused him to ejaculate in her mouth - rather thoroughly - which was enough for the charge of Monogamy."

"But on the second occasion," Fin'la stroked her jaw, "did you experience any fainting?"

"No, Mistress."

Fin'la brushed her hair back, "Was the usual punishment applied for Monogamy?"

"Of course, Mistress," Marissa relaxed now, meeting Fin'la's eyes. The embarrassing part of her story had past.

"Then you must have the names of both parties?"

"Yes, Mistress. Talla Ch'lai and Zhair'lo M'han."

"Zhair'lo?" Sheila blurted out as she rose from her seat to examine the bulletin board.

"He's on our list, isn't he?"

"Yes," Sheila pointed at the last name, scrawled in Temple Script on a piece of parchment hanging off the bottom of the bulletin board. "He was at the Hunter's camp."

"A connection at last," Fin'la breathed. "Let's find out where he slept the night of second incident, re-interview whoever Served him the night of the first ... what else?"

Fin'la smiled.

"And let's bring this Talla woman in for an interview."

------===================-------

Maksa looked up as a woman crept into the catacombs late in the afternoon. Even in the dim light near the steps at the entry to her chilly work place, Maksa recognized Agra, an Adept and co-conspirator, and stood up eagerly when she saw the small scroll the woman held in her hand.

"Where are the documents I requested?"

"I'm sorry, Mistress," the Adept waved her empty left hand apologetically at the scroll in her right. "This is all that came for you. The rest were addressed to our Mistress, who requests your attendance in her Office immediately after you read your correspondence."

Maksa cracked the scroll open and hastily unrolled it:

---

While we are aware of the importance of your efforts, in light of recent events, We do not wish to use Our access at the present time to acquire the documents in question. Nor do We have the resources to copy such documents for your perusal.

Apologies,

Sorc Psy, Beshenna

---

Maksa's mouth hung open in speechless shock. The woman hadn't even had the decency to scrawl her entire title in the signature. What 'recent events' affected her research anyway?

"Our Mistress awaits us?" Maksa stood up to face the Adept.

Agra nodded and the two of them made their way out of the catacombs.

"Do we have any idea about these 'recent events'?"

"No, Maksa."

Rubbing her eyes in frustration, Maksa walked beside Agra up into one of the rearmost hallways on the ground floor of the Hall of Sweetness. Despite the shade and cool marble floors, a familiar wave of heat washed over them. As much as she liked the catacombs in the heat of summer, she felt a great deal of relief from her singly upgraded nipples when her chest warmed up.

"How many documents did Pussy receive?"

"A great number," Agra replied, keeping her voice flat. "Most of them were perfunctory matters."

'Perfunctory' ought to mean 'unimportant', but the conspirators used the word to indicate documents coded in some manner.

"They're working through them already?"

"Absolutely, M-Maksa."

On an instinct she attributed to her double Facial upgrade, Maksa had long ago gotten a feeling, despite their similar ages and identical ranks, that Agra looked up to her as much as any of the Officers. Stammering over her name, as if she had been about to say 'Mistress', indicated concretely the accuracy of Maksa's intuition.

"So by the time we get there," Maksa lowered her voice, "They should know what in the nine hells is going on."

They walked the rest of the way in silence, not daring to speak of serious matters in public and not caring to discuss anything else. As expected, they found the rearmost office of Principia Pussy sealed when they arrived, requiring them to knock and wait for the unlatching of the door from the inside. The breeze that wafted out as the door cracked open smelled of melted wax, burnt parchment and warm, nervous flesh. Inside, the entire coven of conspirators busied themselves at the documents spread about the room while a fire in a small metal basin in the middle of it all burned harder than the already unacceptable temperature of the room warranted.

'Records disposal,' Maksa supposed as she heard the door latch behind her.

"Your missive was less than informative, I presume?" the Sorceress asked without looking up.

"Indeed," Maksa looked around the room carefully.

The tight faces of the women told her that Beshenna, at least in terms of the genealogical conspiracy, found itself troubled. Occupied exclusively with the study of charts in the catacombs, she hadn't learned the subtle methods of encryption the women of Pussy used to communicate between cities. Instead, she relied upon half sentences and the faint muttering passing between those who knew the code.

'How odd,' she thought, 'even here, with the doors sealed, they whisper.'

The whispering sufficed, however, to fill Maksa in. Pussy in Beshenna had found herself under considerable stress on account of the complete failures of the Queen of Endowment to give up her search for further evidence. This continued in spite of Form's clearly stated antipathy to the subject. Pussy had gone so far as to arrange for the 'accidental' destruction of a ream of documents. The convenient fiery death of said parchment, carefully arranged by women of Pussy, had fooled those of Form but not their large breasted sisters with their knowledge of heat and cold.

Conversations made more details available, but Maksa didn't find them interesting. It sounded to her as if her compatriots had destroyed the offending evidence without tilting their tiles in a way that showed them to Form.

'That's why we keep our tiles so close to our chests,' Maksa thought, remembering the childish games she'd once played. 'And Endowment have far more cleavage in which to hide their tiles, don't they?'

A quarter bell passed before her Sorceress rose from her position leaning over a low table and slowly straightened her spine.

"I'm afraid they didn't have time for your request, Maksa," Pussy tilted her neck to stretch her stiff muscles. "I imagine your response was quite short."

"Yes," Maksa tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. "The more I think about it, the more I realize they never could have answered to my satisfaction anyway."

"Really?" the Sorceress raised her eyes in mock indignation. "Come. Let us not disturb the others."

Pussy led her away toward a small, higher table where a carafe of water and glasses waited. Maksa, having the lower rank, filled two of the simple glasses to the brim.

"What makes you doubt our sisters?"

"It's not doubt," Maksa waved her hands defensively. "It's just that I know the information I need is going to be layers and layers deep. I won't even know what the second layer looks like until I've seen the first."

"I know this is frustrating for you," Pussy inhaled deeply. "But it will take time, given the priorities we have. You can't blame our sisters -"

"Oh, I don't, Mistress," Maksa's eyes went wide. She hadn't intended offence! "What I meant is that I need to go there."

Pussy's expression flattened.

"To Beshenna," Maksa clarified.

"You want to transfer cities?" the Sorceress twitched.

Maksa saw the older woman's face freeze; felt the other's body tense up. Weeks ago, without her Facial upgrade, she might not have picked it up at all. But here, now, it seemed to Maksa something had broken inside the woman in green.

"What's wrong, Mistress?"

Pussy's eyes turned away from Maksa for a moment and Maksa watched a vast array of barely controlled emotions cross her face.

"You're right," the Sorceress said finally, a touch of sadness in her voice. "Part of me wants to keep you here."

Their eyes met again and deep in those dark pupils, Maksa realized how personally the two had come know each other.

"I'm very proud of you, Maksa. I wish I could take credit for finding you and teaching you but I would be holding you here out of pure selfishness. I'll have the scrolls finished as soon as we have a moment and you'll be off."

"Th-thank you, Mistress," Maksa's eyes threaten to tear as the suddenness of her departure struck her. "You can just send me? We don't need permission from Beshenna?"

"It isn't necessary, no. If migration gets too one-sided ... well, that isn't important now. Your research, in spite of all this -" Pussy waved a hand at the busy women behind her "-is paramount. I'll have the documents signed by the end of day."

The Sorceress, lost for a moment, turned back to look at the Officers. Seeing her superior turn her back so quickly, Maksa felt a chill descend upon the room, regardless of the conspiratorial files.

"I'll think of some innocuous reason for your transfer," the Sorceress spoke distantly over her shoulder. "You may as well return to your research now. I don't know why I called you up here."

'You called me up here,' Maksa remembered very well, 'to check on the quality of the scroll I'd received.'

She said nothing of that aloud however, merely whispering, "Mistress" before curtsying her way out of the office. When she heard the door latch behind her, Maksa gulped back tears and wondered if she'd just ruined a friendship right in its infancy.

------===================-------

The promotion from Recruit to Soldier gave Zhair'lo access to maps he had never seen before, leading to surprising realizations. He hadn't, for instance, realized how close to the edge of city Harzen's farm lay. From the out buildings where he'd patched that roof, and more memorably ejaculated over a skinny messenger's chest, he'd needed to walk only a few kilometres to reach the tiny clearing where they'd found Merelda.

Barbarians, weak as he'd found them, had lain not far beyond! He could have walked away from the farm and met them himself. They'd have killed him, in all likelihood, but he'd never imagined the possibility.

Zhair'lo had already spent a great many bells in this Map Room, with its massive, centrally located tables of oak. Rolled up maps took up most of the space in slots along the walls, with window space cut down to the absolute minimum. Even the undersides of the tables held more maps, each one carefully labelled for the curious. Zhair'lo had yet to run the place out of interesting facts. Long after the others tired of this part of the Tactics School, he had remained. It might hurt him in the short run, for the others would be keeping themselves in fighting trim while he studied, but Sergeant Yung and the others supported his quest.

Besides, he wouldn't fall completely out of shape. His schedules still mandated participation in patrols with the rest of his squad, which also required a certain number of hours in both the archery and close combat yards. All of them attended tactical lessons as well. The difference lay only in how they spent their few free bells. Most preferred the yard, while Bree studied the tactical school, and Zhair'lo poured over these maps.

On the third morning after the night of his squad's joint promotion, he heard someone shove open the heavy oak door behind him and pause at the threshold.

"Zhair'lo," Aloe's sweet voice called out.

Following military courtesy, he stood up from his stool and turned to look at her. Instead of her leathers, she wore the clothing of her Temple rank: a yellow skirt and a pair of yellow sashes crossing her breasts. Her hair, normally pulled back tightly, hung in graceful, brown curls. When she closed the door behind her, she stood in a narrow beam of sunlight, a stunningly bright beacon in a dark sea of wood.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 28



"Mistress," he politely gave her his full attention.

"Not 'Ma'am'?" she let her voice lilt humorously.

"You aren't looking very martial today, Mistress," he smiled playfully.

"No," she sighed and waved him back to his seat. "No, I'm not."

She took a stool for herself, the many layers of cloth strips hanging from her waist spreading over her thighs, covering her dignity far more than when he'd last seen her. Women, Zhair'lo imagined, have different skirts for different occasions.

He had no idea what she wanted to say, but as she outranked him he had to wait for her to get around to it.

"How are you?" she said finally, as if that phrase contained the whole purpose of her visit.

"Fine, now," Zhair'lo remained perplexed. "Recovered, if that's what you mean."

"Oh, I know your body is fine," Aloe lilted her voice to let him know the trifling priority she placed on mere physical well being. "You've run a ten kilometre patrol already, so I assume you're back to full strength."

Zhair'lo nodded.

"But how are you?" she widened her hazel eyes and twitched her eyebrows in a way that made him understand it as a question about his mental state.

"Oh, that," Zhair'lo shrugged it off with a half smile. "It wasn't a big deal. I just went through that 'test' thing they do to us -"

"The running track?"

"Yes, that one. I did it a few months back, before I joined the Hunters. Then I asked to come here."

"Archer. Fighter. What else do you do?"

"I've work with a blacksmith, a roofer. I've cared for horses and baked bread. I get around."

"And you like maps," Aloe nodded at the table.

"Like to know where I am in the world," Zhair'lo spared a longing glance at the map.

"Planning to go somewhere?" Aloe laughed lightly, one of the sweetest sounds he'd ever heard, and pulled his attention back to her.

"Sixty kilometres, around in circles," he pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the maps, unwilling to look away from her again.

She stood up to look at the map Zhair'lo had unrolled, relieving him of the burden of her gaze. He had laid out for examination one of the largest rolls, showing the entire city from the foothills in the north, the quarries in the east and farms in the south. The aqueduct snaked into the Temple from the mountains, delivering running water to everyone inside that privileged triangle. With her finger, she traced the sixty kilometres of patrolled roadway separating the barbarian hordes from the structures of civilization. As she reached across him, their bodies nearly touched and Zhair'lo caught the faint scent of some intoxicating perfume.

"Is that our job, running in circles?"

"That's what 'patrol' means, doesn't it?" he doggedly maintained his tone against her distracting proximity. "Doing the same thing again and again?"

Aloe nodded and pursed her lips in acknowledgement of his wisdom, and Zhair'lo felt a rush of pride for knowing a simple word definition. Her presence still perplexed him and he knew that the deftness with which she could manipulate his emotions meant he might never know.

She backed away just slightly, giving him some space while leaning on the map table so she towered over him slightly less, and her expression became serious.

"It does not bother you to have been Served by so many, of ages well beyond yours?"

"No, Mistress," Zhair'lo shook his head honestly. "Though I much appreciate your part."

She gave a startled laugh at this.

"You'd better! We only do that for ..." she trailed off.

"For special occasions," Zhair'lo finished for her, remembering Zoe's phrase. "I know."

"I wonder how much you know," she searched into his eyes, but didn't seem to find what she wanted.

"Were you worried about me?" Zhair'lo lowered his eyebrows and tilted his head up to peer at her more closely.

"Somewhat."

"You have to know the weird things I've seen," he explained.

Zhair'lo then launched into a greatly edited account of his first frightening upgrade, his encounter with Atani after she'd accidentally exposed herself to him, and a few other choice stories of his life. He left out, naturally, any further mention of Talla.

"That's quite a bit to carry inside you," Aloe paused thoughtfully when he'd finished. After some consideration, she spoke lightly to the ceiling. "And yet your burden will only get heavier, as it is with anyone."

"Take 'em as they come," he shrugged in reply.

"Indeed," she nodded, again making him feel very wise. Her voice became relaxed, "That's why I came to talk to you."

'Finally,' Zhair'lo thought.

"One of the predictions the Temple made, when they sent you here, was that you would have a predilection for, among things, maps," she waved a graceful hand to take in the entire room.

"Yeah," Zhair'lo expressed his resignation with a burst of air. "They know me well enough by now. I'm not surprised."

"The intention is to have you become, in time, a Ranger."

Zhair'lo froze, suddenly unable to breathe.

"Out there?" he twitched a rigid arm at the empty portions of the map. "Exploring on my own?"

"Something like that," Aloe gave him that warm smile again. "This obviously appeals to you."

"They knew it would," he pointed out, an exhalation relaxing his body again. "And so you knew it would."

She peered at him, hazel eyes glowing with that penetrating look Facial women used, and he faced her as blandly as he could. Having found or not found what she wanted, she stood up straight. For the sake of courtesy, he rose to his full height as well. 

"Continue with your maps," she spoke in clipped, formal tones. "Memorization of them is an essential part of your training in becoming a proper Ranger."

"Yes, ma'am."

Aloe let out another of those nearly involuntary laughs as she slipped out the door, leaving the room as she left every other room: slightly darker for lack of her presence.

Once the door closed, it occurred to Zhair'lo she'd learned a great deal about him while he'd learned almost nothing of her. He dismissed this minor defeat with a shrug. The Temple saw him as an ideal Ranger, and he couldn't imagine a more useful delusion on their part, given his desire to tear the place down.

------===================-------

Talla and Yua trudged across the Goddess's domain on one particularly dusty afternoon, their bodies sore and their minds weary from their final lesson in Form's yard.

"They've started building that ugly tower," Talla had stopped to look north toward the centre of the Temple.

"What?" Yua tried to wipe sweat from her eyes but only succeeding in getting her face dirty. "Talla, I never want to see those training yards again, and after today I won't have to. Can we get to the baths and wash off the dust?"

But Talla remained standing in the large courtyard where Form emptied out into the Goddess's triangle.

"Look up there," Talla pointed. "It looks like they're on the third or fourth storey by now, or we wouldn't be able to see it from here."

"What is it?" the whine had dropped from Yua's voice.

"I don't really know -"

"It's a Heliography tower," a deeper voice said, prompting both girls to turn around.

A woman stood over them, tall and dour, a virtual statue of bronze skin, black hair and a body decorated with the minimum of orange clothing an Officer could get away with. By the assets attached to her chest, Talla identified her as a fellow sister of Endowment. She turned away from them a moment to wave through a long train of carts bearing quarried, yellow sandstone.

"Mistress?"

"Once we're done," the woman stated proudly, "They'll install a heliograph at the top."

"Helio ... you're doing what with the sun?" Talla racked her brain. "Mapping it?"

"Reflecting it's light," the woman corrected impatiently. "You are Endowment? You should be aware how quickly light travels, yes?"

Talla and Yua straightened as they became aware of a lesson underway.

"Immeasurably fast, Mistress," Yua spoke softly.

"We will install towers like these on the highest hills between here and Beshenna in the east, and Turiksa to the northwest. With a simple code, we can pass messages from one city to another and receive answers in less than a bell."

Talla's mouth dropped. A round trip took something like fourteen days to Beshenna or Turiksa, and that only worked if a merchant caravan arrived the same day another departed. If the Temples really managed to build all these heliography towers, they'd have a network of sunbeam messengers that would embarrass the strongest legs in Form.

"How does Form feel about this?" she asked.

"What?"

"Messages are Form's things, aren't they?"

"Form women will manage the towers I imagine," the Officer raised an annoyed eyebrow. "I assume you two have somewhere to be?"

"Yes, Mistress," they chimed back and, clearly recognizing dismissal, darted away.

"Amazing," Yua's eyes widened.

"Frightening," Talla shivered. "The power this would give them, Yua."

