Tanwen was worth looking at, wearing a loose, flowing green gown in the Roman style—though the neckline was so low, one could almost see her nipples. Gold bracelets covered her tattooed arms from wrist to shoulder; a diadem of gold and crystals sparkled in her hair, which had been curled into dozens of tiny ringlets. More gold and crystals sat in a tight collar around her neck, drawing attention to the bareness of her bosom beneath, the astounding pillows of rosy flesh held up high and full by some magic I could not name.

“Welcome to the College of Mona,” Tanwen said, her voice carrying with the power of a practiced performer. “Tonight you shall be apprentices of pleasure, studying the mystic powers of man and woman, cock and cunny, suck and fuck.” She paused, and the men laughed as she intended. “Those of you who have been here before, I hope you remember your lessons well, for you shall be tested. The acolytes will be expecting your best, and will be so very disappointed and forced to punish you if you fail to please them.”

Raucous hoots and taunts met this threat, complete with crotch-grabbing and hip-thrusting. The energy of their response alarmed me, and I scanned the shadows, looking for some sign of Maerlin. I felt like a piece of meat about to be thrown to the wolves.

“Like any good teacher, I have rules for my classroom,” Tanwen went on. “Obey them, and your pleasure shall be tenfold. Disobey, and you may find your joy in the sheep pen, but not in the dampened, fragrant folds of the beauties who surround you.” She told them they must obey every instruction an acolyte gave; they could not force an acolyte to an act she did not wish; they would pay ten times the value of any thing (or anyone) they damaged; and all bodily wastes were to be spent outside, no matter the weather.

“They like being told what to do,” Tanwen said in an aside to me, in Phannic. “They’re terrified of looking like fools and being unable to please a woman, even when they’ve paid for her.”

Her confidence bolstered my courage. She knew how to handle them, and as long as she was at my side I would be all right.

Assuming she wanted me to be.

“Tonight is the most important night of one man’s life: the night he first sinks his sword into the scabbard it was born for.”

Cheers, and Pyrs’s face going scarlet. I felt a stab of pity for him. Poor kid, his first time with a woman put on display, to be gawked at and laughed at by men he’d likely known all his life. I’d wager some of the men were his brothers, and that they’d been giving him a hard time the whole journey here.

“And because we are so honored to be given the task of plucking his flower”—she was interrupted by more cheering, and when it had calmed went on—“we offer our own new flower, for him. My lady Nimia, fresh from far Byzantium, schooled in the arts of pleasure long known in that ancient, perverse, and eternally erotic capital.”

All lies, but that was the nature of a performance. I stepped forward and executed a rapid twirl, my short, sheer, cloth-of-gold gown flaring to give a glimpse of tattooed loins, my hair a swirling river of black. I’d had kinks set in my hair via dozens of tight braids worn all day, then combed out before I dressed. I’d tied a black mask over my upper face and rouged my lips, and when Tanwen had come to get me she’d had a handful of jewelry to drape upon me. When she saw the gold labyrinth and garnet bee hanging across my sternum, however, she’d frozen, and for the first time since we’d met I’d seen uneasiness in her gaze. She’d studied me and then said slowly, “That’ll do, I suppose.” There’d been no time for her to question me on it, for which I was grateful.

“Go fetch him,” Tanwen told me now, in Phannic. She would use our language to guide me through the evening; it wouldn’t do for anyone—be they acolytes or Druce’s men—to understand what was happening below the surface of this “banquet.”

As I moved across the dais, I felt myself slipping easily back into the familiar role of being a performer. So many times, I had danced and acted and played music for the entertainment of others. Even the promise of a sexual lesson in front of others was nothing new to me: Sygarius had done the same to me, and made me enjoy it despite my embarrassment.

I took my time approaching Pyrs, whose mouth hung open beneath the squirrel tail on his lip, his arms hanging loose and helpless at his sides. He looked too frightened to move.

Internally, I sighed. I felt sorry for the boy, and would make certain that he enjoyed himself, but I was not feeling the least bit of sexual excitement at the thought of bedding him. Even as I swayed my hips and undulated my arms and danced around him to the hooting appreciation of the men; even as I took his hand and led him up onto the dais; even as I gave all outward appearance of being a seductress eager to devour her juicy bit of prey, I felt a seeping boredom.

There was no new challenge here, no thrill. The boy required no effort, and the role of seductress was too familiar. The thought of spending years at this “college,” reenacting this scene time and again, made my soul shrink. No rewards of silken garments or golden diadems could be worth the tedium. Unless Tanwen lacked all imagination, I couldn’t see how an intelligent, ambitious woman like her could stand it, either.

