Acolyte

I lived my childhood in the service of the goddess, prayers at first and last light, mornings spent gathering fruit or baking bread, bringing food to the poor and homeless in the afternoon. It was not always an easy life, but it was a good life. I may not have had others of my own age to play with, and my education was sparse and of little value in the outside world, but I seldom went hungry and always had a warm bed to sleep in, cleaning myself and my clothes was a daily ritual, and - until my twentieth year, at least - I was kept safe.

I always knew I was different, and that I had to keep that difference hidden. I understood also that there was something dangerous and shameful about it too, and that it was important for me to remain spiritually and physically pure. There were many restless nights when I wrestled with temptation, but being in the presence of the goddess helped me to endure.

As I matured into a woman, my body seemed determined to betray me, my breasts growing until no looseness of clothing could conceal them. Too often they provoked an envious glare or some lewd and lustful comment. I hated them and prayed often for the goddess to flatten my chest, but such prayers went unheeded, as did my pleading for her to do away with my difference.

I was cursed with a voluptuous sexuality I no had desire for or use for. I would have traded it all away for an unremarkable normality.

Only a handful knew the truth of it, and only one man. The old priest had always been kind to me, assuring me always that I was not cursed but in truth blessed, and that the goddess would look after me. Never once did he touch me or even look at me in a sexual way. I loved him dearly.

And then he died, and in time a new priest took up residence, a young man of frustrated ambition, carrying the weight of some far-off scandal that had seen him banished to our humble temple with its mission amongst the poor. From his first arrival I felt his eyes on me, undressing me in his thoughts the way the men in the marketplace did, as if beneath my habit I was no more than livestock to be bought and sold.

A time came when it was no longer possible to avoid being alone with him. There was something inevitable about it, as if not even the goddess could have prevented it. My prayers on this had also gone unheeded.

It was late at night. I had awoken, afflicted with a terrible craving after a lustful dream - the intensity of these dreams and their lingering aftereffects had worsened as I matured into adulthood - and sought comfort at the feet of the goddess. As I knelt to light a candle in the eternal flame (that regularly failed to live up to its name), I heard the brush of feet against stone behind me.

Startled, I struggled to my feet, backing away from the unexpected presence, even as I turned to face it. In the dark, all I saw at first was a firefly light tracing a path in the air, looping and swirling, burning a symbol into my mind that I recognised too late. A dark and forbidden magic snared my thoughts. To flee, to cry for help, to deny in any way the shadowy figure, was beyond me.

Like a fly in a spider's web, I was caught, helpless before my captor. The priest moved closer, close enough for me to see him in the dim candlelight, close enough for his cold hand to caress my cheek, his rough-skinned thumb to brush my lips, his wine-sour breath to assault my nostrils. "Your face is fair," he said, "and you play the innocent so well." His other hand unbuttoned my nightgown, until it parted to reveal my breasts. "But you have the body of a whore."

I knew what he was doing was wrong. I knew it was wrong for me to let him see me and touch me, but my thoughts of resistance scattered like butterflies. The bright symbol continued its devastating weave through my mind as my breasts were mauled by his cold hands, as my aroused and swollen nipples were squeezed and pinched by his brutal fingers, as his foul mouth sought to plunder mine.

I knew it was wrong for me to find any pleasure in the assault, but my body reacted like a whore's, eager for every abuse. My caged mind was unequal to the challenge. My sighs became gasps became whimpers became moans. Never before had I allowed myself to become so aroused. I felt on the edge of some profound revelation, my body as potent as my mind was impotent.

"Yes," he hissed, his expression a sneer of delight, "your true nature is revealed, whore." He tore off his cassock in an eager frenzy, his member hard and pulsing.

I knew it was wrong to laugh, but he suddenly looked so ridiculous, waving that tiny instrument at me. I laughed, and couldn't stop laughing. The magic that contained my thoughts did nothing to curtail this heartfelt pleasure.

"Quiet!" he hissed, shaking me angrily. "Stop it!" he screamed a moment later, his eyes bright with fury, and he struck me savagely across the face.

I stopped laughing. Stunned from the shock of it, I barely reacted as he thrust my nightgown down about my ankles, exposing my body to him entirely, save for the undergarment that concealed my difference.