Yua's eyes shrank a little, but Talla had to admit to herself that a brilliant woman had invented the heliograph.

"Not much we can do about it, though," Yua pointed out. "Our nights have been full for a whole week now, delivering wood down there. I don't have enough engineer in me right now to knock down a tower."

Talla wondered about Yua's exhaustion. While Talla had taken every trip down into the sewers, despite her full slate of extra history classes, Yua, Tina and Illya had alternated alongside her, and yet Tina and Yua always seemed more tired. She shook her head, wondering if her determination borrowed energy from some distant, future version of herself.

"Just promise me you won't let me fall asleep and drown in the bathtub, okay?" Yua pleaded.

With a shrug, Talla put an arm around her friend and smiled.

------===================-------

Zhair'lo could only observe Talla's work from the very perimeter of the city. The real work, as always, belonged to the women, on this occasion marching in the sewers while hauling logs and kindling. Zhair'lo had shown her how to arrange tinder, straw, kindling and logs to get a very quick fire going, but for now, Talla and her friends kept their supply hidden in whatever dry crevices they could find near the ventilation room. 

For two weeks, he'd felt her excitement growing and, standing as he did on the highest level of the tower which looked over the Eastern Barracks, he had a very good read on her present mental and emotional state. Leaning his elbows on the sandstone ledge and looking back across the Barracks toward the Temple, with the setting sun almost blinding him, he sensed Talla's presence somewhere near Endowment Hall, perhaps the courtyard where women gathered before going out for a night of Service.

Behind Zhair'lo stood two Soldiers of the third rank, a man and a woman, both on duty watching the road where it stretched out to the east, winding up through the heavily forested hills.

'Watch that way all you like,' Zhair'lo said. 'You keep an eye out for your enemies, and I'll keep an eye out for mine.'

"Enjoying the view, soldier?" a deep voice sounded behind him.

Chief Cameron, a dark haired, square jawed squad leader of many years, had climbed up the ladder to join him.

"Yes, sir," Zhair'lo straightened as he replied. "South Barracks doesn't have a tower like this."

"South Barracks isn't on the road to Beshenna," Cameron leaned a shoulder casually against one of the four thick timbers that held the roof in place over their heads.

With his thorough study of the maps provided at each Barracks, Zhair'lo had made himself familiar with the land and roads all around Gern and he well knew the significance of the road the Barracks guarded. But looking at a map didn't compare to standing on a tower and seeing it all laid out before him.

"A merchant caravan is coming through," Zhair'lo shielded his eyes against the sun.

"Seven days to Beshenna," Cameron commented idly, "If they have good weather."

'Three and half, maybe four, for marching Fighters,' Zhair'lo smirked at the thought.

A watcher on this tower, located at the outward facing eastern wall of the Barracks, had a short window of time to detect outbound caravans They cleared the forest around Gern and only moments later disappeared from view below the high palisade wall at the west end of the Barracks.

Chief Cameron tilted his head to listen as a great deal of shouting erupted near the western gate, and soon the doors opened to admit the long train of horse drawn carts and walking attendants.

"The longer you watch these trains go by, the more you learn to recognize them from a distance, even covered with canvas," Cameron explained. "That first one's loaded with flour. Same as the second. The next two have smaller loads, so they must be heavier. Metal weapons possibly, since the canvas is so flat. If it were a special stone of some kind, it would be bumpier."

Zhair'lo wondered at the older man's eyes, that he could see clearly what looked to be identical burdens to Zhair'lo.

"Next, you look at the people. There's a way that carters have of walking, almost as efficient as Fighters, but without the wariness we have, and without the tiptoeing of a Hunter. They've got a long way to go, see, and they don't worry about the barbarians."

"Of course, they aren't all Carters," Chief Cameron peered intently at the two files of walkers passing through the gate. "If you see a woman, she's either H'rem, and is used to this, or migrant, and isn't. You can tell the difference by the walk, too, usually ..."

Cameron trailed off, squinting into the sun.

"... but not always."

"Not always, sir?"

"Some of the migrants have purpose in their feet, soldier," Cameron stroked his chin as he continued to stare, leaning out over the stone ledge. "They're not changing cities for kicks, but instead because they've got some reason to be somewhere else. That one in yellow, for instance ..."

------===================-------

Thirty metres below and a hundred metres west of Zhair'lo and Chief Cameron, Maksa walked alongside the caravan. As a migrant woman, she'd spent the last several days inside the Temple, denied the opportunity to Serve. All travelling women, whether permanently assigned as H'rem or making single journeys, saved up their sexual energy for the long road ahead. In order to keep the men happy during the journey, they'd be busy every night.

Maksa saw the lure of it. H'rem spent roughly seven days taking long walks through the forest, each day punctuated by a night of Service. Following such a journey, the doctors prescribed three or four nights recharging in the centremost, and therefore nicest, rooms of the Temple before new orders sent them to another city. A woman could visit the entire empire, see the coldest and hottest cities, the wettest and driest. She could visit Prima, the place where the gods had come down, and she could journey to the smallest and most dangerous Temples on the frontier of the empire's growth.

Conquest and expansion held no priority for Maksa, for she chased a more delicate demon, one who would scratch impishly away at the foundations of the Temples until they collapsed. For this alone she went to Beshenna, laden with as many documents as she dared carry. Nothing in her satchels contained evidence of her involvement in the genealogical conspiracy, for she'd written most everything in her own cryptic, mathematical code, a cypher nearly as deep as that which the Sorceresses of Pussy used to convey messages to each other. If need be, she could babble on about her research to the utter boredom of any who asked..

On the other hand, Maksa still felt the thrill of adventure. Born and raised in Beshenna, she'd known no other city. And now she found herself marching with the H'rem, duty bound to placate the travelling men with her vagina. Alone of the other women, she knew the precariousness of that control, how close to the cliff edge they trod, and how much more dangerous these journeys would become in the decades ahead. 

The train of carts never slowed its progress on its way through the Barracks. Instead, it picked up a new cart at its head. Maksa had learned about this in the days she'd spent waiting for a caravan she could join. The forward cart would be loaded with weapons to be used by the Fighters. A second cart, waiting in a side alley, would bring up the tail of the column, carrying a good deal of the camping supplies needed for such a journey.

Never having seen a Barracks from the inside, Maksa's eyes roamed everywhere. The structures registered as almost entirely foreign, as if imported from another city. Although predominantly wooden framed instead of stone, they still looked sturdy. Practice yards, currently in use for archery, bo staff fighting and sword fighting, packed in tightly with sleeping quarters and eating halls.

What with all the things on which to feast her eyes, however, Maksa's gaze constantly crept to the dominant structure, a traditionally constructed stone tower rising several storeys above everything around it. The tower, she also knew from her studies, had stood to watch the road to Beshenna long before the Barracks had existed. Only in recent decades had the Temple decreed the building of the three Barracks buildings.

As the the carts passed the base of the tower, she looked up to find two men leaning out over the edge, staring down at the moving train of carts.

'Actually, they're staring right at me.'

Maksa paused in her walking and squinted to check for certain. Not knowing what else to do, she waved at them. Apparently startled, they both waved back hesitantly.

Not wanting to hold up the line, she resumed her walk and passed out their sight.

Seven days of marching awaited her.

------===================-------

They'd put all the wood in place.

On this rarest of evenings, Zhair'lo and the male members of his squad, as well as several other squads of soldiers found themselves housed in a small wooden building just outside the main gates of the Temple. The unusual location put him close enough to Talla he could clearly sense her pride of accomplishment.

After three weeks of careful carrying and stowing, Zhair'lo's link with Talla had assured him the girls had accumulated enough fuel to absolutely cook anything in the Synergist chamber. The work had been complicated by the fact that, in addition to her normal duties, Talla's had found her schedule packed with daily lessons on History, Temple Culture and various language courses.

Nothing remained but waiting, and Zhair'lo's nerves rode a razor's edge. For three weeks, they'd feared the Goddess might die before they'd completed the preparations. Their panic had absorbed them so completely, they hadn't considered the opposite possibility: years of patient waiting.

As he generally spent his time on the periphery of city, he had no way of knowing when the fateful event would happen. Talla, even with her minimal rank, had the advantage of proximity. The talk amongst the older women revealed that, while the death of a Goddess was always kept a secret whilst a new one was chosen, wiser heads could detect the frenetic motions of Officers low and high as well as strange empty slots in the Upgrade schedules.

Tina swore the nightly dockets exposed the inner workings of the Temple, and they would serve as the lever that released the conspirators' catapult. The moment those documents became closely guarded secrets or contained blanks, the moment they found an Augmentation Chamber shut down for an entire evening, the time to strike had to be seized. While all eyes and every guard studiously served the Ascending Queen above the ground, the conspirators would unleash their attack from below.

Zhair'lo saw the tinder igniting the first embers directly under the stone vent, felt the cool air rushing in as heat and flame hurled themselves upward. The conflagration spread around the room in a circle, the heat igniting the heavier wood around the vent. More air was drawn in. More heat was forced up inside the vent ...




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 28



'It will be magnificent,' he inhaled deeply and smiled.

He had to accept the idea that, given the way he and Talla moved about, their thoughts might not reach each other when the girls made their strike against the Temple. In that case, the ringing of alarm bells inside the triangular fortress would be his only signal. Day after day and night after night, he waited eagerly to hear those bells.

Then, this particular evening, Zhair'lo had been surprised to discover that the women who arranged Service, in their infinite and random wisdom, decreed that occasionally Fighter men be Served by women outside their Barracks. For this purpose, an accommodation had been constructed containing nothing but a small common room equipped with a reasonable quantity of alcohol, and a large number of bedrooms.

Zhair'lo wondered about the need for such Service, since the lessons received by Talla told him the whole mind-controlling purpose of Service was unnecessary for Heroes. If all the Fighters qualified as loyal to the Temple regardless of how many women they had sex with and how often, why did this building exist?

His lips twisted thoughtfully.

On top of that, the female members of their squads had been handed cards and dispersed across the city to Serve as randomly as their city dwelling sisters. That made even less sense. The power of the Goddess, Talla had been taught, imbued and saturated her Disciples while they rested in the Temple. The Goddess's control was projected onto the men of the city when the women, so imbued, carried her power to the men.

But how could Fighter women, who spent weeks at a time circling the city, be infused with this same magic?

Zhair'lo grimaced as he tried to fathom what trick the Temple meant to work on him and his fellow soldiers. Conclusive investigation was delayed by the sudden arrival of a vast array of dainty women in very fine clothing. Seeing them enter the room, straining to push aside the thick wooden door, a muscle in Zhair'lo's abdomen twitched.

'Strange women, these ones tonight,' he peered at them warily. 'So fragile and layered so thickly with perfume.'

Their hairstyles, long and flowing, felt foreign to him, and he recalled a time he'd accidentally tried to put on Kit's chest armour. These women, with their strange frailty, felt like someone else's clothing. He couldn't fathom why the Temple had imagined these could Serve the men arrayed here. He'd have to be so gentle. Whomever he merited among the girls in white might consider the athletic effort expected by his sister Fighters as bordering on violence.

It struck him then, as soft voices started quietly and casually calling out names in a tradition Zhair'lo vaguely remembered, that every man around him faced the same problem. Large men paired off with tiny women again and again. If they could do it without trepidation, Zhair'lo decided he would also manage.

"Zhair'lo?" a tiny voice peeped up.

His eyes focused on a timid, brown-haired girl in white as she nervously adjusted the pair of sashes that refused to properly cover her breasts. The fact of a Neophyte coming to his bed surprised him. The third rank usually took two years to reach. Had he been eighteen long enough the Temple had added twenty year old women to his list?

Perhaps her promotion was recent? As he smiled and approached her, he watched her adjust her sashes again. Dark, brown eyes twinkled at him in the firelight and he caught a wince when she shifted her upper body around.

"Zhair'lo?" she held out her hand. "Mindi."

"Hi, Mindi," he clasped her hand, feeling its silken softness as he tried to ignore the feeling he was damaging or profaning her skin with his crude, weathered flesh. "We have number sixteen upstairs."

He kept his walking pace intentionally slow, the grip of his hand light. Tara would have mocked him for treating her this way, while Bree and Zia raced ahead. And Del? Del would have raised her eyebrows, wondering why he was interfering with a very simple and easy to follow pattern.

Mindi, in stark contrast to his bed mates of the last several weeks, bubbled over with a strange, airy froth whose nature eluded him. Zhair'lo felt that if he merely pushed her away with his fingertip, she might drift off the floor and float down the hallway or perhaps his hand might go right through her insubstantial body. The hard, repeatedly tested muscles of his recent sexual partners had never been a requirement of Mindi's life.

"What do you do, during the day?" Zhair'lo asked.

"Huh?" her soft voice came back. "Oh, I make breakfast for children most days. Sometimes I do drinks in the Hall at night. Y'know, when we all go back home after Serving? I used to run the big laundry bins and fold clothes, but not anymore."

At this statement, she thrust her chest out.

"Third Abundance upgrade?" he made his voice pretend he didn't know this already.

"Two nights ago," she smiled full of pride.

"And you're out Serving already? Not too sore?"

She blushed, turning her head away as they walked down the hall.

"What?" he prodded.

"We don't get a lot of chances to Serve Fighters," she tilted her head back and forth. "It's kind of a, thing, you know?"

"A thing?"

"You know ..." she trailed off before picking up again, "Exciting and dangerous. You're all so strong and - anyway, they told me I could go if I wanted to, but I'd miss my chance for a while if I didn't."

Zhair'lo suppressed a sigh of realization. Not only her unmuscled body filled itself with air, but possibly her head, too.

'We represent danger to you,' he thought. 'We live out at the edge and fight the monsters so you never see them. You imagine great escapades when really the Temple has no formidable enemies beyond its own gates.'

The honey-stained door to number sixteen beckoned and Zhair'lo waved Mindi through before gently closing them away from the outside world. Even the door, he noted, was made of wood weaker than that of the Barracks. Had his world always been so fragile? He'd never noticed.

Mindi had turned back to face him, standing in the middle of the surprisingly large room. Why, Zhair'lo wondered, was there more than a nightstand and bed here? Not only was the bed twice the width of any he'd slept in before, the nightstand was the width of a dresser and there was a full size desk and an extra wooden chair in the room. No accommodation he'd ever lived in had been so nice.

His puzzlement evaporated when Mindi began, without a word, removing her clothing. It was the skirt that went first, revealing her smooth mound. Breathlessly, her mouth open and her head tilted down, she slid out of the double sashes to reveal her swollen, upgrade reddened breasts.

"You have to be gentle with my tits," she gasped, having suddenly remembered to breathe.

"Of course, I -"

"I know how you Fighters are," Mindi blinked, her eyes darted around the room, "but -"

"How we are?" Zhair'lo approached her slowly, turning his head slightly to the side but keeping his eyes on her.

Mindi twisted her legs to rise up on the balls of her feet and turn her knees inward. Even as she spoke, her eyes still wandered the room.

"You know," her voice contained a mysterious mix of fear and excitement. "All hard and rough."

Zhair'lo reached a point where their bodies so nearly touched he could feel the heat from her breasts radiating into his ribs. He inhaled deeply, inflating his chest so that his shirt grazed her nipples.

Mindi whimpered in response, her arms hanging limply at her side.

"That's how they talk about us?" he teased.

She nodded and, when he inhaled again, closed her eyes against the overwhelming sensation of having her now stiffened nipples come into faint contact with the clothing of a great warrior.

"One point upgrade?" Zhair'lo asked.

Helpless, though not to the point of fainting, she opened her eyes and nodded.

"I'll get another if I can," she whispered. "A month from ... ahhh!"

Her voice had risen to a squeak as he grazed her again. Realizing that Mindi had incapacitated herself with excitement, Zhair'lo unlaced his shirt himself and shucked it aside. He got the distinct feeling that he was an actor here, playing a role for her.

"Is it true, what they say?" she asked.

"What do they say?" he deepened his voice and pressed his chest gently against hers, feeling the residual heat from her upgrade.

"About the way you guys do it."

'Gods,' he wondered, 'what is she expecting? Someone ought to write a small book containing all of the legends and rumours girls passed around about Fighters so we know what sort of beasts to act like.'

He thought a book of crude drawings would probably suffice.

"Possibly," Zhair'lo kept his tone even to hide his ignorance. "What have you heard?"

"That you always do it standing up, so you're ready for battle."

He concluded that the strength of her enthusiasm had somehow blocked her ability to see the gigantic bed next to them.

It occurred to Zhair'lo he could make Mindi do almost anything he wanted. He merely had to declare his desired sex act to be the Way Fighters Do It and she would lap it up like a thirsty horse at the trough.

"Oh, yes," he nodded warily, trying to keep out of his voice any hint that he was humouring her. "We don't usually do that with city women -"

"No, no," she protested, her eyes wetting in her desperation, "do it with me like that!"

Mindi's hands came to life, deftly unlacing his shorts and letting his erection spring free. She stroked him eagerly.

"I can lean on the window frame," she nodded eagerly, feeling him stiffen in her hands.

"Too bad we can't do it outside," he tilted his head in sadness, "for the full experience."

"We can open the shutters, though!"

'This is pretty straightforward,' Zhair'lo thought, thinking how Natta had acted, so long ago. 

