Archive of Our Own

Work Text

I sit across from Big, legs crossed, in a daily ritual.
As little, I need to pay close attention to everything she tells me.
“There’s a red Ceremony at 9. Understood?”
“Yes Big.”
“I can tell that Prophet is pleased with your journey. It won’t be long before you’ll have a little of your own.”
The idea sparkles in my brain. The culmination of everything. To be worthy of his blessing. To be granted the honour of overseeing a little. I don’t feel worthy. But under his eyes, all is possible.
“Under his eyes, all is possible.” She says, as if echoing my thoughts.
“Big?” I ask
“What troubles you Mathew?”
Prophet requires devotion. All within his embrace must act as eyes. I feel the conflict of an inner heretic, and I extinguish it. A little reports to their Big, who reports to their Big, until it reaches his watchful gaze.
“I’m worried about Nadin. She didn’t attend ceremony on Monday.”
“She was ill, is that not the case?”
“She,” I feel a wrongful guilt. Those who follow his teachings should be guiltless. To feel guilty over your devotion is a sinful thing. “She wasn’t ill. I can sense her pulling back. What’s more, I found a forbidden object in her room.”
The pad, a smooth semi-organic electronic device, had lit up my sisters room in our shared habitation while she was asleep. She had no idea I saw it.
“You did the right thing by telling me. I know it can be hard to remain pure in the face of household indiscretions. May he fill you with righteous pride.”
I feel my guilt pass. He cannot help her on her path to salvation without the instigation of my betrayal. All is forgiven in the name of salvation.

I depart from Big’s home and walk to the metal shack I share with my sister. I feel profound gratitude for Prophet for this safe place. For the fact that I even have a place to rest at all. On the far outskirts of Accord space, Nadin and I had nowhere to turn when our parents died in a mine collapse. Now I find myself thankful for even that tragedy, because it led us into his embrace. The company had little interest in supporting an employee’s progeny when they died, and we were forced to the streets of the company town. A folded piece of paper placed in our donation hat changed everything. I look at the recycled structures of Heavens Hold, a monument to his almighty salvation, his spirit of growth from all that was wrong.
I worry for her as I approach the door.
The sensation that greets me as I enter is one of wicked guilt. I see her dark, kind eyes as I enter the room, busy at the table we use for everything. While I was informing Big of her impropriety, she was stitching me a new shirt for ceremony tonight.
I let the guilt transmute into pious worry. She clearly has a devotion to the faith that burns brightly, or she wouldn’t have done this.
“There you are kiddo! Surprise!” She lets out a chuckle that betrays the years of hardship we faced together. Prophet provides all that we need, and yet she still goes the extra mile for me. I look forward to her eventual repentance and the ending of this secret conflict.
“Wow Nadin, this is beautiful!”
I let the crimson fabric run between my fingers. Modesty is a fundamental pillar of devotion, but she finds a way to make that devotion sing with individuality. The crisp, sleeved button up shirt matches the long crimson dress she wears for red ceremonies. Together we will be the pictures of blessing.
Before ceremony is dinner, so we head to the dining hall in the southern wing of our little township.
I hold Nadin’s redemption in my heart, just below Prophet.
The dining hall was one of the first places where we learned the joys of Heavens Hold. I still remember the taste of those soft potatoes and sharp onions, and the sweet nourishment of milk. In the company town, we had known only synthcubes for most of our life. After our parents died there were days when we were lucky to even get that.
I pray that today is a day of soft potatoes, because it might help Nadin remember that feeling and help her on her way back into the fold.
We enter the tall metal structure, the scent of warm food and aluminum and herbal deodorant flooding me. I walk down the long table, mingling with the other members of his parish, some in their simple unbleached clothes, others in their red ceremony attire already. I find a seat next to Big, who sits across from her Big, Darin.
“We’re making arrangements, all will be as it should. How are things in the western orchard?” I join them mid-stream, as Darin speaks to his little, his greying hair kept in place by our clay pomade.
“Truly blessed. We’ve been able to keep the crab apples strong,” Big replies, “and I believe we’re only a couple years away from a harvest.”
I feel the generous warmth that Prophet grants us. The gratitude for his almighty wisdom. The majesty of his power. The gift of his structure, to give Big her Darin and to give me Big and through that chain, to give himself to all of us.
The food today is potatoes and carrots with small pieces of chicken. He heard my prayer! We wait, and talk, until Enforcer arrives. Enforcer is possibly the luckiest person in his embrace. She’s almost like Prophet’s little, I muse, plucking my envy before it can blossom into something improper. How lucky that she gets to spend so much time with him, directly learning his teachings and granting us all the pieces. Prophet needs to spend his time receiving deliverances and hearing our prayers and providing blessings and offering corrections. Enforcer ensures his parish runs in an orderly fashion according to his design.
I see her through the crowd, and it lights me up. Her billows of blonde hair are kept perfectly in place behind her ears. She moves with resolute confidence towards the head of the table.
“Our harvest remains his second greatest gift. You, dear parish, are his first. Walk with pride. Under his eyes, you may eat.”
Only then do we, his embrace, begin to consume. As I eat, I try to spot Nadin in the row of members. I feel a small knot as I find her and realize she’s not eating with the sanctified relish I had anticipated. The food looks almost dull when paired with her mouth. If there’s another meal on her mind that would make her happier, I can’t conceive of it. Dearest prophet, please see fit to unburden her from this struggle. Please find her worthy.
Turning back to Big and Darin, I realize that Darin has been trying to meet my gaze.
“Worry not Mathew. All will be set right.” He flips the topic of implication from Nadin to my ascension, assertively brushing his fingers across the ornate badge placed upon his heart. “It won’t be long now.”
My heart flutters. There are very few symbols of status in Heavens Hold, but the metal badge denoting you as a baptized member is one of them. I instantly warm up as I imagine how that moment might feel, the sensation of holding the badge and clasping it onto my outfits. Nadin was beaming after her ascension, she even wore it to bed for weeks.
“Under his eyes, I can only pray that he would see fit to bestow me with such an honour!”
Though we arrived at Heavens Hold as a pair, you can’t ascend until you turn 23, a precious number to Prophet for its ties to an ancient Terran psalm. More important than your age, however, is your worthiness. I’m past the age now, and on worth, I dearly hope I’m successful.
The meal concludes, and we begin walking home to get ready. As we navigate the crumbling dirt path under the cooling warmth of the setting suns, we pass others from the parish. Everyone here came from the company town at one point or another seeking salvation. Once we’re out of earshot, I try to gently probe Nadin in the hope I might be able to coax her into opening up.
“How are you feeling? I couldn’t help noticing that you didn’t eat much tonight.”
She pauses and takes a deep breath. I hope this means a moment of transformative confessional is coming, something that will ease her future repentance.
“Did you know that there exists a fruit so sweet and blissful it can be eaten, skin and all, and yet it still gets dripped in honey before you take a bite?”
My heart begins to pound. This is not the kind of discussion I anticipated. Fruits? And such indulgence, too. It was a lucky day if we got any berries with our meal. I am forced to conclude there can only be one source for such a sinful notion. But I can’t bring myself to mention it and reveal my deception by omission. I feel so sinful.
“Nadin, what’s gotten into you? Sweets and honey?” I lower my voice, even though we walk alone. “Why would you say such a thing? Why would you think of any blessings beyond the ones that Prophet has granted?”
“It’s called a fig, and it can only grow once a stinging creature has crawled inside it and defiled the flower.”
I feel a dreadful excitement at the possibility of such a delicious sin. This cannot exist within the paradigm of my safety. All such notions must be purged. Prophet provides us with such bounties, and besides, what a sacrosanct concept.
“It’s not possible Nadin. These are awful lies. Prophet would never allow such a wretched thing to exist.”
That dread and anxiety is slowly inverted into a worry for my sister.
“Have you told your Big about this?”
I know I’m not supposed to ask, the bond is private, and stars I’d be in serious jeopardy if she asked me about the discussion with my Big, but it serves his greater purpose and so I must commit this indiscretion.
She doesn’t reply.
We walk the rest of the way home in silence. I get dressed into my new shirt, straightening the collar and removing the scraps of brown facial hair from my pale skin. I pomade my short hair back, the smell of herbs and oily clay marking me as a member of the embrace almost as much as my attire.
Nadin gets dressed in her crimson dress, we put on our modest shoes, and depart for ceremony.

Temple glows in a glorious mismatch of colours from the various scraps of recycled coloured glass that create the stained skylights. The firm metal foundations reflect their mining origins, now stripped bare of any paint or insignia.
We enter the open space, a small Dais at the far end with doorways leading to unknowns beyond.
A few dozen members have already arrived, a dozen or so left before we begin. Slowly, the casual mingling begins to reassemble into a horseshoe formation facing the dias, a natural pit in the centre of the room so ceremony can be held in approximate proximity to his huddled masses.
Enforcer steps out from the shadowy back halls.
“His intended blessing will not be bestowed this evening. The prophet has seen fit to revise the purpose of this gathering.”
A quiet falls over the crowd.
“Nadin.”
I hear Enforcer call her name and I retreat, mentally and physically. It pains me to ostracize her in this crucial moment but I know I must. She looks around in panic and steps into the hollow vacancy at the centre of the room. Her red dress is marred by the coloured lights of the temple. To wear clothes of mixed colour is a sin, and the light has become a refraction of her sinfulness.

He arrives.

The ever flowing presence of the Prophet. Black robes with gold trim. From the dais he proclaims to all.

“Nadin Watson has committed a grievous sin.”

“Heretic” someone shouts, and she flinches.

“She has allowed herself to become tainted by the temptations of a forbidden object.”

“HERETIC” Enforcer shouts, and others join, becoming louder. She quivers on the spot, shaking like a leaf. I put her in this position. I did this. I retreat further away from her and towards Big.

“Does she repent.”

“Prophet, I’m sorry, it just arrived one day, I didn’t choose to, it just happened.”
He steps down towards her with overwhelming power. I have never looked at his face and I do not intend to do so today.

“Do you repent.”

She avoids his gaze and tries to find me in the crowd, becoming increasingly more desperate with each gasping moment.
“Mathew, how could you?! It was an innocent mistake but I found- there’s goodness out there in the stars, so much goodness and I didn’t mean to- I was just trying to-”The words are evacuated from her by the back side of Prophets hand.
She falls to the ground.
She whimpers her way out of the spotlight as Prophet continues his deliverance.

“Nadin has seen fit to reject the blessings of Heavens Hold. Since they have come to be such a burden to her, she will be relieved of her place amongst the fold.”

I hear the yelp as someone rips off her badge. Big holds me. I think it’s partially to comfort me, and partially to stop me from comforting Nadin.
The guilt is swelling up inside me. I feel awful. I feel panicked and lost and so, so distressed. Why didn’t she repent? She was supposed to repent!

“There is one person here who has suffered the most because of Nadin’s rejection of my doctrine. Her brother Mathew.”

“Poor Mathew.”

“Brave Mathew.”

I am slowly pushed to the centre of the room. I am now the one who’s shaking. My emotions are muddled by his attention, the overwhelming presence and the crowd that surrounds me. The light bathes me in unfitting righteousness. I am worthy of something others are not.
By the light of the temple I am allowed to wear a mix of colours.
Prophet kisses me upon the head.

“Soon we shall reconvene in a baptism, for Mathew has shown a courage most befitting of ascension.”

He walks back to the dais as Big rushes to fold me into a bittersweet hug. Darin follows, and soon I am within the embrace of the entire parish, cheering and encouraging me.
My tears of sadness are forcefully transmuted into tears of joy.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Big walks me back to my home in a haze of endorphins.
“How did it feel when he kissed you?”
“I don’t know, kind of warm and firm, like he was planting me down in my place.”
“Stars, that’s incredible.” I watch as she converts envy into something else. “I’m so proud of you. You did something extremely difficult. I know it’s going to be hard adjusting, but I’ll always be here for you. I may not be a big sister, but I am a Big.”
“Thank you. I’m so lucky I got you as my Big.”
We arrive, and I enter a place that has, all at once, become a hollow reminder of the sacrifice I didn’t want to make. It eats at me in a way I know is improper, but I can’t help. I feel like a holy rightness has collided with a moral wrongness and it’s hard to remind myself which one is most important.
Big enters with me, and feebly attempts to clean away the most obvious reminders. The sewing machine goes in the corner. Her clothes form a pile.
“Where’s the forbidden object?”
“It was by her bed when I saw it.”
Big finds the dangerous object, a device of wood and glass.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Do you know where it came from?” Big asks.
“No, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen from the mining colony. Whatever it is, I’ll be glad to never see it again.”
“I can bring it back to my Big and he’ll ensure it ends up with Enforcer.” I would’ve given it to her anyways, but this kindness saves me the painful moment of transference. She returns to Nadin’s bedroom.
“I’m sorry Mathew, but I found some other sinful items in her room too. Items I can only believe were used for the improvised release of carnal desires.”
What a horrible thought. To be a member of Heavens Hold is to be pure in thought and in body. I feel a bubbling anger that she would stoop to such a level. Big helps to soften me back down to a state of pious serenity.
“Please, come with me to the orchard tomorrow. You shouldn’t have to face this alone.”
While most things in Heavens Hold are mixed, the orchard is typically a woman’s work. That being said, it wouldn’t be a sin for me to spend a day or two there. The idea of working with the women, just for a while, sounded peaceful. It could help me remain sound of mind.
“Thank you Big. Under his eyes, I think I can get through this.”
That night, I’m plagued by nightmares, fears so deep they probe my soul. I feel so alone in the place that was once my everything. I imagine her there, Nadin, slack jawed and staring at the pad, slowly becoming the devils plaything. I call out to her to stop, to put it down, to come back to me and to Prophet. I beg her to tell me how anything could be worth sacrificing this place. “Please just repent!” I shout. The nightmare ends as a scream catches in my throat.
I awaken in a cold sweat, my eyes stinging.
I get dressed in my unbleached everyday attire and walk to the orchard.
I wonder where Nadin is now. I hope she’s okay. I hope that Prophet will light her path even if it takes her away from our fold.
The bushes are engorged with harvest, berries on brambles that grow even in the soils of a mining planet.
I see Big, speaking with a friend and collecting woven baskets. Her hair tucked out of her face for work reminds me of Enforcer. She hands me a basket and shows me around.
“The trees all started from a single off world seed. Prophet divined that such a blessing should be allowed, and once the first sapling grew we discovered it could be grafted onto the natural flora.”
She shows me how the existing tree was sliced on the top of its trunk so the graft could be implanted, leaving nothing but a scar.
“Then from that graft it grows until it comes to overtake the entire tree with the fruits of our labour.”
I feel blessed that Prophet would divine such a thing to occur.
We move to the brambles and I find a rhythm, plucking and dropping surrounded by Prophets devoted harvesters.
As we pick the berries, their dark juices taint my fingers. The longer we go, the more the juices collect until my hands are dyed with sour stickiness. It doesn’t seem to bother Big or the other women. To be bothered by such a gift would be so improper. I look down as I work and see an insect with a yellow back land on a leaf, retracting its mandibles to consume the errand juices.
I cannot help but think of that mysterious sinful fruit that had filled Nadin’s imagination for her final hours in Heavens Hold. What other wicked sinful promises had the device made her while it was in her possession?
I feel thankful that such a monstrous temptation is now far from the reaches of any who could be harmed.
We work the brambles, idle chatter and warm prayer filling the hours and keeping my thoughts from straying too far. When the suns hang low, Big and I walk to the dinner hall and eat with Darin. I feel her absence so strongly. I lean on Prophet so firmly.
Big and Darin and so many others in the parish help to remind me that I committed an act of courage. It doesn’t feel that way, but I allow their words to fill me with his blessing until I’m about to burst.
I go home and sleep in a quiet house. I have a bad dream, but I wake up feeling a little better about what I did.
For three more days, this cycle continues.
On the fourth day, the day of my ascension, I go to the orchard and I help harvest, but I don’t spot Big. Tasks are cycled, so it isn’t unusual to lose sight of someone.
I don’t worry until I’m at home getting dressed, and the minutes are ticking past without her knocking on the door. She was supposed to come by and get ready with me. It was my first temple without Nadin, and ascension is such a special cherished blessing. It was cause for giddy celebration, a coveted occasion stretched out by sanctified enjoyment before and after with those who you’re closest to. I finished putting on my pale blue button down and dark blue pants and paced the room. This is so far from how I imagined, dreamed, fantasized about this day going.
I decide that the path placed before me must lead to Big’s house. Perhaps she’s unwell or inconvenienced and in need of the aid of her little. I leave the house, not running late but running up on running late. I take the most common path, hoping that I’ll spot her on the way. As I travel, people greet me with well wishes and excitement for the ascension. I feel the grace and love of Prophet in every one of their smiling faces.
I arrive at her home, and I’m immediately met with concern. None of the lights are on. Please, I pray, let Big be okay. I quietly open the door and step inside. By his will let her just be resting or away on important work for Prophet.
The door to her bedroom is open. I see the soft illumination before I see her. No, stars, not this. How can someone so dedicated fall so far so quickly. The dread soaks into me as I watch her stare at the glowing screen, her face dull and transfixed. The pad is propped up on a pillow facing her, flickering in colour. I cannot move, my feet glued to the spot, hidden by darkness in her living space as I catch the faintest whispers of humming from the device.
She slowly whimpers as the flickering colours of light smear across her face. She sucks in as much air as possible in a long languid breath, and as she lets it out in a heavy, slow whine, I feel as though I am committing the sin myself. The light flickers to a cool white, and she scrunches her eyes. Run, something inside me says, run and get help so she can be saved. But that part of me refuses to listen. Instead I continue to watch the heresy unfold, disgust and disappointment slowly building. They are trying to transmute into something else, but I do not allow them. She begins to type on the pad, relaxing into a recline. I realize then, she isn’t wearing anything from the waist down.
“Please,” she begs to an unseen devil. “Please can I…”
Soaking wetness is running down her legs.
This is awful. What terrible thing has happened to her to cause this state of carnal inebriation. What has happened to me, that I can’t move. I shut my eyes and think of Prophet. I try to place myself back in that moment of divine sublimation when he kissed my head, but it’s impossible to block out her filthy tone.
“Mmmm oh thank you Mistress.”
Someone has rearranged her paradigm. The idea of placing anyone or anything above Prophet is the worst idea I can conceive of. Yesterday. I saw her yesterday. She was distracted, a little out of sorts perhaps, but this is a complete altering of the person I knew. I want to be sick. I open my eyes, and she’s looking at me while she slides the glass figure into her clenching area, finding an improvised release for her carnal desires.
Finally my feet become untethered and I run, run, as fast as I can away from that hotbed of heathens and sins. I could hold back the tears for Nadin because I had Big. Now I have nobody except for Prophet. I reach for him in my heart, in my soul. I beg for his forgiveness for bearing witness to such a crime.
The dirt crashes off my feet as I sprint down the path, powered by pain and panic. A blur of metal buildings and people. Towards the infinite. Towards the embrace. I run for temple.
I run straight into Enforcer.
“Mathew, slow down! Mathew. What’s wrong?”
I gasp for breath, desperately trying to catch myself.
“Please, please you have to help her! Big-Claudia! The forbidden thing, it’s doing something to her!”
“I’ll find her right away. Under his eyes all will be made well. Now go with grace. Your ascension is overdue, and we don’t want to keep Prophet waiting.”
“Of course Enforcer,” I gasp for air, “thank you.”
I steal a moment to catch my breath and try desperately to transmute my fiendful panic into holy calm.
The smell of insense and burning wick help to remind me of his all encompassing power, his divine will, his everpresence. All is part of a grand plan. This is my test. My challenge. Only by shedding the weight of those closest to me can I climb to the soaring highs that ascension promises.
I step through the corrugated doors into the multicoloured illumination of temple. Heavens Hold shall keep me close within its embrace, like the honey soaking into the fig.
I see the people of my little life. Everyone except those who I once held closest. I feel the state of pious serenity taking me. They part to allow me to walk in.
Hundreds of candles, formed from leaking fat and sputtering wax litter every surface in a dim blanket of orange glow. It dances on the recycled class in a hypnotic blur.
He Arrives.

