Summoning

Merlin laughed out loud at that. “I think you and I are going to get along fine, lad. Very few who have worn the ring have seemed comfortable with the metaphysical ideas that govern certain aspects of its existence. In fact, most were quite unconcerned with ideas at all, preferring to keep the conversation grounded in the rather mundane. Genghis Khan, for instance, had no desire to know where or when he was…he only wanted to know about the power and how to use it.” Merlin shuddered noticeably. “Quite a brutal chap, that one. Didn’t like my tea, either.” He paused a moment, considering, then shook his head as if to clear cobwebs. “But that’s of no matter at this moment in non-linear time. You must have questions, and, if I can, I will answer them to the best of my ability.”

He was right; questions ricocheted through my brain, competing with each other for my attention. But, sitting in front of me was supposedly one of the most legendary figures in history, the tutor and court magician to a legendary king. The only question I could utter at that moment was as simple as it was mystifying.

“The last…and the first?”

He smiled again, though a bit more ruefully. “Ah, I see. Finally someone more interested in learning history rather than making it.” He reached across the table to pat my hand. “We are kindred spirits indeed, my boy, for it was my fondness for history that got me into this situation…though I would not and will not trade a day of it for any amount of loot that man could dare to imagine.

“What do you know of me, from the books or stories you’ve read? Forget the cinema or television…none of those performances have any merit in the consideration of my history.”

I thought for a moment before answering. “If you wanted to know dates or places, then I guess I’m the wrong guy. What I remember is that you were the confidante and teacher of one of history’s greatest legends, the means by which he gained Excalibur, and, by extension, the throne of England. And, at some time, I have read or heard that you did not live in time the way most people do, but that you aged backward in some way, growing younger as the kingdom around you aged.”

He pondered for a moment, then got up from the table and walked to a bookshelf that lined the wall of the dining room. All the books looked the same, as if bound by the same binder: red leather covers with gold inlay, and a large number written on the spine of each. Surprisingly, while the table and floor and virtually any other free surface was covered in books, this bookshelf was only three-quarters full, and the number on the spine of the book Merlin touched was not 1, but a number somewhere in the thousands. He removed the book from the shelf, and resumed his seat at the table.

“There are more versions of history than there is truth about what really occurred,” he began, stroking his chin whiskers as he talked. “In truth, I began my own journey with this ring because of my own desire to know exactly what did happen at certain times, and in certain places. I hope it will not surprise you to know that I was born in the land known as Antarctica, in the year that most easily corresponds to what you would think of as 2632 A.D.” His eyes took on a dark cast, as if remembering something bitter. “If you can imagine it, at the time I was born, Earth was a ruined husk, fit for habitation only in one small area around what was once the South Pole. Massive global warming had melted the ice caps hundreds of years before; overcrowding and failure to find a way to efficiently dispose of society’s waste made habitable land nearly non-existent on the major continents. In the century before I was alive, the heartiest and fittest took to the stars, hoping to find habitable planets where they could start over. All that were left eventually began to battle over what was left of the planet’s arable land. In the battle for what many felt was the only place humans could survive long-term, a madman unleashed a plague, killing 99% of the world’s population, and poisoning the very land they were fighting over.

“All that was left was Antarctica…a hostile environment, but one that could support life after a fashion. The ozone layer over the content had been depleted at one time, and it was still not the place to go without skin protection for any length of time. Hybrid crops would grow fitfully, but the land was rocky and hard to cultivate. We refused to die…but we had precious little comfort.

“As I grew older, I began taking any time I had away from scratching an existence out of that land to try to learn something about the history of Earth, trying to make some sense out of what had led us to this point in time…our progeny spread amongst the planets of the solar system and beyond, carrying on the dream of humanity.

“And the remainder of us toiling under an unforgiving sun on the last bit of land left that could support us.”

