Fate of Tyrants

Fell crimson moth in thy little gleamsilk cage

What today the texture of thy fine murderous plumage?

What shape thy sly talons, blindly grasping escape?

In the dreamlike, waking hours before she set foot in the arena, when she could see the grass slowly turning blue outside her and window with the daylight and listen to the Giershrike's whirruping warning of the impending dawn, Askara wrote her death sakta. The artful script she'd once regarded with boredom was now a personal treasure, a lock that none outside her gilded cage could crack; the soft clay tablets had been a chore at first for symbols meant to be painted upon palm leaves.

'neath the prickling heat of the noonday glare at odds with the frigid breath crawling off the Ionəssaq River she was a velvet wasp preying upon a wind scorpion; she stung him beneath his bronze shell, sliding like a lover amidst his organs stirring them free; they slid forth like a child's pageant of dangling, fanciful red bags as his knees buckled. Her flight moved the cold hearts of the gold-adorned mantids, waterbugs and dragonflies watching from gilt stands of frilled brass, fluttering their approval.

When congeals thy oiled spirit unto dread definition

Shallt thou dazzle them nauseated with thy gory wings?

Or this day do you soar into flame?

Held together by ingenious, hinged rings of bone - an innovation her noble masters had stolen from the now extinguished people of Tsraɲ - she'd grouped them by their 10s. Sitting back and looking upon her half completed paen to her own mortality, she contemplated the quality of her work; once her regentess had regarded her work as 'paltry' and 'often tawdry', but she'd moved beyond the careless linen-swaddled little flower she'd once been and become...a poet.

Askara's sly claws ripped the lance from the wind scorpion's armored digits, which were busy with the work of scooping his victuals back into his belly; longer than the fine stinger of bronze that had parted her nameless foe's taut belly, she whirled like one of her Masters' dancing girls, the spear her tall, limber partner. The scorpion's brother in arms, a cautious garden spider clenching his axe's haft like a branch, tracked a wary circle around her vermillion and violet art.

Gold it dances, burnt and burnished blue

Glorious agony in Agna's embrace, thy ultimate rite

Blinded by victories' hoary years, free at last

Her dust-caked fingers - the nine that remained - carried the tablet like a newborn from her humble lectern to the stone plinth beneath her window that would, in an hour, be bathed in sunlight. It was the thirtieth she'd written, and awkward pride knotted itself in her chest like a ribbon. Thirty times she'd commemorated her death in the manner of a warrior, like daubing makeup over her servitude, and that many times had blood washed it away, leaving her a slave.

She pre-empted his long-limbed gait, awaiting the footfall that would stir his balance and she uncoiled the muscles of her right arm, the lance whipping an arc for his legs but the garden spider's fear filled him with alacrity. A hop that carried him over the leaf-blade, and despite his ungainly landing the axe-blade caught the spearhead against the ground in a downward arc. A backward flutter as she released the lance, his weapon's passage a zephyr against her chin; coiled like a whip, she sprang forth to bear him unto the ground, rolling to his screams as she dug deep her stinger in his heart.

Her wry smile was joyless as a hungry night, reflected back at her in the still pool occupying the center of her quarters. Her shoulder length hair fell in coiled tendrils past the strong, defined jaw she inherited from her father. Her umber, scarred skin was at odds with the pale, rosy pallor of her captors...it had been rounder once, soft like a woman of peerage should be; even her name had been gentler before she'd taken a new one.

Once she'd worn a soft robe of flesh and privilege beneath silks and gold chains; carried upon the shoulders of lower-caste in a palanquin of bamboo and cushions bulging with cotton like a stuffed prawn. Now there was barely a digit's worth of softness clinging to her frame, hardened like an oak training spar in Winter. Her flat belly was scored with muscle-lines like a war god's idol, her hips flaring outward - beneath the red linen panels of her loincloth her posterior formed a taut convex; in her yielding, plush life of indolent lounging broken up by fits of strangling court drama, she'd been as the pale flesh of a lychee, lush and eager to soak the lips of a strapping young noble.

That beauty had been pared away by the lash of Daevite servitude and, when she'd proven to her new mistress she was possessed of an unyielding will to kill in the name of survival, the arena had painted sinew and strength over skin and bone. Her breasts, once heavy and soft, were now far too firm and round for a lady; thighs once pillowed and tender for questing lips and fingers were defined by a line of muscle that ran suggestively to her groin.

