Fate of Tyrants

It was ironic, of course. The simplest and most natural thing would be to express her gratitude to them - if such power was hers to exercise Askara would have freed her drones, but such authority was limited solely to her Mistress; the helots she'd grown up around, tilling the soil of her old estate were essentially woven from the same cloth as she and all the others she'd known from her long-dead life. Once the ritual was peeled away, all were flesh, bone and wants and lies; but the ritual was everything.

For now, her cosmos was shrunk, a tiny cell in a spire-hive at the top of which sat a queen...and she dwelled far beneath. Her ruminations broke apart into a hundred pairs of buzzing wings, flitting back to the flowerbed of her lust. "It would please me...to witness you mate one another first, that I might grow warm with anticipation..." digits accustomed to caressing a spear played along the flexible hardness of Valyn's bulbous cock; through the lust-soaked folds of Fyrrahl's sex.

Snug against their mistress, her bed servants gazed at each other with feverish intimacy...this was, of course, something they were well-accustomed to, and in fact enjoyed. Fyrrahl reclined on her back, shameless and lewd on the stone floor, holding her smooth thighs apart. "You heard yer lady, helot...do your duty, I'll ensure you perform with enthusiasm."

"Oh I assure you...I always perform with enthusiasm," the slender catamite quipped as he pushed up from Askara's throne and from her arms. For her part, she draped a long, scar-hardened leg over the side of her chair, fingers traveling through the thatch of dark, soft velvet covering her mons.

By the power of her mind's senses the curling, silken lines of green stenciled along his legs sang a cricket's chirp with each step...barely a measure of fat clung to his umber frame. Completely aware of the way his movements drew her attention like dawn-light against a sunflower, she wondered what Fyrrahl saw...supine and presenting, the pillowy elegance of her thighs parted and pale. "You've made him be patient, mistress...he's hard as a spire. I'll burnish him to perfection for you," she promises; you can see the way her azure eyes sparkle, her eyes firmly on the shape of his lance.

Askara's fingers imitated the path of Valyn's masculinity, traveling up and down her swollen slit to spread her arousal across her node; from this angle she could enjoy a perspective most artists were denied in the form of his engorged, rotund cock, parting her slave's folds and entering her with slow, filling motions of his hips that reminded her of long grass bending against the wind. She slid three fingers into herself, clicking her mandible as the wet resistance gave way. Sunk up to his hilt within her, Askara filled herself to her own knuckles and, the aria of her delight echoing Fyrrahl's as Valyn's long heft reached those places of deep stimulus, she curled her fingers upwards.

Stoking her depths for the ecstasy that awaited, she was entranced by the sight of him...plunging into that pink, swollen, wet flesh; churning her Fyrrahl until her inevitable release. It was, in Askara's mind, a stirring sight, and Valyn certainly knew as he looked over a shoulder and smiled her way. The pale, red-headed girl's legs shook, bracketed against the catamite's arms in a deep mating press; an irresistible, hungry pull against a plunging, unstoppable force. Fyrrahl's mouth was open as she cried out, her song echoing in Askara's chambers.

In the fanciful corners of her mind she imagined the smooth, long curve of his sting thrusting into pink, frothing petals, the weight of his sack like shining jewels filled with his creamy, fertile venom; swelling that flesh to leave it dripping and flowing.

"Valyn..." Askara smiled back at her slave with a coquettish glimmer of her refractive gaze. "Come here. Fuck me against this throne, do as your mistress commands." Her digits slid forth, tempting, shining with her juices.

"Your wish is the pinnacle of my ecstasy, oh champion of the satin blade," and the poetic exhortation was almost as good as when he pushed the swell of his crown into her depths. Slicked with Fyrrahl's nectars, the ease with which such a fulsome shape filled as tight a grip as hers was a shock of force that rolled her eyes into the back of her head - an undignified expression brought on by the sheer gratification of his initial penetration. Quickly clawing back control like part of her nest, blown free by a storm gale, she tugged Valyn close that her tongue might lock with his and silence any teasing unbefitting a thrall.

No man - be he a superior come to take of her flesh, or a prostitute she'd bought at the Fane of Sighs - had ever mated her with as much precision and control as this one. He'd become intimately familiar with her plateaus and peaks, how to take her along the edge of euphoria by stimulating her to the depths; his teeth found the darkened hardness of her nipple as his slowly pulled his manhood forth, his helm remaining ensconced at her gateway.

"Valyn!" Askara made to snap at him, but the ferocity she commanded in the arena wilted as an azalea on a sweltering day as she was captured by the delicate beauty of his jawline, the white hardness of his teeth glinting through his pretty lips. "Did I not...tell you...to fuck me against this throne? Fyrrahl, is he annmhh..." she trailed off as his lips climbed her throat, and Fyrrahl's dextrous tongue curled around Askara's.