Mindi, too, had built up a fantasy in her head and given him a role to fill. She turned her back to him and reached to unlatch the shutters. Cool night air flowed into the room as she swung the wooden panels open. She bent over, standing on her toes to lift her hips for him expectantly.

"Come on," she begged over her shoulder, "I'm ready!"

Nine gods.

He slipped up behind her, laying his erection between her taut, bony cheeks.

"Someone might see us," she whimpered.

"A silhouette at most," he assured her.

Mindi ignored him, adding, "I could get in so much trouble."

"Very dangerous," Zhair'lo agreed, catching on now, "part of being a Fighter."

He backed away just far enough to let the tip of his shaft fall past her spread rear. Zhair'lo was stiff enough that he could poke upwards at her lips without help from his hands. Mindi reached under her body with her hand, forcing the swollen head against her clitoris, grinding it in circles and forcing her juices to spread over the middle part of his penis.

Moaning with pleasure and rotating her hips, she started pushing him down towards her vagina and Zhair'lo felt the first tingling of the mesh coming on.

"You ready?" he asked.

"Don't ask," she said. "Just ... just shove it in ..."

'Right,' Zhair'lo remembered with a unseen roll of his eyes, 'like one of those rough, tough, dangerous Fighters everyone talks about.'

With nothing else in mind, he determined to do his very best to fulfil her fantasy, even if she hadn't given him all of the details. Zhair'lo estimated Mindi had at least three rounds in her, though, and counted on her to provide further ammunition. For the moment, he had only to be the slightly reckless, borderline thoughtless beast of a man she was expecting.

'Gods, I hope she's really ready for this,' he thought as he set his erection against the dripping wet entrance to her tunnel.

Then he pushed, hard as he dared, and slid smoothly until his entire length was buried in her. Mindi let out a shriek of triumph as the mesh ensnared their minds.

...

She wasn't really a complete airhead.

Zhair'lo caught that much right away.

Mindi had simply excited herself with fantasy to the point where her brain took a walk.

She had found ecstasy, being ravaged by a big, strong Fighter.

Lifting her hips, she slid as far off him as the mesh allowed, her mind begging him to thrust harder, to slam his pelvis into her cheeks.

He grabbed her hips and pulled her back as he pushed forward.

If there was pain, the pleasure overwhelmed it.

Zhair'lo thumped her again and again, feeling her body shake and break into a sweat with the intensity.

When he tired of the repetitive motion, he reached around her body with his right hand to grip her breast. The mesh told him, unequivocally, how hard to squeeze the sore, upgrade-reddened orb of flesh - he knew it hurt her a little, but a modicum of pain served her fantasy, delivering it just part of the role a mindless beast ought to play.

What else could he do?

Mindi had expectations, but he needed to surprise her.

What would bring out the best for her?

Suddenly Zhair'lo knew.

He released her breast and crouched a little so he could push upward inside her.

"There is one other thing," he let his voice trail off suggestively.

"What?" Mindi's gasp leaked enthusiasm, "What is it?"

"Well," he laid his right hand on her cheek. "Most of the Fighter girls are Tight and Iron, see? I don't know if you'd be able ..."

A surge of anxiety twisted its way through the mesh.

"You spank them?" she looked over her shoulder, her exertion reddened face showing wide eyes.

"If you don't want -," Zhair'lo offered, but he already felt her answer in the mesh.

The fear in her expression came from pretence.

In reality, she wanted to experience what she imagined as the brutality of Fighter life.

"Do it," she turned her head away, "do it like you do to them."

'Here comes the tricky part.'

Done too softly, Mindi would recognize mockery.

Spanked too hard, the whole fantasy faced ruin.

How hard did Bree and Tara like it? They had two Tight upgrades. How about Del and Zia with only one? How much more gentle did he have to be with an Abundance girl?

Bracing himself and wincing preemptively, Zhair'lo pushed his erection as deep as it could go and slapped at Mindi's cheek.

A reaction raced through the mesh.

Pain and pride.

Mindi's triumph at standing alongside the Fighter girls.

"Again!" she cried out, but the time for action had passed.

Orgasm struck them.

Zhair'lo gave one more swat to her cheek as he felt their genitals begin to pulse at one another.

"Yes!" she shrieked.

He grunted, thrusting involuntarily and feeling his seed launch from his body into the deepest parts of her.

All the while, though, he knew he had to hold back.

Mindi couldn't take it the way his usual bed mates could.

...

"Ooh," she sighed, letting his erection slide out of her. She rubbed her cheek, adding, "That's gonna leave a bit of a mark."

'Pride,' he thought, 'she's proud of herself.'

"I tried to be gentle," he apologized, knowing his part.

"It's okay," Mindi assured him. "It's just who you guys are. I knew that when I signed up for it."

Zhair'lo pulled her into an embrace, partly for the post-coital pleasure, but mostly because he couldn't keep the smile off his face and this kept her eyes buried in his shoulder. Somewhere inside him, he knew that Fighters shouldn't smile at times like this. Fulfilling someone else's fantasy constituted a heavier burden than he'd expected.

Pulling her down to the bed, he let Mindi rest her head on the crook of his shoulder and chest. Her cleavage tucked neatly against his rib cage, she curled up to him.

"Do you always do it standing up?" she murmured, slowly regaining her breath.

"No," he replied slowly. "We do have beds, after all."

"Good," she sighed with relief. "I do want to ride you, you know. So you can see my tits moving around."

Zhair'lo noted how the word 'tits' didn't roll naturally off her tongue. She invoked a cruder vocabulary for his sake, or at least for the sake of her fantasy.

"Maybe you'll slide 'em over my cock next time."

She murmured her enthusiasm for this idea and Zhair'lo wondered if he could keep up this act all night.

The barbaric Fighter and his monstrous ministrations might prove tiresome eventually but he hoped to hold on. The greatest difficulty stemmed from Mindi's fragility. As much as he had to fake this 'brutality' she wanted, Zhair'lo also had to make sure he didn't hurt her with accidental excesses of his natural strength.

'This is why the Temple brings us in,' he realized. 'To show us the ones we protect in the city. Mindi is the innocent; the naive. We go out there to keep watch on the wandering barbarians so people like her can live simple lives of laundry and baking breakfast for children. If it weren't for these visits, we might forget.'

Staring at the ceiling, wondering at the implications, he heard a bell ring - a bell with a tone entirely different from the one that marked hours and quarters of hours.

Zhair'lo's mind recognized the particular note and dumped all other thoughts as he waited.

It rang a second time.

'Nine hells, it couldn't possibly -'

It rang a third time.

A pause followed, and he sat bolt upright, nearly throwing Mindi from the bed.

The bell began ringing again.

------===================-------

"Nine hells," the Goddess cursed, rising suddenly from her desk as she, too, counted the bells. "Is that -?"

The second part of the sequence contained only two rings before another pause.

"Imminence!" shouted a woman at the doorway to her bedchambers and guards in ceremonial leathers flooded into the room.

"To the roof," she rounded her desk and walked past the guards as they attempted to surround her.

"Imminence, your safety," the chief of her guards insisted, even as her compatriots moved with the Goddess toward the stairway at the back of her room.

"My safety will be assured by information," she glared over her shoulder. "Information will be found on the roof."

"Clothing at least, Imminence," the guard begged, eyeing the nearly transparent black nightgown the Goddess wore.

The gold skinned woman dismissed her concern, however, flipping her hair back in a shower of angry blue sparks and turning to the back of her room.

As she climbed the spiral staircase from her chamber to the roof, preceded and followed by a retinue of Form's finest women, the bell rang on: three rings; a pause; two rings.

"Check the signals from the gates," she commanded once they had the roof, and guards split off to reach the parapets from which they could see the walls over the many gates of the Temple.

"Form's large gate is sealed already," one guard reported. "The small gate is ready."

Endowment's gate was the next to close, followed by Sweetness's, the guards atop those gates communicating by the waving of coloured flags.

The main gate and the small gates would remain open to let every last woman currently Serving back into the Temple. They only shut otherwise if those on the wall saw invaders within range of the walls.

The Goddess walked past the large, flat marble altar that marked the exact centre of the Temple and approached a round building two storeys higher yet than her rooftop and currently under construction. A spiral staircase around its insides allowed the Goddess to climb as far up as it went.

Two women sat there, both of whom the Goddess knew personally. One, a dark skinned Facial woman named Anakwi, stood at a telescope looking east while the other, a pale Within Officer named Chantal, sat at a small, improvised writing station consisting of a pair of simple wooden chairs and a desk. Neither woman rose to curtsy when their Goddess came to stand behind them.

"Report," she kept her voice soft.

"The Eastern Barracks sounded the alarm," Chantal's voice was full of darkness, even as Anakwi at her telescope continued reading flag colours to her.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 28



"Are they under attack?"

"No, Imminence."

If barbarians truly threatened, the bells ought to have come continuously in threes, not threes and twos in alternation.

"Then what?"

Chantal, her face strained, continued taking down colours, the set of her shoulders telling her Goddess she waited for the completion of the message.

She gulped once.

"Beshenna has fallen, Imminence."

"Nine gods. What happened? How long ago?"

The woman shook her head.

"I am only getting details now."

The platform filled up with more of Form's Enforcers. Ignoring nudity protocols, the ceremonial guards stripped on the spot to rid themselves of their formal leathers and switching to the full length, chain reinforced leather armour meant for battle.

'Leave it to Form,' she eyed the hard, naked female bodies around her, 'to break the rules when they see fit.'

If the message contained accurate information, however, no danger could reach them for days. The Goddess pursed her lips, waiting for the information that would tell her what action to take.

"The runner took three days to reach us since the Fall," Chantal continued her decoding and scribbling.

'Three days,' the Goddess thought, 'they'll barely have felt the effects yet.'

"The Goddess of Beshenna had Weakened and passed," the pale scribe read on.

The woman in black tried not to keep her sadness at bay. Such things happened, after all, but a proper Goddess did not allow her death to bring about the Fall of her Temple.

"Sweetness died."

A Queen had died with her Goddess, leaving three possibilities if the Temple had fallen.

"Within died."

The Goddess winced and waited.

"Any other deaths?" she asked.

"No," Chantal shook her head. "There is more coming, but it's complicated."

"They've only lost one Perfection, then?"

"Yes," Chantal nodded with certainty. "And they request our aid."

Gern's proximity to Beshenna made it the wisest source for the help her sisters needed.

The Goddess exhaled and stepped away from the two women and their post to face a pale and topless guard commander, taking her turn and allowing lower ranking attendants to switch her armour.

"Inform your Queen we'll be sending a delegation to escort a Conduit to Beshenna," she ordered. "Make sure she knows the Temple has already been down for three days."

"Yes, Imminence."

"And bring me Zhair'lo M'han."

"Imminence?"

"The Conduit, woman," the Goddess raised her voice. "He's Beshenna's best hope. Go find him with his Fighter squad, wherever he is, and bring him to my bed chamber as soon as possible."

The guard commander passed this order to another.

"And you there," the woman in black pointed at an attendant, "get me a scroll. I have a message for the Queen of Sweetness."

She had scrolls to write and obligations to be fulfilled. A woman could do no less for her sisters in danger, and no more for the son she'd entrusted to the genealogists of Beshenna. The night would be long and the next day's dawn upon them before all was done.

------===================-------

"Highness!" an Officer shouted.

"I'm right here, fool," the Queen of Form hissed back.

Unlike the Goddess, she remained within the well fortified confines of her own domain. Whereas her superior needed immediate access to information, the Queen of Form knew the best place for her posterior was at the nerve centre of her city's military might. A large map of the Temple had been spread out across one desk, with wooden markers showing which gates stood properly sealed. Another desk showed the Temple in smaller scale, leaving enough room to add the woods and roads around it.

Reports came in and orders flowed out. Movement of female bodies was constant. As much as the Goddess might dictate policy, the physical defence of the Temple's walls remained Form's responsibility.

She allowed herself a moment of admiration for the cold efficiency of her underlings.

"A report from the signals Officer," the breathless woman gasped as she arrived beside her Queen.

"And?"

"It's Beshenna. Beshenna's fallen."

"Further details?" the Queen took this in stride. Demonstrations of panic ill befit a Queen.

"They lost a Perfection. Nothing further as yet."

Wheels spun in the Queen's head as she marched over to another map, this one hanging from the wall. Attendants and officers followed the swirl of her red skirt to a giant contour map showing a large chunk of the empire run by the Goddesses and their Temples.

She laid a long, pale finger on the map and traced a line from Beshenna to Gern.

"Three days," she said, "if they sent a proper runner."

She paused thoughtfully, her brow laden with calculations.

"Four days to bring a proper armed force back," she pursed her lips. "And it will need to be quite an army to get through the -"

Queens, she realized, shouldn't wince.

Then she spoke the words that, in a different context, she'd wished to speak for days.

"Summon Master Kendrick," she ordered. "Where is he?"

"South Barracks," an Officer reported instantly.

"And send a messenger to the nearest Carter's depot ...?" she trailed off expectantly.

"Master Ellis," another voice filled in.

"Tell Master Ellis we'll need four heavy carts and the twenty four oxen to pull them."

The numbers came to her easily, because military logistics constituted the bulk of her duties.

'Ah, Kendrick,' the Queen thought. 'I could have summoned you to my bed a week ago. The rules allow it, but I always prefer to savour the extra few days, pitting my willpower against my desires.'

It didn't matter, really. Once Master Kendrick had arranged the expedition to Beshenna and sent them off, she would arrange a Summons to bring him to the bed of his Queen.

------===================-------

Principia Sweetness hosted a quieter gathering. The Queen sat calmly behind her desk, her attendants and Officers around her, themselves surrounded by armoured guards.

They, too, had heard the news of Beshenna's fall, but could do little about it besides mourn. No raging hordes likely approached Gern, at least not for several days. The sudden arrival of so many of Form's guards constituted excessive alarm in the opinion of this particular Queen.

"A message from her Imminence," a small voice squeaked from beyond the beige wall of leather.

"Let her through," a Sweetness Officer insisted to the hesitant guards. "Look at her! The scroll is sealed in black."

A small scuffle ensued where the Queen couldn't see it, followed by a small girl's squeak.

"No!" the Sweetness Officer insisted again. "You don't need to search her. Where's she going to hide anything in that outfit? For the gods's sakes!"

Wide-eyed with trepidation, a small Initiate in a tiny white outfit carefully picked her way through the giant women between her and the Queen.

"A message and urgent orders from the Goddess," she curtsied and laid the scroll on the table.

The Queen of Sweetness eyed the girl briefly, "Wait in case I need to make a reply."

The girl nodded and looked around nervously at the women in orange.

"It's alright sweetheart," one Officer assured her. "We won't let them bite you."

Twisting her lips, the Queen cracked open the scroll and felt the blood run from her face.

'Zhair'lo,' she felt dead inside, 'she wants to use Zhair'lo. After all our work ...'

How many days travel would it be for him?

She shook her head sadly, forcing herself to agree the boy stood the best chance of saving Beshenna. The thousands of lives at stake had to outweigh the risks to any single person, even one who had been the focus of so much of their breeding effort.

The Queen closed her eyes, trying not let the sadness wash through without overwhelming her as the impending scene played itself out inside her head. She only lamented Zhair'lo for a few heartbeats, knowing she had a duty to support her Goddess's commands. Without question, the choice of such a young Conduit on such a long journey required further orders on her part.

'I wish,' she beamed her thoughts into the air, imagining they reached Zhair'lo, wherever he might be, 'I wish I could give you day after day of joy and happiness. I wish I could give you pleasure from my own body beyond your wildest dreams. Instead, I will play my part in this, and may the gods agree with our cold calculation because we aren't giving you any choice in the matter.'

"Scrolls," the Queen demanded, when her pity had bled itself out. "Three of them."

The first went to the Sorceress of Within. The next two would find their ways to the Seconds of Pussy and Lips. Men would have to be found as well, and anyone currently in line for the Augmentation Chamber could damn well wait until tomorrow.

------===================-------

"What's happening? Do you know?" Mindi asked, her cheeks flushed with excitement. "Is the city under attack?"

She looked eager as ever, as if the very best of her fantasies had come to life. While he had moved quickly to retrieve his clothing, she had only sat up far enough to put her feet on the floor, her naked breasts heaving with the delight of the moment

"No," Zhair'lo said quietly, looking out the window. "That's the wrong pattern. But something's wrong in the Eastern Barracks."

"You're going to put your real armour on, aren't you?" Mindi's eyes lit up. "Don't you have to run out right away?"

Zhair'lo eyed her with a smirk, realizing this evening hit her most ardent desires like a bull's eye. Not only did she get violently ravaged by a Fighter - she would be exaggerating her difficulty sitting down for days - but she could tell all of the unfortunate interruption to her Service when danger had spirited her Fighter away. He imagined, quite easily, Mindi putting a false tear in her eye and looking longingly into the distance with a resolute look on her face.

Zhair'lo could at least say he'd done well by her.

"It's best not to run straight out into the streets," Zhair'lo advised as he dressed in his regular clothing. "We form up as squads first - at least once all the men are dressed, then we'll find the women. We'll stick together, see?"

He searched his brain and found one of Sergeant Yung's best remarks, "We don't win battles with recklessness."

Mindi nodded at him as if he'd dispensed some ageless wisdom.

"Shouldn't you be getting back to the Temple,too?" he asked her. "Maybe put some clothes on?"

