“Up you go, Magelord.”

The words percolate through my being. I try to focus on them, try to give them the attention that I’m pretty sure they’re due. I’m being talked to, I’m pretty sure; being addressed, I am the direct object of this sentence of which someone else is the subject.

My limbs have no interest in cooperating. No, that’s not quite right; I can figure out that Lady Sheid wants something from me, but there’s a disconnect between figuring that out and figuring out what I’m supposed to do, the action I’m supposed to take. Usually that would bother me, but my senses are too full of fire, from the way my nerves are lighting up to the heat and bitterness coating my throat.

“Ah.” There’s an understanding in her voice, and a laughing finality. “Well. If that’s how it is, up you go.”

Her hands slide under my shoulders and lift. I don’t exactly hang limply; there’s an instructive quality to her touch, and my muscles respond by cooperating with her without any conscious involvement from my drifting mind. Once I’m standing, eyes open but unseeing for how distant I am from the world, she tucks one arm under my shoulders and one under my knees, and there’s a moment where there’s nothing but the feeling of her power and her warmth.

When she sets me down, it’s onto a hammock of sorts. The weave is a springy fabric whose threads feel like they’re slipping through the weave of my shirt, caressing my skin; it starts at my neck, cupping and supporting my shoulders, and ends at my waist. My core trembles almost immediately once her hands lift off of me, unable to keep my weight in any sort of configuration that stops me from sliding off the hammock. That would be bad, my body tells me, but my mind is placid and calm, and then there’s a hand each on my ankles, lifting them, supporting my legs.

“Let’s see. Can’t have you sliding, and you’re not much for anything right now.” There’s nothing but affection and kindness in her voice and touch, and her fingers trace circles around my calves and work their way downwards. There’s a soft sound of fabric, and then her hands let go and my legs stay up, comfortably seated in cloth. “Better. Well, a start. How present are you right now, Adam?”

That’s a direct question. The fact of it trickles through my awareness, activates enough of my presence of mind to reply. “Mmmmrm,” I manage.

“Beautiful.” Her hands start at my toes, massaging, pressing, and tugging. I’m agonizingly sensitive, and my feet twitch to try to get away from her hands, but there’s no give in the cloth they’re bound in, even as she chuckles and maneuvers them apart and up towards my hips as she works her way from my toes to my heels. Even as relaxed as I thought I was, there’s still a release of tension as she works out a knot in one of my feet, and the feeling rushes through me in a flood of bitflips, desire-to-tense turning into a sudden shock of ease and then into a desire to wriggle, to feel how my muscles respond and flow with so much less tension.

There’s certainly no doing that. Even if the connection between thought and action weren’t somehow mostly absent, when she places my ankles where she wants them, they stay as though the silken cloth wrapped around them is a titanium shackle anchored into space itself. They’re wide, wide enough that before she worked the last bits of tension out of my thighs they were starting to burn with the physical instinct to actively support the position, and pushed up and back enough that my knees are forming a pair of right angles.

Lady Sheid’s hands gently stroke their way up my inner thighs, and the vulnerability and physical fear comes unbidden like a shock of cold hitting my spine.

“No, that won’t do at all.” Her voice is warm, as soft as her hands are firm. They’ve taken mine, bringing them above my head from where they’d gone to push against her hands in unconscious protest. “Back down you go, Magelord.”

Her mouth brushes lightly against mine, then more firmly, and her tongue parts my lips. The kiss swamps the feeling of coldness, and I’m fully unresisting as she binds me—and it’s clearly binding, there are three firm loops of cloth around each wrist, each clearly defined against my skin. Her breast presses against my face as she does, an act of deliberate teasing, and then her nipple slips into my mouth as her hand slides down my chest to my belly and then to my hips.

Her nipple is soft and warm against my tongue, something about its texture and flavor sending a warm trickle of electricity down my nerves. She leans down fractionally more, cradling the back of my head to her breast as I feel my body arch helplessly, futilely, to try to press more of my body against hers as she stands to my side, and then as her fingers slide around my waist to my thigh and across my perineum, she steps in and melds her belly into my chest, stifling my sudden, intense moan by dint of keeping my mouth filled.

Then her fingers dip lower, and the intensity of it all is overwhelming.

It’s too much. It stays too much as she works her fingers in slow, gentle circles, something slick and cool being rubbed into and onto my overheated skin. I can’t stop myself from clamping down as she slips a slim finger just the barest bit inside; it’s not painful, it’s just too much, too intense, and I try to tell her that, but all I can manage is a whimper around her nipple so silent I can’t hear it.