Sliding her meager garments from her frame, she stepped into the cool water, and her small, dark nipples hardened in response. Filled up to her hipbone, the sandstone gritty beneath her bared feet, she bent forward and stared at the water, inches from her face, clapping her hands to splash it over her eyes. The challenge had always been not to flinch, not to blink - an errant movement of her eyelids had cost her a little finger fourteen months prior, and its phantom presence still ached.

"Hesitation is death," she breathed to the ripples; her eyes burned.

"Pity is death." Askara clapped again, gritting her teeth against bodily reflex.

"Now I am become a dread wasp, and bite without regret." A final clap...followed by another, another until she was churning the water and pretending that she hadn't been turned into this murderous thing, like an Ashura had been forced down her throat and into the space where dwelt her soul. That which had once been a tender, loving flower was mutating into a brambled, blood-soaked tree hanging with the corpses of people she couldn't even call enemy.

Askara had always eschewed armor - her claim, of course, that it interrupted the flow of her virtuosity was a cover for the simple fact that it chafed - but instead adorned herself as befitted whatever role she adopted. Emerging from the water, tears streaming gladly down her cheeks and dripping from her chin to her breasts, she clad herself in a skirt of red pteryges, lined in soft, crimson velvet. Over the supple grace of her neck, the slave draped a broad collar of red-painted lamelles, lined in black, rolled cotton; her breasts she bound in a simple strip of leather she'd painted red. With crimson and vanta pastes, mixed with rosewater, she painted edges and lines upon her jaw, over her lips and eyes to give her a vespid aspect.

At the entrance of her quarters, a key turned in its latch, the lock to her gilded cage creaking open as her mistress' claviger tapped the end of his ranseur twice against the stone floor. She never stopped smiling as she turned to regard the Daevite, looming over her by a few hands like some milk-pale steppe ghost. In her eye, her captor's people were all beautiful in a sense, though there was an uncanny sense of disconnect...as if she were looking upon a man that wasn't entirely human, or at least, not the same way as she. The shape of his ribs beneath his bared chest were segmented, rather than smooth, and while his developed musculature had its own mouth-watering quality, his belly seemed...almost sunk. A simple cloth garb was wrapped around his waist, doing little to obscure the long, low-slung shape of his masculinity.

Inspired as she was, she couldn't help but wonder at taking one to bed.

After spilling blood, Askara would be as a rosy flame, her desire desperate to be quenched.

------------------------

In the aftermath, when the gore had flowed, the spider and the scorpion lay dead, and her mistress had won glory through her:

"Welcome back, victorious mistress."

The cage-door clattered closed behind her, sealing her within the luxuriant glow of her stony nest, and the world of her audience...here, instead, she was a hierophant in a dramatic ritual she herself had devised, a self-designed reward carefully curated by her own attentive slaves. The victorious warrior held her arms out at her sides as they painstakingly removed her blood soaked velvetine vestments, stripping her down to hard-edged, firm-fleshed nudity with worshipful adoration. "You are truly an artist of blade and lance, delighting the Good Masters and Mistresses...come, lotus of our desire, it is our dharma to cleanse you of sand and blood."

Valyn's touch was subtle as a dragonfly's pricking legs, barely tracking across her scarred, almond-dark skin as he undressed her; she saw no need to restrain herself with her Egyptian catamite. Askara's fingers combed through his luxuriant black curls, nails hissing across his defined, smooth jawline, painted similarly to hers; an edge that reminded her of a terribly handsome grasshopper. Her feelers drifted down his flank, his hip to touch the defined, powerful muscles of his thighs...she inspected, without any trepidation, the chitin-hardness of his masculinity, of his orotund crown, gently pressing the tip of her finger into the opening; a squish of his thick, pearlescent nectars that she tasted with a furtive, pink tongue.

"She's a'ready a'flame for our touch - yet methinks...it's the slow, honey-drip of our love our mistress hungers for, no?" She wasn't wrong - her other bed servant, Fyrrahl, was a passionate and fierce treasure her mistress had collected at great cost; her other hand quested for the crimson haired girl's heavy, lush breasts, cupping each pale orb in turn and enjoying the caps of her pink nipples. A golden collar around her neck held a pair of diaphanous, iridescent blue demi-cloaks that wafted across her shoulders like gossamer wings. Her wide, fertile hips were gently cupped by curled filigrees of gold, teardrop shaped rubies pointing alluringly at the trimmed patch of red hair hiding her creamy, swollen folds. The musk of her arousal was, to Askara, a calming incense.

