Bound to the Turnings of the Wheel

"Mmmmhhhrrmm?" She tapped the panel with a finger.

"In a little while, Isari. No questions for a little bit. Mistress is tired."

Your damane is, too, Isari thought. Beyond tired. Utterly, completely, blissfully, perfectly spent. Let there be legends written about this, she laughed softly to herself.

Mistress Lanfear lifted Isari, then, cradling her under her back and knees, though that mattress-like force spread around the collared blond woman and did much of the work. To an outside observer, though, it would have looked like the raven-haired woman was lifting the blond woman as if she weighed nothing. She deposited Isari on the sectional, on her stomach, head towards the central corner. Then she settled in the same position on the other wing of the sectional, so their heads were close together in the middle. The silver leash draped and coiled lazily along the floor between the collar on Isari's neck and the bracelet on Mistress Lanfear's wrist. Emerald and sapphire eyes met, only a foot apart.

The raven-haired woman gave a dreamy smile. "Good girl," she breathed.

Awkward as it was with a phallic rubber plug in her mouth and that mouth covered by a leather-lined metal panel, Isari smiled back as best she could, too. A moment later, she hummed dreamily around the gag, too. Without moving from where she lay, Mistress Lanfear was using the power of the collar to give her damane a backscratch. A moment later, she added the sensation of firm, tender hands giving a massage to her ass, thighs, and calves. The beyond-drained blond closed her eyes and simply allowed herself to experience the moment.

With her mistress' invisible hands giving her a backscratch and massage, Isari fell fast asleep.

Chapter 4

The floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room faced east, and the first rays of sun were just sneaking through when Isabel finally returned to the world of the waking. It might have been the sunlight that woke her, though there was definitely another candidate, and it wasn't the dildo and plug that were still held fast in her nether orifices by the chastity belt. After all, that had been on her all night. The gag was gone, though.

"Welcome back from Tel'aran'rhiod." Adalynn—was she still Mistress Lanfear at the moment?—was in the kitchen that opened into the living room. She wore a red-and-white gingham apron over a lacy black bra and matching thong, and was barefoot. The bracelet remained on her hand, and the leash was at just about the limit of its length before it reached the collar still on Isabel's neck. She had probably felt Isabel stir through the connection, and Isabel guessed she had been waiting a while to make that quip about the World of Dreams in the Wheel of Time universe.

And the aroma wafting on the air from the kitchen, combined with the memories of last night, and the realization that she was still helpless in the belt and collar, set her going at a low simmer, too.

"Someone didn't forget their roots when they went up North after all," she said. "I don't know if I saw Heaven last night, but I can smell it now."

The raven-haired woman, whoever she was at the moment, laughed. "Chicken and waffles, fried green tomatoes, succotash all ready to go, and the cornbread will be done in about eight minutes. And Heaven is wherever you are, whether in this universe or the larger one next door."

Isabel warmed at the compliment. "You say the nicest things. And cook them, too."

"Some I just pour!" the other woman continued brightly. She held up a rocks glass. "Might not be your typical breakfast drink, but I decanted half that George Dickel Reserve bottle and might as well use it. Oosquai? You know you're safe to have some now. Not even close to the best perk of having this on you," she jiggled the leash, "but why not take advantage of all of them?"

Isabel swung her legs off the sectional and rose gingerly to her feet. "You're a very persuasive woman, in whatever clothing and in whatever universe. Oooh," the last came out in a breath as she began to walk towards the kitchen table, and the dildo and plug held in place by the chastity belt moved within her. She couldn't stop herself from making a nearly identical sound when she sat down on the closest chair at the table, either, even though she knew what was coming and braced herself for it.

"Oooh-squai?" the raven-haired woman asked, sliding the rocks glass in front of her, along with a massive plate piled high with a sumptuous Southern banquet.

"Oh, bless your heart. Ow," her hand went to her throat as Mistress Lanfear sent a light shock to the base of her throat, and even that teasing reminder of the power she wielded caused a tremble in her legs under the table. "Fine. Bless your heart, Mistress." She took a sip of her first drink in almost four years, and it was more than a step up from the Miller Lite that she and her underage friends had managed to corral from time to time, or even the Southern Comfort bottle that she had managed to smuggle out of her father's impressive collection to share on one auspicious occasion.