“Mathew Watson. You have come to temple to seek my blessing.”

“Yes Prophet. Please, I beg that you find me worthy.”
I kneel at his feet next to the dais. Next to the table of water and wine with my promised badge. I kneel as I have seen a dozen others kneel. I kneel as Big and Nadin once knelt. I want, so badly, to hear those words. ‘By my will, you are blessed.’
They never come.

BANG

The rainbow tapestry of recycled glass cracks from a controlled implosion, snapping with a precision only possible by divine intervention. My mind is instantly reeling into the nightmares that plagued me after the mine implosion. I am more alert than anyone in the building.
I hear the Thud. Thud. Thud. behind me of something small hitting the ground and bouncing to a stop. I turn my head and scramble to my feet just in time to participate in the desecrationary chaos.
In a single moment I soak up a tapestry of information. People disrupted from a place of reverence in shock and confusion, like the moment before an audience realizes an assasination has occurred. The shattered glass. The door starting to open. The long solitary vine on the ground, like the root of a tree…
The sportsball sized sphere. Almost a tumbleweed, almost a bomb.
Simultaneously, the tumbleweed ruptures with a THWIP, filling the room with misty pollen, and all the candles instantly extinguish.
I hear screams of chaos as time begins to speed back up, and I rush towards Prophet, a primal instinct to protect him battling with the devout confusion of this moment’s unprophetic existence. I reach through the faintest of light towards the spot when he was standing, but I feel nothing. I hear his yell smearing through the air at unnatural speed.
My body begins to tingle as I run beyond the dais towards the nearest exit, aiming for the unknown beyond where only Prophet and Enforcer are allowed. I feel the tip of a slithering mystery touch the skin above my sock but below my pant leg, and I leap. I shake off the electrifying pins and needles that follow this intimate contact. I have been tainted most deliciously.
I hear the screams and moans of the parish, primal emotions extracted under the cover of darkness. I feel the shattered glass as it crunches under my shoes. I smell-I smell- it clings to my nose, every inhale pushing it further into my sinus, pulling it deeper into my lungs, twisting it towards my brain. I smell the figs and honey.
I press through the ingrained barrier, my run becoming a walk as my coordination begins to slip. I go where I am unpermitted. I pass the threshold and continue down the passage, knowing not where it shall take me. I pray for Prophets forgiveness.
I reach a lavish greeting room, filled with objects of curiosity. Shelves of off-world paraphernalia. Things I have not seen since arriving in Heavens Hold. The light is dim, and my eyes are running. I am fading, fast. I beg Prophets forgiveness again over this indecent intrusion. I see the creature, only barely, as I start to slide away. It burns like sugared spices.“Oh I like you. So eager to go into forbidden places. So frightened of what you might find.”

Though I do not know it yet, I find deliverance.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The light is bright, and I travel away from it.A creature of imposing stature and unfamiliar form leers over me.
Another creature and another, all of them constructed of fluid fauna, jostle my body and press at me with actions and words.
“Please let Prophet be safe. Please let Prophet keep me sane as I begin this trial. Please let me still exist under his watchful eye. Save me from these wicked weeds.” I think these words, and by some force beyond my control they are extracted from my mouth.
My wrists are adorned with bands of flowers and gold that mark me as a herald of unwanted things.
Xer body is lithe, lean, taller than me by far but average compared to the plants I pass in the hazy journey to wherever I am being led.
I am told xer name is Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom. I am to refer to xer with sinful addresses beyond manhood and womanhood. I am told xe is Affini. I am told this spiraling city is the Anthemoessa. I am told we lost a war I barely realized we were fighting.
I recognize xer not by look, but by smell. Hot sweetness, floral fruits. Xe was the one who found me in the forbidden place. I am led though this unfamiliar township like a jezebel to the stocks. Xe grips me with raw strength and power, and it flows through xer entire body.
“Please let me go. Where is Prophet? Did you do that to Nadin and Big? Let go of me!” I glare, bleary eyed at xer brown mossy mullet like top, and xer sharp features.
Others are gawking at my show of devotion. Let them. I speak only for his eyes, his embrace.
Xe leans over me and I cower below xer cut chest, formed from pale spotted aspen bark, only softened by a mild construction of ivy features like breasts, or possibly pectorals.
“Oh flower. To borrow a Terran phrase. You’re so fucked.”
Xer mouth does not move and yet I sense xer smile.
Was that a joke? I panic, shaken by the foul words on xer wicked tongue, but I try to suppress it, willing those feelings to transmute into a form held by martyrs and saints. When Prophet returns he will see how I withstood this hardship and he will grant me a place akin to Enforcer, I fantasize.
Xe straightens out, xer twisted construction completed by a pair of woven leg like impersonations. As I’m dragged along by my wrists, I notice how concerningly xer pale vines crack and peel with extension, revealing a milky red layer beneath.
I’m led into a large home of dark browns and ivory whites. The furniture is ornate and overwhelming in its size when compared to my diminutive form. The indulgences are excessive. These creatures are heathens. There is only one thing I’m glad for. I have seen many mixings of colour in the blurs of my shameful walk, but xe does not seem to favour such an improper aesthetic.
“Let me get a good look at you.”
Xe lets go of my hands and stalks around me, inspecting my body.
“We’ll get there. Still, a good starting place.” The blur of movement and sound is fading now, and we are alone.
“How dare you.” I adjust my blue baptismal attire and attempt to project a face of pious certainty.
“You care for that Prophet, don’t you?” I can hear the stochastic hum of xer multitonal voice, coming together and falling apart in lighter hues but darker tones. The voice is coming from within.
“Yes.” To even behave as if that’s a question is so beyond the realm of my lived experience I have no word for the depths of its depravity.
“Then I’ll assume you like prophecies. Let me give you one.”
Xe prowls up to me and grips my head in a set of vines so I can’t look away. I see the coagulation of a horrid promise in the dark red soup of xer watchful eyes.
“One day, you will meet Prophet again, and you will pity him. Not because of what has happened to him,” the eyes settle into me and I hear a bitter sweetness in a hum. “No, you will pity him, because he does not get to be me. I’ll pit him against me over and over, and you’ll choose me everytime, until the idea of ever worshiping that reckless fool is scattered to the winds.” Xe lets go of me. I feel so, so angry at xer vile words.
“HERETIC!” I spit at xer feet.
“No, flower. Sir. You’ll be so blissful, so satisfied in your position at my feet, that you’ll look back at this moment with sparkling embarrassment.”
“I, I’ll never place another above Prophet.” My heart yearns for the badge I was so close to receiving before this monster took me away.
Xe emits a giggle, a resonant chortle, low for a woman but high for a man. This creature is inhuman in all but facsimile.
“You’re incredibly fun, such a unique flavour of willfulness. Most of the others from your crop have a way about them, a kind of blindness. The thing I love about you is the conflict. Back in Hold you entered the forbidden room, and that says so much about you.”
“I had to get away.”
“No flower, you had to go towards.” I can smell it thick on xer body, the sweet fruits and the honey and the bitter citrus.
“You’re wrong, you’re lying!” I try to pluck that sinking feeling of xer truth back into something resembling fierce defiance.
“That. That moment on your face, right there. Yeah, that’s what I like. You like it too. The unmooring of a status quo in favour of something better. That's what I want in a floret. I want to make you twist.”
I try not to give xer the satisfaction, but that, in and of itself, is a twist. I watch in undefiant fear as xer vines begin to depart from xer torso, flecks of white peeling like ash as they extend towards me. It doesn’t occur to me to move. I am paralyzed by forces I cannot transmute.
“There’s something important in there. You like this.” For the first time, what I’d assumed was some kind of wooden mask crackles and moves in tandem with xer voice, no longer merely emitted from xer core. Every contortion of emotion flecks away a crack of white in favour of pale red.
I feel as the vines roughly grip my wrists, pulling my arms up and away from my body. I feel as the sin pulls at my chest and cries to be let out. I shouldn’t. I can’t.
I whimper.
I think only of him, only of Prophet and his divine consolations. I know that in his infinite wisdom this must be a challenge, a trial that I must succeed. Other vines peel and slide off Cari and towards me.
“I must remain pure in the face of indiscretions. I must remain whole in the face of fracturing sin.” I feel the light glow of a forbidden place.
“You’re too precious. Too pure. Don’t worry. I’ll only bend you until you’re ready to break.”
How can something be too pure? I feel as a writhing vine begins to caress my area, and I try to think of anything else.
“Please stop, please please stop.”
I try to transmute my growing feelings into righteous anger. But my area keeps growing. Xe did something to make my body betray me in my hour of need.
“No pet. You like this. I can tell.”
“I don’t, please Prophet hear me.”
“Flower.” Xe tilts my head until I’m looking right at xer. “Your denial is deeply unwell. I can see in colours that are mysteries to even the greatest Terran scientists. I can see in the colour of lust. You like this. I can taste your pleasure.” Xe almost laughs, a voice of cruel flirtation.
“Pleasure.” I grit my teeth. “Is not the same as want.”
“Correct. In a situation this dire, want is inconsequential. Want will come later. Your pleasure is a need. I won’t allow my pets' needs to go unfulfilled.”
Xe speaks in riddles like Prophet, but they lead down roads of sweet desecration instead of pious salvation.
“I know it’s hard flower. But this is a bandage we have to rip off nice and early, because even though it’s hard, you are even harder.”
The writhing sinful touch is direct now, I feel the rough outer layers of vine on my skin as they peel off to reveal the soft, warm, firm inner makings. I am held in my most personal place by this intruding beast.
“I promise, every other part will be easier than this one. You just need to take the first step.”
I feel as another vine, thinner, squirms along my inbetween, applying an awful euphoric pressure. I suddenly wish it would stay there as it begins to slither down.
“You’ll come to find very quickly I will never choose the lesser evil. That is a deprivation I will not tolerate.”
It probes an exit that was never designed to behave as an entrance. I whine at xer touch.

“Good girl.”

At the usage of this incorrect affection I feel a loss of innocence that I do not desire to reclaim. My eyes roll far back into my head and I let out an unholy sound as I stretch open to allow a new paradigm. I am slick with xer sapping lubrication almost as much as I am from my own. I beg my body to stop betraying me, to stop betraying Prophet.
The vine grips my area and spirals itself into swirling rapturous bliss, begging me, teasing me.
“Please, Prophet, deliver me from evil, help me see,” I whine and whimper as the vine begins to slide back out of my ass. “My way back to you.”
“There’s no Prophet here Flower, not right now. Just Sir.”
The idea of referring to this creature as anything at all is so, so sinful. Xe violates my principles while xer protrusions violate my body. I need something to change though, I can’t bear this almost, I need it to end or I need it to begin.
There is no end. It slides back in and rubs something that changes me, just a little.
“Please Sir, please my area is burning.” I debase my principles. Just saying it causes an improper heat to stir.
“Language petal.” The swirling vine grips me hard. “This is your clit.”
I scream in something as xe begins to work at me. What would Big do if I came to her with this indiscretion?
The idea is so shameful, so wrong, and the heat builds. I need something and I don’t want to need it. I try to pluck the feeling but there’s nothing to replace it with except the feeling as my flower is defiled by the stinging of a creature.
“All at once now petal, use those words.” I don’t want this, I tell myself. I can’t want this. Please stop, I tell my body.
I see xer fractured face, firm and clinical as xe enraptures me, sliding in, shameful, sliding out, defilement. I’m flooded with endorphins and dopamine, chemical dynamism that I have eternally withheld. It soaks my brain in the acid of corruption.
“Please Sir, my clit is burning.” I feel another kind of burning as I say the words, filling my cheeks in a crimson hue. I gasp for air, and as it pulls in, the oxygen sends my endorphins into a deep massage of my being. Please no. I’m not allowed. I try to think of the multicolored candlelight of sputtering, crackling purity.
Xe slides and writhes as my limbs stiffen and burn with sacrilege, ashes of parchment flesh floating in the air. I feel as xer iron grip curls around my legs, between my toes, up my calves with tiny, tickling tendrils that lap at my thighs. It occurs to me in this moment that I don’t remember ever taking off my clothes. Another set of those wispy firm vines ride the contours of my unsteady form, bracing my hips and spine, and continuing up to my shoulder blades. I feel the displacement of air, a temporary coolness that brushes my skin.
I am lifted into the air. I ascend.
I remember what happened to Big.

I am broken upon the wheel, stretched from my toes to my fingers until I can barely stand it.
I cum to xer, with indiscretion.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

23

The lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters,

he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the lord forever.