"Cleanse me." The simple command, uttered in the gladiatrix's haunting alto poorly suited for hymnals, now scarred like smokeflash paint from howling in the arena, stirred them to vernal instinct and heat.

They all stepped into the water, a belt of crimson, leathern petals spreading across the surface.

Vahn's Elfin, muscled chest glowed with the special dye the Daevites had produced themselves, vivid greens and purples in silk-thin lines; his penis bobbed pleasantly at the surface of the font, long enough to fill her fingers and palm down to her wrist...his girth made him an almost taxing lover until she'd learned to handle him. Fancifully, she thought of his cock like a stinger of his own, plunging deep, thrusting into soft, yielding tissue and gushing so forcefully; she stroked it idly as he poured warm water over her hair, sluicing little rivers over her scalp. "My mistress' hair is the envy of Saphava; how the pale, ruddy Daevites must chitter in envy." His smile was the delicate pincer movement of mandibles to her fruitful imagination.

"Mere helots as we are unfit to serve such as she." Fyrrahl's kisses floated down Askara's oil-gleaming shoulder like butterfly wings, her breath like little flutters of wind. Each press of her lips sampled the warrior-poet's bouquet of sweat, of pheromones enticed forth by her little season of war until they found the sepal curve of her breast. The sound from Askara's throat was the buzzing of vespid wings, the quiet gnash of her teeth the click of mandibles as the freckled, lush girl's probing tongue traced around the dark anther of her nipple.

"Or by being eager to be pleased," he quipped in that voice that reminded you of laughter on the Great Lake's shore, vivid as a lantern and her wings beat eagerly in his direction as Askara pulled him close for a wordless, savage kiss; the sweetness of his lips mixed with the tang of Fyrrahl's bite as she pulled her ruddy, full-cheeked concubine to her...and fickle thing she was, she released them, spreading her wingspan in silent demand.

They treated her body, lost of its pliant charm and nothing but unfeminine muscle in her eyes, as if she were still a lovely thing to be lavished with labor and desire; from a tiny clay decanter Valyn drizzled a brilliant, sky-blue oil over her shoulders, painting it with darting, antenna-quick motions of a tiny brush across her taut skin. Errant pearls flowed over her sensitive breasts, a cool warmth that stimulated them and provoked an errant trill when he cupped one with spider-gentle fingers.

Fyrrahl probed and snuck along the crags and canyons of her back, nails like tiny grasping claws that pinched free dirt and dried gore, finally reaching her hips and inviting her mistress to recline back against her in the pool; it reminded her of the way bottleflies mated in defiance of gravity, here in the water, and a smile crept across the gladiatrix's face when she felt her slave's plush thighs on either side of her. The budding pearl of her desire was swollen and throbbing between her thighs, generous and pink.

"My beautiful concubine and sensual dancing boy tantalize the mind from thoughts of blood shed to..." Askara kissed the moth-softness of the crimson haired girl's cheek, to the edge of her lips, "flowers in bloom...and of course," she smiled as Valyn stood between her opened thighs, running an index finger in a lazy circle around his crown peeking above the water. "Seed spilled."

Their sly smiles reminded the former noble of rakshas' as they rose, dried themselves, and further adorned their deadly mistress with hornet stripes of slender gold chain, around her throat and waist; an emerald glinting ring through her navel; crimson trochanters of hide bangles trimmed in black ermine. For her own part, to...stimulate her slaves to more passionate rut, she gently clamped Fyrrahl's confection-pink nipples with little golden clasps - around Valyn's cock, she slowly tightened a brass ring behind his low-slung, heavy testicles.

They'd practically made her writhe in the pool, so it was only fitting that Valyn's hips squirmed side to side as veins stood out in shaft, and Fyrrahl's white teeth bit down on her full, red lips.

Satisfied, Askara reclined back upon a cushioned, finely crafted chair of stone, a hymenopteran queen, wasp's smile sinister and thighs immodestly spread; those red scales hanging from her waist obscured the lush swell of her sex, a rich fruit ripe with taille and ready to be plucked. Her court of two knelt in joyful reverence - a wiry, handsome drone with his gravid stylet, dripping potence, and a zaftig, sweet worker slick with her own royal jelly.