"Mm-hmm. Much better, damane. But, Isabel, it's just me again now. For the moment."

Isabel let out an explosive breath, as the use of her real name and Adalynn dropping out of character seemed to collapse all the enormity of the past half day onto her, everything she had held at bay, everything that had been outside the reality of her subspace. Including things that might have been outside the reality of actual space, too. "Addie, that was ... I can't even, like, how did you, where did we, what the holy actual ever-living fuck?!"

Adalynn had poured herself her own drink by now. "All outstanding questions," she said with a smile around her first sip. "And to be honest, I'm still very much a student myself, except that there is no one, at least on this planet in this plane of existence, who had more real-world experience with psionics than me even before last night. And as of this morning, I'd honestly say you've moved into second. None of the tiny few others at MIT who secretly took this whole pseudoscientific field seriously, or the small-minded but well-paying government guys fumbling in the dark at Allatoona Dam, have ever seen anything like what we saw together last night. In fact, the only ones who have seen anything close are you, me, and ten other ex-dance-camp girls camping on the shores of Lake Allatoona at Red Top Mountain Park, across from the dam. A hydropower dam is the official story. I've since learned better, and you could probably guess as much yourself. That dam holds back more than water, you might say. And on Memorial Day weekend of 2018, it overflowed, and you and I and those other girls got caught in the flood. Or so I thought. Now, I don't think it was a natural thing, something that just happened. You felt those, whatever you want to call them, beings, consciousnesses, entities on the other side? Whichever one touched our world that night, I'm pretty sure it didn't come across by accident. It was pushing to."

"Do I even want to know why?"

"My working hypothesis? To fertilize human souls."

"Pretty sure that's not MIT-speak."

"And I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to publish this in any scientific journal. Science needs to be reproducible, and I can't reproduce the effect of Allatoona without literally extradimensional help. I could show the scientific world what I can do, but my consulting contract with ARPA-E pays me very well and has a confidentiality agreement. Also, as of last night, I have a highly unethical relationship with my top research subject that I have no intention of letting go of."

Isabel brought her hand to the collar at her throat, and then drew it back and forth a short way along the leash. "Am I your guinea pig?"

"I hope not, because in that case, I'm way too into bestiality."

"Don't kink-shame."

Adalynn laughed. "Not kink-shaming, just not kink-sharing. Because, ew."

"So, psionics?"

"My true field of study at MIT. The science of the paranormal and psychic, the energy of the mind. And the soul, if you believe in that, and I have to admit I'm kind of starting to again. Much as Mistress Lanfear hates to admit it, this," she tapped the bracelet on her wrist, "is not a ter'angreal, and what makes it work is not the One Power, nor anything that divides into those old Greek concepts of Air, Fire, Earth, Water, and Spirit that every fantasy novel seems to use. And the Wheel of Time is sadly just that, a fantasy novel. Though I'm definitely making it as real as possible."

"Or fourteen." Isabel had cut in before Adalynn's last sentence, so they talked over each other for a moment.

"Or fourteen and prequel and spinoff books and now a huge TV deal with Amazon, oh, and JordanCon coming up in April, which we are totally going to, by the way."

Isabel laughed, and was about to make a joke about Adalynn on being such a geek, but the tremor as she laughed reminded her of something pressing. Quite literally.

"Um, Mistress," she said, and realized she had slipped back at least to the edge of being Isari again, maybe because of the stimulus from the belt and its intruders, maybe simply because it was easier than thinking about all of this too strongly, "I've done better than I ever would have dreamed not freaking out about everything that's happened since yesterday." She licked her lips as the previous night drifted on strong winds of memory back through her mind. "The fact that I've had the best orgasms of my life and didn't ruin your parents' beautiful new house definitely helped, and you were right about how bad I needed that. And the fact that they were with you and how much I trust you, that was even better. Better in terms of me not freaking out, I mean. Though just better, too ..."

