The Princess and the Pod

The general left, and Sela stared into the night sky. She realized that Honnie's hands were no longer cupping her ass. The small woman was moving rhythmically, and she suddenly realized that Honnie's hands were on herself, pleasuring her own private area. "Honnie!" she scolded. "Bring your hands back up!"

"But I'm so needy!" the servant girl pleaded. "Allow me to pleasure myself, ma'am! I'm begging you!"

"No! Hands up here. And you, too, Zeeta. Play with my nipples, and get your finger back into my ass."

Sela realized with horror that the blonde Ice Princess was dry humping against her hip. Zeeta's legs had been wrapped around Sela's left thigh when the attack had begun, and now she was trapped around it, her wet vulva pressed against Sela's thigh. "Stop that, Zeeta!"

"I ... I can't," Zeeta grunted. "Please, madam!"

"Stop it or I'll have you hung by your tits when we get out."

The two servant girls groaned with frustration, their hips squirming, but they reluctantly turned their attention back to their mistress. Honnie's tongue dipped out and licked Sela's clit fervently, causing the princess to spasm in pleasure. One orgasm, then another wracked her body. It didn't dampen her desire, though, and with horror she could feel her heat continuing to rise unabated.

"Again," she growled.

****

The small group was hustled into Rokal's tent.

The escorting officer pointed first at the man, an older fellow with coarsely painted leather armor. "This is Breen, a foot soldier in the second infantry squad. He was once in a patrol that freed a woman from a Secondskin."

The officer then pointed at the woman. "This is Insala. She's a camp concubine. She was once captured by a Secondskin and survived it." The woman was in her forties, but with a youthful face, long straight brown hair, and a curvy figure. Rokal had hosted her in his tent more than once on this journey, and she was highly skilled at her job.

Rokal looked at the two. "You're probably heard our situation," he said. "We have three members of the camp who have been captured by a Secondskin. It's important that we remove them safely."

"Is it true that it's the princess?" asked the soldier. "That's what we're hearing in the platoon." The woman next to him gasped, her eyes widening.

Now was no time for secrets. "Yes," Rokal admitted. "It's the princess and two highly valuable royal aides. So tell me, Breen, how did you release someone from a Secondskin?"

The soldier nodded enthusiastically, his chest swelling with his sudden importance. "It was a village woman. We found her on a patrol back when I was in the Eastern Moors. Secondskins are thick over there. It had taken her arm first and then swallowed her from there."

"What did you do?"

"There was an old woman in the village, a naturalist. She told us what to do."

"And?"

"The thing is impossible to deal with when it's soft. That's when it's mobile, and it can latch onto a person. It's' soft like a jellyfish. It'll split off if someone else comes too near, and it'll expand from one person onto another. That's how it reproduces, in fact. Even a small amount will grip on you, grow over you, and engulf you. Man or woman, it doesn't matter. So if you're trying to get someone out, you have to stay away until it hardens, or it'll just split off and take you as well."

"It hardens?"

"Yes." Breen modeled the process with hand gestures. "As it swallows a person up, it hardens into a shell to keep them trapped. The inside is still all thick and gummy, but the outside is hard as dulcenite. It's like a big hard-boiled egg, with the person trapped inside. But that's the key. Once the shell goes hard, the Secondskin won't move any more, won't attack, until the person inside dies. Then it softens again and moves on."

"So the person does die?"

"Yes, but just by hunger or thirst. The Secondskin doesn't actually kill them. In fact, it wants them alive as long as possible. But the entrapment eventually kills the person."

"But it can't attack when it hardens into a shell over the person? You're sure of this?" Rokal envisioned his entire camp being entombed, and the ignominy of ending his career and life in such a fashion.

"Positive. It can only split off to attack when it's soft and mobile. It won't split off once the shell hardens. And that's when you dismantle it and burn it. It's the only way to kill the thing."

"How long does it take to harden?"

"When we found the woman in the Eastern Moors, it had already hardened on her arm, but not everywhere else. One of her legs was still completely free and dangling outside it. The hardening happens in stages as the creature engulfs the person. The final bits of coverage will still be soft and dangerous while the first bits are fully hardened. So you have to wait until engulfment is complete, and then start cutting where the creature attacked first. You then slowly work your way up freeing the body until you finally free the last part that got covered. It took about fifteen days for us."