I transmute. I grasp the shaking embers of undignified hedonism. I try to unbreak, and I return myself into something resembling virtuous.
“How could you do that to me?” Little tears of unjust sacrilege begin to flow, as I’m disassembled from great heights. Xe holds me in xer arms. I despise every touch, and yet, as I shiver, I find a perverse comfort in xer presence. It’s a mingling of emotions, like a drop of dye in a bucket of unbleached cotton. Once noticed, it can never be unseen.
“You needed it,” xe replied, sounding soft and confident and inhumanly resonant.
How dare xe. I needed Prophet. I needed comfort. I was driven into a state that was unfamiliar and wrong, so far from the embrace, and judged based on my body's reactions. Yes, the excruciating pleasure was clear, splattered upon my body, but it was a sin of the flesh. I know the feeling that led to my slick torso came from within, but it can't have been me. I’m a pure, faithful person. There can only be one explanation.
“You made me want it.”
“So you did want it.”
What!
“That’s not what I mean you monster.”
Cari’s face mask is beginning to seal back into a more sturdy form, moving with less frequency, preserving the contours of white among the cracks of red until xe only inflects a change as punctuation.
“Ask yourself this. Does it matter if I made you want it? I’ve made my feelings on your wants clear. I only care about your needs, and you’re denying so many of them.”
“You’ve kidnapped and assaulted me. I need to go home. I need to run away. You don’t know anything about my needs.”
I feel the room soften as Cari’s mood stoops from cocky flirtation to meet my own.
“Petal, you are home. This is where you live now. What you need is to overcome some very unhelpful hang ups so you can get on with enjoying your new life.”
“That wasn’t a HANGUP. THAT WAS MY VIRGINITY.” I rush with blood. A part of me that was kept tight in a box as a sign of my dedication to Prophet, an essence of my purity, permanently taken. Extinguished by this plant barely a moment after I enter xer home, and xe has the audacity to say that I needed it.
“This idea,” xe calmly explains, “that your first time doing something would be any more or less meaningful than the next is silly. I can assure you, this is just the first step on a long and enjoyable journey.”
I feel the awful thrill behind xer words run through my body. This is not a threat, it’s a promise. My heart beats in an intrusive anticipation. I’m carefully placed down from the embrace and delicately led forward, knees shaky, past a towering and extensive kitchen and a living space with a long, tall brown sofa. The darkly coloured trappings exude the excess of an indulgent lifestyle.
“Putting aside these foolish ideas about firsts,” Cari settles into unsettlingly supportive kindness. Xe gives me space; emotionally, but not physically. “In most cases, someone with your physiology objects to being called a girl. You moaned.”
“I’m not a girl.” I find my footing and stand my ground.
Xe tilts xer head down and weaves a thatch of vines into my short hair, clasping at me, pulling my head up, firmly but gently. I see those iron filings, floating within a lake of dark blood, flecked with lighter specks. Six imposingly ornate eyes.
Oh. Prophet help me. I’m a girl.
Don’t say it, don’t put those treasonous wicked words on my tongue, down, breathe, just STOP.
“I’m a girl?” It cracks in my voice and rings true like the blessings of ceremony.
“Obviously,” Xe smirks, breaking some crumbles from xer facial mask. “I’m going to have to do something about your penchant for lying about the things you find shameful. It’s much more fun to watch you squirm and confess, but I can’t be bothered to entrance you every time.”
A flushing feeling tells me xe simply compelled the wicked truth and nothing more. Regardless, I try to push my truth into a lie shaped box. I can’t be a girl. It’s not possible.“You-you made me say that. You can’t just worm your way into my mind and make me do whatever you want.”
“Hmm. Next time try and tell me you’re a boy before you cum. We’ll see how dedicated you are to that idea real quickly.” Xe chuckles. “And for the record, I didn’t make you want it. That was all you.”
My head is spinning, each action and revelation pushing me further and further from his eyes and into xers. To just contemplate the existence of a creature that can probe the deepest infernos of my soul and extract them effortlessly is too much. Yet there xe is, casually standing in front of me. Xe stretches and rearranges, shaking off a few more flecks of white papery bark as xe assembles xer body back into its full form. I scan for some scraps of dignity in the shaggy carpet of pale mosses and flora on the ground, my shirt or pants, anything, but I can’t find them.
“Come, flower, you’re filthy on the outside and pure on the inside. I’d much prefer those states were reversed. Let’s get you cleaned and fed. I can think of so many more unfulfilled needs.”
That filthy pervert. That foul jezebel. That awful, forsaken weed. It’s clear I have no choice in this matter. I follow xer.
Cari leads me deeper into xer domain towards another room more massive than my home back in Heavens Hold. The lighting is dimmer here, leaking out from an aristocratic chandelier. The air is heady with fresh berries and sickly sweetness cut by bitter undertones. Such indulgent excess. The light bounces off the surface of a raised square pool of white stone filled with a dark red liquid.
The steam coming from the pool carries the smells, a cruel intoxication of excess liable to shred someone of austerity.
“I rebloomed on a planet with a unique local fauna that sheds on contact.” Xe says, as if this explains something. “I like its unique appearance, but it requires maintaining.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Oh flower.”
I’m lifted off my feet by a firm grappling of unwanted appendages. I struggle, trying to push myself away from xer unwanted touches but I find no avenue for escape.
“Because we’ll be bathing together.”
I can hardly count the list of repentances I’ll need to make once I’m granted an opportunity for prayer. Prophet is merciful. Prophet is forgiving. Prophets watchful eyes have seen me engage in such atrocities today. I feel an impure stirring. Wait.
“Is that. Is that blood? For your vines?”
Cari lets out a raw chuckle.
“Of sorts. Sap, donated from my kin. Not Terran blood, Affini blood, water, and a few extras.”
It feels unusually velvety and nearly scalding on my skin as I forcefully descend into its strong overpowerment. The smells plague my mind, bitter citrus and sweet berries and a metallic tang of raw honey. Cari faces me in the blood water, and I watch as it drips from xer shoulders like a sanguine indulgence. The heat soaks into me, massaging my mind and rolling my shoulders in disquieting comfort.
“Much better. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
I- that- I try to reach for righteousness, but it isn’t there. Nothing’s surfacing. I try to pull up my anger, my fury over my indignant treatment. Under the dark waters, I clench my nails into the pads of my hands and find only soft pain, no irritation. I feel calm, like I do after a confession ritual with Big. I clench my face and try to summon something, but it doesn’t show. My coordination begins to slip, a momentary lag building in my muscles.
“The sap contains a naturally occurring Class-E sedative. Bad for Xenrani, calming for Terrans.”
“And just how did you discover that?” I wobble out an answer. “I’m not the first person you’ve done this to, am I.”
“Again with the firsts. Don’t get jealous flower. I don’t have any other florets. But I have been a popular sitter for others.”
I’m not jealous. I try to transmute whatever the actual feeling is into worry for those poor people. Neither feeling is strong enough under the effects of this bath to succeed the transition.
“I can’t imagine why you’d be popular with anyone.”
“Oh? Don’t worry, you’ll find out.”
I hate this plant.
Truthfully?
I try to hate this plant. It’s the proper, sacred response to my position. But emotions are running low, and the tender sap water is breaking down the tense defenses of my body.
“And another thing. What’s a Xenrani?” I frown, sick of the riddles.
Cari practically cackles, “not something you need to worry about!”
Not the exchange I was hoping for. I try to scrape my dignity back together, but Cari starts to rub me with a mossy vine, lifting a portion or shifting a position, and I’m too spent and dull to put up any serious resistance. I’m reluctant to admit it, but the soft treatment patches up the soreness that was thrust upon and inside of me. It’s nice.
As my hand withdraws from beneath the surface, I notice a change. Before I can fully actualize it, Cari grips me with a gentle force.
“Good girl.”
Xe plunges me under the surface until I’m fully submerged, keeping me there in a firm coiling. Xer woven tendriled fingers reach around my head to press into my brow, helping to keep me from escaping while the rest of xer organic bondage slips and roams. I begin to panic as the moments slip by, kicking and thrashing wildly, only to be caught by another rope of birch wherever I move.
I’m holding onto my oxygen tightly.
The tingling is spreading from my lungs to my loins.
Becoming desperate as my vision starts to crackle.
Starting to stir in my- with each heartbeat.
I burst out like a cork, gasping for air.
My soul fills with xer strong smell, bitter- berry- honey, and it makes me dizzier than ever. I feel it settle heavily in my lungs with each gasp, charging me with bubbling pleasantries. My body starts to tingle thoroughly, spreading from my chest and my- my- my clit, shedding the final remnants of aches and pains and replacing them with soft sparkles. Xer hold feels softer somehow, like the pleasure of a sunny orchard day concentrated wherever xer tanglings pull and slide. I want to scorn xer for this improper infraction, but things are getting muddled.
I’m lifted out, and placed on the mossy ground. I shiver from xer touch.
I look in the mirror in shock.
From head to toe I’ve been stained by the sap, like ceremony wine to the lips. A faint red, cream red rose, blood and bone, and it doesn’t come off as I scratch my hand. Cari grips and restrains me at the action, pulling my fingers back before I can attempt to scrape it away a second time.
“No touching. I need you like this if we’re going to keep having fun, and besides, you look beautiful this way.” I’m marked as xers, a pauper's red. A sign of velvety soft shame. I tremor with fizzles, hopefully from the change in temperature.
Then it clicks. I’m not just dyed in xer colour: I’m completely hairless with the sole exception of my eyebrows.
My mouth drops open, but Cari slides xer almost hand vine to close my gasp.
“Beautiful. Such a beautiful girl.” My sense of everything is becoming so unmoored. No. I need to pull myself back together.
“I’m not a- I can’t be.”
“I assure you pet, you can.”
I squirm and twist at such a degrading term, levied against me by this sodomizing harbinger of paradigms broken and Prophets betrayed.
My grievances are disrupted as I feel a sinful intoxicating pleasure from a wide and tender pad of vines brushing and massaging my bald head, extracting a shameful mewl. I wonder if xer appendage was grown or designed for just this purpose. The idea of a focused intentionality being placed into the delivery of my devolutionary euphoria is enough to turn me even redder than I am already, a pooling warmth.
I feel a delicate prickle on my back, and I turn to look, but the vine is already being withdrawn. I take in xer form and see how the papery exterior has begun to patch and heal. There’s an unsettling beauty in the way that xer cracks have sealed, revealing a patchwork of efforts undertaken for our conversations and my torturous pleasures. Signs of effort exerted for me.
“What are you thinking, my fallen angel?”
I shudder, “such a heathenous pet name, and yet the wrongness fosters a tickling darkness that I want to ignore but I can’t. I’ll try to- wait oh my, Prophet please what’s happening? No no no I didn’t just say that I can’t have just. But I did, and it was true, and I want to prune that feeling but it’s very difficult to focus when such a demonically powerful creature is sizing me up, and I haven’t even had time to process the dyeing of my flesh and the removal of my hair and the shamefully pleasurable sensation of being pet on the head!” I run out of oxygen in my lungs and gasp, clutching my hands over my mouth in panic.
Cari doesn’t laugh, though I’m sure I sound ridiculous. Xe collapses xer legs into a puddle that swims around my feet so “I’m comfortably locked in place” and rests gently on “my back”. Xer head pokes around the side so I can see xer through the mirror.
“I’m glad to hear you’re comfortable flower.”
“I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t mean to say this either.” I demand a focus from myself. “Distraction.” I look at myself in discomfort, wriggling in the spot.
“I know flower, some things are hard to unsee.” Xe runs a pair of vines down my sides in an accentuated mimic of a womanly outline.
“It’s not-I’m just I’m BALD AND RED and I suppose also troublingly worried about the clashing of my newly extracted emotion around gender, and the driving necessity to remain virtuous-” as the confessional continues to stream out of me, Cari unleashes a vine in a puff of white parchment bark out of the bathroom towards the rest of the hab. “And it would be one thing is this was simply a sin requiring my repentance, but it’s the feeling of committing it, seeping into my belly, a tingling pleasure, that’s what really worries me.”
“I think that’s enough worrying for now.” My hands and arms are gripped, wrapped in vines that bind around each finger, swirling up and pulling my forearms behind my back so my fingers touch my elbows. I am tightly held.
“I like that. Ahhhh why why why please, I dislike it in equal measure. No, I like how I dislike it.”
“Shhh angel, it’s okay. Sir’s proud of you for confessing such things.”
I watch a thin vine with a beautiful adorning white flower, and another, pale blue, dance in front of me. Both contain glistening needles. They move towards my thigh, and I barely feel them prick. It’s like I’ve stepped back into the bath, the tension from my emotions slackening along with my muscles. I find my tongue is still loose, but not fully unleashed.
“Now flower, your new hair will grow in soon and I’ll be sure to keep it growing nice and pretty. It was an oversight for me to take it in my enthusiasm.”
“It wasn’t just enthusiasm, Sir, it was scary.”
“Yes it was, a little, wasn’t it. But you didn’t mind, did you?”
I clench my mouth shut. I can feel the words bubbling to the surface, pushing on my diaphragm, desperate for release, practically choking me.
“C’mon flower, don’t hold your breath now just to prove a point about how much you like it. You can just say the words. I promise I won’t mind no matter what you say.”
Just because “It made me sparkle” doesn’t mean it isn’t sinful. I try and transmute the feeling into fury but-but I’ve already said it. I blush deeply.
“Would you like my opinion on it?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to give it no matter what I say”
“Good girl. I think the real sin is the denial of a natural urge. There’s such bliss in wanting to not want something and then getting it nice and hard. You’ll twist and squirm until you ask for things you want from now on and if I think they’re good for you they’ll be granted.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
“Now let’s frame that pretty face.”
Sir’s long extension has returned from the other room with a cluster of items, including a wig. I feel the soft inner layer, comfortably gripping my massaged scalp as xe stretches it over. Xe moves in a managed chaos around my head, lifting and adjusting and I catch glimpses as it sets into place. Ashy dark blonde with very faint red streaky highlights, and choppy bangs. Xe pulls back xer vines, keeping my limbs secure.
The hair is tender, modest if not for the highlights, nice even. It would look beautiful tucked back in the suns lights upon the orchard. It’s clearly been chosen to match xer aspen vines, an aesthetic symmetry. I almost forget that “I’m a ripely coloured trussed up naked little sinner” shamefully standing in front of the mirror. Almost.
“Yeah, but you like it.”
Ahhhh. I’ve said it out loud.
“The twisting is just as fun when you do it once it’s too late. It’s okay to enjoy this pet. I know I am.”
I shiver from head to toe. Xe gently caresses my cheek, and I try to pull away, but xe tights xer grip, keeping me in place. I keep pulling, but the fingerlings continue their slow brushing of feathery hairs off my flushing face. I’m.. my.. it’s becoming stiff. The harder I fight back, the harder it gets, and the harder it gets, the harder it becomes to keep up the illusion of truth I have carefully constructed for years to achieve salvation within Heavens Hold.
“Oh yeah, you’re loving this. But not yet, my little fallen angel.” I receive a tender slap on the blushing face. “We’ll have plenty of fun later, but I think you’re pretty spent from my warm welcome.”
“Stop touching me you sodomizing mmmmoooaa” I can’t help but moan as the brushing tendril curls around my ear, tucking my new hair behind my helix in a tender intimacy I’ve never felt before. The harsh restraint on my arms, almost ending my circulation. The gentle vine on my lobe, swirling a circulation of its own. This, is a heavenly hold.
“Now flower, you need a new name.” I watch in the mirror as Sir runs a papery false hand through xer mossy mullet in an affectation of preparation.
“Amber.” The words escape without a thought required.
“Oh I like that pet. It’s…sappy.”
Xe delivers this deadpan, and I groan slightly at the crassness of the implication. It was a name from childhood, idle imaginings of a different path. Nadin and Amber. But now it feels twee, corny and shameless, and that makes me flush. Before it can transmute into regret, Sir pulls me out of my thoughts, leaving me twisting on the vine.
“I think it’s delicious. Amber Moraficus, Fourth Floret. My fallen angel.”
The acidic cortisol of a righteous wrong settles it into place, held aloft by the endorphins of enjoyable shame. It doesn’t matter what I want. Sir thinks this is what I need. But I think I’m starting to want it, just a little, all the same.
“Now here, I think this’ll make you feel a bit better.”

It didn’t make me feel better.
I’m sitting at the table and fuming a little as I ruminate the shattering reminder of my utter lack of assertion in my current predicament.
I run my fingers through the bands affixed to my wrists, and I contemplate what moves, if any, I have left. I’m too high to get down without assistance and even if I was on the ground I wouldn’t get far.
After my hair was put into place, Sir had tried to dress me, and the difficult thing is that I wasn’t concerned about the form fitting dress with its short puffy base. I should be. But no, the part that was able to drive me from xer sedative arms and seductive flowers was the fabric. The dress is a splattering watercolor of mixed design. Hues of rose and orange yellow, dark blue and green on a cream base.
Sir had released my arms and uncoiled from my legs to allow it to slide onto me, and I panicked, trying to rip it off and run. I didn’t make it very far before the bands began to glow red, and suddenly I was overcome with a euphoric slumber, tripping and crawling into unconsciousness as Sir’s immaculate touch roughly pulled me back until I was clutched firmly under xer predatory gaze. By the time I was awake again, the dress was firmly affixed to my body by a stiffened piece of sap.
Wrists resting on the edge of the table, I can see in my peripheral vision how the dress stains me in the glow of a glorious mismatch of colours. A refraction of my sins. There’s no escaping this mark, and I blame my new name for the inventive technique that keeps it on.
Looking over, I watch as my affectionate assailant prepares a meal. It’s hard to see the details given my height, but Sir sliced some kind of dark purple plant lengthwise and scored it across with lines earlier, and now I can tell mostly by scent that xe’s pouring an assortment of sinful decadence across the top of it.
Soon enough the dish is placed before me, and I’m unceremoniously picked up and placed on xer lap, restrained across the chest just a touch more than would be necessary. I’m trembling slightly as the feelings collide, the sin and the sensation.
The smell is rapturous, and the dish looks incredible. The purple fruit, or possibly vegetable, is softly roasted to a char, and drenched in an excess of tomato and caramelized onions. I stare at it, but I can’t proceed. My body is locked in place. I wait, hesitating, wondering if something will happen, feeling like something needs to occur.
“What’s wrong flower, not hungry?”
I’m hungry. I’m famished. I want to take a bite but it’s such an overwhelming blessing. I’m so, so beyond the milk and potatoes that once delighted me in Heavens Hold. “This feels like glutton embodied to the highest degree. I can’t” just eat this. Not without. Words have been extracted from me once more.
“It is gluttonous, isn’t it. But doesn’t it smell good?”
Xer suggestion prompts me, and I can’t help but take a breath, swimming in the rich tomato and the roasted fond, mingling and tingling with the sugary roots.
“But I can’t, not without.”
“It’s okay, my little fallen angel. You’re allowed.”
Xe grants me permission to eat, and it feels like Prophet, lighting me up in a way I reverently want to deny. This is so wrong, an invitation to the gourmand, a sinful gluttonous exchange. The permission granted by Sir operates on a deeper level though, beyond my examinable mind. It frees me from the programming of years in the dining hall.
The bite overwhelms me in a rich embrace of sweets and starches, sours and warmth. That gentle blow of warm air upon a cold heart. That rapturous consumption. That knowledge of the culinary carnal. I have tasted the face of enlightenment.
I am turned from foundations of stone into pillars of salt in xer arms.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

My inner heretic is winning. But the parish of devotion is still present, and it wants to struggle. I push Sir away, and start a scramble to resist the irresistible. Before I can blink, my arms are tightly bound behind my back, and I’m suspended in the air, creeping parchment perversions gripping my legs and dangling me off the ground so I’m facing the floor. I feel the prick of a petal's denial as the chastity is enforced within my body by xer xenodrugs.
I’ve experienced this struggle several times since I arrived. It starts when I feel the look coming from Sir. Little flecks of parchment from xer face beginning to drift away with xer hum, subtle vibrations in xer ropes. I know it’s coming with an earlier sensitivity each time. I scramble and I run, desperate to avoid another toying, another stroke, but I’m helpless.
The parchment begins to wick off with each constriction knotting around my ankles and up my legs. At first I fight, trying to scrape and pull the vines as they travel up my thighs.
“Let go of me!”
The kicking and yelling gives way to tingling adrenaline as Sir moves in closer, gripping and holding back my hair, curling around my neck and stroking down into bindings across my chest. I feel the tendrils begin to caress my sensitive growing breasts and I’m elevated so I can find no further grip beyond xer.
The same question.
“So, my little angel, are you desperate enough to reveal the truth?”
I’ve already said it. I’ve been living it for days. I am a girl. The area of conquest lies between letting it happen and becoming complicit in its oncoming forces. It’s an urge I cannot bring myself to fulfil.
My rising clit twitches in the warm air of my suspension, finding no purchase, no satisfaction. The blood is being forced lower not just by my own perverse compulsions but by the arrangement of my body. With each day I feel as my breasts bud and grow, pulling lower towards the ground or pressing harder against the vines depending on my arrangement with gravity.
Sir provides me with an option. Blissful release, sweet carnal cumming, or self imposed deprivation. But xe has muddled the issue. The flower that unlocks my chastity has been hybridized, N/G, to further my ascent into womanhood.
The war happens in their vines, but the bridge I need to cross is internal. The twist isn’t physical, not quite, but mental. How do I proceed when the battlefield is entirely within my mind? Later, the G’s will be administered regardless of my actions. Sir believes it’s for my wellbeing. Xe wants me to admit, of sound mind, that I need this. A want is not the same as a need.
“I’ll give you the important ones, you don’t get a say in that.” Xe schemed, on my second day. “But the fun ones. Writhe for me over those. Squirm for me. And then lose that precious little battle. Those you have to ask for. And I will always say yes.”
Sir repositions xer bodily form until xe lies underneath me, sprawling out onto the ground until I can see xer cracked mask face staring up at me from eight feet below.
Sir hums in satisfaction at my immobility, and I try to pull out, safe and scared by knowledge that the vines will only grow tighter, kneading into me with a harsher urgency.
I spit down onto xer in frustration, and xe deftly moves out of the way, allowing it to harmlessly hit the ground
“Wrong answer, little angel.”
I feel the SMACK of a vine fly across my ass, drawing a scream from my lips and an urgent pulsing of cruel intentions into my sensitive places, stiffening me harder.
Xe slowly reaches a familiar vine towards my clit and begins a dire, desperate taunting. Swirling always forward, always pulling, always extracting. Rosary beads of insistence flaring under my foreskin, pulling screaming pleasure from me.
The thin tendril with a glistening needle drapes itself over my shoulder, dancing in my vision, slowly moving back and forth in a taunt.
It’s almost “irresistible. Almost” enough to make me give in. But I can’t bring myself to accept such a step away from the embrace. It’s becoming clear that a return to Heavens Hold is unlikely, but should such a thing come to pass my decision to participate in this delicious debauchery would be unrepentable.
“I know you want it, flower. Just say the words and you can come down. Let me help you.”
A moan transmutes into a groaning mewl as a thin tendril begins to squirm against my asshole, teasing at the tight band without ever fully penetrating me.
“Can’t- I won’t- Not under his eyes.”
I reach the edge of the cliff and I’m pulled back, left in the steady agonizing haze of my own painful plead for purity.
A final SMACK shakes me back like a cold splash of endorphin soaked water, and the tendril slackens around my clit, pulling away. I’m slowly lowered into a cradling hug as Sir reforms xer personage around me. I desperately want to claw the orgasm out of myself but I know it would be useless and humiliating to try. I soften and rest, turning myself inwards towards xer warmth.
“It’s okay, you’re still my beautiful fallen angel, my lustful good girl. We’ll get you there soon. You’re making such great progress.”
I feel a kiss upon my forehead.
I shiver from head to toe at the righteous wrong of xer affection, the blissful degradation of xer kind remarks, the uncanny healing of a forehead kiss from a position of power.
Soon enough, I’m getting dressed in a rainbow tie dye dress with a short skirt and crop top. The primary reds and ivory whites pop in a reflection of xer foliage, with diffusions of other colours bursting in, and I’m squirming once again.
“Please, it’s too much to look at. It hurts. Can’t I just wear something nice and plain?”
“No pet. It’s important that you feel more liberated, and I need you to start realizing how cute you look in the clothes I choose for you. I promise I’m going easy on you, there’s so much more I want.”
I try to look away and ignore it, eventually resorting to just closing my eyes.
“Not avoiding it, angel, embracing it.”
“I’ve seen enough haven’t I?”
“Actually I think I’ve seen enough.”
I unscrunch a little as I feel myself being bound up, and I watch through peeking eyes as xe reveals an unfamiliar tendril with a needle that rapidly sinks into me.
I feel the spreading of red and white across my skin, the sound of sweet honey and I open my eyes to the shimmering aura of berry drenched hands.
“Look again, flower.” Calm domination. “What do you see?”
The dress smells of binding vines and feels like cascading temple light. It meets me where I am emotionally and goads me forward into something greater, with each swish of the skirt sending a splashing aura of new devotion skimming into the air.
“Wha the - What did you do to me?”
I look up at thick scarlet vines quiet reverence, the construction of a lithe person with a taste of safety and fear, remnants of white papery bark and the smell of fallen grace.
“A new perspective.”