Women, even the ones not due to be in the centre of any battles, had some obligations under such warning bells.

"I suppose," Mindi's voice turned sad. "I just didn't want this evening to end."

With a leap from the bed, she wrapped her arms around his neck, burying her face in the dirty brown locks of hair he still hadn't cut to standard Fighter length. Where her breasts pressed against his still bare chest, he felt the warmth of her conviction.

"Be safe," she whispered.

As Zhair'lo held the safety of the streets as a certainty, he reassured her with a quick, "Of course."

Then, in the stern manner one expected of a soldier, he braced her by taking hold of her shoulders and pushed her away.

"You need to get back to the Temple. Please."

With a gulp and a nod, she grabbed her clothing and had the two pieces of it laced up before he'd even finished with his shirt.

Fighters and city women filled the hallway as they filed their way down to the common room. The women quietly sorted themselves out by Division, the men according to their squads. They would wait, each in their groups, until all presented themselves. Mindi gave Zhair'lo's hand a last squeeze before she departed for the far end of the room.

Kit and Z'rus joined Zhair'lo almost instantly, and each had his own speculations.

"Three, two, three, two," Kit pronounced. "Could be anything except actual barbarians at the gates, right?"

"Impending attack," Z'rus warned in a weary voice. "That's all. Impending but not urgent. It means we get ready, but we've got time."

Z'rus tried to look as if he didn't care, but betrayed himself by adding, "What's taking Renzi so long?"

"He might have been meshed," Zhair'lo pointed out.

"And what?" Kit asked. "His cock wore out and he can't come?"

"Maybe she used her teeth too much," Z'rus added helpfully.

Their banter, unusually loud and high-pitched, betrayed their nerves.

Zhair'lo hid his own hope: that Talla and her friends had actually kicked off their fire. He took a deep breath and reached out, but felt a barrier blocking his connection.

'Focus, dammit,' he told himself.

And, suddenly, Talla came through with a feeling of breathless exhaustion.

'Why were we blocked?' he asked.

'Had to,' she replied, 'our meshes would have gotten tangled.'

Zhair'lo saw the wisdom of that instantly, but wondered when she'd developed the ability.

'Where are you?'

'Serving on the south side. Heading home now, fast. We all are.'

'You'll be passing by here, then.'

He showed her his location, which she understood easily, knowing the buildings nearest the Temple by heart.

Then Talla faded away again, concentrating on her comrades and their return home.

Returning his attention to the men around him, he saw Chief Cameron coming down the stairs.

"Alright, Fighters," his gruff voice projected a grim calm over top of the incessant, keening bell. "The protocol is for us to remain here until the women have arrived. They're scattered all over this side of the city, so it's way easier to gather here. Let's get our armour on and get everything laid out for the women when they get back."

It surprised Zhair'lo not at all to find out a contingency plan prepared for the situation. He wondered what Mindi would think of the Heroic Fighters standing around idly, waiting to reunite with the women, while the bell tolled and tolled.

The city women, still waiting for their numbers to fill out, moved out of the way as men pushed the doors open and starting hauling in armour and weapons off the carts parked in the alley. The older men took theirs first, heedless of being nearly naked in the presence of the women. Nudity would have been a joke in the Barracks showers. Here, in the seriousness of battle preparations, the men checked and rechecked their weapons and the fastenings on their armour without a smile passing anyone's lips.

Eventually, Zhair'lo and his squad had their turns to gird themselves, just as Renzi finally joined them.

"What took you?" Kit asked.

"We got ... uh ... stuck," Renzi turned his eyes away and focused on his armour.

"Stuck?"

"She got spooked," Renzi looked up at the ceiling. "Took a while to come, okay?"

Sheepishly, a tiny girl slunk around the wall past the assembled and joined her sisters at the far end of the room. Zhair'lo wondered for a moment about Renzi's experience. A mesh couldn't be broken without an orgasm, but what had happened to the two of them?

He shrugged it off and took up his weapon. Alone among the men, Zhair'lo carried a bow. He might have stood out if not for the presence of the giant double-bladed axe Chief Cameron managed to strap to his back.

"Does that thing really work as a weapon?" Kit wondered quietly to Zhair'lo.

"I don't see any swords on him, so I'd guess so."

The heavy, dark axe carried a certain dread with it. Together with the man's bulk, Zhair'lo felt weak at the knees whenever he imagined having to fight someone like Cameron. The man's skin looked thick enough to deflect several arrows as a prelude to slicing his foes in half. Zhair'lo shivered and reminded himself flesh, no matter how weathered, couldn't actually stop an arrow.

Still, the bell tolled, heralding a conflict somewhere out beyond the ring road.

He estimated a quarter bell passed between when he and Mindi had left bedroom sixteen and when the heavily armoured Form women showed up at the door.

Chief Cameron, expecting their squad mates to be rushing back from their scattered Services, squinted oddly at the four women. None of these belonged to any of the squads waiting inside and besides, none of the Fighter women would have their armour yet. 

"What news?" he asked.

The leader of the guards looked around the room, seeing the Fighter men on one side, fully armoured, and the city women in their frippery on the other side.

"Beshenna has fallen," she announced tersely, heedless of the gasps of dismay that followed.

Cameron took this in stride, a true Fighter. Zhair'lo had never seen the man show fear before and expected no less from him now.

'A Temple has fallen!' he shouted to Talla in his mind. 'Beshenna. It's Beshenna, not Gern, but one has fallen!'

'How do you know? Are you sure?' Talla seemed ready to burst.

'There are Form women here. They've just told us.'

Talla's glee came back to him so perfectly, he nearly mistook it for an echo of his own.

'They're free, then? They can do whatever they want? No more Temple?'

'I guess so,' Zhair'lo shrugged back, 'I've got on other infor-'

"Her Imminence Summons Zhair'lo M'han," the guard at the door announced to all.

Zhair'lo, shocked, broke his connection with Talla as he stared at the woman who had spoken his name.

"What?" Chief Cameron froze too, as if some terror rooted him through the hard, wooden floors to the soil beneath. "Him?"

"Me?" Zhair'lo called out, feeling the gaze of every eye in the room. "Why?"

"Her Imminence will explain," the guard's voice brooked no opposition. "You will come immediately."

"Kit, Renzi, Z'rus," Chief Cameron's body thawed and his voice came out harsh. "Stay with him."

"My orders -" the woman began.

"Did not explicitly exclude his squad mates," Cameron's voice was harsh. "And we don't break up squads without explicit orders. They stay together. Move! All of you!"

Terror began to scrape at the pit of Zhair'lo's stomach, which suddenly felt hollowed out as if he hadn't eaten in days. Not only had his Chief's reaction disturbed him, but he found himself being rushed out the door and through the streets accompanied by tall, dark armoured guards once again. The last time they'd taken Zhair'lo away like this, it had been to torture Talla and force him to - he didn't want to think about that.

'What's wrong?' Talla came through again, having sensed his anxiety.

'I don't know. The Goddess has Summoned me.'

Zhair'lo felt a gut-deep shift in her, even as he ran. Talla, he realized, had left her Endowment comrades and changed course toward him.

'No! There's nothing you can do about this.'

'Nine hells there isn't,' her anger came through loud and clear.

And their link went blank again as she began devoting all her energy to the run.

------===================-------

"Master Kendrick!" the Queen of Form shouted, rising from her desk with a satisfied smile and ignoring the gathered female Officers she'd been conversing with. "You arrived quickly."

Relief flooded the Queen, a consequence of her expectation the grizzled Master of Fighters would radiate confidence into their midst.

Instead, his dark, hooded eyes caught hers.

"I received your message en route, Highness," his comforting brogue rolled over her. "I understand we're sending this boy as the Conduit?"

"Aye, Master Fighter," she answered, falling into his dialect.

Kendrick didn't quite shake his head, but disappointment - and a shade of rebellious disagreement - showed in the tilt of his head.

"Who will have Authority when we march?"

"Gillian," the Queen of Form replied.

"I trained her myself," Kendrick nodded his approval. Then, lowering his eyes to the map on the desk between them, he added, "I'll take Command."

Everything stopped, then, an entire room sensing the tension this last statement created. Master Kendrick, though a great man, had already pushed his luck with his abrupt interrogation. Making a request to Command would be another level of impertinence, right here in the Queen's own Domain. But declaring himself to be in Command?




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 28



The Queen of Form, meanwhile, felt something deep in her chest lurch. Kendrick? She would not allow her Kendrick to run straight into the wreckage of a Fallen Temple. She respected him far too much to be insulted by his strange, rebellious attitude, but the idea of him risking his life that way struck her with dizziness.

A tick of the Queen's head dismissed her Officers and attendants from the vicinity. She walked slowly around the desk until a last corner separated her from the Master Fighter as he continued to stare at the map.

"You will remain here," she told him quietly. "And see to our defences should those from Beshenna make their way to Gern."

"That could be weeks away, Mistress," Kendrick peered stonily downward. "Or never."

"Nevertheless," she intoned, folding her arms and leaning imperiously away from him. "This is -"

"It isn't likely, Mistress," he interrupted her, "that I'll be around then, at any rate."

Panic seized the Sorceress as a fist inside twisted her stomach, clutching at her insides and wringing them out like a wet towel. Gracelessly, she lurched forward, banging her hip on the corner of the desk so that pain fired up her spine. Moving so close as to be nearly improper, she held a hand up to his temple, brushing his hair back over his ear.

Grey hairs spread before her fingertips.

"How long?" she gulped.

"A week, possibly," he said, still refusing to meet her eyes. "Long enough to see this lot to Beshenna."

The Queen of Form turned to the map, horror on her face, her mouth hanging open in shock. Her very vocabulary denied her the words she wanted to say. She couldn't even cry here, with her underlings so close, her only option to turn away and keep her face from everyone else.

"How will we -?"

"I've trained your Fighters well, Mistress," Kendrick turned to view her profile.

"But how will I - I," she trailed off, then turned to gaze at him, her eyes wide with a mix of fear and sorrow. "Kendrick."

Looking into her eyes for the first time since he'd greeted her, he spoke in his softest voice, rolling his 'r's heavily as ever, "You'll have your armour to comfort you, Mistress. Now let me fight this last battle for you."

She suddenly felt like the child she'd been the day she'd first seen him. Staring into his eyes, the little girl inside the Sorceress did her best to hide the twitching in her chin. She jerked her head toward the exit, regretting now every day she'd delayed in calling him to her bed.

"Go, Master Fighter," she pulled herself up to her full height, forcing cold stone into her voice, "Take Command and lead them to Beshenna."

"Aye, Mistress."

The Queen of Form didn't watch him go. She couldn't. Instead, she turned her back on him and walked around the desk. When her Disciples had gathered around her once more, they found her eyes dry and her voice steady.

------===================-------

Running flat out, her legs aching and lungs ready to burst, Talla caught up to the tail end of Zhair'lo's procession in front of the Temple's main gate. Four guards surrounded Zhair'lo while three other boys in Fighter armour tagged along behind him. They halted at the main gate and Talla passed them, casually as she could with her heavy breathing, while they faced the guards' interrogation. No one questioned, in times of emergency, that a woman entered any gate, no matter how where she called home. But bringing men into the Temple caused a disturbance, even if the men had escorts.

"Where are you going with these men?" the lead guard at the gate called out.

"This is Beshenna's Conduit, fool," the leader of the entourage responded, waving a sealed , black scroll at the gate guard.

"Go ahead, then, sister," the gate guard waved them through and they darted through the gate.

'You can't follow us,' Zhair'lo's eyes found Talla's as they passed her and his thoughts came through loud and clear at this distance, 'we're going into the Goddess's central domain.'

'Why you?'

'I don't know. They must think I can fix it somehow. I didn't know about this Conduit stuff until just now.'

'Fix Beshenna?' she shouted in his mind. 'Those people are free now! You can't let them use you for that!'

'I'll avoid it if I can. Dammit, Talla, what can I do right now?'

She chased them around the fountain, but the entourage shortly went up a long, narrow alleyway into the heart of the Temple. Talla knew that corridor from her very first tour of the Temple. It ended at a large set of doors, guarded by numerous women who likely had no patience for any story she might tell.

Stymied, she paused in the central triangle courtyard, full of impotent fury. The Temple clearly intended to use Zhair'lo as a Conduit and send him on a gods-knew-how-long journey to repair Beshenna. She'd worried enough with all the double upgrades they'd forced him through and felt helpless against the damage they intended next.

'Gods damn you all to the nine hells!' Talla shouted in her mind. 'I won't let you have him!'

She could find no outlet for her anger. Standing next to the beautiful fountain with its naked Goddess statue, Talla desired nothing more than to climb into the small pool so she could kick and punch the statue until it fell to ruins.

"Make way!" a shout came across the courtyard.

Form women, rushing home to put on their armour, flashed past her in their colourful Service clothing.

The dammed up rage inside her suddenly found a watercourse, lending her a courage she'd never felt before, and she rushed into Form after them.

"Talla!" a deep voice shouted behind her. "Talla, dammit!"

She ignored it, caught up as she was in the rush of Form women.

------===================-------

"You will wait here," the guard commander spoke to Zhair'lo's squad mates.

The obsidian hallway with its flickering torches, had been crammed to the hilt to accommodate the bevy of the Goddess's personal guards, Zhair'lo's entourage and his three squad mates. Even then, women moved in and out past them, wearing the thinnest of clothing. The guards at the door gave them a quick pat down, checked the scrolls many of them carried for hidden weapons, and passed them through.

"What goes on beyond here is a private matter," the guard commander clarified. "Zhair'lo will return to you shortly."

To their everlasting credit, Renzi, Kit and Z'rus ignored the lethal army of women around them and all looked to Zhair'lo for confirmation. Only when he raised an eyebrow and tilted his head in acquiescence did they relax their postures.

"Loyal bunch," the guard commander observed. "Now you get out of your armour. We'll have no man with weapons in her Imminence's presence."

The guards who watched over the door to the Goddess's inner sanctum forced Zhair'lo to strip down to his shorts and t-shirt. They then went over his body carefully, making sure not even the smallest weapon could have been concealed in his remaining clothing.

They waved him into the room, with only one very large guard following along the black marble floor, watching him warily from a pace away. Zhair'lo couldn't be sure, but he didn't think this one had been part of the original entourage, but rather someone picked up locally, possibly a member of the Goddess's personal guard. The helm she wore, covering most of her face, made it impossible to make out anything about her besides her size.

The Goddess's central chamber, also her bedroom, carried the theme of the blackness to an extreme. Zhair'lo's eyes gained the impression of a dark, cloudy night, with a fire of women burning in an over-sized pit. Countless women, sparks of orange and yellow around the central flame, maintained the illusion as they spiralled in and out of the ebony four poster bed, dressed with translucent black curtains, resting its massive legs upon a raised marble dais.

"Toward the bed," a disturbingly familiar voice chilled him from underneath the helm.

Women with scrolls ran in past him and dashed out again while others waited in queue. More orange bedecked Officers stood aside, conferring in small groups before taking matters behind the black veils.

Why, he wondered, did the Goddess manage things from her bed instead of the ornate, black desk on an even higher dais across the room? Ink wells, parchment and maps were much more capably arranged there than here. From his angle at the entrance, Zhair'lo could see nothing for the Goddess had closed the curtains on the near side.

With the guard woman prodding him from behind, Zhair'lo rounded the dais on the right.

"Begone," a sweet voice from behind the curtains commanded the attendants as he came to an opening in the curtains.

Her golden skin reflected torchlight into his eyes before she even saw him. When she turned to look at him, blue sparks flung from her hair and her eyes shone at him with some inner light, locking his gaze in place.

"There you are," she said, her soft voice sweeping through his head and temporarily rendering him dizzy.

Grasping for his senses, trying to remember protocol, he fell to one knee and lowered his gaze in the proper manner of a Fighter. It was only then, with his eyes averted from hers, that his mind started working again and he remembered the pose she'd struck on her bed.

"Rise, Soldier," the Goddess's voice was gentle but firm. "We have work to do."

The golden woman reclined on her bed, supported by a number of pillows at her back so that she could face him. Her long black nightgown, translucent as the curtains, dark as her silk bedsheets, lay all about her, as she had pulled it high up to reveal a tremendous amount of her long golden legs and the patch of dark hair between them.

"Imminence," Zhair'lo squeaked out and gulped.

Not only had she exposed her body to him, she was also stroking herself, gently but deeply,with the middle finger of her right hand.

"A sacred duty has befallen you, Zhair'lo," the formality of her voice weighed heavily on him, in stark contrast to what was going on between her legs.

"I go to Beshenna?"

"Indeed," she noted with a tinge of surprise. "They have lost the Perfection of Within and We require a Conduit to repair this loss."

The story came together for Zhair'lo all at once. Someone in the city of Beshenna, by plot or accident, had caused two more deaths than usual, and one more than their system could handle. The Temple could not sustain itself, an outcome matched exactly to what he and Talla desired for Gern. On top of that, the golden skinned woman presently masturbating in front of him planned to send him into the ruins.

'What better place could there be to observe what truly happens when Temples fall?' he thought, 'We'll show you for the exaggerating liars you are.'

"I am to take it from you, Imminence?"

"Who better?" she waved her left hand delicately. "Only three in my Temple carry the last piece of this puzzle, and the other two are currently busy in the Augmentation Chamber."