The metallic panel gag flew into Adalynn's hand from where ever it had been lying, and she approached and put her finger to Isabel's lips. Her eyes hardened slightly.

"Isari," she said. Mistress Lanfear was back, apparently. "You're babbling again. Control it or I'll control it for you."

Isari went weak at the knees. "Mistress, did you for real weld this onto me?"

"Mmm-hmm. I do appreciate how well you have embraced all this, but I would also forgive a little freaking out under the circumstances. Because that very well could be on you for a long time to come. Yes, Isari, potentially months."

"Months?!" Isari squeaked, even with her mistress' finger still pressed to her lips. And yet her body still responded to that prospect very differently than her mind did, the spike of adrenalin from the fear of what Mistress Lanfear was saying mixing perfectly with the anticipation and submissive thrill.

"But note that I did not say forever. Trust, Isari. You swore to trust and obey. And you have obeyed quite well, but now you need to trust." She removed her finger from Isari's lips.

"I ... I trust you, but, how can that possibly even work?"

Mistress Lanfear smiled. "I can both lube and clean them even with them still inside you, remember?" To demonstrate, she floated a thin film of the whisky out of her glass, spun it slowly in midair, and trickled it back down into the glass. "And as for bodily functions, you experienced yesterday how that will work, too. There's a little place you can open it up in the back that goes right up through the plug, it's hollow."

Isari blushed at the memory of the enema. The loss of control as much a turn-on for her as it ever had been, but the specific experience of the enema itself had definitely not been her favorite thing about the evening. And now Mistress Lanfear wanted that to become a long-term, every-time thing? And to have to be constantly with her? Well, that part was actually amazing, but constantly with her in the sense of having to help her use the bathroom? And also, this was Christmas break, but months would mean ...

"What about when you go back to school?" She asked. "You planning on me dropping out of Emory? Coming with you to live in your student apartment at MIT? Hell, what about when you have to go to class?"

Mistress Lanfear grinned then. "A few things you may not have picked up on from what I said earlier. I mentioned ARPA-E. The federal government's most advanced energy research arm."

"I know who they are," Isari said.

"And that's why you're my favorite nerd as well as my favorite damane. But what you might not know is that they have a black budget, like they were Pentagon or intel. Usually for dual-use energy projects, things that could be both civilian and military. And their secret site below the Allatoona Dam hydro plant was kinda small until 2018, because it was considered a moonshot even by their standards. But it's grown a bit since the incident. And I'm part of that. A big part, if I dare say so myself. I'm working there now, and MIT is giving me externship credit for it, which will finish my degree, on top of my considerable consulting fee from that black budget. I wasn't lying when I said that this is my parents' new house in the city. What I left out was that I bought it for them, and they're not moving in for a while yet. So for my last semester of senior year, this is my house. And yours."

"Wait, seriously?!"

"Absolutely. You can't go back to Castleberry Hill after last night. So the real question you should have asked is what about when you have to go to class. And I actually have a pretty good option for that, too. I'll tell you about it in a bit. But in the meantime, that is, as you put it, how this will work while that psionium belt is on you. That's what I've called my alloy for now, incidentally."

Oh my God, she's serious. Crazy, but serious. We're moving in together! Am I OK with this? This is insanely quick. And this belt is driving me stark raving mad!

"W ... when will you take it off me, Mistress?"

Mistress Lanfear's smile took on a curious tinge, then, one that Isari wasn't sure how to read, even though she had her undivided attention on her mistress' face. Not exactly soft, but not as sharp as usual, either. Nostalgia? Regret? Impossible to say. "No, my blossoming little damane. I will not. When you're ready, you will do it yourself, and I wouldn't even be able to stop you if I tried."

"Wait, you mean like, using that, that energy that comes out of me, that stuff that happens around me in the real world when, when, when I ..."

"When you cum, Isari. Just because you're a chaste woman now doesn't mean you have to turn into a total prude."

More dad jokes. I want to move out already. "Mistress, didn't you say that this alloy, this psionium, has parts in it that don't even melt at 5400 degrees?"