“The first thing every man needs to learn,” Tanwen said, “is how to undress a woman, and what better way to learn than to watch it done?”

This was a cue to the acolytes, who were paired up, two to a man. They giggled and gave the men taunting orders as they offered themselves for disrobing. Pyrs gaped at the scene before him, blushed, and turned to me. He reached a trembling hand toward me, but Tanwen stopped him. “Better to watch how it’s done, the first time,” she said.

Tanwen gestured into the shadows at the curtain, and two acolytes came out to join us. Without a word or a glance at my face, they unhooked the chain at my waist and unclasped the brooches at my shoulders. My airy gown fell to the floor, leaving me nude except for my necklace and my hair. Pyrs’s gaze flicked back and forth between the swirling spirals of tattoos over my breasts and my sex, as if unable to decide which deserved his attention more and afraid that one or the other would disappear before he got his fill of looking.

The acolytes reached for his clothes next, making him jump. He cast a frantic look out into the hall, but Druce’s men had already forgotten him, their hands too busy and their pricks too stiff to bother watching a boy fumble through his first time. When Pyrs was naked and his rod exposed in all its pale and purple eagerness, Tanwen had him make himself comfortable on the couch, amid the cushions and furs.

“Now you all know better than to go plunging forward the moment she gets her skirts out of the way,” Tanwen said to the hall, though I doubted any man was listening. “She needs her passage slicked. Best to use your tongue for that, and I don’t mean for talking . . . Although compliments are a nice start. Let’s show young Pyrs how it’s done.”

Below us, the men’s faces disappeared as they tasted their way across acolyte bodies, with the acolytes themselves returning the favor. I watched for only a moment, for then the acolytes on the dais with me urged me onto the couch, spreading me out on my back near where Pyrs sat with his cock sprouting from between his thighs like a gopher from a hole. The women ran their hands over my breasts and down my thighs, and one bent to take one of my nipples into her mouth. It felt perfectly fine, but I’d seen this acolyte feeding the ducks and shared a word or two with her over the past days, and there was nothing about her to arouse me. Her mouth was a mouth, with no one of intrigue behind it.

I tilted my head back and caught Tanwen’s eye. It didn’t help my condition that she was watching.

She read something of my mood. “This is where your lesson begins,” she said for my ears only.

“I feel nothing.”

“You don’t have to: that’s what the acolytes are for. Men love watching women touch each other. Touch Pyrs, and use his arousal for your own. Let it flow into you.”

I reached over and lay my fingers on his knee. He jerked, then settled, and I closed my eyes and tried to push through the point of contact with my mind, trying to reach inside him.

“Open yourself to it,” Tanwen said. “It’s not an invasion of him, it’s an opening of yourself.”

My powers felt muddy; distant. I couldn’t feel him, couldn’t sense anyone beyond myself. Then I felt soft hands pushing my thighs apart, and a delicate mouth settling over my folds. The flick of a tongue, rough and light at once. A spark of pleasure flared through my sex, and as it did I felt the first tingle of Pyrs’s arousal, coming through my fingertips.

The tongue again, pointed, its tip tracing up the edge of an inner fold to the apex, then dipping in quick dashes against the hidden nub, coaxing it out of hiding. The mouth lifted and I felt fingers gently spreading me apart and pulling up on my mound, laying me open like a butterfly. Tanwen murmured, and I felt Pyrs move under my hand and the cushions shift; I opened my eyes and found him leaning close, watching intently as the acolyte lowered her head again. My palm was full on his thigh now, and the tingle of his excitement was turning into something heavier, richer, more liquid. I heard the distant hum of my golden swarm.

“Keep your power at a distance,” Tanwen said. “Hold it back. Let the pleasure in your body build, for with it comes greater strength.”

The acolyte had been trained well, running the tip of her tongue up and down my folds without obscuring my sex from Pyrs’s view. I closed my eyes again as she swirled her tongue around my stamen, petting it, adoring it, with a devotion beyond a chore assigned. Her partner sucked at one breast, then caught my nipple between her teeth and rubbed her tongue against its end. I sent my mind down to the wet points of contact between us, wanting to know what they were feeling. The moment I opened my awareness to them, a liquid heat of desire flowed in, hot and golden as molten metal. It flowed up through my belly and down through my breast, then washed up against the tide flowing in from Pyrs. Together the three engulfed my own small pleasure and transformed it. I drank in their longings, their arousal, and then instinctively fed it back to them in a tight, controlled stream that was not quite enough for their hunger. The acolyte at my breast whimpered, and tried to suck more of my breast into her mouth; the one at my sex slid her long, agile tongue into my passage, pressing it as deeply as she could, her hands gripping my hips to bring me closer. They drank pleasure from me as if dying of thirst. Pyrs groaned and tried to bring his rod to my mouth; I felt it pressing at my lips before Tanwen got control of him, making him sit back.