I don’t know if she notices that or if something else changes with my body language, but she withdraws, and my breathing slowly settles back down as she strokes my hair with the hand she’d had behind my head.

“Up, Adam.” The irony of up after back down flows into my consciousness and I somehow fail to giggle, fail to smirk, fail to say anything. “Surface for me. You can do that for me, can’t you? Let me hear you. Breathe in, breathe out. Eyes on mine. In, out. When I ask you a question, do you answer it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The words fall, tentative, through my lips, and my eyes focus, not fully but more than they had in I don’t know how long.

“Your words, when I want them, are just as much an offering as your body. Your truths, I bid you lay at my feet.” Lady Sheid’s words have a strange resonance, something that grabs at my attention and focuses me further. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answer, voice no less floating but now firm.

“Talk to me, Adam. You’re tense from your calves to your neck.”

“It’s so much.” My mind is starting to come back into the moment, and I… don’t want to, I want to go back to the warm floating feeling, but Lily said she wants my truths, so I point that little part of me that engages in analysis at the physical, at me. “It’s too much. It… feels too much, there’s too much happening, it’s like I need to be focusing on everything and instead I focus on nothing, and also I’m nervous and afraid.”

“Ah. Ah.” There’s an understanding in her voice, as her hand strokes my forehead. “You trust me, but that doesn’t stop your body from reacting.”

“Yes. Yeah.”

“What else?”

“I… feel like I should be doing something with my hips, or my body?” My memory casts back to the fuzzy, half-perceived feelings and reactions in those moments of unreality. “The lube was cool, and I felt almost overheated, so that felt nice. I think I was torn between trying to figure out what I was… supposed to be doing? Torn between that, and not being able to actually turn that into action? I’m not sure. I’m sorry, I—”

Her lips are suddenly on mine, interrupting me. The kiss is soft, but enveloping; I lose myself in the softness of it, the warmth, the tenderness. When she lifts her head, she does something, and my legs lower enough that they’re almost level with my body; I’m surprised to feel a tension go away, something that felt like it might have almost been cramping and yet which I hadn’t noticed. “There’s nothing to apologize for. I pushed you too hard, Adam, but the night is yet young. You were so very present and yet gone, in that beautiful way, earlier—it doesn’t matter. We’ll take this slower, and I’ll trace the lines of a thousand joys with your body as my canvas.”

I try to say something along the lines of sounds nice, but she kisses me while pressing her fingers into what turns out to be a knot of muscle just under my shoulder blade, and all that comes out is a murmured mmrmmrm mrmrm. There’s a pulse of magic, something warm and soft like fingers ruffling through my hair, and she runs her other hand up to my shoulder, holding me close.

“Cleaning magic,” she whispers into my ear, tongue tracing my earlobe. “Comes in handy.”

A tension I hadn’t even realized I was holding leaves my core, and I hear myself giggling breathlessly, because part of me had been wondering about that. I squeak as her hand snakes around my waist, and her laugh is like glory and beauty distilled into the sound of chimes as she flips me over onto my belly. I eep, delayed enough that I’m already settled into the hammock by the time the reaction makes its way through my lips, and then eep again as her hands, cool against my flushed skin, press into the muscles on each side of the base of my spine.

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She works her way up, slowly, pressing her palms into muscles that unknot under the pressure. She then works her way down from the shoulders, not lingering unduly over my ass—I tense, despite my best efforts, and she murmurs soft reassurances into my ear and moves on—until she reaches my feet.

From there, she works deliberately and thoroughly, as if she’s waging a war. One assault of her hands after another squeezes the tension out of my toes, from the extensors to the tibiales, and it feels… unbelievably good, better than most of the sex I’ve had, with a deep, thrumming pleasure and joy that almost vibrates its way up and down my body. Her hands work their way up my calves, passing swiftly where so much of the tension has already flowed away, and then linger lovingly on my thighs, and suddenly I’m immensely conscious of how the skirt I was wearing is bunched up around my waist and how sheer every piece of clothing I’m wearing is.

For a split second, I’m terrified; not of her, not of her touch, but of what that self-consciousness and the fear itself—recursive though that is, and the thought passes my mind—will do to the moment. Then it passes, with a kiss on the back of my neck and a thumb digging into one of my adductor muscles, a knot giving way to flood my legs and core with bliss.