"Not all of it, but some of it, yes. And that's before I reinforce it with a psionic matrix that gives it some of its more interesting properties that you've experienced, and that no spectroscopy will ever show. I had to get every piece of this a'dam north of four thousand Kelvin to forge it. More than 6700 Fahrenheit.

"Mistress, please ... tell me you're not just trying to get my hopes up. Four thousand Kelvin is three times the temperature inside a typical volcano. I start little fires and short out electronics and circuit boxes."

"No, Isari. That was what slips through the cracks that you try so desperately, so constantly, to hold closed. And you did far better at that than you probably ever believed, considering how much you beat yourself up about the trivial damage you caused. But the remaining power from each of your surges back-scatters into the other side of what I call the Veil, back into the world we caught a glimpse of yesterday. At least until I got that collar on you. But of course, that seems to have just made your orgasms even stronger."

Isari smiled, even as her brain raced to process this. There, at least, was something slightly familiar. "It wasn't just the collar, Mistress. It was the woman who put it on me. She has that effect on me."

Mistress Lanfear's emerald eyes softened, and a faint mist that definitely came from Adalynn shone through. She took a quick sip of her oosquai. Isari took advantage of the moment to grab another bite of the chicken and waffles. Maybe living here will be worth putting up with the dad jokes.

"And I love how you've responded to both," the emerald-eyed woman continued. "But while I definitely tried my damnedest to make this the closest thing to the Wheel of Time dream I could think of, the truth is the a'dam, even the a'dam and belt together, even with the gag I just made and even a few other things I might add, can still only partially contain you. It's not like the books where no matter how powerful a channeler you put it on, that was it, the sul'dam has total control of the Power from both. It measured your power output yesterday while I was more busy enjoying it. And it's already more than an exawatt, and no way it's not still growing."

"An exa-what?"

"Exa-watt."

"Watt is that?"

"A latt of watts."

"Natt funny."

"I know it's natt. The total power capacity of every power plant in the United States combined is only about 1.21 terrawatts."

"Not 1.21 gigawatts?"

"And this is why you're so amazing, especially because you didn't say jiggawatts and I still got the reference, but no."

"Good, but—wait, so an exawatt is more than a terrawatt?"

"Isari. Yes. In fact, a petawatt is a thousand terrawatts, and an exawatt is a thousand petawatts."

"Wait, so a thousand ... thousand ... wait, a million Americas?"

"That's right, little damane. Your orgasms have a peak power output more than a million times that of the power infrastructure of the entire United States, and almost ten times the total power that Earth receives from the Sun. Two seconds of your orgasms release more energy than a magnitude 9 earthquake. If the dimension next door followed the same laws of physics as ours, which lucky for both us and them, it doesn't, the energy you've vented on that side of the Veil just in the past day would have been enough to destroy entire islands and make ancient civilizations believe they had invoked the wrath of their most vengeful gods."

"Wait am I ... are we ... killing people, or living things, when we ...?!"

"No. You felt them yesterday, right? Lots of different emotions, but not a single one of them was scared. I'm pretty sure the beings there feed on energy. They need that instead of food. They have no bodies. Which also means they can't experience what we do—or the psionic energy it generates. And it seems that one of the greatest sources of psionic energy in either world is the human orgasm, especially a woman's, the more mindblowing the better."

Isari's mind raced, trying to process. The dildo and buttplug made that distinctively more difficult. She took another sip of the George Dickel oosquai, not that she expected that would help her focus. She wasn't even sure that she expected it to calm her nerves. Fertilizing human souls ...

Mistress Lanfear had continued while Israi's mind whirled. "But beyond that backscatter, I'll bet that your surges were getting stronger on this side, too. That's why you started heading outside of town."

Isari nodded. "Yours, too?"

"Yes, but not like yours. Do you remember what you were doing when the surge hit?"

Isari grinned. "Oh, I do, Mistress. But like I said yesterday, I have unhealthy ways of processing shit. At least until last night." She ran a hand along the collar and first arm's length of the leash. "Maybe I still do even now, but damn if this doesn't feel like a better one."