Striking me had broken the spell, though the lingering afterimage of the symbol slowed my reactions. He snared my arm as I flinched away in horror, the muscular strength in his hand and arm too much for me.

He struck me again as I tried to scream, and I tasted blood. My eyes blurry with tears, I yielded as he tugged down that last protective garment, revealing -

With a strangled cry, he threw himself away from me. "You're a -" he said. "You're a -"

Whatever he thought I was, he couldn't say it. Nor, it seemed, could he tear his gaze away from my difference. As horrified as I was to be exposed like this, to be abused like this, I felt again that I was at the point of revelation.

The naked priest raised his hand, a bright firefly scoring through the air, as hypnotic as it was terrifying. No doubt to capture my mind once again - but this time his arm was captured, by the marble grip of the goddess's fair hand. With her other, she beckoned me to approach, and when I did, my eyes drinking in every feature of her expressive face, impossibly beautiful, she plucked the firefly from the priest's immobile fingers and multiplied it into a swarm that became a brightly glowing mist.

The priest screamed as the mist condensed, his eyes shut fast in denial, but mine was the flesh that absorbed its energy until my blood sang with it. Aroused beyond measure, my breasts swollen and aching with the need to be held, my nipples painfully hard, my difference jutting out proudly and dwarfing the priest's that now dribbled limply.

I screamed as I exploded, streams of bright moonlight hurling from my convulsing member, each pulsing contraction sending a burst of pleasure rippling through my flesh. The priest screamed as if burned, and perhaps he was. Years after, I spied him once, a broken man, his face crisscrossed with pale scars.

At last, drained, exhausted, I slumped to my knees, the temple echoing to the sound of the priest's fleeing footsteps. Above me the goddess had returned to her statue form, the only echo of her divinity the pulsing aftershocks of pleasure that rippled out from my twitching member.

My difference, I understood then, was something to be embraced.

*

I am, in every way that matters, a woman. I just have a difference. An addition. I have a member much like a man's, though few men match mine for size, and none that I have knowledge of exceed it. Like a treacherous companion, it stirs excitedly in response to the idlest of lewd fantasies, and sulks at being kept hidden when it would roar proudly like a lion.

And why not, when it has been blessed by the goddess herself? Certainly it adores to be worshipped. I am seldom as happy as I am when a pretty young woman kneels before me, her lips pressed adoringly to my rampant member.

But I am feared for my difference too. The priest fled from the temple, but his ravings soon brought others in search of me, inquisitors who cared not about a divine intervention, only about the contravention of natural law and the implication of dark magic. I could have told them about the priest and his firefly spells, but I was hidden from them in a dark space beneath the floor, cold and miserable, flinching at every cry from above, at every thundering footfall over my head.

I hardly dared sleep, though I must have. When at last I dared to emerge, dizzy with thirst, there was no sign of those who had hidden me, who knew the truth of me. Those who remained, though they had known me for years, bore the scars of terror. What affection they still bore for me was tempered with dread, and though I was given water and food, and given garments suitable for the outside world, I was not welcome to stay longer in the temple that had been my home longer than I could remember.

I knew nothing of the world. Had I been a man, and not merely possessed of a man's part, perhaps I would not have been so afraid, but the memory of the priest's grip on my arm, his mouth and hands on my helpless body, was too fresh. Men were the enemy.

I hid and lived and slept in the shadows, emerging only to beg for food, or sometimes steal it. I, who had grown up feeding the poor and homeless, was now one of them, and I dared not return to the temple. By figure and face I was too recognisable, too in danger from the inquisitors who still hunted me. Too in danger too from men who, like the priest, saw in me only a whore to be abused for their profit and entertainment.

Fear kept me in the city too long, when fear should have made me run, but the city was all I knew. The outside world, with its forests and mountains seemed as deadly as it was beautiful, and vast beyond comprehension.

And then I met a girl. A whore, as it happened, though all I saw at the time was a young woman, her clothes torn from her, being savagely beaten by an ugly bute of a man. Good sense would have seen me walk away, leaving her to her fate, another sad victim of a cruel world. But I had received help in my moment of need, and could not turn my back on another.