Merlin sighed, removing his reading glasses to rub his eyes. He held them in his hands, folded, as he looked at me and talked. “As the poet said, the end came not with a bang, but with a whimper. I was the last human being born on the planet, as far as I know, and I buried the only other person on the planet sometime during my 26^th year of life. Alone, and with no reason to continue pushing myself to eke out a life in the middle of nowhere, I simply read what books there were to read, ate what little food there was to eat, and waited for my own life to dissolve into dust.

“And then, in the dawn of another monotonous day…a woman simply walked up out of the sea and asked if I might spare her a moment of my time.” He smiled at the memory. “Of course, I had nothing but time, and I was sure that she was some figment of my imagination conjured out of some desperate need for comfort and company. But, if she was a figment, she was a beautiful one, and I guided her into my home and offered her a cup of tea. She accepted, and we sat and eyed one another in silence across a tabletop not unlike this one.

“She finished her tea, and asked if she might tell me a story, and of course I, having nothing better to do, said “Please do.”” He leaned toward me a bit before he continued. “She said that she had once been queen to the most powerful man of his time, and queen mother to one of the most powerful of all times. While the name of Phillip the Second, King of Macedonia, may not be remembered through history, the name of her son remained legend even to me…”

“Alexander the Great,” I whispered, finishing his sentence.

His eyebrows rose just a bit, asking an unvoiced question.

“The wife of Phillip the Second of Macedonia was Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, or so the histories tell us. She survived her son, only to be killed by vengeful relatives of those she had ruthlessly slain to help cement her son’s place as ruler after his father’s death.” I paused, closing my eyes. “And in my dreams before I woke up here, I saw Alexander place the ring into a woman’s hands, heard him bind her to it as its keeper…heard him say it was she who had given him both the ring and his destiny, for which I’m not sure he was completely grateful. He may have thought she would be the only person who could decide the destiny of the next person to wear the ring. Or…he might simply have been damning her to a fate the exact opposite of his. He died too young in the pursuit of conquest; she would never die, and could only watch as others conquered.”

He nodded, looking at me with admiration. “A fine bit of reasoning, lad, and so close to the truth to be accurate enough for history. However…” he paused, taking a deep breath, “I was the last human born on the planet Earth, and to me she entrusted the ring, and a destiny I found fitting, given my own passion for history.

“To be the last…and the first…to wear the ring.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that, and it still doesn’t make sense to me. How can you be both last and first? Is it a riddle?”

“Bear with me, my boy, and let me tell you about that meeting with Olympias at what was truly, for all purposes, the end of the world.”

Setting the stage. It was such an appropriate metaphor for what I had in mind.

Call it a reenactment.

Of course, first we needed some actors to play the parts.

I looked over at Tricksie, whose mind was still reeling from the pain of the self-inflicted slashes down his arm, and Richard, who was still in a haze of pain and pleasure from the use of the claw on his back. I knew that Richard had never and would never – willingly – fuck a woman. Tricksie, on the other hand, was aggressively bisexual – aggressive in this case meaning he would fuck any man or woman that would hold still long enough for him to screw. However, even he would have qualms about putting his dick inside Matilda; images of black widow spiders ran through his mind when I projected such an idea to him.

But then, I really didn’t need their minds…only their dicks. Matilda could do the rest on her own.

Reaching out to Tricksie’s mind first, I imagined his self-will wrapped in a cocoon, a sort of forced hibernation. As I wrapped layer after layer of my own will around his, his moans of pain quieted, and the rocking motion he was making as he cradled his arm began to cease. His muscles relaxed, and I was sure that all his will was repressed when he lay motionless on the floor, his unfocused eyes unblinking and glassy. He was breathing, but it was obvious that whatever inner spirit that had animated Tricksie’s body before was no longer in residence.

‘Stand up,’ I thought, and Tricksie’s body jerked into motion, like a marionette in the hands of an inexperienced puppeteer. He stood facing me, face blank, eyes looking at me, but unseeing.

