Flowers of the Imperial Palace Ch. 04

Dawn. And the harem was awakening. Not the harem girls who inhabited it, they were all but one still asleep, but rather the space itself it was warming and flexing. The catalyst was the first glow of approaching sunrise, its hour almost invariant in the heartland of the empire astride the solar equator. Sensing the light, or perhaps merely in synchrony with it in the manner of a perfect clockwork, the flowers of the llimhendel vines began to sput open and disburse their scent. Minutes before, one or more of the harem matrons would have engaged the water mills that powered the building's circulatory system, the wooden corkscrew fans that drew the llimhendel-laced air through a lattice of ceramic piping and into every corner of every wing. And like the limbs of a giant body, the four wings of the harem slowly flooded with vigor, ready, awake and alive after dormancy.

Lor leaned her head and heard it, the quiet hum echoing through the main conduit far above, the one that ran along the apex of the arched ceiling of her dormitory wing. At intervals the dense llimhendel vapor tumbled out of circular holes in the pipe. Lor fancied she could feel it drifting down and settling on her skin like a hot dew. The scent of the llimhendel was the spirit of the God-empress, and the harem building an incarnation. This thought had stuck fast in Lor's imagination when she had first heard the harem matrons teach it, during instruction. She and all the girls of the harem lived and slept inside the body of their Goddess, and Goddess awoke before they did, to be ready to hold them always, and to envelop them in her kindness.

Lor cherished these moments, when she was up before the others and could be alone with her thoughts of Goddess, sometimes even a for full turn of the clock. It was usually the heat that woke her. As a southerner, Lor was not accustomed to it. Even after these many months her body had remained calibrated to the climate of her homeland, attempting to cool itself by coating her skin in sweat, futile in the saturated air of the Uyraali tropics. Under her thin bedsheet, the stickiness quickly became uncomfortable as soon as the day began to bake. She often found herself clasped uncomfortably against Suria's broad body and had to peel herself free.

Standing beside the bed from which she had just risen, Lor looked down and checked Suria's face carefully for signs of wakefulness. Suria's mouth was open in a quiet rasping snore and her thick red hair was clumped across her eyes. Lor leaned over and slipped her hand beneath the cover where she saw the tenting of Suria's morning hardness. She gripped it in her fingers and tested, felt the pulsing of full stiffness burn hot against her palm. It was the surest way to know whether Suria would soon stir. If she were close to wakefulness and already in the throes of a dream, her hips would shift and she would thrust idly into the grip of Lor's fist. Now, her dick throbbed thick against Lor's gentle squeeze but Suria did not stir, and her snoring murmured on unbroken. Lor might be alone for a little time yet. The other girls almost never woke this early, and when they did they would most of them use the time to stroke themselves and relieve the ache of their morning hardness before the harem matrons arrived to stop them.

She made her way out along the nave of her wing and into the space under the central dome. Her bare feet slapped quietly on the stone floor, in the early morning still untouched by the sun and cool enough to offer some relief from the gathering heat. With the memory of Suria's throbbing on the nerves of her hand, Lor grew aware of her own hardness. It stood out awkwardly in front of her as she walked, pointing upward, its swollen weight swaying from side to side with the twist of her stride. She had not stroked herself this morning, nor had she spurted unwilled in her sleep, and the full weight of unspent need sat like a tight knot in her insides, squeezing an unrelenting stiffness into her dick. Still impressed by the harem matrons' admonitions against it, Lor refrained from ever touching herself. The thought that some of the other girls did not always hold themselves full and ready for Goddess was something that provoked in Lor a certain scandalous unease. In part it was perhaps simply that an awareness of the other girls' transgressions reminded her of her own and forced her to confront a minor hypocrisy. She never touched herself, but she did touch Suria, and she allowed Suria to touch her. Lor reconciled herself to this one lapse by accounting for it as a necessary act of affiliation. Suria was her only friend. Their touching was a bond of sorts, something shared in privacy. It also helped alleviate the frustrating silences brought about by the lack of a common language that they both spoke fluently.