With even more trouble, she got the acolytes detached from me. “Enough,” she hissed at them, and with a shock of frozen mental steel cut them away from me. Deprived of me, they fell on each other, hands sliding up each other’s bodies with loving familiarity, fingers searching, mouths seeking.

“Take hold of his rod, and feel his desire. His pleasure at your touch.”

I no longer cared that Tanwen watched; was barely aware of her presence, beyond her voice.

I got onto my knees beside Pyrs and wrapped my hand around him. He was hot and silken, yet hard as stone. He looked at me with pleading in his eyes, and his hips jerked in involuntary thrusts inside my hand. I squeezed harder, the molten river of his pleasure as delicious to me as the fine stream I fed back to him.

“Keep him on the edge of release. The longer you hold him there, the more your power builds. Hold your own pleasure back as tightly, for your climax is when all power escapes. Keep it inside you, where you can use it. Ride along the thin edge of the cliff, and don’t topple over.”

I leaned forward and kissed Pyrs, hard, forcing his mouth open. For a moment he did nothing in response, and then his hand was at the back of my head, his head tilting for a better angle, and the shy, awkward boy showed himself for a young man who’d been down this path, at least a time or two before. His tongue thrust inside my mouth, the pressure of his kiss holding my jaw open as he ravaged what he could of me. I let him, sucking on his tongue in return, drawing from it another molten stream of desire.

Was this what Maerlin did to women? I had just enough awareness to wonder. How had I not known it was possible?

I knew the answer as soon as I asked myself the question: I hadn’t known I had to open to get this. I had to let down barriers and accept, in a way I’d never thought to try. There were times it was difficult enough to open my body to allow physical pleasure to flourish. How much harder to do this, letting another’s emotions inside me, letting them swamp my own and take over.

And how unexpectedly delicious. I felt I could dine on Pyrs’s lust until dawn, and beyond. In my hand, his rod felt as if it had grown yet thicker, if such were possible. I felt the pain of his unspent lust, the unbearable fullness in his staff that begged the warm, wet friction of my passage to release it. The more I fed on his passion, the more that seemed to form inside him to meet my need. He seemed a bottomless well of it, and yet I knew that could not be true. He would have no strength left to breathe, or for the beating of his heart, were I to draw down all I needed to satisfy my appetite.

“It’s time to take his seed,” Tanwen said. “Mount him slowly, and hold tight to your control. When he spends himself, feel it inside you. Push back through his desire, and find his mind. Tie your sense of him to his seed inside you, so you know how to find him again. His seed is your trail home, and you must know how to recognize the markers.”

I pushed Pyrs onto his back, breaking our kiss as he lay down. I stroked my thumb over the head of his shaft, swirling the slick drop of moisture I found there. His whole body shuddered with a pleasure that verged on pain, and if not for the mental grip I held on his loins, he would have spent himself.

“Please,” he said, his voice hoarse. It was the first word he’d spoken to me. “Ah, gods . . . please.”

I straddled him, my hand still around his cock, and then slowly, carefully guided him through my gates. I lowered myself, allowing in just the head, moving up and down on it to slick my juices upon him. He grabbed at my hips, trying to impale me and end his suffering. I tightened my passage, squeezing my gates on the end of his staff and earning a tidal wave of his molten pleasure as my reward. Behind that wave, however, were flickers of emptiness; moments of darkness where his mind faded. He was coming to the end of his endurance, and would pass out—or worse?—if I continued without giving him relief.

In the corner of my vision, I saw someone join Tanwen and whisper in her ear. Tanwen caught my eye and nodded her approval, encouraging me to go on; a moment later she was hurrying from the dais, disappearing behind the curtain.

I was too caught up in my mind and body to care. Tanwen existed outside the golden wall that I’d built with the lust of Pyrs and the acolytes as bricks, and my humming swarm as the mortar. All that mattered was the cock straining to enter me, the tendons in Pyrs’s neck standing out with the force of his effort to break through my hold. His need was so great, his rod so full, it seemed he might die if he was thwarted any longer. I sank myself upon him in one long, slow motion, and then released my hold on his body. His hands dug into my flesh, his pelvis thrust upward, and I had one deep stroke of his rod inside before he spent himself.