Richard was beginning to come out of his own daze, and barely had time to register Matilda on her knees in front of me before I reached into his mind. A startled ‘Wha??’ was the only thought he could muster before I locked his consciousness away in layers of my own will. Within moments, he too was standing golem-like beside his partner, a robot waiting for orders, at my mental beck-and-call.

In the interlude that I had concentrated on the pair of men, Matilda’s mental fortification had started to buckle; the door to her little room at the top of her castle tower was cracked, and at any minute threatened to split open and admit what she thought of as the ravening horde that would most certainly cause her to cease to exist. She fled from the center of the room, looking fruitlessly for some weapon with which to defend herself, or some other avenue of escape.

Feeling it was the moment I had been waiting for, I reached into her panicked mind, and, when she touched the stone wall at the side of the room, one of the bricks slid inward. With a creaking groan, a door swung open in the wall. Matilda ran to the door and looked in; all she could see inside were stairs leading down into what quickly became an inky darkness. For a moment she stood uncertainly at the door, caught between her fear of surrender to the force that sought to take her, and the unknown that awaited her if she stepped forward. But, as she heard the lock on the outside door give way with a tortured screech of rent metal, she ran through the opening and, standing on the first stair, managed to push it shut, sealing herself in darkness. Feeling her way carefully, she began making her way down the uneven stone steps.

As I had intended, she had leapt from her mental interpretation of what was happening to her into mine. And, as she descended, the stone steps of her castle changed to the carpeted steps of an old house; the pitch black of the secret passage gave way to hazy light that brightened the closer she came to the bottom. As she emerged into that light, she let out a small mental gasp.

She was back in the basement of the frat house she had not seen since that night 18 years before.

Using her memories of the night, which were still fairly indelible despite the alcohol of that night, and the years that had passed in the meantime, I had recreated the basement in her mind. She looked down at herself, and instead of the corseted dress she was wearing in her imagined castle, she was wearing the blue jeans and polo shirt of the college girl she had been. However, there were bigger shocks yet to come.

The first came when she stepped from the last stair into the basement proper. Her jaw dropped as she saw three figures sitting on a couch at the opposite end of the room. Much to her amazement sat the drunken younger version of herself that she had often cursed since that night, the one she blamed for all her problems since. On either side of her was a frat boy; one was kissing her deeply, while the other had raised her shirt and was groping her breasts through her bra.

The second big shock came when she realized that her younger self had one of her hands inside her jeans, and was fingering her clit while the other two played with her body.

In all the years between that one life-altering night and now, Matilda had never attributed any of the sexual activity of that night to herself. She didn’t even think of herself as a sexually functioning person at that point in time. However, there had been a very vital, very horny girl inside that body, and the beer and the dancing and the darkness had combined to bring it to the surface that night.

What she was experiencing in her mind was a sort of abridged version of the events of that night. Tweaking her memories just a bit, I started channeling her raw feelings to cut away the fog of drunkenness and the bitter bile of the aftermath, honing each memory to its core.

She liked sex. She liked it a lot, and liked a lot of it. She liked it with multiple partners. She liked the feeling of being fucked in her pussy and in her mouth, the taste of a man’s cum and the feeling when he came inside her. She even liked it a bit rough. Those were her true feelings about sex, uncoupled from the trauma of having no choice in the event that had shaped her sexuality, or lack thereof. She had never been able to get past the mental and emotional barriers of the morning after that night, to truly make the connection I was forcing her to make now.

It wasn’t the sex that she hated; it was how the act had been forced on her without her consent. It wasn’t all men she hated; it was those men, at that time, in that basement…and she had seen to it that they were punished. More than that, she no longer needed to punish herself, to feel guilty about how there was pleasure and desire mixed with her anger and hurt and emptiness. She could even control the time and place and means to fulfill her desires.

She could even start right now.