Suria's snoring faded behind her, and as she entered the huge space of the dome, another sound filled Lor's awareness. She was here even earlier than usual, and the flowers of the llimhendel were still opening. No one flower made a sound that would be perceptible on its own above the babble of the streams of water or the waking chatter of the birds. But the walls of the chamber were arrayed with what were probably many tens of thousands of blooms, clustering on the vines that had woven themselves into the wooden trellises. Together, the pop and burst of so many opening at once produced a quiet but insistent rushing sound, like the hiss of a fine rain, only softer.

Lor hurried to the edge of the dome, feet splashing through one of the shallow water channels. She stood by the carpet of vines and searched, until she found one cluster of flowers that remained completely unopened, near the foot of the wall. She knelt, and held her face close. Each flower had three petals of a faded pink color that deepened to red at the edges. Two of the petals were larger and like concave semicircles, the third one was thin and pointed. In its dormant nocturnal state, the two larger petals were clasped together closed, and the slimmer third petal lay draped over the seam between them, its ragged fringes held down in a crust of congealed nectar that it had secreted to seal itself completely closed. Lor held up her hand and tickled her fingers through the cluster of sealed flowers, tapping her fingertips against the petals. In an irregular sputter, the flowers each popped and splayed open, its insides a much darker deep green. The tiny force of each burst sent a tremor across the nearby leaves of the vine. Lor giggled, pleased. To her fancy, the eruption of the flowers recalled the final twitch of a girl teased over the brink of climax by a last gentle stroke on the shaft of her dick.

From inside each bloom, there diffused a thin puff of greenish yellow. A concentrated cloud of the plant's vaporous seed. Lor thrust her face into the foliage and breathed. Lor had arrived at the harem a virgin, and she had not smelled any other woman's cunt before her Goddess. But she had smelled women's bodies close, when she had suckled from her aunts and cousins, as was customary for unmarried dickgirls in the south. This was that smell exactly, the close scent of a woman's skin, only richer and more overwhelming. It was so strong it barely had to be inhaled to be sensed, instead it diffused irresistibly into Lor's nose and her throat. It was warmth, it was potency, it was the promise of pleasure and it was the memory of being enveloped in the heat of Goddess' divine cunt. To Lor it was not the scent of just any woman, but was indeed, and just as the matrons had taught, the spirit of the Goddess, the empress of Uyraal. It was like the sweat on her broad back when Lor entered her from behind, like the blushing heat on her cheek and her neck where Lor kissed her, like the clean comfort of her lush brown hair, and like the tangy wetness that slicked through the trim hairs of her cunt after the first girl had plowed it open.

A sudden excruciating longing swept through Lor's body, driven out into her limbs by the same pulse that lifted her dick and filled it to full aching hardness. Her breath grew shallow and tremulous, and she felt her cheeks and her chest flush hot pink. She staggered to her feet and stood watching her own eyes swim with little flitting sparks. When her vision cleared and she had mastered the shaking of her legs, she turned and walked away from the llimhendel trellis towards the center of the dome.

This first flush of want at dawn was always the most potent, and the most agonizing. Agonizing because it had to be denied if Lor wanted to hold herself full, ready to empty herself into her Goddess if she was called upon, and yet to deny it felt somehow like a tiny sacrilege, a moment of faithlessness in which Lor had to reject the spirit of the empress and to remove her from her thoughts. It felt wrong, jarring, to not acknowledge the power of her Goddess and submit to it, to not at least let her adoration show, to display it proudly.

Lor kept her lips sealed, holding in a big lungful of concentrated llimhendel vapor, as she staggered down the tiers of shallow steps and into the big central pool. The smooth mirror of the pool's surface broke into ripples as she waded in up to her thighs. The water was warm, only barely cooler than the air. The ripples bouncing back from the pool's edges lapped at the tight sack of Lor's balls, ticklish. She dragged her legs slowly through the water to make her way to the other side, where she leaned forward, resting her hands on the stone lip.