I closed my eyes and went inside myself, focusing on those hidden spurts of his life-force, and doing as Tanwen said and trying to link the fluid inside me to the young man who was barely conscious, his hands falling away from my hips, his head rolling to the side.

“Gods and goddesses, above and below, thank you,” he muttered, and then his eyelids fluttered closed, his mouth dropped open, and out of his throat came a great, gasping snore.

I gave him one more squeeze with my passage, trying to steal a last moment of pleasure from his still-hard mentula. It was no good, though, without a yearning body behind it. With a soft whine of frustration I dismounted and crawled to the edge of the couch to look out into the hall. Some of the men and women were still joined together, hips thrusting, breasts bouncing. One man was in a triangle with his acolytes, each one with their mouth on the genitalia of another. As I watched, he shoved one finger in an acolyte’s cunny, another finger in her arse. She flinched in surprise, then began to shudder with pleasure and did the same to the acolyte she was tonguing; who in turn pushed her fingertip deep between the warrior’s butt cheeks as she sucked his cock, her other hand gripping his sac.

My sex throbbed with unspent desire, and I felt an aching hunger for what they were having. I turned my gaze to another couch, and saw a strong man of about thirty, his rod half-full, lying back on one elbow as he ate from the plate of delicacies on the low table beside him. His acolytes were collapsed on each other, giggling and drinking, their hair mussed. One of them reached over to walk her fingers up his calf, teasing and inviting, and he shook her off with a quick scowl of annoyance.

He felt the force of my gaze and raised his eyes.

I sat on the edge of the couch, feet set wide on the floor, and parted my knees wide. The relative cool of the hall stroked the burning heat of my folds as they opened to him, and even across the distance, and through the woodsmoke and incense, I imagined he caught the scent of my desire. I still wore my dark mask, my black hair a tangled shawl to my hips, my tattoos something from a world far beyond his own.

He stood as if in a dream and walked toward me, his mentula thickening with each step until it stood out before him as rigid and dangerous as a pike. He vaulted onto the dais, and before he could touch me I turned, crawling onto hands and knees at the edge of the couch, offering up my sex from behind.

Sygarius had taken me this way for weeks on end, as a form of punishment. He’d made me yearn for the slightest gesture of his affection, the merest caress meant to please me, even as with every touch, every penetration, he taught me to hate him. Some part of me needed now to relive those joinings. I missed Sygarius, yearned sometimes for the certainty that came from being his, a gold torc around my neck declaring it so, even as I loathed the memory of him. He lived inside me, a ghost of a lover past, never to be exorcised. Maybe his seed had become a part of me, as Tanwen had said.

The warrior gripped my hips with one hand, used the other to position himself, and with one burning hard thrust seated himself to the hilt. I felt his balls brush against my stretched folds, a whisper of hair and flesh before he was withdrawing, his other hand also on my hip now to get the firmest grip. He moved me as if I were a toy, my weight nothing to him, my purpose none but to hold his rod.

I opened myself, and let his excitement flow in. It added another layer to my fortress, the walls of it humming with suppressed power. I felt as if lightning raced across my skin, burning and flaring and seeking the one tall mast, tree, or tower that could bring its forces shooting to the ground.

I fed the warrior a thin stream of magnified desire, and felt him swell within me. His breath came in grunting gasps as he bent over me, his legs shifting for better leverage. He slammed himself against me, his fingers digging grooves into my flesh, his angle changing in pursuit of more sensation from my wet cunny. He was thick and strong, and fucked with purpose and a single-minded determination that had the sweat dripping off him as he chased a victory that I held out of his reach. All the while I felt, It’s not enough.

There was no one here to master me, as Sygarius had done. And even he had admitted in the end it had been an illusion. He’d sensed I would come to this, a power uncontrolled; he’d only held me as long as he did because I was too young to know my own strength.

More, more, where is there more? Build the wall. Build it higher; so high it shall never come down.

I pushed my mind into the warrior’s, and suggested how good it would feel to change position. He thought it his own idea as he looped an arm under my hips and lifted me and turned around to sit on the edge of the couch, me in his lap, his cock still inside me. He spread my thighs outside of his, my muscles feeling the strain of the wide position. It weakened me, made me feel helpless in the way I wanted, and I had to lean forward, one hand on each of his hairy kneecaps, to keep my balance. Only my toes touched the dais, enough to support me but making it hard to move on my own; he leaned back on his hands to get the leverage he needed and thrust up into me. I threw my head back and took it, the new angle hitting a spot inside me that made the world shimmer in my vision.