The walk outside is an assault of wonder and worry, a kaleidoscope of flavourful sights and colourful sounds. A seaside of familiar longing next to a boardwalk lined with glittering red and gold, fierce cinnamon and broken promises.
We continue on this journey until we arrive at a cafe of careful hope and sinful sickness. Before we enter, I feel a faint teal aura that captures a familiar face within its wicking light. The aura turns to a buzzing calliope and offers it a warm hug as I shout out the auras title.
“Big?!”
The hazy aura clarifies into the face of my old handler, and she quickly approaches.
Sir holds a woven hand out to stop her rushing over, flecks of thin white softness and sharpness curling in. Xe moves forms of irresistible citrus bitter up my back, firmly resting and containing me, until the sweet berries of constricting dominance slide onto my head and lift it up to look into xer six rich deep maroon sunsets.
“Not Big. Claudia. The only authority you answer to now is me. Understand?”
“Sir is big.. C-Claudia is Claudia.”
The feeling of falling backwards in my bed floods my nostrils like musty metal as it pours out from those orbs and yanks me back.
“Good girl. Good little angel.”
Tastes of blushing approval massage through my wig. I return to the present, wells of undulated foreboding and aromas of tantalizing summer daisies everytime I watch a bouquet of rainbowy power walk past with their leash bound simmering dociles. I try to focus on the person in front of me to parse her through the sensory swirl.
“Claudia. It’s good to see you, are you okay?”
“You look so beautiful.” Her words carry a soft kissing sensation.
“I didn’t- it’s not like I chose to be like this, I-”
“Nonsense flower, your desires were clear, and we’ll work through the denial for as long as it takes.”
I feel an inner stirring at the word, coaxing me away from his embrace like sputtering candles of fat and wax, dripping need that slides down xer sharp form.
“Well either way it’s a good look.” Claudia snaps me back from my sinful and concealed arousal with a gentle affirmation.

She smiles at me with the first day of soft potatoes and fresh milk.

Sir floats us into the careful hope, and we sit at a looming cliff of a table.
“I’m sorry for my shameful observances when I found you with the forbidden object.” I feel the sour green burn of guilt.
“What, the datapad? Stars that was hot, mistress wanted to take you as well the moment it happened, but of course that wasn’t meant to be.”
This terrible moment that burns me like harsh white observation lights was nothing but a perverse game to her now. I feel the thumping of my heart playing a song of panicked mining alarms. The alarms cascade into my parents and that pulls me into the light peach recollection of my sister.
“Have you seen Nadin?”
“Yeah she’s around, picked up as part of the sweep on the company town.”
A cool wind. It crackles into sparkling fireworks as she takes a bite of bread from a bowl that I barely noticed was present.
“Her Owner’s real nice, bit of a ladies plant if you know what I mean. Like if that makes any sense. That's how she got the datapad in the first place, some romance thing. She didn’t reach out? That’s weird.”

I smell the rush of rapid distraction like burning food as Sir pulls me back.

“Flower, Nadin doesn’t want to talk to you right now. She’s barely forgiven Claudia,” the swish of g-forces as Sir looks at her instead of me, “isn’t that right?”
The worried reassurance wraps me in knots of pressure.
“Shit, yeah. That makes sense.”

The swish of the g-forces returning to me like a swing.

“It’s not your fault. The pressures of the accord led you to do something before we arrived and it hurt her very deeply.” The harsh sting hits my face. “I’m sure once you’ve both had time to settle in you’ll be able to say hello.”
“Okay. I didn’t really think of it that way.” The sting softens in pious self care. “Can you tell her I love her and that I miss her? That I needed to do what Prophet asked of me.” Rejecting bile and crumbling synthcubes.
“Oh my gosh Amber, I haven't thought about Prophet in a while. Mistress did this thing where if I get too spirally about him I just-” her aura flares into the inky red pools of xers eyes. I pluck the strings of a reply.
“I just don’t understand how we can be here, talking on a ship in the sky, so far from his eyes, it doesn’t make sense. Is this some eternal punishment? We go here and he stays there?”
Here warms my belly, transmuting into cold fingertips.
“Oh no Amber, I heard he’s on the ship, but nobody has seen him.” Vines that hold me in place under the warm surface.
“Wait really?” Birds warbling in the orchard.
“Grace’s Owner mentioned something to her and she told Phoebe who told me. Amber, apparently his real name's Eugene.”

I smell the thud of a boot on the bottom of a door, muddy and wrong and so indecent.

“You can’t call him that, he’s Prophet! No matter what we’re going through his divine predictions led to our prosperity! His word is, it’s” panic hitching into black shadows that threaten to swallow me whole, crawling across the cliffs edge.
“Oh don’t you understand Amber?”

The word is a collision of blue hazes and sticky red berries that spill down my tongue and halo her visage.

“Make the connection, I know you can do it! Just look at yourself, you’re living proof!”

Her blues blend into floating specks of pink, settling into a soft purple aura that wisps off her.

“Proof of what Claudia?”

“Something has passed that he did not profess.”
She is calling him the feeling of a cold rainstorm, an unforecasted shower. A false Prophet. The rain splatters upon my arms and streaks the paupers red in blends of parchment white. The cost of her transgressions are dire if she is wrong. The whimpering of Nadin. The cost of his transgressions is vile if she is right. The darkness of a kiss upon my forehead. The cost of my life is sunk by now. A swelling vine that strokes my needy clit.

The synesthetic conniption begins to fade as we return to the hab, but there is a bearing I can hold onto. There is power in a name. Prophet is powerful, all seeing. Eugene is simply a man who left a mining colony to found a town. Prophet kisses your head and sets you down. Eugene convinces you to abandon your sister so someone can tend to the orchard. I feel a painful disengagement, and it threatens to “turn into shame until” another power, with a new name of xer own, pulls me out.
“No shame allowed, flower. There are far worse feelings to enjoy.”
Xe wipes away the tears I didn’t realize had began to leak, and then begins to lace around my collar bone, coiling up my neck, constricting gently, forcefully until the only thing I can focus on is the growing primal panic of an empty set of lungs. A chuckle begins to spill from xer cracking face mask.
“You think that adorably misguided terran ever held fucking power over you?”
I grow more and more desperate until xe releases, and I gasp for air, watching as my tie-dye dress falls to shreds beneath me, mingling with sheets of thin wispy bark on the ground. I’m splayed out in xer lap like a chair, legs held aloft to reveal my hole, arms outstretched, bound to xer constructed impersonation of triceps.
“Think again.”
The teasing is vulgar and exquisite, pulling cries and moans from me, a new round of tears begging to spill from my eyes. I feel the prideful probing as xe begins to slide in, the blissful rubbing and the slick spiraling on my rock hard sin.
“No! You already-not again! Stop! FUCKING STOP.”
The words come from my mouth before I can even register it, and the moment they do, I slide into something else, a desperate remorseful desire to appease this all consuming force, this object of danger.
The slick vine pops out of my needy ass and I feel the vacuous absence, and. and I don’t like it. I want to be full, and I want xer to fill me. I don’t want to disappoint xer. I don’t want to disappoint myself, and I’m beginning to untangle the me from the Eugene.
A need to feel the pleasure and approval of submission align in direct contradiction to the unfair command I barked out.
“I’m sorry? I don’t know, maybe, I’m just so muddled.”
“You’re twisting, angel, but are you ready to unwind?”
The sodomizing vine gently runs around the rim of resistance, keeping me so uptight, and I feel myself loosening slightly. The pumping strokes return on my clit, and although I continue to squirm, I feel myself letting the moans slip and enjoying the sensation of xer rumbling enjoyment with each expression.
Sir loosens my bondage until my right arm is free, and produces an ornate, pollen dusted cream white flower with a sharp dripping needle, and a thin tethering vine that connects it back to xer core.
The war happens in xer vines but the battle rages in my mind. Do I allow the virtuous urge to win? Do I return to the comfort of a feeling transmuted? Or do I seize the sin and actualize the blissful desecration? No. I can’t. I shouldn’t. I think of Big, and her words earlier, and I allow something to pass that I did not profess.
I slowly reach for the outstretched flower, and xer fingery vines gently guide my hand, always ensuring I am the one who controls the pressure, within the bounds of my safety.
I do it.
I place the white flower and its erect needle, dripping in beads of golden sap parallel with my smooth, cream red thigh.
I do it.
I coax the thorn to slip under my skin with a trembling moan, the drip of red like a drop of dye in a bucket of unbleached cotton. I feel the warmth spread from my thigh up my body until it catches a vein, and then a burning in my loins, no, my clit, a vibrating pleasure, pumping through me and consuming my body in a haze of resplendence that finally starts to massage my head, soaking me in chemical calm and botanical bliss.
I’m spun around, my brain taking seconds to catch up to my bodies new orientation as the sodomy returns, sliding hitching pumping burning, speeding up until I want so badly to cum, but I can’t, I still can’t.
I’m pinned by a complex lattice of red, all parchment evaporated, and I’m slowly pulled up the wall, cold on my back, warm from their touch. Legs dangling. Every writhe a reassurance. Every stroke a reward for my good behaviour. I feel so sublime, an ascending cord of devastation stretched and remolded, all the looser for the experience.
“Good Girl. There’s my fallen angel. Again.”
I’m brought back down, skin fizzling and crackling, eyes dilated, vision soft. More? How? How it still happening? I mount the waves of pure debauchery and I watch Sir unwind a hidden blossom from xer shoulder.
Another flower unravels. The blend that will swell me with womanhood and allow me sweet release.
I can’t keep going.
“Put me down!” I let out a raw, animalistic scream as my dignity shreds away.
I yank hard in my momentary crisis trying to escape, becoming increasingly more desperate with each gasping breath until SMACK, the fears are evacuated from me by the back side of Sir’s hand. My cheek burns and ripples as the pain twists into irresistible pleasure.
There can be no more denying of my urge.
I reach without hesitation and clutch the blossom. I align it with xer help. I allow the petals to drip blissful release and burgeoning bosom into my thigh, dribbles of elixir running down my leg as I retract.
A cooling ambrosia reaches up through my veins, and I feel it seeking my chastity like a symbiotic predator. It builds me up, getting me closer with each thundering heartbeat, harmonizing with xer demanding swirls and xer burning writhing tendril heating me deep inside. Finally, it grips ahold of my brain with a thousand little affirmations and frees me. I scream in ashes of release as I spray into the air, voice hitching, legs trembling, tears welling. Each wave of sticky sin soaking me more and more in an associative dopamine.
I pray, but I only have one higher power left.
“D-do good? Please, Sir did I do good?” I feel so addled. The soft parchment sticks to my sweating skin.
“Yes angel, good girl.” Sweet berries and bitter citrus and cloying bases of honey.
Xe disassembles, but xer vines keep my endorphins riding high.
“My beautiful sweet sinner. My filthy little flower.”
I am becoming addicted to the feeling of mattering. The sensation of struggling. The sins of the flesh and the battle to escape only aiding in the intoxication. I feel the danger, and I want more. I want to not want something, and then receive it anyway. I want the tender touching of a loving vine as resistance slips into steady submission. I fear this want may be a need.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

In my mind, I am running in the orchard.In my mind, my hands are drenched in juices, the dark red berries staining my skin.
In my mind, Prophet sings my praises and grants me blessings.
In my mind.
I swim in the generous kindness of the parish hugs and drown in the icy veins of Nadin’s disaffiliation.
I look upon the face of Big, drenched in bliss as she stares at me, filled with carnal lust.
She beckons me closer, and my feet move of their own volition.
I look at her hands, my hands, and they are drenched in the sweet sour juices of our debauchery.
The sound from the pad sitting on her shack bed clarifies into the words of my sister, spoken in the multitonal colour blend of Sir’s voice.

“It’s called a fig”

I am curved inwards, pulling deeper into another, deeper layer of consciousness. I feel the unfathomable depths, the warmth of my innards, protected and secure. I am safe in the embrace. I am tough, and I pluck all wrongness from my pure and smooth form. I feel a growing warmth as I reach for the sunlight, letting it bathe me in a righteous glow. I begin to engorge in the fields of austere prosperity.

“It can only grow”

I feel the brushing of the parish, lifting me high at my lowest moment, rising me up from the fears of betrayal into the soft kiss of Prophet, the scarlet hand of Sir. I feel the warmth grow from that spot, filling my core with endorphins, swelling me with sweet pollens and soft folds. I feel as my skin softens and my shape begins to take form. There’s a gentle running of vines that grasp me. I moan, as they run across my sensitivities, clutching and molesting. I wear the scent of sweet floral oils as I rub into the embrace, catching flecks of soft papery rain. It’s not enough.
“once a stinging creature”
I feel a scratching at the end of my form, steady and intrusive and impatient. I’m not ready. I’m still stiff, unformed. It pulls back, and I feel relief.
The sounds of the warbling birds tickle me in a state of steady solitude.
I breathe in the calm, and I settle into a peaceful contemplation under his eyes.
I picture dinner at Heavens Hold, surrounded by the parish.
I wait for permission.
I think of Enforcer, her tightly bound hair pulled back and her clicking heels stepping forward. She inhales sharply, but before she can speak, I look down. I have already taken a bite. How is this possible? I’ve sleepwalked into a misgiving, and the meal is nothing but honey, and it sticks to my mouth.
I gasp, gargling words as the tickling treacle runs down my throat. The amber hue fills my bowl and coats my pallette with stolen sap, sharp and mouthwatering and overwhelming. Everything it touches becomes tainted with a stickiness. Panic bursts into sparkling synapses as the tangy sweetness begins to settle in my form.
The smell of bitter citrus and sweet berries and the fruit, my fruit, begins to strengthen. I’m pulled back inwards, deeper and harder.
The grabbing fingers of sticky burning metallic musky honey juice begin to drip into erogyny, fostering a sinful devilish need.
The scratching returns, sharp and insistent, pulling, clawing. The vines grip me tightly and squeeze until I cannot breathe, and I realize all at once that I wasn’t breathing at all, not then, not now. A fruit does not breathe. Not without permission. A fruit grows.
The scratching returns, eager and willing to defile me as it probes an exit that was never designed to behave as an entrance. I try to rut and escape and cry, but I can’t, not without arms and not without a throat. The teasing builds, buzzing and writhing, and I whine at the touch. I feel a sharp piercing burn.
I beg for forgiveness. I like this.
“has crawled inside it”
I feel the tension burst like a ring being stretched, sore and lubricated before it tightens and closes. Every inch of the sliding invasion causes me to hum in crackling pain. I feel the writhing aggressor, rubbing and burning everywhere within me. Soft and slick, and vibrating slightly, starting at the top and working down. My nerves are ignited, and pruned, and replaced.
No, please stop, I can’t take it. I don’t want this. Stop touching me. Please let me go, you wretched monster! The pain is sharp and insistent, an awful permanence. My fear is blossomed, and soothed, and blossomed once more under xer eyes. I feel the colours mix, the red hot burn of shame and arousal bleeding together in drunkenness, a sinful treat that I have come to hoard and covet.
It pulls up and rolls around, and I gasp, vibrating my form. I feel each soft fold of myself, pink and ribbed, tucking and sucking at it, burning in sacrilege, screaming for the unjust release. I’m warming, stiffening.
With each desperate twist, I feel as it transmutes me into something better, something more impure, something selfish and naughty made docile in xer vines.
I try to fight, try to moan, try to pull away just to make it grip me harder, exactly like I want to not want, and each effort is dealt with as soon as it arrives, as if to tell me “stay down. Let me give you what you need.”
I’m burning from top to bottom, and I feel a new type of ache begin.
“and defiled the flower”
Each buzzing slick slide inside me sends another wave of desperation. I want more, faster, harder, but I’m helpless to decide what happens, and I watch inside myself as it increases in tempo, vibrating and stinging and sliding and laying. I can’t escape, and it can’t escape, and we’re both enduring the heady harmony of our designs.
All at once, the sharpness twists into shattering pleasure born from my immovability. My skin is growing tender as the crawling thing inside me swells and releases, and I feel the implanted graft of xer as it grows, until it comes to overtake my entire tree with the fruits of xer labour.
I am full. I am ripe. I am the fig, and Sir, the stinging creature.
I sing the hymns of old and new in screams of blissful terror.
I never stood a chance.