A hot swell of tortured pressure bloomed inside Lor's body. It settled into a tight knot right behind the base of her dick, where it forced an unrelenting stiffness up and out into its straining length. She angled her hips downward and walked herself back a few paces, steady with her hands on the edge of the pool, and sank her dick beneath the lapping water. It was a delicious and vivid sensory contrast, the way the same water that felt like a warm coddling blanket around the sack of her balls was at the same time a balm of cool against the burning heat on the taut skin of her shaft. Her body burned for Goddess, with a heat she could feel on her brow, at her neck beneath the thick mat of her long hair, and across her chest, concentrated in an ache of stiff sensitivity in her nipples.

"Goddess. Goddess. Your... I am... I will..." Lor's mouth burst into gasps and grunts of agony that cut short each exhortation. Her murmuring did nothing to alleviate the pressure in her body, it only stoked it harder. But words helped at least to tether her mind, to rein in the delirium of arousal by molding it into ideas, if only half-formed and clumsy.

It was fortunate that the first and most intense flush of llimhendel lust, at dawn, usually made climax very difficult. It was as if its grip were so tight that it choked itself, as if Lor's hardness resisted even that slightest slackening that would be necessary to coil the first spurt of release. As with every last aspect of the harem's physiology, this was surely as the spirit of the God-Empress desired it, was by her loving will and by her design. At dawn she did the work of empire, so her girls should not spill themselves then, their bodies should be given time to gather the seed with which she must be filled.

And so Lor had some moments in which she might safely sink into fantasy without risking failure. She would not touch herself, she tried never to do so unless instructed by Goddess in her presence. But she could fuck the pool, be here in one of Goddess' favorite places in her harem, and feel in the embrace of the warm water a dim echo of the loving heat of Goddess' divine body.

"Ohh, oh Goddess. Your... your cunt. I want... I will... Your cunt!"

Lor heard the indignity of her own abject moaning against the rush of her pulse in her ears, and she thought to look over her shoulder, feeling sure for a splitsecond that she was being watched. But she was still alone. She saw only the darting flight of the birds, a flutter in the foliage that lined the harem walls as a last few llimhendel flowers burst open. The tension of arousal tempered slightly by her brief flush of panicked self-awareness, she sighed and sat back, slowly let herself sink beneath the surface of the pool, until she was submerged to the scalp, her long hair drifting about her.

When she rose, her hair slicked down and clung in a heavy mat to her face and shoulders. She parted it with her fingertips, spat a trail of watery saliva over her chin, and began to wash. She splashed water onto her body and rubbed it clean of her nighttime sweat. Then stepping out towards the edge, she finished by rinsing the crux of her thighs, lifting handfuls of water to her dick and throwing them against it without touching, before passing wet fingertips through the crevices where the tight sack of her balls met her body.

Lor liked to keep herself clean for Goddess. She bathed regularly in the harem pools and cascades, also as a relief from the tropical heat. It was a matter more of personal pride and comfort than of duty. She knew that Goddess was too loving, too forgiving of her girls, to insist that they wash for her. The one occasion on which Goddess had taken Lor in her mouth, she had not been freshly clean. It had been right after Lor had spilled herself in Goddess' cunt. Lor's softening dick had been caked with the residue of her seed and of Goddess' own divine wetness, yet Goddess had sucked and swallowed it with all of the same love and compassion that she showed a fresh, hard girl, swirling her long tongue around it to leave it clean and smooth, only her saliva gleaming on the taut skin of its freshly stiff shaft. And Lor had found herself almost immediately revived and restiffened, ready to serve again.

Goddess! Her mouth!

Lor shuddered. She rose from the pool and let herself drip for a moment, breathing in the harem air. She was still alone under the dome of the main chamber. She stepped across the stone floor, through the streams and past the dense green bushes that overflowed the flower beds, towards one of the arches that led into another wing of the building. As she strode she was acutely aware of the unyielding heat and stiffness between her legs. Her sense of her body was concentrated in the rigid swaying of her dick in front of her, straining forward as if it were leading her, like a lodestone.

The east wing of the harem was without dormitories. Both the tall space of the central nave and most of the side chapels were given over instead to the cultivation of its many plants and flowers. As elsewhere, llimhendel vines lined the walls, but in place of the cluttered indoor jungle of the dome, this wing housed a neat array of nursery beds, bordered by wooden planks. Here grew many varieties of plant, of whose names and purposes Lor was mostly ignorant. Some she knew were medicinal, used by the harem matrons in the preparation of ointments and poultices, others perhaps in perfumes.