"Fifteen days?" Rokal grimaced at the thought of delivering the princess late to her coronation. "And what did you cut it with?"

The soldier shook his head at the memory. "It was almost impossible. The creature is harder than any of our weapons. We finally fashioned chisels out of dulcenite that we found nearby, and we used our war hammers to chisel the shell open. Once you do that, you can pull off the gel inside by hand, but it's a wicked slow process."

Rokal thought through the timeline. "If it takes days, the woman inside will be dead. She can't breathe."

The concubine, Insala, spoke up. "No, the creature wants you alive. It can feel your breath, so as it engulfs you, it leaves a small breathing hole at your nose and mouth. You can't talk, but you can take air and water." She shuddered at the memory. "It's awful."

Rokal looked at her. "Tell me what it's like. What can we do to ensure that these people remain alive? It's very important."

Insala's skin rose with goosebumps, and her eyes got a haunted look. "I was captured by the legs, sir. It took four days to engulf me, and I was fully encased when I was found by a shepherd. They were able to pour drinks of water and fruit juices into my breathing hole as I needed it, and they cut me out a piece at a time, just like the soldier said. They had to cut me out feet first because that area hardened first."

"Tell me more."

Insala blushed and looked at her feet. She had the sickened look of someone who was reliving a great horror. "It was torture, sir. Pure and absolute torture. You're trapped as if you're encased in stone, and you can't move other than maybe the slightest of trembling. The creature feeds off of your sexual energy, so it keeps you constantly aroused. It drives you mad with desire, but not enough to ever let you reach satisfaction. You're just stuck there, forever on the edge of cumming, and you can't do anything about it. It feeds off of your arousal so it keeps you on that edge endlessly."

Rokal knew Insala in bed, and how fervently she sought her own satisfaction. Now perhaps he understood why. "Is there anything we can do to help these women while we're waiting to free them?"

Insala shifted on her feet, but then the soldier Breen spoke up. "We fucked her with a stick, sir."

Rokal was taken aback. He laughed in shock. "You did what?"

"We fucked our woman with a stick, sir. She was begging us for it. Her arms were trapped first and she couldn't pleasure herself, and she begged us to fuck her. But we couldn't go near her because of the beast still growing. So we created a ten foot stick, smoothed it at the end, and then we fucked her with it." He tried to suppress a smile.

"You did your duty, eh?"

"Right on that, sir," Breen grinned. "But it really seemed to help. Otherwise, she was screaming in desire constantly. At some point, though, it completely closed over her. We waited a few days for it to completely harden over her, and then we started working on her arms to break her loose since those were the first parts that went in. At some point after a couple of days we had her head and arms out, but her body was still inside. She was screaming to be fucked, banging on the hardened creature with her hands in her frenzy to frig herself, but we couldn't do anything then to help her. She was a madwoman with desire for days as we worked to get her out."

Insala nodded. "They chipped loose my feet first since that's how I was trapped, and then worked up my legs. I was dying for release. They had a team of men and women pleasuring me constantly once they got my ..." she looked down toward her crotch, "my pussy carved out. And I was ever so grateful for it. My arms were still trapped and I couldn't do it myself. Even if the creature only has part of you, it makes your entire body desperate for a cum. It's an overwhelmingly strong need, too. I must have cum hundreds of times once they were able to help me, and I was still mad with need. The Secondskin is pure evil in what it does to your body."

Rokal pondered the political implications of having a traveling contingent of soldiers gang-fucking a princess on the way to her coronation. "Well, that's not going to happen," he said, "Under the law, only a royal is allowed to pleasure another royal. That's apparently why we started two wars to capture princesses to be her girlservants." His heart sank as he thought of Honnie, so helpless and sad between the princess's legs, before he forced himself back to the issue. "As commoners we can't pleasure any of them. Not even the girlservants, because they're still royalty even though they're slaves now."

"You can't withhold that help," Insala warned. "The creature creates a sexual need that is beyond agony."