Zhair'lo had expected a trip to one of those Chambers tonight, but guessed now the timing wasn't right for such formality. The magic, present plans indicated, worked just as well here. What, he wondered, kept the Queen of Sweetness and Sorceress of Within busy this night?

"He has no weapon," the Goddess intoned, a dark scolding threatening to surface.

Taken aback for a moment, Zhair'lo realized the target of this potential discipline was the woman behind him. Swept away by the Goddess's beauty, he'd entirely forgotten the itching sensation this woman had induced in his spine. Turning his head to look over his right shoulder, he observed her to be in some discomfiture. He looked back at the Goddess, his confusion clearly evident to her.

"Nothing to concern you, Zhair'lo," she assured him, waving that left hand again, even while the right worked away. "But we do have rules here."

"Imminence," the woman acknowledged, "I could move to the far end of ..."

'Oh!' Zhair'lo saw a small lecture from Talla's memories. Of all the information she had learned in her first two weeks, the neat tables with the rules of relative nudity stood out with utmost clarity. 'Of course, this is so simple I don't need the table to figure out what the guard should strip down to. There's a practically naked Goddess here.'

"Just remove your clothing," the golden woman's eyes flared into a glowing blue, cutting off all further argument. "I may have need of you."

Even Zhair'lo couldn't see the need for the guard to stay nearby. What could the woman possibly contribute?

"Imminence," the guard's voice hinted at subdued objection.

The first thing she unclasped was her metal helm, which she slid off over her head.

'Oh, nine hells,' Zhair'lo barely held the words inside.

He recognized her instantly from nine hundred nightmares and nine thousand revenge fantasies.

'Sonja,' he cursed, for her name constituted a obscenity in his vocabulary, 'of all the gods damned ...'

The rest of her armour came off, buckle after leather buckle, slowly revealing the shirt and small orange underwear underneath. As she now stood beside him, and the Goddess watched her, Zhair'lo found it difficult to split his attention between the golden woman determinedly playing with herself on the bed and his worst enemy, this statue of a human being, slipping her panties gingerly to the floor to reveal her finely haired genitals before letting her breasts out of their containment.

Zhair'lo quirked an eyebrow. Even with everything else going on, he noticed the size of her breasts and concluded she'd had an upgrade since they'd last met. A Form woman had chosen Abundance? He shook it off, tearing his eyes away from her naked body.

'I should do an upgrade? Now? With her standing behind me?'

Sonja had avoided his gaze the entire time and, now finished, retrieved her sword and stood stiffly at attention, the pommel of the sword in her hands and its tip on the ground, braced against a groove in the marble floor. Zhair'lo couldn't decide how he felt about her now, appearing so naked and vulnerable in spite of the sword.

"Come here now, Zhair'lo," the Goddess waved him in as she sat up.

From her nightstand, she retrieved a golden chalice decorated with fine rubies and sapphires.

"Drink," she bade.

For the rest of his life, Zhair'lo knew his gut would wrench every time they offered him a drink.

"Drink," she repeated, seeing his reticence, "There is no other way."

'It tastes like water,' he noted as it spread over his tongue. 'But then, it almost always tastes like water, doesn't it?'

His mind held no doubts about the contents of the goblet. After all, the Goddess would be using him to carry a Within upgrade, which meant they needed to avoid an accidental mesh. He'd done such upgrades before, the most memorable of which had involved a momentary, probably inadvertent, penetration of a Sorceress.

When he handed back the chalice, the Goddess reached one golden hand to his shorts and disappointment came in the form of her pursed lips.

"Served once tonight already?" her eyes sparkled at him.

"Yes, Imminence," he shrugged, events having driven him to a place where he could no longer feel embarrassment.

"Sonja, dear?" the Goddess's voice was sweet.

"Imminence?" the naked woman stepped forward.

"Prime the young man, will you? I'll do my part from here."

"His age," Sonja stammered, clearly horrified by something else.

"His age is irrelevant at this point," the Goddess spoke softly, returning to pleasuring herself. "I hardly have the time to find an appropriate attendant, who wouldn't have your skills anyway."

One raised, dark eyebrow was enough to close off the argument.

Sonja, a head taller than Zhair'lo, stared down at him. His chin level with her ample cleavage, he stared back.

"Really?" the word choked out from Zhair'lo's throat before he could think, startling even himself.

"Do you two know each other?" the Goddess asked. "It doesn't matter. Get to it."

As Sonja knelt down before him, Zhair'lo cycled through all of his revenge fantasies. Some of them involved hurting this woman. Many required her death, either at his hands or Talla's. In certain daydreams, vengeance came after the fall of the Temple while in others it came during or before.

No daydream, however, had ever imagined this. It had never occurred to Zhair'lo to wreak any kind of sexual vengeance on the Adjudicator.

"No iron circlet today?" he nodded at her forehead, keeping his tone conversational.

Rolling her eyes to the heavens, meeting his gaze only briefly, she pulled his shorts down and took him entirely into her mouth. Zhair'lo couldn't even identify the emotions swirling through his brain and found, for once, a happiness at being mentally isolated from Talla. Even with his cock in her mouth, her tongue expertly working him over, would he be able to develop an erection? He found it disturbing that his and Sonja's interests lined up, but only because this upgrade stood like a palisade wall blocking his investigation of Beshenna.

'I need to see over that wall,' Zhair'lo thought, 'and so I have to make this work.'

Still, part of his brain reminded him that the woman who knelt before him had tortured, and forced him to torture, Talla. Fury and duty raced each other around his brain, forcing his heart to pound. He looked down at Sonja again, crouching her large frame slightly in order to be at the right height for him.

'I haven't washed,' he thought. 'She must be able to taste Mindi on me.'

Nothing worked on his cock. No thought associated with Sonja could ever bring life to his lower regions.

Instead, he looked up, past Sonja to the bed where the golden creature lay sprawled out, continuing to finger herself. The Goddess raised her eyebrows, eloquently speaking volumes with the simple gesture, telling him she recognized his problem and would do her best to help.

The Goddess shrugged slightly and twisted her torso, letting her nightgown slide off one shoulder and then the other. The light material caught at the tips of her breasts, aureole half visible in their slightly darker gold. A deep breath and shudder forced the gown down her belly, revealing the generous abundance of flesh eleven upgrades had given her.

A surge of blood rushed down his body and the golden woman, recognizing it, looked a bit sadly down at Sonja's back. Her expression said she understood Sonja had failed, through no fault of her own, but rather due to a lack of certain assets.

Ensconced in her pillows and continuing to masturbate with her right hand, she used the left to trace gentle circles around the border of her aureola, gently bringing the nipple to stiffness. As Zhair'lo watched, his erection growing in leaps and bounds, pushing to the back of Sonja's mouth, the Goddess took her nipple between thumb and forefinger, gently twisting back and forth.

The Goddess exhaled, closing her eyes in the face of an excess of pleasure as she gently plucked at and released that dark golden tip.

When her eyes opened, a knowing smile came to her lips. How many Facial upgrades did it take before a woman could read a man's desires in his eyes? She knew Zhair'lo as if she held a scroll of his innermost thoughts.

Her left hand cupped her immense breast from underneath and pulled it slowly up toward her mouth. Mouth hanging open in anticipation, Zhair'lo watched breathlessly as her golden tongue slid out of her mouth and touched, tip to tip, with her nipple. He might have whimpered when she held his gaze and began slowly circling.

Only when Sonja came off his erection did he realize how deeply she'd held him in her mouth.

"He's ready, Imminence," the woman tried not to gasp, looking at the wet manhood before her.

She retrieved her sword and stood once again at Zhair'lo's back.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 29



Pril gave a nod and sweeping wave of her hand to the four fully armoured guards standing outside Principia Abundance. The sight of these women, Disciples of Strength, comforted her far more than the Enforcers of Form at the entrance to Endowment Hall. With highly improper haste, she darted to the back of the room where her Mistress stood, blonde hair awry, leaning heavily on her desk with fingers splayed.

"Mistress," she gasped.

Atreya, her long dark hair neatly coordinated with her working blue outfit, and Shanata in her armour, helm tucked under her arm, both looked up in panic at Pril's sudden appearance.

"Yes?" the Sorceress's bewilderment strained her voice.

"Talla, Mistress," Pril gasped. "I saw her run into Form with the Fighters. I would have stopped her but I-"

"She did what!?" Abundance asked, her eyes alight with angry fire. "As if I haven't spent the last several weeks making up excuses to dodge whatever reason they have for wanting to 'interview' her again."

"I saw her run off and she looked upset," Pril straightened to attention, fully certain she shouldn't have heard what her Mistress had shouted. "She's probably armoured up by now. I think she means to go with them."

"Because of Zhair'lo," Atreya put in. "She'll have found out somehow."

"The Seal Breaker?" Pril stepped back. "What's he got to do with this?"

"He's going to be the Conduit," Atreya explained with strained patience, jerking her head toward the other women to let Pril know this fact had caused the stress amongst them. "Quite possibly, he already is."

"Rutting beasts," Pril whispered as she looked aside and tried to regain her breath. "He's so young ..."

"Find Talla and get her back here," Abundance snapped.

"Let her go."

Abundance's straightened up with indignation. Her anger dissipated into astonishment as she looked back and forth between Atreya and Shanata, who had spoken the words simultaneously.

"Pardon?"

Without moving her head, Atreya turned her eyes to give Pril a sideways glance, but she only looked at her Sorceress and planted her feet.

"I say again," the Sorceress hissed flatly. "Pardon?"

The two mutineers looked at each other for a moment before facing their superior again.

"Our duty is not just to the Temple," Atreya's lips formed firm, thin lines.

"Nor," Shanata continued the quote, "just to the women."

"The Temple serves the people," Atreya continued the Virgin lecture. "The women and the men."

"Or it serves nothing," Shanata put a note of finality in her voice.

"What has that to do with Talla?" Abundance put her hands on her hips. "She is no warrior. Who will -?"

"She made her choice," Atreya, impossibly, interrupted. "She is a woman and we are to respect how she wishes to Serve."

"More to the point," Shanata carried on. "Who is protecting Zhair'lo?"

"Are you two insane?" the Sorceress asked, her voice carrying a bit too far. "Zhair'lo will be the Conduit, the whole point of the journey. The Fighters will do their utmost to protect him and deliver him to Beshenna."

"To Beshenna," Shanata said. "And then what? He is eighteen, nowhere near ready. We've already discussed what state a man is in after that. Who will guard him then? Who will watch over him as well as Talla would?"

"You are relying on their personal loyalty," Abundance glared at her underlings. "The feelings that landed them in so much trouble just a few ... how long ago was that again?"

"So be it," Shanata folded her arms. "Let my sister go."

"Indeed," Atreya moved to stand hip to hip beside Atreya.

"Sister?" Abundance stalled. "I though that an honorary title."

"I changed my mind," Atreya said. "Just now."

The Sorceress sniffed at the air, tossed her hair and stared into the distance.

"Very, well," she pronounced finally. "By the gods it's on your heads. Especially yours, Shanata. You're going with them as Our Representative. You watch out for her. She'll watch out for him."

Shanata's eyes sharpened with excitement. "Mistress," she said as she bowed, turned, and rushed away.

"I've never seen her move so quickly," Abundance noted. "I wouldn't have guessed her for bloodthirsty."

"Hardly," Atreya pointed out. "Her goal now is to find Talla before anyone in Form notices."

-===================-

Atop a balcony overlooking Form's largest practice field, two women stood, alike in dignity and stature. Beneath them, the Temple's military rolled itself out across a wide, torch-lit yard. The smell of leather mixed with the human scents of anxiety and excitement as hundreds of women marched and hundreds more rushed to don their armour. Others, always at the ready, had laid out stations with weapons.

Every woman had a place to go and knew her obligations. If one had the eye for it, one could see the organization and purpose in the chaos, as well as spot those out of place.

"Oh, Madra Zen. What's she doing now?", the taller of the two women, a lightly armoured Valkyrie, leaned over the solid oak railing to get a better view through the visor of her helm.

"Mistress?"

"The little one, look," she pointed. "An old grudge breaking into a new mutiny."

The second woman, graceful as a swan, extended her neck to look down into the beehive.

"Talla, Mistress?" she whispered, not quite sure of the identity of the lost woman in her armour. "What's she doing here?"

"Isn't it obvious?" the first said. "We can see the anger from here and surmise the rest."

"There will be no dissuading her, then?"

"No. But we can get her some place better than here."

"How, Mistress?"

"Baccarat's Depot. I can get her that far. You make sure someone's waiting on the other end."

"Yes, Mistress."

"A long time has passed since we last played games like the Little Girls, isn't it?" a smile came over the lips of the taller woman, nearly invisible but easily sensed by her disciple.

-===================-

In the black marble hallway, the seven remaining members of Zhair'lo's squad waited, standing stiffly at attention as they faced off against the equally placid women who guarded the Goddess's inner sanctum. The Temple had taken one of their number from them, and they had found no way to address the matter, so they had reached a decision, without discussion, to prove themselves as patient and emotionless as any squad of veteran warriors.

A woman in full leather armour, her face obscured by an iron helm, pushed a two wheeled cart out through the doors of the Goddess's chamber into the hallway.

Bree gasped, a look of horror on her face. Two wheeled carts, they all knew, didn't usually carry the living.

"Is he alright?" her spoke burned with accusation.

"He'll be fine," the woman's voice carried a cold hollowness. "He will perform a heroic duty in carrying the lost Perfection to Beshenna."

"Who are you?" Kit confronted her.

"My name is Sonja," the woman stared down at him, her voice warning him of the line he had crossed. "And I am to escort him to the van heading east."

"That's ours to do, Mistress," Zia's pushed the astounded Adjudicate aside from the rear of the caisson whilst Z'rus took the front handles.

"Lead us to the van, if you please, Mistress," Del made a show of putting as much courtesy as she could into her voice, as if to apologize for the abrupt indiscipline of her mates.

"Who are you people?" Sonja quirked an eyebrow at her.

"We're Soldiers, first rank," Del replied, her voice even and polite as she walked in front of the cart alongside Sonja. "Zhair'lo is one of us."

"I surmised as much," Sonja kept her voice flat.

Del promptly introduced herself and each of the other six members of the squad.

"Where are your helmets?" the Adjudicate asked.

"With our weapons," Del replied. "Chief Cameron ordered us here as soon as we armoured up. We're headed to the same line of carts as you."

They passed out of the Goddess's central chambers into a labyrinthine set of passages.

"I never noticed before," Del remarked. "These passages are made this way on purpose, aren't they? To make it hard for anything bigger than this caisson to get through."

"Indeed, Soldier," Sonja's tone cut off any further conversation.

They passed through the last set of large, black doors which led them into open air. Sonja went ahead and Z'rus stopped when he became aware of the problem of taking the caisson with their unconscious squad mate on it down a flight of nine stone stairs. Sonja waited at the bottom of the stairs, arms folded, her face unreadable beneath the mask.

"She ain't helping us," Tara pitched her voice only for the pretence of not being heard. Certainly, the cadre of guards around the door heard her.

"The thing disassembles," Bree pointed out. "Yank the pegs."

"Grab all four handles first, one each," Renzi said.

The four girls each took a handle while the boys yanked out the pegs that held the simple plank of a litter to the caisson's wheel base. When Kit pulled the last peg out, the girls lifted Zhair'lo and the board on which he lay free and carried him down the stairs. Following on, the three boys gently rolled the bottom section of the cart down the stairs. Once they had it on flat ground again, the girls moved the stretcher back into place.

"Easy, gotta line up the peg holes," Z'rus hissed.

"Easier to move the wheels while we hold this plank still," Zia grunted.

"Okay, okay," Z'rus accepted the rebuke as he adjusted the carriage. "There, drop it on."

With a gentle squeak, the board settled into place. The girls held on carefully as the boys wedged the pegs back into place.

As one, they turned to face Sonja, regarding them implacably from beneath her helm. Something like a harumph came out, perhaps an exhalation of breath and a hidden twist of the lips, before she turned on her heel and led them away.

-===================-

Standing in the middle of Form's square, surrounded by a veritable ant colony of anonymous soldiery, Talla maintained her determination but had no idea where to go. At some point, she surmised, they would make an exodus toward the gates, to join the group travelling to Beshenna. She only had to look busy until she could find them.

'If only I could see over all their nine-times-damned shoulders,' she cursed inwardly.

How many of them would join the march to Beshenna? How many stayed behind to guard the walls? Might the departure have already occurred, leaving without her while she stood here, armoured and waiting to go? Zhair'lo would know and she'd lost contact with him at the worst possible time.

Talla had easily pilfered her military needs from what Form made available. As long as some far off Fighter continued to ring that bell, the women here freely let anyone who showed up take on armour and weapons. The thievery of a bow, a quiver of arrows, and light leather armour constituted the sum total of her achievements thus far. At the very least, the helm covered her face, keeping her anonymous.

"You there," a commanding voice called out.

Talla twisted, knowing somehow, despite the insanity of the mob thronging about her, this speaker specifically addressed her.

"What?" she stared back defiantly at the exceptionally tall woman gliding through the chaos like a bird weaving through a thick forest of trees.

The woman, face and hair hidden by her helmet, didn't speak until she closed with Talla.

"This is not a good place for you, dear," the woman's voice flooded Talla with layers of comfort, like multiple bedsheets on a cold winter's night.