At the far end, the upper half of the terminating wall was built in panels of glass like those that capped the central dome. The dawning of day was now complete, and the radiating heat of direct sunlight blazed down on the gardens. It fell hot on Lor's bare skin. She felt the first pricking itch of a renewed sweat beading on her brow and her back. She took the still soaked swab of her long hair and wrung it out behind her, let the water run down her spine and into the cleft between the cheeks of her backside. Then she did the same for the front of her body, twisting out another trail of water and watching it snake down between her breasts and into the depression of her navel.

"I woke early," Lor called out softly, "I am here for morning devotion."

Beside one pillar of the nearest archway in the side wall, there sat one of the harem matrons, on a wooden stool. The stiffly starched white linen of her hooded robe swished about her when she startled. Lor saw that the matron's eyes were narrow and drowsy. The matron blinked them slowly open and smacked her lips, looking up and around until her gaze alighted on Lor's body.

"Girl," the matron mumbled hoarsely. She shuffled on her stool and sat upright, "Good. Good girl."

Lor approached gingerly, aware that she had interrupted an incipient snooze. Her lips fumbled for one of the many phrases by which the matrons could be properly addressed, "Sorry, sweet mother. I... want to make devotion."

From the brief blinking fluster that followed, Lor could tell that by acknowledging the interruption her apology had compounded the slight awkwardness of the encounter. She winced with regret. She would have done better to dissemble, and to pretend she had not noticed the matron's state of lethargy.

The matron swiped the long sleeve of her robe quickly across her lips. Her kindly, sun-leathered face looked up from among a tangle of wispy gray hair beneath her hood. "Very good," she repeated, "Come, come."

Lor stepped forward and stood before the arched entrance. She waited for the harem matron to finish fumbling in the bulky front pocket of her robe. A rough, tan-skinned hand was reached out to her. From between the matron's fingers there hung a slim gold chain of fine linked oval rings. At the end of the chain a small egg-shaped container, likewise of gold, swung from side to side like a pendulum. Lor turned her back to the matron and reached two hands behind her neck to lift the now half-dried tousle of her hair up and away from her skin.

"Take a pomander, good girl," Lor heard the matron mutter and heave herself to her feet behind her.

Then she felt knuckles and fingernails tickle deftly at the nape of her spine as the pomander was draped in place around her neck, its golden egg sitting just above the cleft of her breasts. Lor caught its scent with her first deep breath. While the matron fidgeted at the clasp to fasten the chain together, Lor looked down and watched tendrils of yellow-beige vapor ooze from the many pinholes in the pomander's shell. The dried seed of the llimhendel. Lor's slow sigh of inhalation drew the vapor up and over her lips into her flaring nostrils. The scent of Goddess' body filled her throat and her lungs, and her dick pulsed with a fresh aching want.

"Turn, girl," the matron's hands were on her shoulders, gently twisting her by her torso.

Lor complied. She was a short girl, shorter than most in the harem, and though the matron was slightly stooped with age she still stood over Lor, looking down into her eyes. The woman reached her hand down between Lor's thighs, fingers curled in a cupping gesture to hold and gently heft the sack of Lor's balls. The knot of tension that had wound itself tight inside Lor's body pulled her balls closely clasped to the base of her dick. Against the warm touch of the matron's palm she felt them squirm and shift, lifting themselves away and yet tighter. When the matron's grip lingered, Lor could not stifle a shrill grunting moan. The sound forced itself from her throat, impelled by the swell of arousal in her core. She found she had to close her eyes in order to focus her will on her dick, throbbing with need in the space between herself and the matron's robe, and haul back the urge to clench and spill herself.

Lor had heard it said that the harem matrons had touched so many girls in their years of service to the empress that they need only hold a girl like this to know the state of her readiness, and know whether she had recently spent herself or was full. Some of the other girls laughed at this and at other tales of the matrons' power, dismissed it as fancy. But Lor had known the matrons be right about so many things, often enough to be wary of the other girls' complacency. She trusted the matrons in everything, and obeyed them when bid, as emissaries of the Goddess.