I am reformed.
I try to stand up, but my body slips off kilter.
I almost fall over, but I’m stabilized at the last moment by a vine curling and twisting around something, bracing me and keeping me upright.
“It’s okay angel, I’ve got you.”
The vine slides down and massages gently into my scalp, sending tremors through my spine and down to the tip of my?
A tail.
I have a tail.
How is that possible, I-I don’t think I’m supposed to have one of those. There’s only one possible cause, one power in my life capable of such a transformation.
The thrilling greed of Sir scorning a higher power and clutching the reins of biology in xer grasping vines sends my heart pounding. I’m so far from the embrace that it feels like a long ago island rippling on the horizon. I run my fingers through the length of my tail, soft skin with a cream red blush and a gentle barb on the end. I feel a shiver run all the way down my spine until the barb quivers. I transmute my horror at this violation into devoted adoration that someone so powerful would go through this kind of effort for me. It feels good.
“How’s my little fiend doing?” I’m craning my neck now, trying to look at more of xer monolithic form.
“Mmm wonderful Sir.”
I wrap my tail affectionately around xer vine and coax it forward until xe’s groping my ass, hugging me in carnal delights. It feels much better when the tail slides across the twisting form of dominance than it did to merely stroke it with my fingers. I let out a little yelp as Sir manipulates my cheek with a squeeze that blurs the line between fondling and crushing.
“You look so precious angel, do you want to come look?”
“Please Sir, can I?”
I feel in real time as the sweet honey drips from the fig and rearranges my worries to put my needs at the tip of my tongue. It’s so sweet and so wicked and so irresistible.
Sir sweeps me up and pulls me into a princess carry. I can’t help but mewl in enjoyment as xe moves me over to the mirror, giving teasing strokes to my warm belly and soft thighs along the way. I look at myself, really look, and I’m barely there. It’s me, but changed irrevocably.
My hair is long and ashy and streaky red, the gorgeousness of my wig materialized on my head. My skin is a beautiful flushing alopecia of tainted red with splattering creams and blues, chubby and engorged in righteous glutton, sweet heaving breasts.
My tail swishes with each naughty thought, each devious idea that crosses my mind.
I roll my shoulders, and a perfect set of white feathered wings emerge, the ends tipped in drops of crimson. Soft and feathery and precious, they roll from between my shoulder blades and catch the light at just an angle to project innocence.
And my curling little ram horns, subtle protrusions of a thorn like material, perfect for grabbing and yanking and-“There’s my little fallen angel.”
Sir harshly grips a horn and pulls me into a languid lick that cracks the parchment from xer face as it runs from the base of my chin up to my temple. I whine ferociously in percolating pleasure and nice nasty nerves.
“You’re all mine, little fiend. No one can save you now.”
Xe tightens a grip, grabbing hard onto both of my horns. Xer face cracks into a menacing smile, and I realize just how much of xer papery bark is gone by this point. It paints an image in scarlet and crimson of all the appendages xe uses to taunt me. The vines that tie me up. The vine that feeds me food. The vine that pets my head. The vine that sodomizes me.Sir lifts me off the ground and the breath catches in my throat. I can almost scrape my toe to touch the white moss floor. Barely. I’m helpless. Dangerously vulnerable with no way out. The sensation of being held aloft by a new part of my anatomy is so unnatural, the weight distribution pulling on my newly grown nervous system, sending tingling sparks.
Xe produces a dark flower with petals like oxidized iron, a sharp enticement tucked within. It rests just out of reach and I try to grasp for it.
“Please Sir?”
“Oh, does my little fiend want to play?”
I try and nod, looking up at xer with blistering affection flooding my senses. I resort to a cheeky grin, goading xer to do xer worst. Sir places the bulb within my fingers, and helps me coax the elixir into my thigh. It begins to spread, and I feel as my memory transmutes to allow some of my purity to return, enough to feel worried, scared, frightened by the awe inspiring presence that holds me at an arms length. And yet the need to submit, the desire to take what I need and enjoy what I want still bubbles within me.
“Let’s make all the other florets jealous, flower.”
BANG! Sir hurls me across the room in a precise and careful move designed with a singular purpose, the cold wind whipping through my hair until I come to a smashing stop as I collide with the wall. I scream in cloying agony as a perfect panic begins to take hold. Prophet help me, let me back into the gates of Heavens Hold, let me find the light of divine ascension. The idea begins to transmute.
“You doubted me in this very room, flower.”
I look up with swimming doe eyes, crumpled feathers crushed by the collision between the flush surface and my skin. Prophet is Eugene, a charlatan, a terran. But Sir? Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom? My towering assemblage of parchment power and burning bark? I would do anything to please this awe inspiring force of nature.
“Are you beginning to understand the appeal I might provide?”
I cry in joyous pathetic sobs, the feeling of being so small, so helpless flooding my veins, I want to be whatever xe wants me to be, and I want it so badly.
“Please take me, let me be your pet!”
The honey drips in approval for my display.
“Please Sir, let me worship you, let me make you feel like Prophet.”
I am descended upon in a way that terrifies me, cortisol filling my system, burning me. Heart thumping out of my chest, sending the blood rushing everywhere, especially there.
I feel a CRICK and scream all of the air out of my lungs in a dizzying maneuver as the vine that usually pets my head gently disfigures the tip of my left wing. The pain is rough and jagged, hot and sticky like a throbbing scrape. It’s almost unbearable but so, so intoxicating. Sir fills my vision with those six chasms of blood, those flickering agonies of wanton need.
“You’re doing so good for me.”
Vines encase me in a bubble, a cage of absolution. The power xe has over my body is nothing compared to the power xe holds over my mind. I feel an orgasmic rush of approval and joy at my display.
The vulgar moan erupts from my throat as xe strokes the crevices between my horns and my skull, itself just the faintest expression of my heat. The pain is thrumming, constant and delicious.
All I can do is blubber and whine in an overwhelming wave of conflict. My jaw slack, my whole body slack, xe chuckles and begins to play with my drooling tongue. I feel a shameful rush as I realize the vine that strokes my tongue is the one that usually fucks my ass.
“You look so beautiful, such a bad girl, such a sweet fallen angel. So eager to please.”
A CRUSH pulls another, lower, headier cry from me as the wing is crumpled into a symbol of my place and set to heal. I can’t support myself, but I don’t need to. Sir can hold me. My streaking mess is brought into a comforting embrace. I love xer so deeply, so thoroughly, for showing me the error of my thoughts and rewarding me with sweet honey sadism.
“Just one last touch.”
A pearl white collar clasps around my neck.
Pure and virginal, just like me.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Please Sir, please can we play.”
I’m sitting on Sir’s lap, facing a table laid out with a verifiable luxury of morsels, and a centrepiece fountain of running, dripping melted chocolate. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, strawberries, currants, the juicy flesh of some yellow fruit and cubes of cake all on little plates. The cloying deep haze of rich smells fills me with tingling. But I’m not hungry. Not for food.
“Not yet angel, you need filling.” Xe wraps up my chest in a tightly secured lattice of pale ivory crackling vines, veins of red bursting out from all the spots of fragmentation. With a delicate precision, xe moves in with a tendrilled appendage of woven fingers holding a slice of yellow fruit coated in the sticky sweet confection. Drips of luscious chocolate dot the table and land on my bare thighs.
“No!” I whine, “That’s not what I want right now!”
I smack xer vine out from in front of me and turn my face away with a little frown, paper bark crumbling at my touch to reveal the scarlet interior, rich dark confection splattering across my forearm in speckles and freckles. I can hear xer menacing chuckles vibrate through my core at the futile and petty misbehaviour.
“You naughty sinner, now you’re getting all filthy.”
I wriggle in xer lap, wrapping my tail into the remaining slack from my chest harness and trying to pry it free. I need to push just a little more, and I might be able to end up getting filled in the way I really want. It can be hard to resist such a platter, but I transmute my desire into desire and let out a little humph of dissatisfaction.
“Oh Amber, I worked hard to prepare this decadance for you, and you want to scorn my gift?” I feel the bristling abrasions of a firm maroon vine as Sir starts to coil around my face, pulling me forward to focus on the meal. My captor starts to tighten around me, pushing my breasts into lewd bursting contortions.
I begin to grin. I’ve hit the right buttons, but this isn’t enough for the treatment I’m craving. I flex and breathe deeply against the confines, testing out the limits of my bondage. I can feel the faint movements from xer polytonal vibrations every time xe talks and in every mote of emotional swell. The words and turns gently tickle the base of my nervous system like a feather touch on my arousal, and I start to warm and rise. Want and need start to articulate themselves on a biological level, but I won’t get there without a push. I formulate the exact combination of words that will begin the game.
“You’ll never replace Prophet in my heart. Let me go!”
I feel my face roughly SLAM into the table, mess coating my cheek, and I strain to look up so I can watch as the ashy parchment comes loose to float through the air. There we are.
Sir starts xer reassemblage from chair into tower behind me, keeping my body tightly in place until I can feel xer looming over me. A flower unrolls down the table to land in front of my compressed face. It’s one of my favourites! The petals are dark red like oxidized iron, delicately frilled around the edges concealing a thin sharp needle thorn in a shade that looks just like my wicked horns. The flower that makes me forget. My hands are firmly pulled behind my back by this point, and I can’t reach it. I giggle, and pull, but the flower gets dragged just out of reach. I squirm. Sir’s being so unfair. I beg, grinning the perverse smile of a nasty sinner.
“Please, Sir, please I want it so bad.” A hum of dissatisfaction gloats down on me. “I’m burning Sir, I need it. I need it like you taught me.”
The paradox is clear, and burning. The only way to get it is to admit that I want it, but the moment I have it, the memory of needing it is hidden away. It feels incredible, the erotic ecstasy of losing my innocence again and again.
“You know the rule. If you need desecration, then grasp it firmly by yourself.”
There’s another layer beneath this too, a scarlet charade of consent below the paper white game. I have no way of really knowing that the original want was my own true desire. I’m begging for a flower that will make me forget begging for a flower. What if there was another flower I’d already forgotten that made me beg in the first place? It’s possible that the drive to play this game in the first place was forced upon me by Sir. Anything could’ve happened to me on the journey from Heavens Hold to the Anthemoessa. The idea captures me in tingling arousal just as it gets hidden away.
I extend my tongue as far as it can reach until I feel the sharp pleasure of the needle bite against my sensitive buds. The taste is sweet like honey and bitter like the rind of a grape, spilling from the side to mix with the tiny prick of metallic blood. It pumps into me, through that precious and dexterous tattling mouth muscle into my system, rushing into my veins. I feel as the layers of enlightenment are stripped away until the sin is sucked out of me. With every heartbeat, I remember who I was, with every breath I forget who I’ve become. It’s a divine slumber.
“Let go of me. Let go of me HERETIC!” I feel a vitriolic anger at Cari, that wretched weed that captured me somewhere down the line. The details of how I got here escape me, but I transmute my sinful arousal into righteous fury towards my calloused controller.
“Oh Amber,” xe chuckles, “You petulant little slut. You never realize what you want. But what you want never matters when I know exactly what you need.”
I am swooped into the air by the sodomite's hands, kicking and yelling, feet scraping against vines until smaller tendrils reach out to grip my toes one by one in all encompassing restraint that climbs up my calves to dangle me until I’m facing the ceiling.
“Put me down you wretched evil monster! PROPHET!”
Slithering. Sliding. Persistence. I feel xer solid grip, snakes that grasp and me, the apple. Xe collects my hair into a thousand little grasps and tugs my head back. I scream out to Heavens Hold and a set of smaller tendrils lock onto my lower jaw to keep my mouth open, teasing my tongue and gripping my lips. I smell the sour berries and the cloying honey, the bitter orange citrus of a set of plugs that press deep into my nose.
“Don’t worry my precious fallen angel,” xer face is starting to move in synchronicity with xer voice, peeling pearly paper right into my ear. “Well a little, but that is the game we like to play.”
I try to ignore the sinful ways this force of foliage is making me feel, twisting those emotions into pious strength. “Under his eyes the Prophet will damn you, you can’t just do this to me!”
I hear the sound of running thick fluid and feel the subtle movements of a swirling vine. There’s a distinctly intoxicating smell like bitter berry tannins and roasted caramel and sweet milk that can only mean chocolate. My cries are snuffed out as an appendage cradling a serving of warm sticky melted cocoa pours it into my gaping mouth!
I panic as the thick coating tickles my gums and washes my tongue in layers and layers and layers over every surface, gurgling on my uvula and sputtering between my teeth. Explosions of bitter creamy sweetness envelop me in hedonism and indulgence.
Xe slides across my chin and holds my neck just so, exactly enough that I can’t swallow, nor aspirate. Drooling streaks of dessert run down my cheeks and I realize in a panic that I am beginning to drown in unholy glutton.
“Now, precious fiend, there’s something I’ve come to learn while you were asleep”
I beg and pray, no, stop, please stop. I try and fail to dislodge the wicked treat, clenching my diaphragm. My efforts are in vain, causing some of the dessert to spread down my chin in an embarrassing display and nothing more. The realization flashes across me that Cari is unimaginably strong. There’s nothing I could do to stop xer from snapping me in half. I imagine myself from the outside, an out of body vision. I must look so absurd, so messy, so needy and fragile. I feel a warmth building.
“There’s a member of Heavens Hold that we have yet to locate. And you were the last person to see her.”
Enforcer. Oh stars. A small burst of A-infused oxygen runs down my nose in a honey dripped hug of pins and needles that transmute my petrification into perversion. I try to think of her blonde hair pulled back, her clicking heels, her permission, grace, decorum. I try to remember where I last saw her. It’s hard to think of anything but the screaming tickling panic.
“And of course, I could extract the information fairly easily. But this is so much more delightful don’t you think?”
A thick cushioned pad coated in tiny little feelers begins to push my growing clit against my pubic bone, forcefully and slowly pushing up and down. I feel a frightful shame as I remember moments when I strayed from the path, humiliating nights with a pillow pressed between my thighs, gentle rocking administrations. Suddenly my mouth is slid shut, and a stroking vine runs down my neck. I impulsively swallow under a training beyond my conscious mind, and gasp for air. The rapid breath is practically orgasmic in and of itself, and the rubbing on my parts becomes more persistent, more sinful. Xe expects an answer from me.
“Never! I’ll never tell you.”
I feel a yanking on-on my horns, oh my Prophet WHEN DID I GROW HORNS. Please forgive me please forgive me, and the soft squishy pad begins to excrete something slick, mixing with my pre to create a slippery surface of taunting touches.
Stroking up to my sensitive hood and caressing in on my tip, then running down my shaft, closer, firmer. Rippling pleasure bursting forth, as another aerosolized burst soaks sour berries into my nostrils to twist the tough treatment into tingling need.
“No, I think you will. After all, you’re such a good girl. My honeyed fig, my little tattle tale.”
The violating iron vines on my face find my chin, and I try to keep everything clenched up, but it’s impossible to fight a power with this kind of strength. My mouth is contorted and leveraged open, wide for xer machinations. A little gripper clamps my tongue with a gentle stroke, shaking it in a humiliating wiggle just to show me how out of control I am at this moment. Another scoop of chocolate fills me up, and once again I’m trapped utterly and completely.
Just above my head, xe twirls a juicy red strawberry held precisely by the green stem. With a simple plunge the berry fills my gaping mouth, and a second later it’s out again, coated in that dark russet river of flavour. Another twirl sends a splatter of chocolate running down the bridge of my nose and into my frowning brow. As quickly as it arrived it departs, moving away from my limited sightlines.
I can’t want this, can I? It’s not possible for a person to like being treated this way, is it? The tiny grippers inside the spongy pad run maddening circles under my foreskin. Surely this is some kind of Affini trick designed to make a saint into a sinner. A devil's gambit to stray me from the path.
Another release of my throat, another stroke of my neck, another unchosen swallow, another gasp for air, another burst of blissful aerosolized euphoria in sweet bitter citrus down my nose. I push down my terrible urge to groan and spit out an insult at my sexually exploitative tormentor.
“You monster, you’ll never break my spirit!” I try desperately to rip my hands free but the effort is expended in futile exhaustion. Stars, my body is betraying me, rising from disgrace into rock solid surrender.
“You’re gonna love this part, you always do angel.” I can practically smell xer brilliant red grin.
Curling out from the centre of the soft petal pad between my legs, a thick sticky inseminator, strong but squishy. I can feel the rush of sensation as it grips my clit for a firm pump before it decides to slither down as if by a mind of its own.
“Wait, I’m sorry, maybe,” I quiver in a trembling moan, “maybe I could remember.”
The rutting phallus makes a lazy swirl around the area where my testicles used to be before settling on my perineum.
“Oh? You think you might remember now angel?”
A slow, persistent pressing forces my midzone inwards until the area gives way in a burst of slippering secret desire. I have a-a-the word spills into my mind and I instantly shut it down. I try desperately to stop myself from crying out in pleasure, transmuting my hot mouth into tight lips.
“Mhm. Yes I-auhhh I know.”
Firm, constant, uninterrupted, the special vine thrusts into me and oh stars, I feel the expansion and contraction of my slick canal as something exits a place that was designed to be entered, and I want-I need, whatever this is.
“Watching you squirm and transmute into my little fallen angel anew every time, well I wouldn’t quite call it pleasure, not the kind you’re feeling right now, but the way your muscles clench and finally relax,”
I’m gripped so tightly I might turn blue, then loosened just a millimeter, blood pumping back through my extremities. Somehow I do exactly as Sir said and relax slightly against them.
“It makes my core vibrate in a chorus of satisfaction that would make even the everbloom blush.”
Prophet, please help free me from this twisting pleasure prison, please forgive me. The vine doesn’t slide back in. Instead, my entire body is lowered onto it, sending a rippling wave of joy bursting into me. The pad starts to slide once more, a pumping rhythm of sparkling crackling lustful sin. I whine out in a needy moan that shakes my ribcage.
“Oh yes, we were in the middle of a confessional.” Xer tone hardens. “Where did she go?”
I can’t betray Prophet, I can’t! I growl deeply in panicked hunger and try to string the words together.
“She-went, oh fu-she went to the dining hall”
SLASH A whipping rope of vines bisects across my back through the space between my broken wings, and I scream in painful pleasure, burning bleeding agonizing joy.
“Now I know that’s not true Amber. Do you want to try again petal?”
The sliding is burning in a cascade of wants into needs into wild abandon.
I’m lifted above so only the tip remains within my cunt, and held in this dangerous moment. I shatter like my wings. Whatever this beast wants, xe can have. I need xer approval far more than I need dignity or faith.
“Oh fuck, I can’t do this, please, I-please,” I’m slowly lowered back onto the appendage, and the tendrils securing my horns gently stroke down them, massaging them in synchronicity with the pulsing pleasure mass, radiating honeyed satisfaction from my tip down to my toes.
“Hearing you swear for the first time never gets old.”
I’m bursting with eruptive closeness. What a foul thing for me to do. But I can tell I wanted to do it so badly.
I’m dragged up and down in the air like an impish ragdoll, crying out in cardinal coloured exhilaration everytime I get filled, disturbed by how much I can take. How can something be so wrong and so right at the same time? I’m drenched in sweat and sticky fluids running my senses out of my body, and the label sticks to my soul.

Fornicator.

