Acolyte of the Pleasure Goddess Ch. 02

Delyssa felt tears rolling down the sides of her face. She wasn't sure when she started crying; it could have been just now, it could have been hours earlier when she was on her second or third orgasm. Looking up at the warm, gentle face of the priestess, in the tight embrace of three other beautiful women, she did feel love, felt it drawing into her through the air and her skin, through the soft and knowing eyes of the others, through their kiss and their touch. She also felt it flowing out of her, an ache of a different tone than the lust now sated. The love she had for these women, for the temple and goddess they represented, felt uncontainable, something of both her body and her soul. She knew why she was crying. It was the hurt of knowing that the body was a limit to her love. There were no actions she could take or words she could say that would bring all the love she felt out of her and into the world to be seen and felt by everyone else. Perhaps no one who loved possessed that ability. Only the goddess Shevlana herself could pour the whole of her love out and into the world.

"Thank you," Delyssa said to the priestesses. It was all she could do. Her eyes began to droop, and the priestesses kissed her forehead in goodbyes as Gala scooped her up. She clung to the priestess like a babe, legs wrapped around her waist, head tucked into her shoulder as Gala carried her back to her room in the dormitory. Her door was slightly ajar, a candle lit from within.

Now almost asleep, Delyssa felt herself being laid down onto her soft bed, Gala standing over her, another figure seated by her side.

"Hello, Brother Jahroud," she mumbled.

"It seems like she's had the quite the long night. I heard she was due to rove out in the morning, and so I waited for her, but it seems she found her celebrations elsewhere," Jahroud's voice was soft, gentle, as if she were already asleep.

"That was kind of you, initiate," Gala said. "Had Delyssa known, perhaps she would have left us to be with you."

"She's a pretty mess right now. Who all was it?"

"Priestesses Allarane, Ollyn, Rethe, and myself."

"Then she made the right choice," Jahroud laughed. "It would be very hard to turn down that temptation."

"I'm still awake," Delyssa said, turning over onto her chest, her face buried into her pillow. She felt Jahroud's hand, soft for a man's, stroke down her spine.

"Barely," he said. "I'll come around a little before morning, take you to the baths, say goodbye."

"Mm-hmm."

"Alright," he said, and she felt his weight lift off the bed. One of them blew out the candle on her bed, leaving her only in the moonlight from her window, and she drifted off as the door closed.

#

The neophytes are taught that after her ascension into the heavens, Shevlana made a new home in a bright palace, guarded from the old evils of Want and War by a powerful aegis. That shield, the world's brother, the moon, was full that night; a portal through which the goddess' light found its way down to the ground, a blanket over Delyssa's sleeping body. Alone in her bedchamber, Delyssa glowed with a pale aura in her slumber.

Shevlana's love could guard against many things. Nightmares of a childhood spent hungry in the streets of the city among them, especially when rest was needed. Delyssa slept soundly, peacefully, and dreamed of returning to the temple after seeing the whole world and knowing that her home was best.

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