"And Princess Sela does not handle frustration well. She may have us all killed afterward." Rokal regretted making the statement as soon as it passed his mouth, though he had no doubt that it was true.

He paused as he turned over the thought a second time. It really was true. A humiliating and public ordeal like this would be something that she would want to drive into obscurity. And one can't do that with 500 witnesses to talk about it. Given the nature of the journey as merely a traveling convoy, there was no official Scribe in the caravan to document the situation and cement its truth. Thought must be given to this situation, or the entire group was in danger. "Anything else?"

"Well, sir," Insala offered. "One other thing. We did figure out a way of communicating when I was inside the beast, and it was quite valuable."

****

Weary from a broken night's sleep, Rokal walked through the camp, now illuminated by the pink morning light. The sounds of washing and cleaning and preparation were brisk. The plans to continue the journey had been waylaid, with no immediate departure date, so the camp was settling in for a long stay. Guard posts had been set up, tents were being raised, and workers were scavenging for firewood, edible plants, and small game. The official royal history would come up with some explanation for the delay, but in the real world it was nothing more than an unexpected period of respite for everyone, a chance to relax and rest from the arduous journey of the past month. The princess's summer palace was far too distant from the capital, a fact acknowledged by everyone but the princess.

The stop wasn't relaxing for everybody, though.

The camp was being built around the Secondskin and its victims. A makeshift barrier, a small rail fence, had been constructed around the three desperate women and their gelatinous tormenter, and no one was allowed inside that perimeter for the moment. The journey would not commence until the women could be freed, and the women would be freed according to the pace of the Secondskin. It had been 7 hours since it had first captured its quarry, and it was continuing to slowly absorb them.

Rokal stood at the fence, taking a moment to stare at the tangle of trapped and writhing women.

"How are they doing?" he asked the guard. The fellow was a stocky man, bearing the decorative comet symbols of a warrant officer.

He shook his head and stifled a smile. "They seem either very happy or very unhappy, sir. It's hard to tell."

Rokal studied the undulating pile. Honnie was in particular distress at the moment, moaning piteously, and she was the focus of his attention. She was from an island race, the Lainians to be exact, and they were a beautiful tribe of people. Honnie wasn't short, being somewhat over five feet tall, but her frame -- shoulders, hips, and ribs -- was tiny and a large man could almost link his hands around her waist. With her big dark eyes, narrow cheekbones, and small, high breasts, she had a look that was simultaneously fragile and resilient.

On formal occasions he wore a victory medal for his destruction of the Lainians' little kingdom, but he was not proud of it. He had personally witnessed the decapitation of the king, Honnie's father, and the public defrocking and shaming of Honnie herself as the next in line. As a protector of royalty, Rokal had shielded her from the normal debasements of female conquest, but his honor had been solely tested by watching that slender body flail and fight during her defrockment as his senior officers stripped her of her royal gown. Her breasts, though small in absolute terms, were notable for her frame, with dark brown areolas and long nipples, and Rokal recalled with shameful fondness the long nude parade into servitude that she had been forced to endure on the streets of her capital, her wrists and ankles shackled into a horse-drawn bondage frame.

And then there was the trip back, where he privately treated her as the royal that she was, and the flame that had lit between them on those evenings in his officer's tent. The journey home had taken far longer than required for reasons that the official record would never show, and somehow animosity was replaced by respect, respect by friendship, and friendship by love. To their horror, though, the journey ended not as Rokal and Honnie hoped, but rather when Sela surprisingly claimed the captured princess as a personal servant and spirited her away to the summer palace, far from Rokal's station at the capital. He had not seen her again until this journey was commenced, yet not a day went by without thinking of her.

Rokal watched the petite brunette flail against the Secondskin that was enveloping her. If her defrockment was the previous low point in her life, this might be setting a new bar. The Secondskin had worked its way up past her hips, enveloping her small round ass as she lay face down between Sela's legs. The creature was working its cruel magic on her full lower half now, and she mewled continuously in pleasured agony and need. Rokal knew what was happening. The creature was pleasuring her nonstop, keeping her on the edge of orgasm, holding her stock still wherever it gripped her so she couldn't escape its torment. Such pleasures were likely delightful for the first 20 minutes, maybe the first hour, but it needed an end, a climax, and the monster would not allow her one. Her need was desperate, and she could no longer service herself given the engulfment of her hips.