Certainly, Talla trusted her instantly and without reservation. The tone said she had Talla's best interests at heart and, furthermore, she had the competence to deliver what Talla needed.

"I - well - where should I be, then?"

"You won't be able to get out of those gates," the tall woman pointed toward Form's exit into the central domain. "Not with armour and a weapon."

"They'll check?"

"Oh, yes, dear."

"Then what?" she put her hands on her hip, damned if she would show fear now.

"Come with me."

The voice neither frightened Talla nor permitted any thought of disobedience. She followed because she fully believed it the wisest course of action, even though the women led her through the crowd into Form's Hall.

"I'm not terribly fond of this place," she remarked.

"Of course you wouldn't be, dear," the tall woman's voice expressed to Talla her complete sympathy, a slight emphasis on the word 'you' suggesting that she knew Talla's past.

'It's like she knows everything about me,' Talla thought, looking sideways at the woman. 'She didn't even say my name, but I know she knows who I am.'

They passed through busy offices and farther back into odd shaped passages linked through storage rooms and structures Talla couldn't track. Could she trust this woman? Facial existed in Form, after all, and Facial women developed all sorts of tricks as they advanced. The possibility that this woman employed some clever mental device in persuading Talla merited consideration.

"Where are we?"

"It only matters where we're going," her guide pitched her voice like a teacher who had finished a lesson and intended to impart nothing further.

They reached a dead end; a dusty old room full of old sacks marked 'flour' and a number of broken wooden cartwheels and shelves. The place reeked of dust and stale air and it seemed to Talla no one had trod these cold, stone floors in ages.

The tall woman reached for a large sack of flour Talla estimated as about the same weight as herself. With a light grunt, she heaved the sack aside and pulled on a rope buried in a pile of dust on the floor. A wooden circle lifted out of the dust with a crack as it unsealed itself from the stone ring upon which it sat.

"Whuh?" Talla gasped.

"Take this," the woman handed Talla a torch. "I have to close the door behind me."

That Talla felt no visceral reservations twigged her intellect. Certainly, this woman could send her to her death, locking her in some tiny underground chamber, but Talla's emotional side wouldn't believe her capable of such things.

With a troubled expression on her lips, she laid the torch on the ground and climbed down into the hole, only taking the torch again when she could barely reach it. Without knowing the length of the ladder, she had no idea of the consequences of a fall. Descending one handed made things slower than she would have liked, but she had no intention of dying here, in such a stupid way.

When she reached the tenth rung, she heard the door above her close and heard her guide descending from above.

"How far is it?"

"Not far," she called down, her voice pitched knowingly, "Not nearly as deep as those sewers."

'She even knows about that? Madra Zen!'

Indeed, only twenty rungs down, her feet hit solid rock and she found herself at the end of a long rocky passage with only one way to go.

"Come along," the tall woman held a second torch high over her head. "You'll not find the way yourself."

Talla found the subterranean journey bewildering, full of backwards cuts in the rock and unseen zigzags recognized only by her guide. The flickering torchlight played all sorts of tricks on her eyes.

'If this women leaves me, I could conceivably die down here.' Talla remembered now her concerns about the tricks of the women of Facial. Had she brought anything with her, even a piece of chalk, to help her find her way out?

The engineers who had laid out the sewers had done so with a logical efficiency; a need to follow certain basic rules of physics of which Talla had an instinctive understanding. Whoever had laid out this maze had worked under no such compunctions.

Eventually, however, the cross cuts ceased and the cavern began to open up. Her guide, ducking her head under a last rocky overhang, waved her through into a long straight passage bearing all the signs of proper masonry and the use of quarried rock.

"Only a bit farther, dear."

Talla took advantage of the width of the passage to walk directly beside her guide and try to peer up under her helm. The flickering of the torchlight prevented her from getting a clear look through the visor.

Stymied, she faced forward, squinting her eyes to probe the edges of the area they lit with their torches. Consequently, panic seized her when she realized her guide had left her side. Talla twisted around to find the otherwise graceful woman had fallen to one knee, panting heavily.

"Mistress?"

"I - I have to return, Talla," she whispered. "They'll miss me soon regardless."

"But -"

"But nothing. It's not much farther, child. You'll find a ladder fifty metres ahead on the right. It exits onto the second floor of a grain storehouse. Drop down to the first floor and wait outside the front door."

"Wait for whom?"

The tall woman slid backwards and inhaled a deep breath of air as she regained her feet.

"How should I know, child? Someone, certainly. Best of luck. May the gods be at your back."

"But who are you?" Talla stepped closer, trying to get at least a good look at the woman's eyes.

The woman only laughed, very lightly, and danced out of range. A moment later, though she never seemed to run, she disappeared into the maze of caves.

Alone in the dark, Talla realized her options had shrunk considerably and her emotional confidence had departed with her guide, coming to match the intellectual doubts she'd harboured from the start.

Together, she and her guide had walked a considerable distance, possibly enough to have left the Temple, which meant she'd escaped with armour and weapons. If the woman hadn't lied, she could now join up with the departing army and get herself alongside Zhair'lo.

She looked at the sides of the passage, then back along the way she'd come and finally in the direction her guide had pointed her.

'Forward, then, since I have no other choice.'

Holding the torch high and listening for the sounds of enemies she suddenly feared, she began counting her steps and marched down the long straight passage.

-===================-

H'reena, Officer of Facial, stood within the Goddess's triangle, just outside the gates joining it to Form. She watched armoured women hustle in and out of those bronze doors, moving to take positions on the walls or carrying messages to far flung places in the Temple. To an unknowing eye, H'reena acted in some official capacity. Perhaps she waited for a messenger, or carried a message herself. Or maybe her duty lay in overseeing the behaviour of the low ranking women moving around her. At any rate, she comported herself in a way so as to remove all doubt about the legitimacy of her presence.

Internally, however, her mind spun, critically examining every move of every body that passed within range of her vision. In order to expand her visual range, she removed her helm and tucked it under her arm.

Her Mistress had given her an order and she intended to see it through, no matter how vague and open ended. The key lay in finding someone appropriate. If absolutely necessary, H'reena could go to Baccarat's depot herself, but that would draw far too much attention. Besides which, she had no authority to join the departing van to Beshenna, nor to add any other members to it. She would need to retrieve the foolish girl, transport her to the military carts and find a way to get her added to their escorts.

What had the Sorceress imagined in giving her this order? Where had she expected H'reena to find a woman with both the sympathy, rank and of the right Discipline to -

"Shanata!" she called out suddenly at a woman in full armour quietly slipping past her.

"H'reena," Shanata called back, clearly upset by the identification.

Armour could hide a lot of body language and facial expression, but H'reena could still measure eyes and posture. Shanata, she surmised, operated somewhat illicitly.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 29



"How do you fare?" H'reena moved closer, lowering her voice.

"Well enough. I have -," 

"Matters of great importance to which to attend," H'reena acknowledged. "As do I."

"I don't see what -"

"What is your mission within the gates of Form?"

Pauses could speak volumes to women with H'reena's skill and the hesitation before Shanata's answer told her a lie lay in the offing.

"I will depart to Beshenna, representing Abundance."

Nearly the truth, H'reena surmised, except as it failed to answer the question.

"That is not your purpose beyond these gates," H'reena kept her tone light, leaving aside all accusation, and nodded to a place behind Shanata. "The army lies beyond the main gate, waiting to depart."

"I - ah," Shanata stammered. "I go to seek my aide, whom I believe wandered into Form to arm herself ahead of me."

'Do you think you fool me?' H'reena wondered. Certainly Shanata spoke the truth of Talla's designation, but the tinge of triumphant sneer, no matter the masking presence of the helm, exposed it for a cover story.

"Your 'aide' awaits you at Baccarat's Depot," H'reena tilted her eyes skyward just enough to let Shanata know the transparency of her ruse. "We didn't know of her promotion, however. Please congratulate her on Our Behalf."

Shanata braced herself, for only those of the highest ranks used the plural possessive in exactly that manner.

"I will, of course. Thank you for your help."

H'reena nodded, turned on her heel, and passed through the gates back into Form. If they had known of Shanata's imminent arrival - and intention to take Talla along regardless - they could have simply kept Talla safely inside Form until they could arrange a pickup.

She found it far more fascinating that Abundance, both the Sorceress and the Discipline in general, had decided to cover for Talla this way. Certainly, one expected such things from Facial, at least if one resided in Facial. Nine gods only knew what people outside Facial though of the Discipline.

'But Abundance? What tenth hell is this?'

When, H'reena wondered, had they started playing the disruption game?

During her brief tenure as a teacher, she had developed a penchant for spotting her future Disciples. Certainly, the artists and singers made themselves obvious. It surprised no one when these found their way to Facial. An outsider to the Discipline had a much harder time spotting the others, though, the ones who kept playing board games to confuse instead of win, to disrupt rather than conquer, who preferred the creation of clever patterns over the achievement of the written goals.

Consequently, such women found themselves unconcernedly in last place at the Initiation and so stumbled into Facial. No one understood Facial's pleasure with a system designed to deliver precisely the best women into the arms of the those who could make them feel most welcome.

H'reena cleared her head with a shake.

She'd done her bit of disruption tonight and that would suffice.

-===================-

A bone-shaking, endless tremor shook Zhair'lo slowly into consciousness. Before that, a distance as great in time as nine thousand steps would take him in space, he could remember only darkness, anger and exhaustion.

He tried to open his eyes, but his body failed to obey. Speech he attempted as well, and managed only a feeble groan.

Voices intruded upon his awareness. He recognized them, vaguely, as belonging to friends of a long lost era. Pain jabbed at his spine and he determined he lay on a rough, hard plank. As to who had put him there and why, he had no memory. For a moment, he felt a desire to avenge himself on such parties unknown, but the mere hint of revenge brought a foul taste to his mouth and repelled all such thoughts.

'How odd,' he thought. 'Vengeance lost its appeal somewhere.'

The rumbling continued to disturb him, to reach into his skull despite an uncomfortable cushion of some sort placed under his head.

A bump in the cobblestone road jarred the carriage, forcing a grunt from his lungs.

"Zhai?" a female voice, soaked with concern, whispered in his ear and the tremors ceased below him. The woman's tone changed suddenly to mockery and her distance increased as she stood over him. "See? Told ya he was fine. Jackass, making us worry."

He hadn't recognized Tara when she'd whispered, but he knew her then. With that, memories of the others flooded back. Before he could open his eyes, he felt them crowding around him where they'd stopped on the street.

"He will not awaken for some time," a chilling voice, laced with Authority, spoke from somewhere behind his friends. "We must continue to the Eastern Barracks."

"He's waking now, Mistress," Bree's voice made no attempt to hide the irony in her use of the honorific.

"Unlikely."

Zhair'lo grunted again, determined now to defy Authority, and forced his eyes open. The stars created pinpricks of pain in his vision. Torches, mounted on the walls of the street where they'd stopped, blazed in his eyes. The universe, normally quiet and dull, threatened to burn out his senses. He squeezed his eyes shut, prepared himself for the pain, and opened them again.

Every message to his brain seemed invalid. The presence of the stars and the lit torches spoke of some time after midnight, yet he could see every detail of the concerned faces clustered around him with perfect clarity. Behind the faces, buildings rose, every scratch in their sandstone faces visible to his eyes.

An irritating tingling radiated inward from every bit of his skin. He knew the sensation of being burnt, and this didn't match. On occasion throughout his life, for want of a proper sleeping position, one of his limbs might fall asleep on him, the waking of which produced painful jolts. The tingling he felt now reminded him of this, but everywhere and without promise of ever ending.

As he propped himself up on his elbows, the enormity of his situation hit him. His body felt the way it did because the Goddess had imbued him with the Perfection of Within. A flash image of her golden body appeared in his mind, ensconced upon the black silk sheets of her bed, preparing her body.

Zhair'lo blinked to clear his vision and looked around. Zia stood at his feet, looking over her shoulder at him, for she held the front handles of the caisson. Bree, Tara and Renzi watched him from the left while Del and Kit crowded in on the right. Craning his neck, he saw Z'rus behind him.

"You guys look well," Zhair'lo tried to keep the weariness out of his voice, but at least elicited a laugh from them with the failure.

"You don't, Zhai," Tara offered. "Why don't you go back to sleep? We can carry you."

"Can't sleep on this," he shook his head. "But thanks."

Pushing his twitching legs over the side, Zhair'lo sat up and let his feet hit the ground. Tiny bolts of lightning ran from the soles of his feet up his spine, forcing a wince from him.

"Madra Zen," Del cursed. "Are you sure -"

"He wants up, he gets up," Tara cut her off, her insistence mitigated by her lack of confidence.

Behind them, Sonja removed her helm as she stepped up to tower behind Bree and Tara.

"We do not have time to dawdle here," she spoke curtly. "Nor time for him to walk in his state."

"His state," Kit hissed softly back at her, and Zhair'lo wondered at the anger he felt from his comrades-at-arms.

With the overloading of his senses and his general weariness, he began regretting his insistence on getting up. Would marching to the Eastern Barracks leave him better than accepting a bumpy ride on the caisson?

One look at his friends told him the answer, for they had decided to stand up against Sonja on his behalf. Loyal acts such as that, Zhair'lo knew, he had best answer in kind. If he decided to lie back down, he made a farce of their mutiny.

His eyeballs burning and his nerves electrified, he stood away from the caisson and steadied himself before setting his gaze on Sonja.

"I'll walk, Mistress," he kept the rebellion in his voice to a minimum, not out of respect, but for lack of the mental power to come up with any phrase more inspiring.

The towering woman rolled her eyes at him before pushing past his female companions and setting her helm at the tail of the caisson, next to a small pile of leather and weapons.

"Do you want your armour?" Sonja asked, gesturing at the goods.

"Not - not yet," he stammered.

Hiding a gulp that fought down a wave of nausea, he turned on his heel and began walking. Renzi fell in immediately at his left, with Bree and Tara behind. Seamlessly, as if they'd never parted, they assembled and marched as they always had. Kit replaced Z'rus at the back of the cart, so Z'rus and Del could take their positions on the far right.

Properly ordered, they left Sonja no place in their assembly and forced her to tag along a few paces behind. Zhair'lo didn't turn to see her face, but he could hear her uneven, awkward breathing and knew they'd put her out with their tiny rejection of her authority. The woman recovered quickly, and soon he registered a contentment in the steady, near silence of her respiration.

'Hard to imagine,' he thought, 'that I was in her mouth just a few ...'

"How long was I out?" he asked no on in particular.

"It's been about half a bell since you came out of the Goddess's ... um ... chamber," Bree replied quickly. "But you were in there about half a bell, too. I don't know when you passed out."

Zhair'lo couldn't account, between his interactions with Sonja and the Goddess, for more than a quarter bell of his time inside the bedroom. That mean he'd spent a while in there unconscious. He wondered how long it took two women to put clothing on an unconscious man.

"Anybody got water?" he asked. "Weird taste in my mouth."

The faintest nasal exhalation came from behind him. Sonja had found something funny and hadn't completely contained her mirth.

"Any news since I went in?" Zhair'lo ignored Sonja entirely, pitching his voice as if he intended to exclude her.

"Beshenna fell about four days ago when the Goddess died," Del replied. "We don't know why, but the Queen of Sweetness and the Sorceress of Within died too, which meant no Goddess could ascend and the Temple couldn't be restored."

Zhair'lo listened and watched the passing streets at the same time. He found his brain was easily up to the task of dividing his attention this way.

"Gern is the closest city to Beshenna," Del continued. "So they sent a runner to us, stopping only for water and food at certain way stations along the road. It's understood that, by now, the power of the deceased Goddess to hold the men of Beshenna will have been lost. Some will begin falling comatose, while others will become violent."

"A runner came," Zhair'lo paused to wonder. "Not a rider on horseback?"

"A woman of Tight can easily outrun a horse on such long journeys," Sonja put in.

Zhair'lo looked in through the windows of passing buildings. He knew that men slept nearby, as if the sound of each individual breathed in his ear. Certain places he knew as empty by the relative silence.

"The Goddess has chosen you to be the Conduit," Del came to the end of her story. "You have been given the magic of Within and our task is to convey you to Beshenna in speed and safety."

A new kind of tingling ran up his spine; a vibration he couldn't recognize. Some unrecognizable force, Zhair'lo realized, approached from the rear.

-===================-

Two hundred metres behind, along a long, wide street, a bevy of women raced toward Zhair'lo's squad.

"You'll just have to do your best to keep up," Shanata whispered in Talla's ear as they jogged. "Janine is not patient."

Talla, not only out of breath from moving so quickly, but nearly out of energy from the multiple adrenaline rushes she'd put herself through, didn't waste any of her lung capacity on a response.

"They're all expecting me to have chosen an aide with more Form upgrades," she indicated the squad of Enforcers in front of them, a group apparently led by this 'Janine'. "Don't disappoint them."

Talla got the impression Shanata worried most about her own reputation in front of the Form women. The bluff by which Shanata had attached Talla to the outgoing expedition still mystified the younger woman. 'Why is she supporting me like this?' Talla wondered. 'It's perfectly obvious what I'm doing. I already got in a heap of trouble for this once. None of this makes sense.'