More. More.

There was a whole hall of more.

I felt eyes on me and lowered my gaze. Druce was staring at me, transfixed.

I reached one hand down and pinched the nub of my sex. Behind me, the warrior cried out as a bolt of pleasure went through him; I clamped down hard on his passion, penning it, making him hurt with the need to spend it.

Druce came to me with the same sleepwalking stance as the warrior. When he was on the dais I took his hand and reached into him with the power coursing through me, breaking through his own will and awareness and finding that primitive part of him that could not resist the lure of a woman’s folds. I made him crouch down before me, and as I slowed the warrior’s thrusts to a gentle pace that had him groaning in agony, his body clenched as tight as a strung bow, I put my hand on the back of Druce’s smooth head and guided him to where he was needed.

Once there, I let him find his own way, his tongue rough, his lips greedy in their sucking pressure. He had more eagerness than skill, missing his target—if he even knew there was one—more often than he hit it. I liked the unpredictability: for a moment he’d suck hard at the right place, his tongue rasping against my stamen hard enough to make my whole body shudder, and then the next moment he might as well be licking the base of the warrior’s cock, for all I could feel of him.

I began to feel from the warrior that same flickering I’d gotten from Pyrs: an emptiness, a flagging of his energies, a warning that the well was running dry.

But I need more . . .

My golden wall was curving inward both above and below, shaping itself into a sphere with me at its center. I wanted to keep building it. To finish it. To close the roof off with a golden brick and then . . . I didn’t know. I only knew that I wanted it.

Not wanted. Needed.

Dimly, in a far-off part of myself, I knew I was losing control. I couldn’t stop building that wall, my body thrumming along with it, pulsating with an unsated desire that needed just a little more to reach the top. Only, the more pleasure I took in from others, the more distant any release of my own retreated, and the more inaccessible my visions felt. My swarm was locked in that wall along with my pleasure, and I didn’t know how to set them free.

Or didn’t want to set them free, not before the last brick was in place, and my hive complete.

I felt Druce’s lust, his staff aching.

Give it to me, I urged him.

He pushed up from his knees, shoving me backward into the chest of the warrior; the warrior was too lost in his body’s need to do other than lock his arms to support us both, and keep thrusting his hips. It did him no good, my feet now off the floor, my weight pinning me on his rod. My thighs were still spread wide over the warrior’s, an invitation that Druce couldn’t resist—though his eyes were unseeing, lost in an internal world of pleasure-seeking. I felt his overwhelming need to be inside me, and fed it a stream of the erotic power burning through me.

He thrust himself at me. Delirious with need, he either didn’t know or didn’t care that there was already a cock in place. The head of his rod jammed against my flesh and he put the strength of his powerful body behind it, nosing in, seeking to shove his way in the gates before the other could leave.

There’s no way, I thought. It isn’t possible.

Do it, I urged him, aching to be filled beyond all endurance.

I felt the edge of his hand, guiding; pressing aside the obstacle of his soldier’s embedded sword. I was as slick as oil with my own arousal and the spent desire of his son, and as he put all his brawn into it I felt my gates stretching and the thickness of him fighting through to the passage beyond.

The warrior moaned, and I dug into his mind to feel along with him the pressure of Druce’s cock sliding against his own inside the tight grip of my body. He didn’t know what it was he felt, only that it was more than he could take. The blackness rose in him, and in a jolt of fear for him—and greed for what he had not yet given me—I pushed him over the edge into release. He spurted inside me, his rod pulsating beside Druce’s, his seed slicking the way yet further.

Druce dropped down on top of me, stealing my breath with his weight. His calloused hands gripped my hips so hard it hurt, and he started to thrust. He moved with the rabbit-swiftness I’d been warned of, but it was what I wanted. Each jab of his staff sent pressure blooming through my sex, filling me as I’d never been filled, touching spaces inside me no single cock could reach all at once.

The gold dome—for dome it was becoming—grew higher, the aperture of light blue sky showing through at the top becoming smaller.

And still I wanted more.

I flung out an arm and hit Pyrs, startling him awake. I speared desire into him and he groaned, his body coming to life with the quickness of male youth. I reached an arm the other way and touched the two drowsing acolytes who had spent themselves on each other. I fed them both, and sent them down into the hall. Bring me more.