Sela was not an understanding master to the girl, either. The orb had absorbed the princess up past her knees, which was highly arousing to the future queen as well. As a result, she was constantly wrestling Honnie's face into her vulva, ordering her to provide pleasure while Honnie was thrashing and moaning in her own desperation. Rokal listened to the punctured conversation.

"Lick me, Honnie!" Sela had her fingers wrapped tightly in her servant's dark hair, pulling the girl hard into her vulva.

"This is killing me," Honnie said breathlessly as her upper body squirmed. She squeezed and mauled her own breasts, trying vainly to push herself over the edge in that manner.

"Lick me! I need to cum!"

"I can't, ma'am. I .... Unnnnnnnh! I can't stand it!"

Meanwhile, lovely Zeeta was pinned up to her thighs by the orb and also growing more desperate by the minute. Her lovely curvaceous hips were constantly moving, dry humping Sela's thigh against the princess' wishes, and Zeeta was also trying to help Honnie manage the princess's demands. She was hungrily sucking Sela's left tit while mauling the other with her fingers. Zeeta's other hand was somewhere below Sela, and Rokal had his suspicions about exactly where. The blonde Ice Princess took her hand off Sela's breast briefly to try to pleasure herself, but Sela grabbed it and pulled it back. Zeeta let out a guttural moan and humped harder against Sela's hip.

The Ice Kingdom had unique women. Whether it was a genetic abnormality or a cultural anomaly, the women were very busty there, and very sensitive to breast play. It was often said, only half in jest, that Ice Woman had three clitorises, one between their legs and two on their chests, and that they came three times harder as a result. When Zeeta had been captured, during a daring raid in a long and bloody war through the snow that continued to this day, the command team had spent days enjoying Zeeta's servants, testing whether their sexual reputation was truth or legend. It was truth. As royal blood, Rokal had protected Zeeta's honor just like he had protected Honnie, but he had confirmed the legend himself with Zeeta's entire retinue of pale girlservants.

He watched the three women writhe and bicker and maneuver, and was chagrined at the princess's lack of sympathy for her slaves even as she felt their same fate. He shook his head in disapproval.

He had lived through dozens of battles, a score of campaigns. He had conquered six former enemies of the state, both internal and external. He had served his kingdom well and his ruler with unquestioned loyalty.

Now his duty was to destroy the kingdom. He was escorting the imminent queen to her coronation at the capital, and she was a nightmare. She was young and inexperienced to be sure, which was a solvable problem for a novice queen. But the bigger issue was that she was selfish, clueless, and entitled. She cared little about learning, and constantly rejected the lessons that her advisors had tried to instill. She knew nothing about ruling, about diplomacy, about military strategy, and she had no fondness or maternalism for the people of the kingdom. She preferred instead to concentrate on how she would use the kingdom's treasures for her personal enjoyment.

Further, she threatened her subjects constantly with the staff of power that she would soon wield, and the most trusted advisors of the royal court were terrified that she was going to follow through once the transition of power was complete.

And now this.

There were no official scribes present to document this episode, and that meant that the royal history of this event would be written according to royal edict. He had been given an important but simple assignment, to retrieve the princess from her summer palace and transport her to the capital to be crowned. He had failed to accomplish that, and he suspected that neither the royal history nor the royal court would treat him kindly. He looked at the princess, abusing the two captured royals who were her moral superiors in every way, and he suspected that neither of the two subjugated women would live to read that history, either.

"Everything okay, sir?" The guard's question jolted him back to reality.

"We will soon find out," he answered, and turned back to his tent.

****

The orb moved over Sela's hips on Day 4, and things changed radically at that point. She immediately understood why slender Honnie had been so frantic and desperate. Until that point, she had been able to force Honnie to pleasure her. She had become sore with orgasms, but at least she had orgasms to relieve the sexual pressure periodically. But now Honnie's jaw was immobilized, and Sela's vulva was encased so that she could not even pleasure herself. She bucked and pushed and fought, but it was as if she were imbedded in rock. And she so desperately needed to cum.