I took a desperate risk. I, who had never attempted magic before, closed my eyes and imagined a bright firefly at my fingertip, and traced out that same symbol that had stolen my will. On instinct I reflected it too, left to right, to send the magic outward.

The brute, who had ignored my approach, seeing no threat in me, gave a cry of fear, and I cringed in anticipation of fist against my cheek, or a heavy boot in my belly -

But nothing. The silence broken only by the woman's mewling whimpers. I opened my eyes to see the man staring at me in confusion, his fists clenching and unclenching. I could sense the spell at work in him, and in her too, though there was no struggle left in her.

Somehow, impossibly, I had used the dark magic - but this wasn't the time to question it. "Come," I said, helping her to her feet. She clung to me, trembling, sobbing fitfully, limping painfully at my side as she guided me through the dark alleys to a decaying house that was home to many women who worked the night. With the help of those others, I cleaned her wounds and got her to bed, and as she surrendered at last to sleep, the firefly ceased its buzzing.

*

"Thank you," she whispered.

I had shared her bed, she beneath the sheets and I above, but I awoke with her hand on my belly, her lips by my ear. I awoke, as so often, with a raging urgency in that member. She could not have missed it. Indeed, she shifted her hand down, her fingertips tracing its length through the rough fabric. I squirmed beneath her touch, simultaneously seeking to escape it while striving to intensify the feeling.

"You're the one they're looking for?" she said. "The witch from the temple?"

Was that what I was? A witch? I had never used magic before, but they had been afraid of it. Maybe with reason. "Yes."

She extracted my member from the folds of material that were supposed to conceal it.

"You cannot stay here," she said, wrapping her cold hand about the hot shaft. Her murmur of appreciation echoed my gasp of pleasure. "They will know to look for you here."

"I should have left long ago," I murmured, though as long as her hand held me there, I was as powerless to leave as if I were spellbound again.

"Well, I'm glad you didn't." With a quiet cry of pain, she rolled over on top of me. Her face was dark with bruises, her arms too, but her beauty shone through the damage. "It gives me a chance to repay you with the only coin I have."

She pressed a finger to my lips to forestall my objection, which in truth was half-hearted at best. I knew nothing about sex, beyond the basic principle; her hand had awoken a compelling desire to discover the truth of it. "But I pray you," she said with an awkward laugh, "let me take the lead. I am already in severe discomfort, and you would put any man to shame with your weapon..."

I was more than happy to let her take the lead. I lay still and studied her, fascinated by everything about her, her expression of focussed determination, the tight warmth of her as she enveloped me. The more of my member she swallowed with her sweet, sacred womanhood, the more I yearned to push still deeper, until every part of me was buried within her.

"Am I your first?" she asked, her breathing deep and ragged, her breasts straining towards me so seductively that I could no longer deny the impulse to cradle them in my hands. So soft, so smooth. I had a sudden image in my mind of her hands reaching up to cradle my breasts... and for perhaps the first time ever, I liked my breasts.

She swore as she rode me, suffering from her injuries. What she was doing to me was so good, but I needed more. Holding her still, I took over, thrusting into her. "Sorry," I said, but didn't slow. The animal in me was barely contained. I tried to be gentle, but there was such joy in burying myself to the hilt, in feeling her whole body echo the impact, in seeing pleasure overtake pain in her gasping expression as I drove myself swiftly to that precipice, and over.

I cried out with ecstacy. She cried out in ecstacy. We convulsed together, my pulsing member embedded within her fiercely contracting grip. I poured myself into her, filled her with my essence - until, empty and sated at last, I relaxed, and she collapsed onto me, her soft, sweet, bruised lips pressing against mine in a welcome if startling exploration.

*

The baker eyed me sceptically as she read my letter. "How is my sister?" she asked. "Still whoring?" She didn't seem to expect an answer.

I said nothing. I knew what I looked like. The priest had said I had the body of a whore, and my clothes were worn and ragged. But for the first time in weeks, I felt calm and clean. My beautiful lover may have been a whore, but she also had water for a bath, and soap for laundry. And, remarkably, quill, ink and paper.

"She says you were an acolyte at the temple?"

"Yes, madam," I replied. "I can clean up, and bake bread, whatever you need."