As Druce continued his gallop, the warrior’s cock softened and pulled free. Druce gave a cry of either loss or triumph, his speed doubling, his movements so frantically quick I lost all bodily sensation of them and drew only on his panicked arousal. I felt his fear that he wouldn’t be able to come; his desperation to spend himself as if it were as great an achievement as slaying an enemy.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and forced him, through body and mind, to hold motionless with his thick, short length lodged inside me. Just feel, I whispered inside his mind. And then I made him move at my pace, languidly grinding against me, giving me the best benefit of that broad stump of his. I fed him back a slow stream of arousal, soothing him into submission though he wanted to bolt like a horse. I made him feel my enjoyment, and as he did his fear faded, replaced by wonder.

The acolytes returned with others; how many others, I did not know, but I felt them as they climbed onto the couch and a thigh pressed against my arm, a hand touched my brow. Pyrs bent to kiss me, his tongue thrusting inside my mouth, and I felt through him that an acolyte had taken hold of his rod, sliding her hand up and down it and then closing her lips over its end. Druce and I slid off the warrior under me, and he stirred back to life, craving new sensation.

Hand to thigh to arm to foot to buttocks to balls to breasts; wandering fingers and seeking lips, stroking tongues and rubbing thumbs. One person connected to the next, and the next, and all through the growing tangle of naked bodies on and beside the couch. I felt them all, the current of insatiable lust running through them and back to me, all their pleasure becoming mine, all their yearning for satisfaction made louder, fiercer, as it ran through me.

Druce’s grinding was not enough. The golden hive was almost complete, and yet I felt as if I were starving inside its walls. My sex was swollen and throbbing, sensitive past the point of pleasure, my body hyperaroused without hope of release. I had locked the door against my own escape, built my own prison. I’d been trying to build my power as Tanwen said, only I didn’t know now how to free it.

Tanwen, where are you? I need help . . .

My control over the lusts swirling through and around me began to break down. I felt the secret desires, the fantasies, the hidden memories of the men and women around me. The insatiable hunger tangled around me, and all I could think was, Do it. Do it all. Do what you’ve dreamt of, do what you’ve feared, spend yourselves as you’ve always wanted.

The warrior was hard again, his hands roaming my thighs, still wrapped around Druce’s waist. I sensed when he stood behind Druce and parted his buttocks. I felt Druce’s shock when the head of his warrior’s rod pressed against that back entry.

Druce’s shock and the warrior’s lust-blinded excitement put another layer to my hive wall. I urged the warrior on, and shared his sensations with Druce, even as I eased my hold on Druce’s release. The warrior thrust home, and Druce cried out and came, his essence surging inside me. I linked the sense of it to the feel of his mind, the new skill already instinctive to me now.

I unwrapped my legs and pushed out from under Druce, the warrior holding more tightly to his leader now as he continued to work him from behind. Pyrs protested as I moved away, breaking his kiss, but everyone still had contact, no one was alone, and the burning desire only flared hotter, even as the dark flickerings of erotic exhaustion cut breaks in the molten flow of lust.

I crawled through the writhing bodies, pausing when a mouth found my nipple, my folds; when a roving hand slid two fingers into my passage, thrusting roughly; when a cock appeared before my lips and I took it into my mouth, tongue savoring the salty taste of it and the hard-soft smoothness of aroused flesh.

Tanwen, what do I do?

Maerlin, help me. Maerlin, I’m trapped, I can’t stop, I don’t know how. Where are you? Where ARE you?

I could feel everyone’s fading strength. Hearts beating too fast, breath coming too shallow, muscles flagging. Could they die of this? Drained of all energy, would their hearts stop?

There was only a single space left open at the top of my inner dome. One last breath of air and life. Through it I heard Tanwen cursing. Shouting.

I felt a cold mental blade strike at the hive and bounce off, shuddering. Tanwen again, her voice a panicked shriek. The blade came again, and I wanted it to break through, but the hive had a mind of its own and repelled her. It wanted to finish itself.

Then hands on my face, my mouth; fingers opening my mouth and pouring something foul into it. I gagged and spit, and the hands were back, forcing more of the bitter syrup onto my tongue.

My mouth went numb. My throat. The numbness turned to a warm, peaceful drowsiness and seeped down into my chest, up into my head.

I looked upward at the last pinprick of blue above me and felt my eyelids drifting downward, peaceful as falling snow. The blue disappeared, and the gold wall, and I sank, free at last, into the protective arms of darkness.