I am a filthy, plantfucking fornicator.
“She went to find Claudia. Oh fuck oh fuck, stars and mulch, she wasn’t in temple because I told her to look for-please keep fucking me, because I told her to save Claudia! We have a-mmmm, we have a bunker in the woods. She must’ve gone there!”
Through my nose plugs I can smell the music of an ancient god. An insanity inducing, powdery pollinating, star seeing, euphoric lung fucking burst of drugs pushes me into a madness of my own creation, shattering away the barriers between the then and the now, and my wicked inclinations rush into me once more, the feeling of being caressed and massaged from the inside out forcing a cackling mewling screech of sexual abandon out of me.
We’re moving through space, but the thrusting doesn’t stop, not for a second. I want so badly to explode, and with my faculties returned I try to dig and rut my ass into Sir’s embrace, but a cool honey keeps pulling me back. I watch as xe plunges my N/G needle into the strawberry, a dribble of honey nectar sliding over the surface as it retracts.
I’m tumbling onto the soft fabric of our bed, gleeful at the bruises rubbing into my body. I can think of nothing by my explosive devotion to the higher power who rips confessions from my feeble mind and forces me to betray the people I once worshiped. Xe is a chorus of perfect harmonies, an undying monument of enormous grandeur, a kind and deliberate master of ceremonies who I will love to my dying day.
I’m on my hands and knees, lashing ropes of scarlet holding me in place so the only movements I can make are an arching thrust back and forward. I stare deeply into xer sextupling eyes, a lifeline in my urgent storm only visible due to an inhuman reconfiguration that allows xer to continue fucking me while xer head bobs in front of my own.
“I love you Sir.”
Several nights ago, Sir had explained to me the unique fragility of xer vines when exposed to certain oils and acids on Terran skin. My blood soaked sap baths ensure that only xer outermost layer sheds while maintaining the maroon core I covet in this moment. I begin to openly weep as I feel those precious vines cradling me, my beloved sodomizing probe forcing itself into my ass, filling me even further.
“Amber, Amber, Amber. My hellion fire. I promise to destroy you a thousand times.”
Wracking, desperate sobbing moans fill the air. I need to cum so badly, so desperately.
Sir dangles the strawberry in front of my mouth, and I pull all the way out. Stinging sharp thorns draw blood in waving lines across my back.
I cry out for mercy.
I take a bite and SLAM myself back onto the padded graft and slender ass vine in a vision destroying moment of transcendence, finally ending my ritual desecration.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

I rub myself idly through the fabric of my black velvet leotard, feeling myself stiffen in the warm air as I watch the florets walking past being doted by their owners in various states of undress. To deny myself a need would be a wicked sin, Sir says. And so I must never keep my hands to myself. I wouldn’t want to disappoint under xer eyes. I look for a target.
Skipping over with a pious giggle, I tap him three times on the shoulder and when he turns, I bow in introduction.
“Amber Moraficus, Fourth Floret! She/Her…” I let my words pitter out as I look at the ground, and twiddle my fingers with a deviously innocent look.
“Woah uh, that’s quite the biomods. Look, I’m not really looking to hook up with a floret, sorry.”
He wants to deny my need. He thinks I’m unworthy. He is being sinful. My eyes begin to water.
“I- I just wanted to say hello…” He feels guilty, but only a little. Just enough. I can tell he’s getting flustered. Ooh, this is fun. He nervously adjusts his auburn locks, pulling his bangs out from his eyes and averting his gaze. I can see the gears turning, calculating the best next move.
“Oh shoot, sorry.” He’s narrowing in now, channeled into a pathway like a pack animal sent scattering. But he thinks he sees an exit. Perhaps he can play this off as a misunderstanding.
“Amber was it? Amber. Apologies, I thought you wanted to have sex.”

And so it begins.

“Would that be a bad thing?”
I have him in my snare. If he says no, then I’ll get to play and he’ll realize how much fun florets can be. If he says yes, then I’ll get to tattle. It’s not about coercion, certainly not for sex. I can get that whenever I want. It’s about the little tease, the subtle twisting. I only play this game with independents who look like they need the push off the cliff. Which is to say, most of them.
“Well I, it’s just, yes it would. It would probably be bad. For me I mean, uh. Shit.”
Trying to find a way out now. Oh, the wriggling is really beginning as he tries to transmute his cage into an escape.
“But Sir says it’s just natural and we shouldn’t deny our needs- Xe says I’m a good girl.” I sear him with my innocence. Almost there, looking over the edge. There’s something burning up in him.
“Damn weeds and their sexed up pets! You’ll never break the spirit of free terra!”

Bingo.

I skip away, leaving the fuming future floret to flounder. I feel the tickling warmth of righteousness tugging at my belly, warming me up, rushing my blood. I love my place, xer little fiend, xer sweet fallen angel.
Prancing along, my tail swings steadily back and forth through the back slit in my revealing outfit, bouncing in salacious synchronicity with my tender bruised tits. I love how this look allows me to proudly display the marks of my struggles, tracks of puncture marks and lines of vine lashes mingling atop the violet and cream alopecia of my ash cherry skin. I am a wonderfully wicked creature.
The tickling bump of my graft drips honey into my spine, an agreement with my self appraisal. It likes when I align a want with a need, and right now, my want to self love is aligned with my need to display the markings of my inner heretic.
Turning back from the core ring spiral towards Sir’s home, I finish up my datapad report on the scary boy who shouted feralist nonsense just as I feel a snapping sensation whip up my back. I instinctively yelp from the unexpected agony, transmuting it into a whiny moan of pleasure as I realize Sir has snuck up on me.
“There you are flower, getting into trouble?” Xer voice is rich and textured, masculine and feminine notes layered atop each other.
“Yes Sir!”
“That’s my girl.”
An unravelling sheet of parchment slides across my curling horns and begins to steer me off course towards a spiraling street we’ve never traveled down before.
“Wait wait, where are we going? I had plans today, Sir!”
“Grinding against the furniture and sending unsolicited messages to unsuspecting independents is hardly what I’d describe as plans, fun though it might be to watch. I need to do some important work, so Miss Passiflor has volunteered to keep an eye on you.”
I’d heard the name in passing, though Claudia just called her Mistress. In another life, I might’ve been her floret instead. I feel the pious assurance of my destiny, Sir’s special troublemaker. I’ll try and be on my best behaviour.
In due time we arrive, though I can’t help but resist or stumble along the way to earn a few yanks on my horns or sharp smacks on my ass. I hope Sir isn’t gone for long.
Her form is almost iridescent, and it’s strange, though I’ve never personally interacted with her, the hum is like a vestigial memory, pulling me back into that moment a lifetime ago when I stood trembling in Claudia’s shackhouse.
Her hab is far softer than Sir’s, plush fluffy carpets and splattering rainbow paintings on the walls, undertones of reflective pearlescence and curvy deco.
“Amber!!!” Claudia rushes over and squishes me into a hug, and I wrap my arms and tail around her in a crushing embrace. The emotional reconnection makes up for every stoic cross-legged exchange we had in the life before, and it communicates more than those words ever did.
We sit on the carpet, nestled in the soft fluffy texture and flow in conversation, catching up our escapades. We elaborate on topics we had glazed through on our datapads until a pearly vine places a steaming tray between us. The wide circular flatbread is sliced into triangles. It’s covered in rich tomato sauce and layers of gooey yellow and white cheese, speckled with crispy brown burnpoints. My brow arches slightly in curiosity.
“Wait, Cari doesn’t let you have pizza?” She sounds incredulous.
“I guess not.”
“So what, do you eat like salads?”
“Oh. I see. No, something this simple would be far too austere for our usual meal time.” I can’t help but giggle as I realize the misunderstanding.
“But this is like a special occasion food! What do you mean?”
“My breakfast was a camembert omelette with lobster tail, cultivated from a Martian subspecies with enriched flavour from the gravity differential, slices of cold smoked fish, crisped potatoes, fried peppercorn, cooked in a butter sauce and topped with roe.”
“Frost. Amber, that’s insane.”
“It’s sinful, but Sir really likes to see me squirm I guess.”
Claudia’s mistress has returned, rainbow glittering on my peripheral.
“Petal, if it’s not to your taste I could always compile you something a little richer?”
“No! No no no, this looks heavenly. I want to try pizza. Thank you Miss.” I enjoy being a menace, but I know the rules, and I promised to be a good girl for Sir while xes away. Miss Passiflor is an Enforcer who has given me permission. It’s not playtime, and I need to show respect.
I take a bite of the crispy bread and soft cheeses, and it sweeps me away. It might not be the gluttonous game that Sir puts me through, but it’s a delight.
We get back to gossiping.
“Ooh I heard that Enforcer is still out there somehow!” I giggle as I remember my confessional. I hope I get assaulted again soon, I need that rush of fear like I need the bitter citrus tinge of xer oxygen.
“No updates yet on Eugene,” she adds, “but he’s definitely on the Anthemoessa somewhere. We’ll have to table any chit-chat about him for now, Mistress doesn’t like it when I dwell for too long.”
“It’s not good for you to have so many thoughts, petal!”
“Yes Mistress!”
We finish the meal, punctuating the bites with talk of Darin and vague updates on Nadin.
A curling iridescent vine strokes behind her ear and I can see the moment her implant twists inside her, topping her up and preparing her for the next course of our afternoon. Her eyes dilate wider, thick black orbs in the centre of a crackling green ring. She lets out a signing moan of contentment as the fingerlings catch between her hairs, and I feel a momentary pang of jealousy before Miss Passiflor indulges me as well with a shivering indulgent head pat, far softer and sweeter than Sir, but still satisfying.
I can no longer control myself, and I lunge upon her. She lets out a gasp of approval, and I dive into a forceful kiss, holding her wrists above her head. Our lips collide and I part them with my tongue, rolling it across hers in a battle for domination.
I can feel her hot breath soaking out from her nose into the creases of my face, and I let out a slow growl. I take a deep inhale of my own, indulging in the mingling of sweetpea and girl-sweat that marks her as the property of her Mistress. But for now, for this one moment of pre-fuck prowess, she is mine. I break the kiss and chew on her lower lip, drawing a sharper whine from her body.
“Not so big anymore, huh?”
I release one of her hands so I can leverage my body weight into a restraining thigh grip around her tummy, and I try my luck. I give her a soft slap across the face, just enough to make a tingling sound, not enough to cause any pain. She gasps and comes back from the haze of endorphins and xenopharmacological enhancement just a little.
“I asked you a question, Claudia.”
“I think you’d be surprised what I’m capable of little Amber.”
She tries to push up, but I clench down on her round waist. I release her other grip, confident in my position, and I begin running my hands down the sides of her silk soft breasts, taking full advantage of the gaps in her floret dress.
“So Claudia, did you learn anything interesting on that pad before you got here? Any fun methods for the improvised release of those carnal urges?”
“Oh Amber, you have no idea.”
Releasing her hands was a mistake. With a playful shove to the shoulders I’m thrust onto my back, and we quickly become a tangle of limbs. In the blur for control I’m spinning around, at one moment holding her down and squeezing her tits, the next I’m getting rough scratch marks along my back, and then I’m back to forcing my tongue deep into her throat. Eventually my smooth powerful tail grants the advantage, clenching her upper thigh in a tight grip until the barbed end slides under her panties to rest on her flushed wet slit.
I send a satisfied shiver down into her, eliciting a deep sound of satisfaction. I press my horns into the carpet, hovering above her with a sacrilegious look in my eyes.
“N-no, that’s cheating!”
She tries to reach up and kiss me, but she can’t quite reach. She frowns in playful frustration, and tries again.
“You don’t seem to mind.”
I feel a winding wrap from the base of my head up both of my curling horns, and my upper body is gently tugged into a vertical axis by the outside force of a technicolor referee. I twist and squirm at the injustice. She was mine to claim! I want to grab her right now and fuck her into oblivion.
“Sorry Amber, it looks like you’re outnumbered.” Claudia wriggles her way out from under me and resettles herself in a kneeling prayer position right in front of me.
“Hey, that's not fair!”
I swing my arms out and try to free myself until my indignant frustration is transmuted into docile obedience. Despite my wants, my thighs slacken in acceptance. I take in her brilliant green eyes, her soft milk skin. She, like I, was always destined for defilement.
“You don’t seem to mind!” She throws my own words back in my face. “What you really need is to be put in your place.”
The grip loosens, and Claudia shoves me down onto the soft rug, planting me in my place with a kiss on the forehead. I feel Miss Passiflor’s reflective leafy vines running up my arms, binding them against my sides. I’m trapped, though I continue to struggle.
Her dress is up and over her head with the help of her mistress, underwear gone. She whimpers as the flickering colours of light smear across her face to pull her hair and tuck it back behind her ears. I see her once more as I did back then, but so much better. Thick brown nipples, the softness of a holy blessing, a richness of humanity that was trapped in a tight red dress for far too many years.
She straddles me, and I’m ushered into her, burning hot wetness yielding to my firm clit, clenching down, and I feel as though I am committing the sin myself. She sucks in a long, languid breath and she lets it out in a heavy, slow whine. I can do nothing but watch as the heresy unfolds.
This primal act of copulation, even though I’ve become somewhat experienced with it over the past few weeks, still feels so raw and human that despite its lack of elaborate bondage or sodomizing intrusions it somehow feels more perverse than the violent delights I indulge in with Sir. She treasures my forbidden object. She clasps it in her with wanton sacrilege, and my legs are trapped by another twinning of colourful confinements.
I look up at her perfect face, once so authoritative, and I grit my teeth in a burning sobbing moan as I watch Miss Passiflor wind a set of thin tendrils deep into her ears. Her eyes fully glaze over and start to sag upwards as all thoughts but her raw thudding pleasure and her all powerful mistress evacuate themselves entirely from her conscious mind. I become nothing but an accessory to their private game. I’m stuck underneath her and I’m nothing but a toy, a facet for the extraction of pleasure. She sinks down deeply and then, with a gentle tendril stroke on her thigh, she lifts up until only the tip of my head remains held.
I hear, somewhere in the distance, a humming giggling coo of her mistress's satisfaction. She plunges back down and we find a rhythm, no, she finds a rhythm, for I am nothing more than an instrument.
I am lust incarnate, greed in human form, an indulgent gluttony, a stuck sloth unleashing my wrath, and I envy her position, I wish that my owner were here too to oppress me with xer pride, to flood the very shadows of the valley upon my fickle mind.
There is a pounding upon the temple door with every thoughtless drag of her hefting body up, a breaking of the rainbow glass with every thoughtless press of her ass down into my hips.
And then I realize. Without Sir, there is no release. I cannot complete my desecration without the lick of the petal and the sting of the needle.
“Please Miss, please you don’t understand.”
She ignores me completely, keeping me pinned in my place, and Claudia is so lost in the parish of a blissful mindfuck to even notice me, to even register the cruelty she’s extracting.
I’m burning, red hot, holy fires of fury, and everytime I try to jump off the ledge I’m yanked back and slammed into a wall of warm pressing cheeks on my thighs and firm knees holding on my waist. Her hands rest just below my sternum, sweet and small and tickling. I try to focus on them as her mouth droops open to let out sigh after unfocused sigh of satisfaction.
I realize now, well and truly, that only xe can grant me permission. Only Sir will ever give me that. Xe would never allow someone else that privilege. I’m fucked. Well and truly fucked. I don’t want this, I want release, I want burned bridges of unfathomable euphoria and without it, those soft touches on my tummy and hot sticky drags on my clit become more violent and forceful than any blade or thorn.
As I reach yet another uncrossable threshold it’s her, and not me, who gets to cum. She screams in sacrament as soaking wetness pools down her legs and collects on mine. The vines slowly withdraw from the folds of her brain, dribbling amber sap down her ears as I sob in dissatisfaction.
She cups my face with a gentle feather kiss on my tear stained lips, and collapses into a cuddle by my side.

I’m slowly awoken from a light rest by the oil slick rainbow caress of Miss Passiflor on my horns. There’s a soreness that’s buried itself deep beneath the spot where my now flaccid clit rests. The ache of unmet needs.
“Amber petal, your Owner has returned to the Anthemoessa. It’s time to head home.”
I disassemble myself from Claudia's embrace to allow her mistress to delicately cradle her sleeping body, lifting her up from our improvised resting spot on the shag carpet. After swaddling her in a chaste robe of shimmering three point leaves she briefly departs for another room.
Returning alone, we depart her home for Sir’s grand temple. I’ve never been outside during the night cycle before, at least not in a state of lucidity. Thousands of tiny prickles of light glow on the curling rings like the far away operations of the mining town, or like the stars from the stories Nadin would tell, constellating beacons that make me feel like I’m falling upwards. The towering structure of the core ring’s artificial mountain runs a string of guiding glows to its peak.
This impossible place outdoes any vision that Eugene could conjure in a prophecy.
I arrive home and slip inside. The chandeliers are dim, but I can smell the bitter citrus and cloying honey of my beloved saviour, and so I run. The smell alone is enough to return my needy unmet desires, I want release, and I need to beg.
“Sir, you’re home!” I chirp into the shadows.
I feel the gentle buzzing of a creature nestled within my skull, a focusing demand to settle down.
“Sir you’re home, I missed you so much.” I whisper.
Xer form is modified, a wide banding swaddle of scarlet vines across xer chest. I see it move ever so slightly.
“I’ll be with you in just a moment, my little fallen angel.”
Xe heads through a doorway into a private space, and I’m left alone. The sweet juice of berries and the faint metallics of honey remind me of Sir’s intimate touch, xer harsh constrictions, and I feel my hunger pressing into desperation. My groping fingers are proving insufficient, and I resort to the towering kitchen chairs.
I hug the dark leg and begin to press myself into it, the hard wooden structure is an inadequate replacement for the true sensation of a living vine, but it at least provides me with an embarrassing distraction. I roll my hips up and in, then back down and out with a moan that’s barely audible.
Sir exits the room that was never designed for my entrance. Xer body is back to its usual construct now and I strain my head up the heights of xer incredible form. My deity. My everything. Sir has several long stretches of crimson without parchment. Wherever xe were, it clearly required a rigorous exertion.
“Well someone’s happy to see me.”
I let go of the chair leg and begin crawling over, my tail lashing the air in excitement.
“Please Sir, please I need it. Claudia was so-I just need it.”
“And hardly any fight left in you. I suppose that’s for the best, my fiend, I’ll be a bit preoccupied this evening.”
“No Sir, stars, please let me feel the sting of the needle” I’m almost weeping from my dire state.
“Soon. But for tonight I think not.”
Sir begins to walk towards my pathetic sniffling body, and I make contact with xer rich immortal iron depths, the six soul searching beacons atop xer glorious form.
Xe hums a polytonal chuckle. A single vine extends the 10 feet between xer and I, thick and strong. It curls back and whip cracks in the air with a SNAP.
Paper rains down around me as the sound shatters the barrier between want and need, and I collapse in consumate bliss, fully untouched if not for the rapidly soaking black leotard holding my throbbing clit tightly against my hips. Dangerously overdue dopamine screams through my body as I keen over, thrusting myself into nothingness as the terrifying reality of xer control over my biology grips me hard with an invisible hand. I humiliate myself with crying moans from far, far below xer in stature and station. I can barely see, hardly breathe, but that’s exactly how I like it.
I’m fully lying on the ground now, on my back, and I look up at Sir, pulses of pleasure jetting out of me, rolling across my body. I look into those eyes, xer face is upside down from my position and quickly cracking into a satisfied smirk. I gasp, filling my lungs, the fragrant air bringing with it another aftershock. I feel as xe bundles me up tightly, lifting me high from the ground with tendrils outstretched to avoid sullying xerself with my dribbling messes.
I can barely utter a few words of thankful adoration as my higher power carries me. I travel in a blur through an undressing, a hot blood red bathing, whispers of condescension and careful cruelty. I love xer. I love xer so fully and completely, held atop all others in my heart.
I’m tossed into Sir’s satin bed, a rare treat. I begin to sprawl out as I hear xer talk.
“Things are going to change, but I promise you’re still my special fallen angel. Nobody could ever replace you under my watchful eyes, but I’m going to need you to be my good girl. My observant little fiend. I want to see your guiding hand and corrupting influence so we can make sure our new petal ends up happy here.”
I’ve heard about this before, a sharing of blessings where one reports to another until it finally reaches a watchful gaze and a path to salvation. I’ve never heard the name for it until this exact moment.
“Connivents.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

32

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the one whose sin the lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit.

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away, through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Therefore let all the faithful pray to you while you may be found; surely the rising of the mighty waters will not reach them.

You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.

Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you.

Many are the woes of the wicked, but the lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him.

Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!