All she knew she had gathered by hint and innuendo, for Shanata had shown up with a troop of Form's Enforcers to pick Talla up outside the Temple.

"There's my aide!" Shanata had announced with a grand gesture, and quickly dragged Talla out into the street to get her running.

Shanata's eyes had said, 'Play along' as clearly as if she'd spoken the word, and Talla had had little time to catch her breath since.

"What's ahead?" one of the Enforcers shouted.

"The caisson!" called back another.

"With no one on it?" Janine squinted into the distance.

The ten women slowed as they came upon a marching squad of mixed gender. One woman marched behind eight others, two of them charged with moving a caisson lightly loaded with weapons and armour.

'Madra Zen!' the shock hit Talla out of nowhere. 'Why couldn't I feel him until now?'

The sight of Zhair'lo, though unarmoured and clearly not in his best shape, punched Talla in the stomach with such force she stumbled before she could stop.

"Do you have the Conduit?" the lead Enforcer called out.

Zhair'lo's group came to a halt and turned as one to face the chase group. A chill seized Talla's heart when she recognized the woman at the back of the group.

"Yes, he is -" Sonja began.

"I'm right here," Zhair'lo growled, speaking over the shoulder of a girl. Talla watched his eyes scanning her group, searching their impenetrable masks one at a time. "Who are you people?"

"We go to catch the expedition to Beshenna," the Enforcer replied. "We will escort you. You should be better accompanied regardless."

"We're his protection," the girl in front of Zhair'lo puffed out her chest. "But you may come alongside if you wish."

Janine stepped forward, bringing herself to her full height and clearly preparing to rip a hole through the petulant girl who had spoken. Just as she inhaled, however, Talla registered a twitch in the corner of her vision and Janine appeared to think better of the situation.

"Very well," the lead Enforcer muttered. "Let us march on."

As the merged groups got moving again, Shanata and Talla fell slightly behind.

"What just happened?" Talla whispered, watching Sonja and Janine putting their heads together as they marched behind Zhair'lo's group.

"I'm not sure," Shanata leaned over. "It appeared to me that Sonja made some signal to prevent Janine from upbraiding that outspoken little girl. They confer now."

Shanata watched quietly, peering through the wall of Enforcers to watch the smaller Fighters marching at the front.

"We may find out the details later, but some things I can tell from here," Shanata craned her neck. "Zhair'lo's friends are not happy with something, possibly with the state the Goddess left him in."

'Allies, then?' Talla wondered if she could trust the type of people who had chosen to become Fighters. At the very least, they held Zhair'lo in high esteem.

"Regardless, Talla, this is your place," Shanata's voice grew severe.

"Pardon, Mistress?"

"Beside Zhair'lo," Shanata clarified. "That's why we're letting you do this. You stay the hell away from any fighting in what is sure to be a disaster in Beshenna. You stay by Zhair'lo's side right to the end of this mission - and afterwards."

Talla gulped, realizing her transparency.

"How did you know -?"

"Pril," Shanata replied instantly. "She saw you running into Form. We deduced the rest quiet easily."

"Then why -?"

"So you can watch over Zhair'lo. You will take better care of in the aftermath of ..." Shanata waved a hand to indicate their squad, its mission and whatever nonsense they believed they'd find in Beshenna, "... of all this than anyone else will provide."

At the front, there was a cry from a woman and a masculine grunt followed by a rough scuffle of feet and bodies.

"Got him!" someone called out.

"Easy, then," a female voice added.

The Enforcers pounced instantly.

"Get him back on the caisson," Janine ordered roughly before pointing to two of her inferiors. "K'ra, Mae'zi, take over the cart. We need to move to catch up to the van."

Talla sighed as the combined group started jogging again. She'd already felt Zhair'lo lose consciousness before she'd heard the first cry or scuffle. What, she wondered, had they done to him this time? Carrying a single upgrade wouldn't work him as hard as carrying doubles and quadruples, but this time they expected him to hold it inside himself for days. What would this recklessness leave in its wake?

She and Shanata shared a glance as they moved toward the centre of the group, nearest where the caisson rolled, ensconced first by a shield of Zhair'lo's squad mates and then by a cadre of Enforcers.

"Get in the middle," Shanata grunted. "That's where you stay. No matter what. Get used to it now."

In Shanata's voice, Talla read fear of an imminent danger. The idea that some disaster awaited them in Beshenna, that somehow all the men had lost their minds for lack of regular Service, found no purchase in Talla's mind, regardless of the sincerity oozing from Shanata's words.

"Mistress," Talla nodded obediently as she went ahead of Shanata and closed upon the left side of the caisson.

Suddenly, a hand yanked on her shoulder, pulling her hard to the left and away from the rolling wooden cart.

"Mistress?"

"Gods dammit," Shanata hissed in unaccustomed panic. "Not so close."

Bewildered, Talla moved across to Shanata's left, letting the larger woman fill the space between her and Zhair'lo. Her eyes darted to the cart and the Form women controlling it. The thing didn't appear dangerous or unstable, but she couldn't imagine another reason for her superior's anxiety.

"What is it?"

"Later," the Acolyte spoke through gritted teeth. "Just move along and keep your distance from the caisson."

Talla wondered if her proximity to Zhair'lo had somehow triggered suspicion on the part of one of the Enforcers. Could any of them recognize her with her armour on? Did any of them even care at this point? How had Shanata noticed? Her mind whirled with questions even as the shock of Shanata's harsh handling wore off.

But everyone kept marching and she concluded that if she'd misstepped, no one else had noticed.

'You're all far too panicked to care about me,' she twisted her lips thoughtfully. 'You know that if we get to Beshenna and nothing's gone wrong yet, we're all going to realize we don't need you.'

Still, Shanata walked beside her, carefully keeping Talla away from the caisson, making the younger girl wonder how Shanata expected her to protect Zhair'lo.

Zhair'lo, she noted, passed painfully in and blissfully out of consciousness, an undulating wave of pleasure and pain as the Form women bounced his cart mercilessly over the cobblestones roads.

In time, they passed far beyond the part of the city Talla recognized into the surrounding forest. With a jolt, Talla realized the enormity of her decision. For the first time in her life, her feet led her beyond the bounds of her home city.

The road through the forest wound gently, keeping with the contour of the land, as the cobblestone faded into hard packed dirt.

"The torches," Talla breathed. "Are they always lit at night?"

"No," Shanata replied. "Only in emergencies. It's only worth the effort when we muster an army."

Every twenty or so running paces, they passed another shoulder high post with a lit torch in a sconce. Talla started counting them, but lost track somewhere around eighty or ninety.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 29



"How much farther?" she begged.

"Just there now," Shanata whispered back. "See?"

Torchposts lit both sides of the trail here, where it opened, and Talla caught her first glimpse of the blazing bright fortifications of the Eastern Barracks.

"Magnificent," she admired, the word escaping from her mouth involuntarily.

The vertical timber walls rose three times as high as a woman stood tall, with sharpened tips reaching to the sky. A gate, guarded by the armoured warriors atop it, beckoned with the promise of rest and drink. Behind that, on the side of the Barracks farthest from Talla, rose an immense, well lit tower. Her eyes barely made out the shapes of women standing at the highest level, one of them waving coloured flags in the air.

'Signals,' she thought. 'Like their heliograph but with nowhere near the range. Anything happens here and the Temple finds out in seconds.'

As they marched through gates and Talla heard a shouted order to seal the Barracks, Talla felt a sudden change in the air around her. What had -?

"The bell stopped," she noted into the unaccustomed silence.

"Yes, well, they were carrying on a bit," Shanata remarked and casually led Talla away from the caisson and its entourage.

In a moment, they found themselves just around the dark corner of low rising stone building.

"Talla," Shanata's teacher's voice cut through Talla's emotions, oddly steadying her.

"Mistress?"

"What's with you and him?" she jerked her head toward Zhair'lo.

"I - what do you mean?"

Shanata slid her helm off over her head.

"Sister," she intoned. "Speak to me."

"Of what," she pleaded, removing her own helm.

"Back there, on the road," Shanata glared, worry in her eyes, "When you got close to him, he ... he started to glow."

"Oh, Madra Zen," Talla cursed. "I - we haven't been together since -"

"Since when?"

"I - since a while, okay?" Talla tore at her hair with her free hand. "It happens if we stay apart a long time. When we get back together, it -"

A pregnant silence indicated Shanata's willingness to wait.

"It can be weird, when we touch," she lowered her gaze to the ground.

Geared wheels spun slowly behind the Acolyte's eyes.

"Weird?" Shanata accused. "And dangerous for those around you? That was you at the Hunter's camp, then?"

Talla bit her lip, nodded.

"Will you report me?"

"Nine hells, no," Shanata managed to shout and whisper all at once. "At least not now. Madra Zen."

"Then what?"

Talla felt as if she could hear the gears clicking now as her superior stared off into the dark alley over her head.

"Dangerous as hell," the Acolyte pronounced, not directly speaking to Talla. "But maybe, just maybe."

Decision forced a focus into the older woman's eyes.

"Stay close, but don't ever touch him," Shanata ordered, the thorough warrior stepping to the fore. "Don't let anyone see the glow. It might not even be visible during the day. Make sure ... make sure to be with him at the end. It may just be enough."

"Enough for what, Mistress?"

"Enough," she repeated. "That's all. Enough."

Shanata had no more to say and turned on her heel to rejoin the departing group. Talla replaced her helm and followed.

-===================-

The next time Zhair'lo awoke, red rays of sunlight shone up the front of his body. At some point in the night, they'd laid several blankets under him to cushion the back of his head against the rumbling of the wheels. By the sounds underneath him and the angle of the sun, however, he concluded they'd travelled a long way from any cobblestones.

"You awake for real this time?" Tara spoke beside him.

"Yeah," he muttered.

Tara's voice was modulated, just as his was, by the bump of the carriage's wheels. He couldn't imagine the caisson having enough room for two and forced his eyes open to take stock of his surroundings.

He rode in a much larger cart with a vast canvas overhead mounted on four poles. Tara, seated next to him, watched anxiously.

"Maybe don't try to walk this time," she cautioned him. "But they do want you to eat when we stop for breakfast."

"Breakfast?"

"Yeah. We've been marching for about six bells now. We left the Eastern Barracks after midnight."

"You're not walking?" he sat up, squinting his eyes.

"We take turns to sit here and watch you," Tara's quiet voice carried a deep anger in it, as if someone just outside hearing range had wronged her grievously.

'What's she got to be angry about?' Zhair'lo wondered.

He said nothing aloud, merely turning his eyes to meet hers. He had never seen the woman so serious. The petulant child had utterly disappeared, replaced by some strange grown-up wearing the same body.

"How long 'til breakfast?" he stuck out his tongue, rubbing it against his lips. "I have this weird taste in my mouth."

For moment, the biding wrath dissipated in favour of a flash of the mischievous child as Tara stifled a giggle.

"What?"

"Nothing," she shook her head, her eyes still smiling.

"What?" he glared at her through hooded eyes.

"The Goddess, of course," Tara's head tilted side to side. "She'd have given you some of her milk."

"Her milk?" he stammered. "From her -"

"Giant golden titties, yeah. I imagine it tasted just fine, then."

"I was unconscious."

"And so missed the second finest experiences of your young life," Tara shook her head in mock sadness. "So sad."

Somewhere in his mind, a witty retort existed to prevent Tara from identifying that very best experience as the bedding of herself, but Zhair'lo couldn't come up with it right then, so he smiled instead.

His eyes began to focus as he adjusted to the light. As the six horses pulling the cart blocked off the front, the rest of his squad had formed loosely around the sides. Behind and around his friends marched the largest assemblage of Fighters he had ever seen. Even with swords sheathed, bows tethered to their backs and helms racked on the various carts, they made an impressive formation.

In the near distance, off to the right and behind the cart, he spotted Sonja. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments before she flicked her gaze away. Zhair'lo couldn't imagine the woman embarrassed by what had passed the night before, but had no other explanation for her odd behaviour. He wondered what duty she held on this expedition.

"That's a big army," he observed.

"We're going into a city with a Fallen Temple."

"Do you think it'll be that bad?" Zhair'lo let his tone indicate only a touch of disbelief.

"They don't send a thousand Fighters for nothing, Zhai."

He heard them marching, speaking quietly as they moved. The smell of the musk of sweating bodies in well oiled leather armour permeated his nostrils. All their anxieties and tensions spoke to his heightened senses through their breathing and the tones of their voices. Whatever awaited them in Beshenna, these hundreds of men and women believed every disaster story predicted by the Temple.

"Wagons!", a male voice deep with a northern brogue rolled over the moving army. "O - ver!"

The army around him began breaking up as Soldiers moved to obey the command. Zhair'lo hadn't seen clearly before, for the bodies had crowded so close, but they had reached a clearing already set up with cooking pits and chopped wood sheltered under small slat roofs.

"Where are we?"

"They have these camps set up between the cities," Tara explained. "Lumberjacks come out to the closer ones to stock the wood piles. The farther in ones only get stocked when the carters go by. We'll be skipping some of them, of course, or maybe just stopping for meals like we are here."

'Of course,' Zhair'lo thought. 'We're shrinking a week long journey to three or four days.'

When the smell of burning fires reached his nose, Zhair'lo realized some portion of their contingent must have run on ahead to get breakfast ready. Men and women detached the horses and led them off to the right.

"The road runs close to a stream, here," Tara pointed to the line of horses. "So they'll water the horses downstream a bit while we fetch our own water for cooking."

Zhair'lo's eyes, alert and focused as ever under the effect of transferred upgrade energy, spotted horses he knew. He had worked with about half of them in his time at Harzen's farm, while the Temple and the Fighters must have drawn the rest from other stables. He watched those well-fed draught horses, six to a cart, march off politely to their water.

"What's Sunrise doing here?" he asked suddenly.

"What?" Tara asked.

"Sunrise," he nodded to a horse mixed in with the others. "She's wearing a saddle instead of a proper draught harness. Is someone supposed to be riding?"

"I don't know," Tara looked thoughtfully. "Maybe in case we need to move in a hurry?"

"Nice to be you, getting served like a Queen."

"Watching you snore, I deserve it."

Zhair'lo looked around anxiously and let out a sigh of relief when he noted Sonja's absence. As much as he refused to feel embarrassment for his actions, he couldn't pretend to find comfort in her presence and much preferred to not think at all about her.

Soon, the remaining six members of his squad made their way through the army, bearing bowls of porridge. They did not hide their glee at seeing him awake.

"Nine hells, Zhai," Kit said. "You gave us a start, dropping like that last night."

"Thanks, guys," Zhair'lo looked around at them one at a time. "I don't even remember."

"Eat, eat," Bree insisted. "You wouldn't believe how easy it is to bud in line when they realize we're getting food for you."

"What are we eating?" Zhair'lo eyed the bowls suspiciously from a distance.

"Porridge," Z'rus said. "Pretty good though. Spiced with something weird and some pulled pork in there or something."

"Is'ka," Zhair'lo smiled as he took a bowl

"I've never heard of a spice called 'Is'ka'," Del replied.

"Is'ka is the man you took this from," Zhair'lo explained, taking a spoon. "The spice is called 'cumin'. Are there Hunters with us?"

"Yeah," Del put in. "A lot of the Hunters are Fighters. Plus we need people who can kill and clean game. 'Travelling armies run on their stomachs'."

Zhair'lo recognized that last as coming from one of the tactical manuals. He looked around to see whom he could recognize. His brain processed dozens of faces instantly, even those great distances away. Who would come on a journey like this? As he let his mind open up, a thing very much like a block of sandstone hit him in his spine, just behind his hear.

'Talla.'

'I'm here. Behind you. Don't turn around.'

'How - '

'Doesn't matter. I'm here to keep an eye on you.'

Zhair'lo took a spoonful of the porridge.

'From way back there?'

'It's only twenty paces. It's too dangerous to come closer.'

'Dangerous?'

'The thing where we knock people unconscious. It looks fully charged. We glow. Shanata noticed.'

'Shanata? Your sister with the - ' An image flashed between them: Shanata removing her top to let Talla kiss her breasts in a sign of friendship.

'Yes. Her.' Zhair'lo sensed a smirk from Talla. 'Now pay attention to your friends. They're staring at you.'

Zhair'lo shook himself back to his surrounding as Talla faded into the distance, perhaps to seek her own breakfast.

"How long will we stop?" he asked no one in particular.

"They claim it's for less than a bell," Bree reported, looking around. "Hard to believe, but I guess the clean up crew can catch up, since they can run faster than the horses can pull these carts."

"We'll eat lunch on the move," Del added. "We're to tell you that you are advised to rest up for the night."

"The night?" Zhair'lo asked. "We can't march through the night, can we?"

He knew draught horses as tough animals, but even they had limits. Instead of answering, they greeted him with a universal shrug.

"We'll pitch tents tonight," Del pronounced. "They said that for sure."

"Do you want more?" Kit asked.

"Huh?" Zhair'lo gave a start when he looked down at his empty bowl. "Uh, yeah, I guess so."

Kit dashed off for the fires.

"What's with him?"

"He told ya," Tara reminded. "It wasn't nice seeing you collapse like that. Whatever the Goddess and her lot did to you ..."

Whatever mutinous statement she'd lined up faded somewhere short of her vocal chords. The unpleasant gap in the conversation, a train of speech unrecoverable due to its clearly unacceptable direction, found relief in the hurried return of Kit.