She snorted her opinion of that, but did not yet send me away. Instead, she studied me thoughtfully for a minute, and sighed. "As it happens, I do need an extra set of hands. Work hard and no mischief, and we'll work something out."

'Work something out' proved to be a narrow cot under the stairs, a daily bath, scraps and leftovers of food, rising well before dawn, and a hard day's work grinding grain and kneading dough in a room kept warm by a huge oven. Compared to the streets, it was heaven, and it was nice to have routine again. Though my muscles ached at the end of each day, that was matched by a building strength in my arms.

For months I lived and worked amidst flour and yeast. I was given new clothes to wear, and kept largely out of sight. There was no reason for anyone to connect me to the witch the inquisitors still hunted. The baker surely suspected the truth, but said nothing and in return I worked hard and without complaint.

Her husband, ten years her senior and half-blind, half-drunk, visited every afternoon, full of bitter complaint and frequent reminders that the bakery was his, and accusations that she was lazy and squandering his profit. My presence there was proof of both, and were it not for my youth and the size of my breasts he would not have tolerated my presence. There was, in his eyes, the same hunger that had been in the priest's, and the promise that one day he would do more than look.

Were it not that I saw in the baker's eyes the same hatred for her husband that I felt, I would not have stayed as long as I did. I alone saw the bruises and scars. The baker was a proud woman and fierce, and endured her husband's tyranny only because the laws of temple and city made her marriage to him eternal. The gods had ordained that she should suffer, and to deny that would incur the wrath of the inquisitors.

One night as I bathed, believing myself safe and alone, she slipped quietly into the bakery kitchen. There was no concealing my difference. I stood exposed before her, shame and terror warring in my blood, until I observed the fresh bruises and the evidence of recent tears. I dressed quickly, and approached her, sensing her fragility beneath the layers of armour.

"It is you, then," she said. "The one they seek. The witch."

"I am the one they seek," I confessed, "but I am not much of a witch. I know only one spell, and cannot use it without giving myself away."

She gave a tremulous smile. "Perhaps we can help each other. I know many spells, but am no witch to cast them."

"For your kindness to me, I would help you any way I could."

She raised an eyebrow in amusement. "Any way?"

I nodded emphatically.

"Let me see you properly."

I hesitated, uncertain if she was asking what I thought, but then her hands pushed open my nightshirt and pulled away the towel I had fashioned into a temporary skirt. Naked, I stood revealed, a woman in every sense, but with that one addition, and it was that addition that demanded her attention. "Of all the ways my husband has disappointed me, his greatest failure was in not becoming a father."

The idea that I might be fertile like a man, and not merely equipped like one, had not once crossed my mind, not even when making love to her sister. "What if I fail too?"

"Then at least I won't have to explain to everyone why my child looks nothing like its father," she said with a shrug.

Her child. My child. Its father. What would the goddess say?

She solved my indecision by kneeling in front of me suddenly, her face level with my stirring member. "My grandmother was a witch," she murmured. "She often said a woman's mouth could persuade where even gold could not. Let's see if she spoke truth."

Her mouth proved very persuasive. From the first touch of her soft lips against my surging length, I was lost. From the moment her mouth encompassed the sensitive head, I was hers. From the moment her tongue brushed that most sensitive spot, I knew only that I would soon be filling her mouth, her everywhere, with everything I could give. Remembering her sister's full, pendulous breasts, I cradled my own and imagined that it was the whore's fingers rubbing and pinching my nipples.

I whimpered with need, instinctively thrusting in an attempt to penetrate. As an act it seemed so unnatural, but I cared not. Only pleasure mattered in the moment. The baker, my mistress, held me at bay, while whipping me on to a greater need. Her mouth, her lips, her tongue, were truly exquisite. Seeing her on her knees before me, like acolyte before her goddess, was a further profanity that only served to excite me.

Then, marvel of marvels, her questing fingers discovered my long-neglected womanhood, brushing there against an unsuspected spot of such sensitivity that I was propelled to the precipice and helplessly over. I cried out in surprise, convulsing while still captured by her lips. She recoiled, choking, as my milky essence flooded her mouth, and as more burst forth in pursuit of her I tried to capture it with my hands.