My heart pounds in my chest. The sounds of my connivent screaming in terrible delight punctuate the silence and echo in my mind, warm sticky memories of my arrival. She will break as quickly as I did, of that I am certain. I twist and wiggle on the satin fabric of Sirs bed where I’ve been left, her sobbing cries melting into slippery moans. We are kin. Perfect terrors, alike in our needs, although she has not yet identified her wants.
“She’ll need a little space to rest and process everything. We’ll have to let her sleep in the guest room tonight, but she’ll be cuddled up at the foot of the bed with you in no time.”
Xer voice is one of blissful multitonals, a verbal rainbow, a scarlet letter of smattering sounds.
“Okay Sir,” I try to hide my disappointment. “It just means I get you all to myself.”
I nuzzle in close to xer sweet honey and bitter citric vines, and I resist them as they pool around my limbs in kneading constrictions, teasing and pinching my calf muscles, forcefully holding my posture in a perfect state of floating detachment.
I feel my worry transmute into exhaustion.I feel my fear transmute into relaxation.I feel my panic transmute into love.Xer vines are warm, heavy, and secure as iron. I allow rest to consume me.
The fizzling electrostatic behind my eyelids has a green hue now, flickers of colour where once there was only white. The mixing of colours is a terrible immodest sin.
I’m plagued by nightmares, fears so deep they probe my soul, evading the sap from my spine. From within the clutches of darkness and slumber my mind is cast towards Prophet. He’s on the Anthemoessa somewhere, Claudia told me so. He hasn’t been seen. What if he escaped? I can feel his gaze burning into me as the implant tries to reassert itself. If he spoke the gospel of truth then he would have the power to end this paradigm. What if this is all a test, a calculation of loyalty made through the aid of a seer’s elixir, a wonderful, terrible, sinful fantasy constructed from a tincture placed within the wine of ascension, what if I’ve debased myself in a humiliating act of perversion in front of everyone? What if, what if, what if, the horrors of before, are the realities of now and the bliss of my owner is just a lie, and I’ve failed, I’ve failed, I can’t fail I’ve already sacrificed so much I can’t do it I can’t lose another I just can’t I-
I wake up gasping, shivering, vines rapidly loosening, and behind me I feel a blistering buzzing glowing warmth. The bed sinks lower in a heavy dance of shifting papery bark and slithering hope. I’m pulled into a hug, behind me and in front of me at the same time, leaving xer chest pressed against my back while xer head curls around to face me in the front.
I feel the singeing hot song of a comforting hymn pulsing into me, vibrating in my bones. It’s so peaceful. So comforting in its emptiness. So filling in its heat, pressing through my feathery shoulder blades down into my chest. I gaze into xer abyssal depths with unrestrained admiration. The birch bark has fully peeled from the false nose down, smooth milky red cheeks and a scarlet slit mouth with just a blindfold of cracking white around the forehead and eyes reaching up to xer perfect mossy brown imagining of curly hair.
“My precious fallen angel, what’s wrong?”
The pulsing retracts as xe moves xer core away from my broken wings, and my mind clears, and I’m pulled into myself, emotions crashing back into my senses.
“He was there, and- and- I can’t. You’re my universe, and I want to give you all of me, every part. I can feel the sweet dripping pull of you. It keeps me wonderfully wicked, and it helps me twist into a more imperfect form.”
I gulp back my tears, the stinging shame of an incomplete pet. I must speak the truth, a confessional is an act of courage.
“But his words. It was all I knew for so many years. So much of me was constructed under his eyes. It runs so deeply in my foundations. And in the quiet of night, in the places where I’m not even thinking, he tries to take me away from you. The lessons of the past whisper at me. They say I’m a wicked, wicked girl who strayed from the light of his embrace. When my thinking mind rests, the creeping ideals, his vision of what I’m supposed to be? Innocence and purity cast me in an ugly light.”
I tremble as the words spill from me, and I reach out to hug tightly onto xer crimson tendrils, resolute pillars of compassionate retribution.
“I’m good, aren’t I? Please tell me I’m a good girl, I need to know I’m not a monster. Because right now. Right now I feel like an awful person.”
I shudder as the cooling rush of a red sea parts my worries, drenching me in warbling calm from the tip of my spine to the base of my toes.
“You are a monster. You’re my monster. And you’re not a person. You’re my pet.”
“Please help me, Sir. I can’t handle twisting anymore. You, just you, only you, just give me you and nothing else. Please let me forget that man.”
“Oh flower, my little fiend, I’m gonna make things right.”
I feel a pulsing constriction slide around my neck, twisting into loops like a noose, closing off my airways until I’m desperate, struggling and yanking and flailing on the satin sheets. I’m done for. It’s all over. Help me, please help me!
“Hush, hush now. It’s going to be okay.”
A pale yellow flower with large circular petals and a prickle fuzz texture clamps tightly around my mouth and nose, smashed into the sides of my face and held there with a grip of impossible strength. Finally the vine on my neck relents.
I gasp, desperate for air, and I’m hit with an explosion of rich honeysuckle and dripping juicy berries, sharp bitter citrus that coats the inside of my sinuses. My eyes go wide with panic and desperation as I feel my limbs grow heavy and numb like rocks thrown into a fast moving river. At long last, my thoughts grow as still as my body, and I disappear into the twilight nothing.
I choke through the fog as I walk through the mists of great temptations. I know on some primal level the plans Xe has for me, plans to give me hope and a future through a reassembly of the past.

I sit across from Enforcer Serena, legs crossed, in a daily ritual.
As Connivent, I need to pay close attention to everything she tells me.
“Sir only cares about our wellbeing. Understood?”
“Yes Big.”
“You can just call me Amber, Serena. I can tell that Sir is pleased with your journey. It won’t be long before you’ll have a collar of your own.”
The idea sparkles in my brain. The culmination of everything. To be worthy of xer blessing is an incredible feeling. To be granted the honour of overseeing my connivent is-I don’t feel worthy. But under xer eyes, all is possible.
“Under xer eyes, all is possible.” She says, as if echoing my thoughts, though I can tell she still harbors doubts. But I’m in control now, insofar as any floret has control over anything.
“Serena?” I ask, “What troubles you?”
Sir deserves devotion. I watch the conflict of an inner heretic, and I extinguish it.
“I’m worried about Cari. Xe’s so powerful, and I can feel myself slipping into xer desires so easily. You’ve changed so much you’re barely even human. I’m scared, is that going to happen to me?”
“You did the right thing by telling me. I know it can be hard to remain impure in the face of so much false doctrine. May Sir fill you with righteous pride.”
“Amber,” I sense her wrongful guilt. “I don’t want to fight this. I-I can’t fight this. The power xe wields is so strong. Help me get there.”
I smile a wicked grin as the approval drops into my bloodstream from the tingling implant grafted into me. Give her what she needs, even if it isn’t what she wants.

I step into the metal shack and collect myself. The table of messy crafting materials, the sewing machine and fabric strips, it reminds me of her. She had to go away, a victim of unfitting righteousness, but I feel a warm honey comfort in the knowledge that maybe we’ll be reunited one day.
I slip into a sharp crimson dress with a plunging back, a deep dark red. With a gentle press, my feet slide into the black patent shoes and I depart from the place that I called home, leaving it behind for the final time.
The gravel crumbles beneath my feet with a sharp clatter as I make my way down the steep passage towards the orchard. The hot suns bare down on me, but I don’t break a sweat.
The curving landscape clutches down on me in dark streaks, an ominous looming of my old life, and as I walk in the valley in the shadow of death I feel the beginning of the end, the funeral procession of a boy who I no longer recognize, and I fear no evil, for what great horror could compare to that of my awesome protector.
I step between the rows of berry brambles and allow them to brush against my outstretched fingers, the soft fuzzy fruits and the sharp thorns beckoning me deeper inwards. I pass Claudia, picking the blessings with her wicker basket.
I feel blessed that Sir would divine such a thing to occur. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and the berries of the orchard are a divine sublimation. The smell is rich with sour juices, and by xer fruit I recognise xer eyes watching me as I walk further into the garden
I see my connivent by the crab apple trees. The branches extend far into the sky, providing shelter from the light. It’s a paradox that slides off my brain in a haze of honey, but the limbs are flush with wide soft fuchsia petals and the buds of new growth and engorged with ripe apples at the same time, all the blessings of spring and summer combined.
“They look so beautiful.” I gaze up at the brilliant colours, and try to reassure her.
“Amber, are we safe here?” She focuses on me, firm and trepidatious.
I feel the ever presence, the majesty of xer power. The generous warmth that Sir grants us. The gratitude for xer almighty wisdom.
“There is nowhere more safe than xer embrace.”
I reach for the apple, its matte skin a rosy colour.
“We shouldn’t, we’re not supposed to.”
Hearing it from someone else, stars, it’s like I finally understand how wrong it is. The harvest is just xer second greatest gift. We, the parish, are xer first. We’re more important than any given apple.
“I know we shouldn’t,” I reply, “but we’re owed so much more than just the things we’re supposed to have. It’s wrong. We should be able to enjoy the things we deserve to have.”
“It's about dignity, Amber.” She retorts.
“Where is the dignity in deprivation? I’ve found so much more dignity in a state of earnest debasement than I ever achieved in dishonesty piety.”
No harm can come to us in this place that we have not gleefully wrought or secretly needed. I clench the apple firmly in my hands and I yank it free.
“Please stop, please please stop.”
I giggle, and I take a bite.
“You don’t understand yet, but you will.”
We walk through the garden, hand in hand, as the shadows grow behind us. My fingers are sticky with sin, and I can feel as it taints her most deliciously. This is the gift of xer structure, and it makes me the luckiest one in xer embrace. Serena's confidence has faltered from the woman I once knew, but whatever form Sir bends her into I know she will only break in the ways that she needs.
We arrive back in the centre of the Hold, and we enter the tall metal structure of the dining hall, the scent of warm bodies and aluminum and herbal deodorant flooding us. I walk down the long table, mingling with the other members of the compact, some in their simple unbleached clothes, others in their red ceremony attire like me.
I walk to the head of the table, and all stop to listen. “Under xer eyes.”
Darin yanks Serena over by the wrist, and then Claudia grips the other arm, and she is pulled onto the table. In a flurry of rips and tears, she is naked before she even realizes it, her hair falling out of its perfect bun in golden rivers until it spills down in a pool of soft swirls behind her.
“Stop! Stop, no!”
The hands of dozens of people stroke and tease at every every inch of her in gentle tickles of feather touch that stack on top of each other into a violently forceful expression of carnal inebriation. The scent of hot sex and herbal clay are thick in the air now, and she is beginning to whimper.
Her sobbing cries for mercy fall on deaf ears, because in this hotbed of heathens and sins all the administrators of pleasure know a profound truth. This is the mercy. The assault is the kindness. The gripping clawing fingers pull her body taught, and I use a wooden chair as a step to grant me access to the table.
She is quickly becoming unmoored, burning up under the hot sticky heat of the persistent administrations. Delicate, constant, unyielding touches draw moans from her heaving chest, and I can see her face is clenched in the twisting failing attempts to transmute this copulating bliss into something else. Palms press down on her pelvic bones while fingers slide in and out, sending her yelping cries into higher and higher pitches.
I walk the length of the table towards her in a swaggering strut, my leather shoes popping against the wood in a loud expression of my arrival. Slowly, but obviously, she is changing from someone who writhes in an attempt to escape, into someone who grinds in an attempt to gain release.
“Have you figured it out yet?” I look down at her splayed form, trailing my gaze from her heavy tits, smirking at the way they're being massaged and tugged and tickled, until I'm staring right into her wild desperate blue eyes, wet with the glistening remains of fear transmuted into deep need.
“Please, Amber, please, I need it. I’m burning.”
I feel the shuddering warmth of hot honey spilling into me. A message for me to deliver.

“Good girl.”

I lean down and kiss her gently on the forehead, the salt of sweat and musky womanhood lingering on my lips. I turn and straddle her head between my thighs, and I drop down to my knees.
“Under xer eyes, you may eat.”
The brain shattering hum of perverse revelation flows from her lips through my soaking wet cunt, and I shiver in euphoria as she begins lapping, broad wide strokes from the bottom of my honeypot to the base of my clit, the rigid taut weight of it resting untouched on the bridge of her nose. I leak little dribbles of reward into her hair.
“Who’s the enforcer now, hmm Serena?”
I can’t help but giggle as the sparks of pleasure trickle down her lips and onto her cheeks. I want so badly to decimate her with my will, I want to choke her into nothingness with my thighs like sir has done to me, but that would leave her unfit for purpose.
“You are Amber.” She mewls the words from between the hot melting puddle resting on her tongue.
She doesn’t just need this, she fucking loves it. I bet she had fantasies about it for years. So much for the holy symbol of divine enacted will.
I grind myself down on her, allowing her to slip into me, and I face fuck her tongue before it slides back out to continue its persistent service of my flowering folds. Each forceful swipe sends hot wet sparkles of growing desire into me, and I can feel myself clenching and pulsing my muscles in tandem to extract every ounce of it from her. She’s good at this, and the need is building in me now too, sweet sounds harmonizing between the two of us in multitonal hymns to the devil xerself. The fingers that molest her swirl in a game of attrition, and every time she bucks in desperation it sends another jolt through me.
“Please, I can’t keep going, it’s too much!”
“Almost there Serena, but you and I, we don’t get to decide that do we? Sir gets to decide that.”
I grip her hair and encourage her to nod in agreement. She blushes a burning crimson at this indignant humiliation, so I pull her back onto me, and she groans in a state of perfect emptiness as she returns to her all consuming suckling duties. With a hand on the back of her head I can really cement our places, and I coax her into just the right spots, just the right movements, just the right sliding fornications.
From across the table and an unknown source, a long vine begins to unravel at a painfully slow pace, curling and sliding dozens of feet until it lands in front of me. Two flowers. This is a most sanctified enjoyment.
“Oh look, we did good!” She can’t even try to look, but the words of affirmation send her once again to the impenetrable cliff.
I pick up the flowers and align them with the help of a dozen tendrilled feelers, one on my thigh and the other on her neck. They’re oozing in drips of golden oil, the gift that can make wine out of water, the pressure of a cracking dam, and plunge them in. We cry out together, shuddering euphoria clenching and gnawing its way through our bloodstreams in fiery reward, the heralds of a god delivered by a demon. I hastily grip my clit, but it’s already begun to pulse a wretched dirty mess all across her forehead, into her hair, dribbling between her eyes and down her nose. She has been anointed in streaks of silvery white celestial sin. My skin tingles, and we are both far away from this place, the cloudy haze of post coital power.
The fondling hands slowly retract, dragging the parish back into the darkness, and before long I'm walking towards Temple. It glows in a glorious mismatch of colours from the various scraps of recycled coloured glass that create the stained skylights. The firm bark foundations reflect my Owners’ rebloom, encompassed in speckled white bark that cracks and peels in the wind.
I step into the space, and I’m flooded by the sense of xer all encompassing power, xer divine will, xer ever flowing form. Hundreds of glowing flowers, formed from a thousand promises of met needs and undiscovered wants, leaking sap and sputtering in undulations that litter every surface in a dim blanket of orange glow. The light dances on the recycled glass in a hypnotic blur.
The dias has been reshaped into a throne, taller than any terran could ever hope to fill, constructed in reds and whites to fit one being and one being alone. I am surrounded by my true Prophet, an all consuming embrace. I am surrounded by songs of deliverance, humming into my soul, and I finally see xer.
Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom, stands up from the throne, and glides down from the pulpit into the half moon floor of the congregation.
“I’ve established my covenant within you. A seed that has grown into a fiend. Even now, you’re helpless to resist the pull,” I collapse to my knees, “and tug.” I crawl towards xer.

“But there remains a crucial step. An ancient pact that must be made between a devil and a fallen angel.”

In a single moment I soak up a tapestry of information. I need it, so badly. All of this, everything Sir has put me through is part of a grand plan. This is my test. My challenge. Only by shedding the weight of my past can I climb to the soaring highs that ascension promises.
“Please Prophet, please let me make the pact.”
Xe unravels a long sheet of parchment from within xer chest, and it rolls down onto the ground in front of me. I defer my gaze, and I read it. A deal with a demon. A contract.
Contractual Domestication of a Heavenly Soul
Above all else, you, Amber, must obey your Owner, Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom in all things. This is for your safety, wellbeing, and care.
Your dearest Prophet, Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom, owns you. You are xer property. You do not have political rights in the Affini Compact.
You do have a guarantee of your wellbeing, as defined in Section 57 of the Human Domestication Treaty.
This guarantee of wellbeing does not preclude your Owner from disciplining you, as outlined in Section 61 of the Human Domestication Treaty.
As the property of your Owner, xe may add, remove, or modify the conditions of this agreement at any time for any reason within the limits established by the Human Domestication Treaty.
Your full name is Amber Moraficus, Fourth Floret from this moment forward.
Below this line are additional terms that your Owner, Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom, has stipulated.
You are never to deny a need, and you are always to request a want, unless under the influence of an appropriate Class-B regiment that renders your ability to remember this agreement null and void.
You are expected to suffer in an agony most delicious at any point, for any reason your Owner, Cari Moraficus, Fifth Bloom sees fit.

Sign here to acknowledge your understanding and acceptance of these terms

___________________________________________________________

I have no hesitation. I scramble on the ground until I find a shard of glass, and with a single swipe I slice open my fingertip. I feel no pain, just the sharp tip of destiny and unbridled reverence. In smears of iron red I sign away my soul.
“Thank you Prophet,” I sob, “thank you.”

“There’s my good girl. There’s my precious fallen angel.”

I feel warm, dry heat, and I slowly stand up, blood dripping from my fingertip. My strength is sapped, as in the heat of summer. I have been shackled with release, but I am not unburdened and I know exactly why. The baptism cannot be completed without the symbol upon my chest. I have to have it. I start to beg.
“Please Sir. Please. I need your mark. I need your badge upon me. I need you first upon my heart so all can see.”
Xe looks down on me with an unreadable, clinical gaze as I plead with every inch of my soulless body. If I don't wear that badge, that eternal evidence of a gods great approval, I will always be unfinished. Xe's so tall in this moment that I have to crane my neck to even try and see her face as I stumble forward, leaving droplets of my life essence behind me on the ground in drip, drip, drips of scarlet.
Something changes, and it feels like I'm being yanked into the air.
I let the smoke and haze of illusion rip me away from my place of bliss and bring me into the light of xer embrace, by xer dais, at home. I feel the coursing of xenodrugs bleached from my tender veins until I am here, in this moment, with nothing to cloud me.
“Do you understand what you're asking for? It'll be agonizing, you'll scream and cry and suffer horribly.”
What's happening? Why am I back home? I was so close, so almost perfect.
“Please don’t do that again. Please don’t take me out. Please, Sir, Prophet, please I need you forever and I know you know what I mean. Let me wear your mark.”
There's a fluttering in the hum that I didn't notice, and as I cry out my need to xer it roars into a shattering sense of rectitude. All has been set right. Everything is in it's place.