As the older Matilda watched, the younger Matilda pushed both the young men on the couch with her aside, then stood and started swaying to a sexy beat that was apparently playing through her head. Turning slowly, she started giving the boys a strip tease, pulling her blouse over her head languidly, and then raising her arms to let her bra fall to the floor; thanks to the young man who’d been pawing her breasts earlier, it was already unfastened. Swaying slightly, she brought both hands to her chest, and squeezed her breasts together, pinching the nipples as she did so. She leaned forward slightly, as if offering her breasts to the two boys sitting on the couch; as she pinched her nipples harder, she gasped in pleasure, her eyes closed. It was obvious from the bulges in both young men’s pants that they were enjoying the display.

It was obvious to me from the way that the real Matilda was playing with her tits that she was enjoying the show as well.

In her mind, her younger self had unbuttoned her jeans; with her ass facing the two on the couch, she slowly rotated her hips as she peeled the pants from around her waist. With each thrust backwards, a little more of her flesh appeared, along with the black panties that she had deliberately put on that evening.

As she stood transfixed in the middle of the room, watching the sexy striptease, Matilda remembered how she had prepared for the party, right down to the black panties. And remembered what she had said to her roommates, something else she had buried in her head in the aftermath: “One way or another, I’m getting laid tonight!” She had worn the panties because she wanted whoever she slept with to know that he was with someone who cared about being sexy all the way down to her underwear.

She had come to the frat party because she wanted to have sex, needed to have sex, was looking to have sex. The thought was startling because she had let herself believe for years that she would never have had sex without the liquor, without being stripped and fucked without choice by the members of the frat. But, standing in the dim light of room that no longer existed, watching her younger self strip for two men, she realized that she had wanted it. And that, had she not drank so much that evening, it might even have been like this, with her in complete control of what was happening, making the boys all hot but not letting them touch her until she was ready.

Back in the living room, I knew that I had set the stage just right. Matilda was standing now, swaying back and forth like the young girl in her mind. It was time to give my other actors their cues.

Reaching out with my mind, I linked Matilda’s mind with that of Tricksie and Richard. Randomly, I selected Richard to be the boy on the left side of the couch, and Tricksie to be the one on the right. Then I released control of them to Matilda.

You see...I was not controlling Matilda’s imaginings to any great extent. I was keeping her rooted in the setting of the frat basement, and I had set up the situation of her observing her younger self necking with the two young men. However, once the college age Matilda had started the strip tease, the older Matilda had started taking control of the dream, and I had let her. Like kid bumpers on a bowling alley gutter, all I planned to do was keep Matilda heading down the lane toward the pins; she wasn’t going to bail out until she knocked down at least a few of the pins.

So, as younger Matilda reached back a hand to pull one of the young men from the couch, the Matilda in front of me took Richard’s hand and pulled him toward her. As she ground her ass into the crotch of the man in her mind, Matilda did the same thing to Richard. As the frat boy in her head peeled the black panties off her college body, Richard peeled the same pair from Matilda’s real body, even though I had to conjure them into existence once I realized what she had in mind.

The college boy’s every move was aped by Richard, who was rapidly shucking his pants as Matilda spread her legs and then used her fingers to spread her pussy lips in a blatant imitation. It took only seconds for Richard to spring forward and bury himself to the hilt in her copiously wet tunnel.

While all this was going on, Matilda had been maneuvering Tricksie’s character in her mind, and in real life he stood with pants down, slowly jacking his dick with his right hand. While Richard thrust in and out of Matilda’s pussy at a leisurely pace, Tricksie walked up to stand by her head. When she didn’t move to place her mouth on his cock, he grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked. Head up and mouth open, he jammed his cock inside and started ramming it in and out of her mouth. Since she was in control of what was happening, this was apparently the way she wanted to be treated; from the way she was grinning at the scene as it played out inside her mind, I was fairly sure that enjoyed the thought of being forcefully face-fucked.

Matilda imagined that both her college boys were sliding in and out of her at the same pace, so Richard and Tricksie began to develop a similar rhythm, pulling out then driving back in at the same moment. As their pace began to increase, I set into motion the final act of my little play.