"Hmmm hmmm, isn't this just a sight worthy of a queen," the slave chirped with irony. "Two beautiful slaves, on their knees before me, eager to do whatever...my...desires...hold." Askara's fingers slid between the scales covering her sex, teasing lightly at the swollen nodule of her clitoris. "Show me..." she slid fingers into her honey-drooling tightness, withdrawing them as a creamy, gleaming display. "How will you please me?"

Fyrrahl's tongue was the first to find her mistress' digits, curling teasingly around her claws before sucking her thumb into her mouth; joined by Valyn, he cleaned Askara's juices from her fingers and she settled back with a relaxed, low fluttering sound in her chest. She welcome them both as their lips climbed her body to find her breasts, and she finally let out a drawn-out, long moan when they both found her nipples. Ecstasy tingled, warm and tanwy, from thorax to lower abdomen.

The two of them had been well-trained in the arts of her pleasure, more intimately familiar with the flavor of her prana than any lover or slave she'd had prior for these ones were well and truly grateful; the life of a bed servant to one such as she was a far better fate than as, say, a blood sacrifice, or a farm thrall. "This is...a fine showing, thus far..." Askara's voice droned gently, hypnotized by the sight of her fancifully adorned lovers suckling at her teats; she'd long enjoyed the sight of hungry lips at her chest, and the sight of their two mouths working with zeal along the dark, round hardness of her areolas was better than their sum.

"'tis but the opening bar of the song we shall sing through you, mistress." Fyrrahl's tittering laughter reminded her of the little copper bells hung upon slender chains outside apiaries in her river-wrung homeland. With sweet, probing fingers her servant peeled apart the adornments blocking her mistress' petals and crawled her tongue between them; Askara gave a soft, feminine moan against Valyn's arrogant kiss that blossomed into a chord of sighs when that pink, questing muscle reached the apex of her sex and enclosed her bead in concentric circles.

In the temple ground of her imagination she did indeed picture the crimson haired girl as a majestic butterfly, lapping the lush honeys and nectars from her flower and drinking deeply; the radiance of her gaze, like faceted tourmalines - such a rare thing in this land - locked with Askara's. A careful and passionate gardener in the flowerbed of her desires, flitting between the throbbing beacon of her node, and then dipping in deep to sup at her.

Her body convulsed and shook as her composure faded away, and the flowerbed, the color pallet of her curvaceous bed slave, and Valyn's lips working ever diligently at her breast took her perceptions to a transcendent place; she felt as if she were falling through the air, the quiver of her thighs like the flutter of gossamer wings as she gushed against Fyrrahl's lips. Askara's voice trilled in passion, exoskeleton falling away as she grabbed on to her catamite, holding him close in the throes of climax.

Unable, unwilling yet to open her eyes, panting and laughing, she allowed herself a moment to reorganize her higher thoughts as her slaves kissed her cold lips, worshiping and praising her.

"Our lady's ecstasy is our only goal..."

"Surely she has more desire left for us? We've only just started to please her."

"Give us leave to further serve you, it is our purpose and pleasure in this life..."

Askara pulled them to the boughs of her bosom and clutched them close, enjoying the way they attended to her firm chest and soothed the rapacious energies causing her hips to gyrate against her will. She reflected quietly in the clarity that came thereafter, in the relaxation her body could not resist under their loving ministrations...there were times she wished she could come down from her branches and join them in the grass, and those times were when she was at her weakest and needed their care the most.

As Valyn's lips released her nipple and she pulled him close to taste the sweetness of his lips, she thought about the time she'd contracted the Flux. He'd never once left her side, supplying her with fresh linens to soak up her sweat and pouring cool water over her forehead to keep her from boiling within her own skin...she'd never thanked him because...he was a slave, and she was his mistress.

Fyrrahl had done much the same for her, but...her sickness had been of the heart then; brought upon herself, of course, the price she paid for allowing herself to fall for another Master's fighter; cruel, capering things the Daevites were, when her lover's keeper had found learned of their hearts' entanglement he'd forced them to fight. Tears in their eyes, she'd emerged victorious, holding his severed head aloft for the braying crowd; she'd wept in Fyrrahl's arms for days.