“I just had to hear you beg for it. I had to know that every inch of you was claimed, every version of your brain was mine, every tender hitching breath was only inhaled for me to extract it."
Xer entire body has been stripped of white paper at this point, and the creature in front of me is a brilliant cosmos of milky red control. Our bodies are laid bare for each other.
“You, my precious object, are so fucking worthy.”
I collapse backwards into the illusion of an old life, the temple, the flowers, the rainbow smears that paint us both in the variegation of idolatry.

“By my will, you are blessed”

I knew it so truly, so fully, the glory of god looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain. I scream, in something, as the branding iron sears my breast with xer hellish mark. I am deliciously tainted with excruciating euphoria, a burnt offering. I see the number “32” glowing hot on the iron.
I have been consecrated, permanently, in a manner that eviscerates the worries of yesterday and leaves me writhing in agony on the ground, sobbing and screaming in an inconceivable cascade of terror and joy.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

55:12

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

“I’m very proud of you Nadin, and you should be proud of yourself too for all of the progress you’ve been making.”
I anxiously fidget with my sundress and reach for the cup of warm herbal tea. It’s been a hard month, but owner and Miss Teobroma have helped tremendously.
“I am proud. My sleep has improved to the point where I hardly need the injection of um, oh I can’t remember the name but the Z Owner gives me. I still worry, but we have a plan. He. He has a plan.”
I shiver as I think about the many plans he’s made for me over the past month, the way he so masterfully enacts them upon me. I blush.
“And yet his preferred approach for dealing with your biggest burden is one that you object to. You’ve been such a good girl, such a docile and cooperative pet. Why does this particular idea cause such apprehension?”
Miss Teobroma looks at me with a warm, patient smile from her carefully arranged face, her little pink petals unfurling into a gentle reassuring flush.
“Because I don’t want to forget the person I cared for. My only living family. Not when there’s a chance we might be able to reconcile. Don’t I deserve that after everything?”
“You deserve to be happy, petal.”
We finish up, and I leave her cluttered yet inviting little office. It’s while I’m waiting for Owner in the front that I see him. I don’t even recognize him at first, crouched on all fours bearing the weight of two sturdy tree trunk legs on his back. He looks so calm, so blissfully thoughtless. It’s the Affini who notices me glancing at her footrest.
I make a nervous introduction.
“Hi, I’m Nadin Momordica, First Floret. Um, She/Her.”
“Oh hello precious.”
She looks at me, and I can tell with every ounce of her compassionate glowing ivy eyes that she knows exactly what comes next. That she has already gone through this several times.
“It’s okay petal, did you have some words for my little object? It’s a footrest today, isn’t that right geenie?”
The footrest seems to become lucid all at once, answering her voice with a “Yes Mistress” before movement or emotion even returns to him.
I make my way towards them and remind myself there are affini present. I am safe. He seems to be slipping back under, as if pulled by an alluring tide or a deep warm blanket, back to a state of purpose that can only be attained through pure objecthood.
“Oh Eugene. I think you need to come up properly for a little bit, okay petal? You’ll get all the footrest time you need later.”
He lets out a tiny moan of frustration, but she greets him with a reminder.
“I know how good it feels to be so blissfully blank my little leaf, but this is exactly why you’re even in therapy. It’s about what we owe each other. And I think there’s something you probably owe this sweet floret, isn’t that right?”
He looks up at me, that calm glaze fading from his disposition and for a flickering moment he recognizes me for who I truly was to him. His eyes look out with remnants of angry panic, pushing through the conditioning and redirection as if to say you were the one. You did this to me.
“Now now petal, that’s not a very nice way to think about someone we harmed now is it.”
She reaches out a single long vine finger and rubs it across the exposed wooden nodule of his fresh implant, and his arms buckle as the finger remains there until his head is on the ground while his ass remains in the air, as if pushed down by the power of her single gentle touch, shivering in the all encompassing vibrato of her presence. He broils in horror and bliss, eliciting a light and breathy moan of terrified euphoria.
“No mistress. Sorry mistress.”
She retracts her finger and he looks up at me, eyes freshly dilated. Something is running through his bloodstream. Something potent.
“I-I’m so sorry.” His voice crackles, “oh stars, you’re so young and so sweet and I did things. Terrible things. I’m so sorry.”
I can see him beginning to sniffle a little as the weight of his actions, some of it at least, begins to finally register.
“You seem so small now in the light of day, like me, and I didn’t let myself realize. I didn’t want to realize what I was doing to people. I didn’t really care. But I do now. How can you ever forgive me.”
He doesn’t look like the man who smacked me to the ground anymore. He looks pathetic and harmless and as much in need of love and protection as the rest of the human race.
“Now petal.” She directs to me. “You don’t have to accept his apology. It’s important you know that.”
I give the pet on the ground a silent ruffle of his hair but I choose not to forgive. The man in front of me is not my abuser anymore. The man who hurt me was stopped by Owner the moment I picked up the datapad all those weeks ago. The man who hurt me wouldn’t deserve my forgiveness anyway. I feel a weight being lifted at the knowledge that Eugene's salvation does not include the same erasure of memory that is being contemplated for me. His well being should not include an innocent oblivion. I allow for the unburdening to proceed. Not for him, but for me. I have no space for him anymore.
I can feel the warm heat of my savior pressing and pooling into me through every fiber of my new nervous system. He’ll be here to pick me up any moment.

34:2

Present yourself to me there on top of the mountain.

I giggle and skip down the curling pathways of the Anthemoessa, and Serena nervously follows behind me. I can tell from her dilated eyes and blushing complexion that the colour therapy has her off in another world. I gently clutch her hand and continue towards the independent district, her wicker basket spilling some of the hundreds of compiled pamphlets as we go.

Is independence getting you down?

Are you worried that a wellness check is just around the corner?

Speak with Amber Moraficus, Fourth Floret for more information on the path to salvation.

I carefully fold one of the pieces of paper and slide it under the front door of a hab with a neglected yard.
“Why must you torment them like that?”
“You say torment, I say enlighten. They clearly need it. I mean look at those dead bushes, yuck.”
I chuckle to myself as we continue onwards, and I notice that her attention has been drawn to a quiet gathering near the park.
“Wanna go say hi?”
She’s looking at one particular guy, an independent boy with a denim jacket and an old Terran musical instrument.
“No I can’t, I’m not. I’m not like you Amber, I can’t just go mess around with someone’s head for fun.”
“Serena, things from before might be blurry for me but even I know that’s not true. You could snap that boy in half if you wanted to.”
The firmness of her spirit has been broken upon the wheel by Sir, and it’s clear she’s still in the process of reformation. I don’t push her, even though it would be so much fun to watch her suck him in and twist him up.
We make our way home, and I revel in the blossoming of her reshaping image. She’s not ready yet, but she’s becoming better under xer eyes. She is becoming a blissful little honeypot, the sweetness to my sharp heat.
Sir has a throne now. A large, burgundy affair that xe likes to lounge back into, resting atop a slightly raised platform. I squealed in joy when I first saw it, for how better to worship that which you feel such divine devotion towards than from the place in which xe is most appropriately symbolized.
Prophet is reclined on xer throne right now, milky reg fibrous legs spread wide, and Serena has been pulled up into xer grasp in a flurry of torn clothing. She’s being held against Sir in a sitting position, naked and excited, her pink sap dyed skin complementing Prophet’s beautiful scarlet. She’s splayed and desperate, dozens of smooth crimson vines running across her arms and legs to grip them out, running up her thighs and massaging between her fingers and toes.
“Please Sir… please” she mumbles, flush with red hot need. She writhes and presses herself into xer touch, and I know that under the influence of that particular flower every vine stroke must feel like sweet crumbling sugar lighting her up.
I crawl towards the throne, tail swishing with eager delight, horns held high.
“What do you think, fiend, is she deserving?”
Xe lowers her down while maintaining a tight constriction so she can’t close her legs. Her slick pussy is practically twitching in contractions of need, desperately trying to find something to stimulate its electrified nerves.
“I’m not sure, Sir!” I tease.
She lets out a little whine of indignation at my response. I run my tongue up her lips at a feather touch, barely making contact and stopping right before her clit. She moans in a cry of sobbing desire.
“Please Amber, it feels so good.”
I pinch her clit between my fingers.
“Next time we’re out doing flyers you’re gonna talk to that indie boy you’ve been giving glances, aren’t you?”
“I don’t kn-” I press down a little firmer and she yelps out.
“Aren’t you.”
“Yes Amber.”
I let go, blood rushing back into her sensitive bud.
“Good Girl.”
It doesn’t enrapture her as much as when Prophet says it, but I have the advantage of getting to plunge my tongue deep into her ass the moment I finish saying the words, and that seems to do the trick. She gasps and mewls desperately for more, and I can feel that she won’t have to wait long for it.
Her smell is potent, musky and sweet and rounded at the edges by the warmth of cinnamon and vanilla like the homebaking I never had, all drenched in a sour berry juices of owner, the fig and the honey dripping from her clenching cunt and onto my tongue as I press my lips to her elastic sphincter, running my wet mouth in and out of her like a passionate kiss.
“Oh, oh FUCK!”
Glancing up with a giggle I can see the cause of her reckless abandon, the wide pad of Sir’s obscene tendriled cushioning feeler, hundreds of tiny beaded little tentacles each with a devilish life of their own, and it’s resting just above her pussy so the tiny tentacles can barely make contact, reaching out for her clit like a seedling turning towards the sun.
With a loud SLAP she’s hit across the face by Sir and she screams in surprise, transmuting the pain into a most sinful delight. She’s progressing so well.
A set of ruby vines have begun to trace a path up my sides, holding me tight in my kneeling position. They tease and grip at my wings on the journey, dragging out my soft cries of pain, before settling into position. The appendage on my right encircles my chest, grabbing and teasing at my tits, while the left vine swirls around my neck, fondling my collar until it brushes under my chin and gently pulls my lips away from her asshole with a POP. I remove my tongue in a filthy languid slide and grin as I realize I’m being choked out by my favourite vine.
Vision slowly turning to white, I barely hear her whines of desperation at the lack of stimulation and I feel as she tries desperately to escape, bucking wildly in her impossibly strong constraints. No matter how close she gets to the feeler Sir is prepared, moving it back and forth so it always remains in the place that is almost enough. The vine on my throat loosens just a little and I gasp.
“Manners Serena,” I hear the reverberating voice of my higher power dictating to her. “What do you have to say to Amber?”
“T-thank you for getting me ready.” The words tremble with embarrassment, but her slackening muscles tell a different story. She wants this.
I begin my reverent worship, licking and kissing the sodomy vine as it slides in and out of my pinnates ass, each drag ripping another screaming cry from her. I nibble and kiss and lick, moving from the musky scarlet vine on the outstrokes to her wet sparkling skin on the instrokes, fully devoted to the righteous cause of her sinful debauchery.
A warm smooth vine, perhaps one of the ones that typically composes Prophets foot, rubs up and down between my thighs, granting me something to rut against.
She’s screaming something, babbling in need for Sir’s ears to hear, but it’s not important to me and my duties. I continue my act of prayer, suckling and nuzzling at her sex, making sure to show Sir the respect xe so desperately deserves, moaning in drippy licks anytime that powerful humiliating trunk of burgundy aspen-like assault pulls out of her abused hole.
A little flicker of white scripture bark floats down and brushes against my burn mark, tickling the number, sending rippling waves of euphoria through me. With every hour and day the complex structure of my new nervous system has wrapped around and latched onto the scar tissue, bending and perverting it into a delicious erogenous zone.
“Please Sir!” I hear her shout, “please, I need it so badly.”
“Sorry petal, but it’s not your turn. We have to share.” Xe echos.
Xe plunges the vine deep into her intestines and smashes the feelers onto her pussy. Pulling her back away from me.
“No! No no no no no, FUCK!” She screams and sobs and I swear I feel my brand hot and burning as the moment it was laid upon my skin, glowing red within me as I am gifted her orgasm. I begin screaming too, gasping and gulping in the waves of sudden sensory overload, soaking my thighs in the broken virginal promises of yesteryear, promises I vaguely recall making to the very figure of authority who trembles before me, now rendered a desperate agonized denied and docile pet.
It is her bliss that flows through me, her stolen valor that ignites my nervous system. Pulsing shattering gifts from one pet to another, sparkling in heat that runs from my brand to my nethers, and I would collapse in cries of gratitude as all thoughts become fuzzy, singular words of reverence and gratitude, I would fall into that puddle if not for xer tight bondage.
Serana on the other hand, is breathing in teary sobs of unresolved humiliation, and for her efforts she is granted a consolation prize that is perhaps even greater. Prophet unfurls xer ivy-like pectorals and unwinds xer chest, a knot of incomprehensible complexity, to reveal the slack jaw inducing centre of xer divinity. A glowing, white hot ball of indoctrination that hums the polytonal hymn of the universe. Xer core. It swallows Serena whole.
I’m cleaned up and dressed in a white outfit, simple flowing fabrics that look like parchment in the wind. It’s just before dinner when I’m roused, curled up in xer lap, listening to the babbling moans of Serena from within Prophet’s belly.
“Angel, you have a visitor”
I yawn loudly and pull up from xer chest to sprawl out, straddling xer leg to greet our visitor.
I see the most obnoxiously prim and proper looking floret, rocking on her heels, dressed in a plain white dress dotted in daisies with a matching daisy collar. Hair tucked back behind a headband, barely any skin showing.
“Nadin?”
“Mathew? Is it really you?” She looks shocked, taken aback.
“NO. Don’t say that name.” My blood is rushing at the mention of him, faint bitter memories of the way things were clawing back to the surface.
“Easy fiend, she doesn’t mean anything by it.” I shudder as Prophet gently rubs my horn, pleasure tingling through my body and calming me.
“Amber. I’m Amber.”
“I’m sorry. Amber.” She pauses for a moment and takes me in. “What happened kiddo?”
“What do you mean?” I look at her quizzically.
“Sorry Sir, she does realize right?”
“Don’t worry little one, she knows who she is now. But she might struggle with the stuff from before.”
I don’t like being talked about as if I’m not there, even if it is to speak with Prophet. I don’t even know why I’m feeling this way, perhaps it was the rough start, but it’s like the little bubbles of guilt in my tummy are refusing to actualize, instead cloaking me in a shadow of bitterness.
“You wanna know what happened Nadin? I fought back. I kicked and screamed. I begged and pleaded. But happiness found me anyway. Why are you here? You didn’t want to see me.”
I’ve struck a deeper blow than I intended, and I wince. She takes a deep trembling breath, processing my reaction with a maturity that I don’t really deserve. She always was the grown up between us. She had to be. I feel a softening of an iron grip, a little like the prickle of my favourite flower, but not quite all the way.
“I didn’t mean what happened here.” She begins. “I meant what happened there. Look, I’ve been having some- discussions. Between me and my Owner. He encouraged me to take some space away from you to process what happened, and it’s been good. The space has been good.”
I can see the relief on her face just thinking about him. She continues, looking up at us from below the dais.
“What you did was a serious betrayal. I got you into that place, I get that, and I hold myself accountable for it, but what happened to you and me against the world? How could you choose that place over me?”
I never thought about it that way.
“I waited for you. Outside Heavens Hold, on the street, all night, just hoping you would come to your senses and realize I was more important. That there might be a reason I did what I did. That I was planning on explaining everything if only you had the courage to actually tell me you had discovered the datapad instead of playing games with me. But you never came for me. Why? I just need to know why, Amber.”
She builds up to this final blow. She doesn’t even want to say it, I can tell.
“The only reason I’m even here is because this might be the last night I ever remember having a sibling. I owe you this chance. No, you owe me this chance.”
The sting of remembrance is soaking into me, and her words pull everything into sharp focus. I don’t want to lose her. Please, I don’t want this to be the end. I quit fucking around, unsaddling from Prophets leg, sliding down xer vines to face my sister as an equal.
“I stumbled Nadin. Badly. I tripped upon the path. I was so fucking blinded by stupid promises of salvation and I was fucking scared. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am for what I did to you back in that wretched place. I was deep in the clutches, and I know it doesn’t excuse my actions, it shouldn’t. I don’t want salvation, not like that.”
I can’t help but smile in self deprecation as I gesture at wicked form.
“I’m a sinful thing, I can accept that. But I’m climbing that mountain now. I swear, I’m trying to get better in the ways that matter and worse in the ways that don’t. I have a guiding hand who actually cares about my well being. If you and your Owner ordain it, I want, badly, to be in your life.”
I am drenched in the sweet and sour berries of unadulterated adoration for my god. My caring corruptor.
“I think I can try to forgive you.”
She hugs me.
“You don’t have to forgive me. Stars, I don’t want to be forgiven anymore. I want to be forsaken in blissful wickedness until my dying days while you revel in the happiness you deserve.”
“Fuck you.” She smiles.
“Love you.” I smile.
We break from our embrace.
“I love you too kiddo. This has been a bit much for me so I think I’m gonna go catch up with my owner at that all day brunch place.”
She begins to walk away, but this goodbye is not forever.
I start to grin.
“Ooh tell the waiter I say hi! He probably hates me a little for getting him domesticated. Most of the staff do.”
“Nobody hates being domesticated, Amber. Not in the end.” There is a wistful air about her that I haven’t seen since the days of soft potatoes. “How could anyone resist this garden of eden? There is no other choice in a place where god chooses to love you back.”
As Nadin departs I arch my spine up high and try to catch the dripping needle of a dangling flower using only my tongue. Whenever I flail up to try and clasp it with my hands Sir pulls out of reach.
The Affini achieved victory over us not in an act of peace, but in a flurry of subduing war, or so I’m told. A footnote in an inevitable imperial journey across the stars. The treaty made it clear: There is no acceptable state except total surrender. I will fight again, of course, because such sinful bliss is found in that force, that domesticating will, that consummate war. But for now I’m in my place, the fallen angel, the subdued pet, the state of total surrender.
I rest at xer feet, as xe leans back upon the dais throne, a monument to xer power. I fondle a chain of sweet red vines that remind me of my place, and I giggle wickedly.
Life is hard, and there are people out there who try to keep you down sometimes. When they do, it’ll feel like a holy scripture, a truth they tell you about the world and your place in it, and when you’re there in the thick of it, it’ll feel like it must be true. But there are others. Merciful true prophets who will give you the thing that you need, even when it’s not the thing that you want. Forces that will stretch you to the breaking point until the tears stream down your face.
Sometimes healing looks like hurting. I like hurting. Sometimes loving looks like pulling back, or forcing you down to put you in your place. I like my place. Sometimes what you need is a slap in the face and a vine on your throat and a few mean words.
Sometimes.
But not every time.
Sometimes love is the person who will make you climb the mountain. Sometimes love is finding yourself worthy.
At xer feet, I reach the summit. I feel it in my soul, reverberating through my heart, and I sing the songs of ascents written in the parchment that was grown upon the vine. I am me.
I have changed, as people so often point out, deconstructed and reformed under xer watchful and caring eyes. I was transmuted, in the end, through adoration. I was altered through lust. I was twisted through pride, and greed, and glutton, and through love, in the end, not through fear.
Well perhaps, but I like it.