"He is, and doin' a fine job of it I'd say." The girl's fingers slid down either side of her hardened pearl, stroking over the length that should have been filing her...instead, her impertinent servants were once again overwhelming her ability to communicate, reducing her to a honeyed chirp. "Is it that you..."

"Desire my vigorous, deep thrusts?" Valyn clicked softly against her earlobe.

"YES!" she shouted, her enthusiasm getting the better of her, calloused blade-worn hands reaching down to dig her nails into the hardness of his posterior. "Faster, deeper, harder until you seed me! Do you...ahhh do you understand?"

They'd danced this dance before, a ritual of power that leapt between their respective ranks, testing and pushing immutable caste and role as slave and mistress challenged one another; no Daevite would ever tolerate such a game. Given such direct command, the pheromones of her desire stirring him on, she succumbed to his deep, rhythmic penetration; that lovely curve, his keratin hardness slicking Fyrrahl's arousal along the walls of her sheathe carried her along the road of her ecstasy.

The moment of his release was something he'd reserved for her especially...a privilege reserved for her alone. "Shall I fill you, mistress?" his voice shuddered against the strain of his core muscles, building that pressure in the base of his girth.

"You shall," Askara whispered, guiding him in this ceremonial imitation of fertility. "Fyrrahl...ensure this thrall pays for his insolence with every...last...drop of his potency." The warrior-poet's dark lips stretched in a gloating smirk as the crimson-haired girl sank onto her knees, and Valyn's eyes became round as a dragonfly's.

The twinned sounds of Fyrrahl's plush lips suckling her male thrall's sack into her mouth, and the slick, rich gush of his seed filling her to the brim was a singular thrill. Askara trapped him with her legs, wrapped greedily around Valyn's hips as Fyrrahl's questing, long tongue made the journey along the bridge between his scrotum and the tightness of his rosebud.

Whatever words of objection he may have had were lost in manful cries as he reached his peak. In this moment, the lines of caste and rank blurred and they were, once again, but part of Spring's grand, vernal orchestra.

His groan, low in his chest...Fyrrahl's, reverberating between his thighs, and Askara's own, reached the ceiling, and soon she overflowed with the sheer volume of his seed.

Such perfect music they made together...the closest she'd come to being one of them. She longed for the closeness they shared, united in their place at the bottom of the Daevites' pyramid of golden blood in a singular caste, swarming in their hundreds of thousands. Once, sitting near the top of what was a mere ant hill compared to the towering, spined hive of her captors, she'd known...some sort of comity, as much as could be had by people such as she who'd experienced negligible hardship and great abundance.

Then down from Daevistan marched the mantids and water-striders with their saber-fangs, their hedge-rows of pikes, the sorcery they'd stolen from deities they'd devoured with patient, hinge-jawed bites. War, while not entirely unknown to her people, was as alien as a centipede's skitter and there'd been nobody to step forward and fight for her; instead the sparkling shell of luxury had been ripped from her back, replaced with an exoskeleton of scars and cruelty - she'd had no choice, not if she'd wanted to keep drawing breath, and life was something she desperately coveted.

In life, there was always the potential for beauty...in death there was nothing.

Askara lay upon her bed, a low-slung affair of cool stone upon which her mistress had lain layers of cotton; another comfort bought with hymenopteran savagery. In this place, hidden in the darkest section of her chambers, obscured by drapery she'd worked to hang herself, the unspoken rules of distance relaxed. Perhaps because they couldn't clearly see one another, Askara permitted herself to close her eyes and wrap herself in Valyn's embrace, to rest her head against the plush warmth of Fyrrahl's bosom. They both stroked and touched her, their fingers the soft brush of antennae over her rangy back and dark lips; their affection soothed her, and would lead her to rest that she might be ready for the training block tomorrow.

As somnolence draped itself across her shoulders, she wondered, not for the first time, if they truly cared for her or if it was all part the grand performance. Were they merely playing their part, the lurid response to her pining call, or was there something beyond the demands of their helotage?

She'd never know, for she could never ask; it wasn't seemly.

Then again...what need did a velvet wasp have for such things? Liberated from the burdens of the heart, did the wasp not waft carefree and deadly in the river-breeze?

What about her Mistress? Was the Daevite who'd bought her - a thinking, breathing person - troubled by such need, or was the need for this sort of acceptance as bizarre a concept to her as war had been to her own folk?

Before the oblivion of sleep muffled her thoughts, she cast off the fanciful vespid persona she'd worn into the waters of her memories, watching it sink downward to join the doughty face of her regentess, the name she'd once carried, and the severed head of the one she'd loved...little more than a slave once again.