"There ya go, man," the boy handed over the bowl.

"Much appreciated," Zhair'lo spoke earnestly, looking directly into Kit's eyes. "Really."

"No sweat, Zhai."

The others, seeing his hunger, chatted pleasantly amongst themselves. Their speech tilted heavily toward the horror stories caught second hand from the more experienced Fighters. Some few, even in this army, had seen frontier cities and fallen Temples. These reported tragedy and misery to any others who would listen. Zhair'lo tried not to lend them credence, and tried simultaneously to hide his incredulity.

"I - uh," he stammered. "I should - uh -"

His vision, so clear just moments before, began to waver.

"You are going to lie down now," Bree ordered. "Real gentle. The wagons will move again soon enough."

"Yeah," he agreed while Kit took his bowl away and Bree and Tara braced him so he could fall back into the makeshift bed he'd never really risen from.

Darkness clouded in as his vision tunnelled. Through the tiny circle of sight his exhaustion had left him, the sun blazed through reddish orange. He would see nothing more for many bells.

-===================-

Talla had tried to bear the endless march in silence, but nothing in her weeks of training in Form had prepared her for so many hours of monotonous walking. The soles of her feet burned and her calves had threatened to lock up entirely since midway through the afternoon. The sun, now falling to the horizon behind them, vaguely hinted that dinner approached, but the army gave no sign of having received the solar communique.

They'd passed a clearing with a camp several bells before and paid it no heed.

"When do we stop, Mistress?" Talla heard more weakness in her voice than she'd wanted to make public.

"They can't go much longer if they want the horses ready in the morning," Shanata predicted, uncertainty tinging her voice. "Probably before the sun sets."

Gern no longer sat in the highest part of summer, but the days still ran longer than twelve bells. How much did the Fighters want to shave off the transit? What level of urgency had they assigned to the situation in Beshenna? If disaster truly awaited, would they want to arrive exhausted?

Knowing no other option, Talla marched with the army as the sky turned from blue to orange before her weary eyes. Clouds laced with red soon moved lazily across the sky. Talla spared an occasional glance over her shoulder, watching the sun touch and sink below the horizon.

Stuck in the middle of the long line of carts and its entourage of tall men and women, Talla only became aware of curves in the road when the carts in front of her changed direction. She inhaled deeply as one such shift took place. Did she smell smoke? 

"Wagons! O-ver!" that voice bellowed out again. "Pitch camp!"

Bodies moved as they had before, serious and quiet. She had never seen people inside the Temple operate like this, not even in the practice yards of Form. These before her placed a great premium on their energy, moving to set up their tents and cots with an efficiency that made her jealous.

"Should we help?" Talla asked.

"No," Shanata's firm voice replied. "We'd only get in their way. They'll have a place for us, though, don't worry."

"And him?"

"It's getting dark. You'd best stay away. The guards here will see him well protected. You needn't worry for now."

-===================-

Zhair'lo found his legs capable once more and, feeling energized, trusted himself well enough to make it to the latrine farther downhill than where the horses drank. The dark, vengeance-laced horror of the night before vanished into distant memory. Those events had taken place a great distance down the river from where he now washed his hands. Denial fiddled with his mind, pushing spaces between his present situation and his past actions, inserting bells that had never rung. The time he had spent in the Goddess's bed chamber belonged to a past life.

Guards, both the seven from his own squad and four women assigned from elsewhere, waited a polite distance back from the river bank while he splashed water on his face. When he turned to face them, it was one of the larger women who stepped forward.

"A tent is prepared for you," her helm-muffled voice instructed him.

"For all of us, I should think," Tara piped up, hands on her hips, making the obvious point that a squad that slept together in Barracks would sleep together in the field.

"For him alone," the guard reiterated. "His status as Conduit requires it."

Zhair'lo watched his friends. They didn't literally reach for their weapons, but a vague threat put ghostly hands on hilts. He read the tension, saw the creases in their muscles, and knew the pointlessness of their show of loyalty.

"It's alright, guys," he soothed them. "They've got rules to follow. It's all for my safety, right?"

Tara still looked mutinous, but at least the phantom hands disappeared. The four women, anonymous and unfeeling beneath their masks, formed up around him.

"See you in the morning," he shrugged as he left his squad.

Having long since passed the point of numbness with regards to escorts by dull Form women, he did his best to ignore them for a time, but couldn't completely hold his anxiety in.

"Why exactly do I need my own tent?"

"You will understand," one of the nameless escorts waved off his question.

He knew their destination the moment he saw the cylindrical tent in the centre of the clearing, surrounded by much larger, rectangular tents. Not only it's shape, but its coloured panels and pointed top separated it from the drab, functional shelters around it. Zhair'lo well knew the Temple's penchant for ceremony, but he found it crazy to go to this level of extravagance during a military emergency. He saw it as one more piece of evidence that very little danger awaited them in Beshenna.

The guards bracketing stopped silently outside the awning over the entrance to the tent

None of them spoke a word to him.

"Not going to tuck me in, then?" he quipped before he ducked his head through the parted blankets.

Zhair'lo's eyes needed only the space of a heartbeat to adjust to the dimmer lighting inside the tent. With his enhanced vision, he discovered a small table in front of him bracketed by a pair of dim charcoal braziers on stands beside the table. On the table stood a pair of empty silver goblets and a matching decanter, all three items generously inlaid with swirling patterns made of small blue sapphires and other, opaque blue stones whose name escaped him at that moment.

He vision cleared up further and he saw the bed behind the little table. Though minimal by city standards, a bed wide enough to spread his arms and legs upon constituted an irresponsible luxury this far afield. Zhair'lo wondered what the people who had assembled this tent thought of him.

As he walked around the table to the left side of the bed, he paused as something nagged for his attention. Turning around slowly, he surveyed the room again. Little of note presented itself to his mind. The bed, wooden and laid with simple sheets, did nothing to pique his curiosity. Next he turned to the braziers and the small table at the foot of the bed.

'Two goblets,' his eyes narrowed in suspicion. 'Why two?'

The curtains parted and a woman entered.




Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 29



"This really isn't necessary," he waved at the bed. "I'm military, you know? I can sleep on a cot like anybody else."

The woman brushed long, dark hair away from her face and took a moment to peer at him.

'She can't see me yet,' he realized. 'Her eyes need time to adjust. That means she isn't up on the Facial upgrades.'

Zhair'lo noted her clothing next. Instead of heavy leather armour, she dressed in ill-fitting ceremonial leathers, leaving her calves and forearms exposed.

"You're not even Form, are you?"

"No, Zhair'lo, you are perfectly well aware I'm not," her detached voice chilled him as she unlatched her armour at the shoulders.

With her hair down, he hadn't recognized her, but her cold voice hit him quickly, making fresh the memory of a terrifying night so many months ago. Zhair'lo recalled the chilled feeling in the pit of his stomach as he'd waited to find out if he'd killed or permanently damaged Talla. The sense of failure rose up inside him, an echo of past impotence.

"You were there," Zhair'lo stepped back from her, despite the table between them. "You -"

"Examined you, yes," Tia removed her chest plate to reveal a simple blue blouse underneath it. "I'm pleased by your complete recovery."

Nothing of her voice or body language warmed him, even as she loosened the belts at her hips and slid out of her leather skirt to reveal a knee length blue skirt.

"Do I need to be examined?" Zhair'lo stood up straight again, trying to cover for his embarrassing retreat.

Tia turned her pale eyes down thoughtfully, pursed her lips as if to run the tip of her tongue along the front of her teeth, and focused her gaze on him again.

"Something like that," she reached for the decanter and poured two goblets full of fresh water. One of these she offered to him across the table. "You must be thirsty?"

"What's with the fancy silver?" Zhair'lo accepted the drink.

"Silver and blue are the colours of a Second," Tia paused to take a sip from her drink. "The stones are sapphires and lapis lazuli."

"You're a Second, then?"

"You already knew that from our last meeting," Tia's tone veered toward accusation. "Please don't feign ignorance. You don't wear it well."

Zhair'lo nearly stepped back again, but decided to pretend indifference and cover for it with a long draught from his goblet, all the while wondering why she wore a blue blouse instead of the bikini top normally required for a Second.

"That said, my rank is somewhat ... in flux. My Mistress will surely appoint someone in my absence and one doesn't know what the state of Beshenna will be when we arrive."

"You've lost your position?" Zhair'lo raised his eyebrows, choosing to ignore the fear mongering regarding their destination. "Just so you could come along as a healer with us?"

Zhair'lo remained certain Beshenna wouldn't need any healers.

"No," Tia looked past him as she took a long drink from her goblet.

Faced with several heartbeats of uncomfortable silence, Zhair'lo drank down his water as well.

The Second took the empty goblet from him and placed it beside hers on the table. Rounding the table, she sat on the low bed and patted a place to her left. With a shrug, Zhair'lo sat next to her, pulling up his right knee to mirror her so they could face each other. Tia took his wrist in her hand, fingers probing for his pulse.

"How are you feeling?" she looked aside, perhaps counting beats.

"About as good as I always do in the middle of an upgrade," Zhair'lo took a deep breath, a sudden cloying claustrophobia seeping into his chest. "A little ... warm."

"What do you normally experience as a Conduit?"

She had posed the question as casually as any doctor had ever asked him about his health, but Zhair'lo heard alarm bells ringing in his head, three at a time.

"There's a ... uh ... kind of tension," he improvised, starting to feel a cold sweat collect under his clothes. "Discomfort with ... I ... nine hells."

"You're fine," Tia soothed.

"The water" he accused, trying to shake his head to clear it. "But you drank it, too."

"Your goblet already had a powder in it," she pointed out. "As did mine."

Tia, he perceived quite suddenly, wore a subtle perfume which wafted over him in several floral scents. While not strong, it sufficed to rinse away the odour of sweat and leather which had permeated his nostrils for so long he'd forgotten other scents existed. Zhair'lo felt his heart begin to race as his lungs desperately drew in air.

When he looked up, he found that the doctor who had entered his tent had become a woman with dark hair and intense, blue eyes.

"Not again," he gasped, feeling a bead of sweat run down the side of his nose.

"It won't be like that," her voice softened as she collected his hands between hers. "But we must shore up what you hold."

Zhair'lo had no doubt about the power of the Temple's potions - or powders, as the case might be. A beast began to burn inside him, reminded him in stark terms that the magic held inside his body did not belong there. Without any prodding from him, that energy wanted out and knew of only one exit. He'd held it in check all day, what with the nausea, pain and exhaustion. But here, in this tent, with this dark haired woman unbuttoning her blouse and sliding it off her shoulders, his needs became the focus of his attention.

His hands, left listlessly in his lap, twitched as the darkness of Tia's nipples came into view, and a moan escaped his lips as the tips sprouted into the cool air.

"Breathe," she kept her voice soft as she took his hands and brought them to her chest.

Overwhelmed, Zhair'lo didn't resist until his middle finger made contact with the very end of her stiffened points. Tia closed her eyes and exhaled, briefly but sharply, as he took control of his hands and gently drove her nipples in gentle circles with the lightest contact of his fingertips.

When he captured her aureolae between thumbs and forefingers, she opened her eyes and reached for the laces on his leather pants. The erection that sprang forth surprised her not at all.

"It is not easy for you."

Zhair'lo found his throat parched and managed only a nod.

"You are very young for a task such as this," she reached for his erection and stroked him.

"I can't -," Zhair'lo coughed.

"Can't what?"

"Come?"

"Not until we get to Beshenna," she pulled his hands tightly against her chest. "If you came inside me, it would be a disaster for both of us."

Despite the haze of the potion, that gave Zhair'lo pause.

"Would it make you a Sorceress?"

"Outside of a Temple?" Tia shook her head. "It would kill me."

Zhair'lo tried to keep a grip on his mind, to fight off the forces at work trying to pry his head open. Talla, whom he couldn't sense right then, had known that only three women in any Temple could hold any one of the Perfections. A terrible fate awaited a fourth person who tried to reach that level. But Talla had known nothing about the effects of a Perfection outside of a Temple. And here, a High Officer entrusted him, a man barely in his adulthood, with a fact kept secret even from women.

"Kill you?"

"Don't worry about that," she soothed him as she continued stroking him. "You can't upgrade me now."

"The potion."

Tia nodded confirmation and conversation paused and Zhair'lo felt her searching his eyes even as he kept his focus on the dirt floor.

"Something else? You are afraid?"

Zhair'lo twitched, his hands falling away from her body to his lap while his eyes met hers with anger and offence.

"I'm a Soldier," he replied sharply, clinging to at that small piece of his identity.

"Then tell me what bothers you, Soldier," Tia did not take her hand from his rock hard erection.

"I remember last night," Zhair'lo's hands gripped the edge of the bed, resenting the way the potion drove his body and slowly forced parts of his mind to hunger for sex.

"When you took the took the Goddess's magic?" Tia's concern played false to Zhair'lo, as she gave him no reprieve other than the softness of her voice.

"Afterwards," Zhair'lo's voice darkened. "So angry. I can't ... I won't ..."

Tia's hand came away from his manhood then so she could cup his jaw and turn her to face him.

"Is that what worries you?"

He nodded, staring with wild-eyed fear.

"Do you see guards here? Anyone to restrain you?"

Zhair'lo shook his head.

"That was a different potion, Zhair'lo, trust me," Tia's nose brushed against his. "This will not be like that."

He felt his jaw drop in shock. They had made him enraged on purpose?

"Why?" he stammered. "Why would they want me to hurt someone?"

"You're young," Tia said. "To take on magic so heavy, for so long, we needed your most powerful emotions."

"But Sonja ... I struck her ..."

"Sonja?" Tia laughed. "You spanked her?"

Zhair'lo wondered about Tia's sense of humour. Nothing seemed funny to him right then.

"Yes," he admitted. "I didn't ... I lost control of myself."

"Zhair'lo," Tia tilted her head in bemusement, "do you really think you could hurt someone like Sonja? By spanking her?"

He exhaled, trying to relax well enough to think.

"This isn't funny," his voice sounded hollow and distant.

"It is if you imagine the great Adjudicate, bent over a wooden desk somewhere."

Zhair'lo stared at Tia in bewilderment. "Aren't you a doctor?"

"I drank almost the same potion you did, young man, give or take an ingredient," she reminded him. "And I don't have the burden of your worries."

While her left hand still held one side of his face, her right slipped underneath her blue skirt. Her body convulsed and, a moment later, she brought her hand back up and held it before his face, the middle finger glistening in the candlelight.

"I've never ... never used the potion at this strength," she confessed with a gasp, her left hand trembling where it touched his face.

She looked him in the eyes again and, with little warning, shoved him back on the bed.

"Your concerns are handled," she breathed as she straddled him.

"What will happen this ti-", he began to protest, but found warm, wet flesh against the head of his shaft.

"I need to come," she declared to the room at large, and Zhair'lo felt as if he had ceased to exist for her.

"But I -"

With a glaze in her eyes and no further warning, Tia slid herself down, enveloping him. Zhair'lo considered the good fortune of having a Goddess one night and a Second of Within the next. Two of the most most amazing vaginas he'd ever encountered and the potion would prevent him from coming inside them.

"For Beshenna," Tia crooned to the ceiling of the tent. "For the desperate people ..."

Her muscles twitched, hardening his erection, and he gazed vapidly at her breasts, one brightly lit by the torches, the other in the first's shadow, both of them swaying back and forth in hypnotic progression.

A great deal of grinding passed before she deigned to notice him, lying beneath her with his arms stretched out helplessly. Zhair'lo knew full well the potion blocked his path to orgasm and hardened his mind against any futile participation. Tia, however, wanted more and leaned over him dangling her breasts in his face.

"I need to come hard to seal in the magic," she glared into his eyes. "Here, suckle."

She lowered her breast into his open mouth, forcing her nipple on his tongue.

"Suck," she insisted.

Zhair'lo, torn between the resistance he'd planned and the arousal of both a full day's frustration and the effects of the potion, closed his mouth with her entire aureola inside and gently bit down on the surrounding flesh. Her breast released liquid into his mouth.

"Yes," Tia sighed. "Not much milk, but some. Just enough Abundance to keep me going. Suck more."

Overwhelmed, Zhair'lo pulled hard on her breast, part of his mind hoping he could overwhelm the potion and make himself come inside her. Wouldn't that surprise them? What if he defeated them, the way he'd done it with the Fighters and their Initiation? What if, amongst all the other powers he had, they had underestimated him in this respect too?

Blind with lust and anger, he decided to go for it. With a twist of his hips, he rolled Tia over without leaving her vagina. He grabbed her hips and pulled her to edge of bed so he could he plant his feet on the floor. Willingly, she spread her legs as widely as she could so he could hammer at her with all the force he could muster. Vaginal fluids leaked out of her with every full length plunge of his erect penis into her depths. Without his mouth at her breast, she resorted to squeezing them herself, forcing the little milk they contained to squirt into little raindrop spatters all over her chest and the backs of her hands.

She screamed out her orgasm, clenching her breasts in a death grip as her vagina twisted and wrenched at him. Long after her pleasure faded, Zhair'lo continued to pound her wet tunnel. He began to see spots before his eyes and blackness started in from the edges of his vision. Soon, he could see only the face of the woman whose body he relentlessly penetrated.

A moment later, even that disappeared.