By the time her hands have made their way back up to my shoulders, I feel like I’m a puddle, without so much as tendons, muscles utterly incapable of activating. She murmurs a question, and the sounds don’t manage to parse into coherent words, but she sounds pleased; I try to say something back, but all that comes out is a garble. She murmurs something self-satisfied, and turns my upper body by grabbing my shoulders so she can kiss me.

Her fingers stroke from the back of my neck to my jaw, then drift across my lips. They stroke my lower lip more deliberately, slipping just the tiniest bit into my mouth, and I part to welcome them in, suckling as she slides two fingers in. First it’s one joint, then a second, and then my lips are at the joint where they meet the bones of the palm, tongue running along her fingers in a semi-conscious mimicry of earlier.

Her fingers withdraw, and then something else slips into my mouth. “So that you don’t have to worry,” she whispers into my ear, sending shocks down my side as her breath does something not entirely unlike tickling me, “about what to say, or what sounds to make.”

She eases me back down onto my chest, utterly relaxed into the hammock’s structure, and I feel her fasten the gag around the back of my head. I breathe in deeply, consciously, through my nose—I realize that she left a swipe of fluid just below my nostrils, and they flare at the hot, acid bite of her, and the heat flushes through me at the physical reminder of her pleasure and my submission and my pleasure and joy in that submission—and I melt into the cloth as she fastens my wrists in front of me.

I waggle my fingers and wrists at her request-that-is-a-command, proving to her and mostly to myself that I still have a enough freedom of motion that there’s no risk of cutting off my circulation, and the flush I’m feeling up in my sinuses and in my ears and neck follows the slow, patient path of her hands back down my body to my thighs.

By the time she spreads my legs, cuffing my ankles and knees in some way I can’t follow but which provides perfect support, her gentle touch is crowding out the tattered remnants of conscious thought. She shifts my knees forwards, just enough that I feel the smallest amount of activation of muscles that I can’t even localize, and I feel something wrap around my waist, and when I wriggle experimentally I realize I’m totally immobilized.

Unable to move more than the slightest amount, just enough to avoid muscle cramps. Utterly helpless and vulnerable, and yet without even the least trace of fear or worry.

When she begins to run her fingers up the inside curves of my thighs again, when the slightest touch parts my ass and cool slickness again brushes against me, it’s just as intense and just as overwhelming as it was before; but at the same time, when it pours over me like a flood, I bend where before I’d resisted, and I float where before I’d tried to swim.

“I think the difference,” I hear her say distantly, “is focus. It’s this one thing, this single sensation. No question of action, either; just drifting, just floating, just receiving what I choose to give.” She works her finger in circles along my rim, cooling overheated skin. A ripple of relaxation undoes what little tension had built up, and for all that I feel like I should be worried about something, should be concerned about something, there’s nothing but a drifting and incoherent joy within me. Her other hand cups my ass and gently spreads one side wide, and the vulnerability and openness is transcendent. “You know, you might ask—well, not right now.

“One might ask.” There’s a smile in her voice, and a finger traces circles just inside me. I shudder; the sensation is overwhelming. “I could form cloth in bindings, instead of tying you. I could apply this—” I feel a renewed coolness, a renewed slickness, as lubrication trickles down to tickle my perineum. “I could apply that with magic, or with a simple flex of my domain I could relax your muscles and mind. I could have made this sublime so easily, without any of this effort.”

She slides a finger fully inside me, and I shudder, whimpering softly against the gag. Her finger crooks, stroking softly, and my body twists fractional millimeters to press against the ties that bind me, doing its futile best to contort in pleasure, trying uselessly to move against her touch to enhance what I’m feeling.

I can’t. Can’t move, that is; can’t change anything about how she’s touching me. It’s the most freeing feeling in the world, and leaves me feeling as though I’m floating, a locus of pure receptivity without any signals heading outbound.

“If I did that, though, it would be… too singular an experience.” Her finger—fingers, maybe—rub in long, slow circles, as if massaging me further open from the inside. Every time their path takes them around to my prostate, she slides out a few centimeters and then back in, rubbing in tiny motions with her fingertips pressing down, and the pleasure is like a blowtorch to my mind.

Gag or no gag, I’m pretty sure the whimpers are audible.

“I like leaving people with a memory of something real.” She slides her fingers out of me, and warm, dry fingers—I feel a sort of detached almost-giggle at the thought—trail their way up from my inner thighs to my ass and then my hips. “So this…”

She slides into me slow, inexorable. It’s like her fingers, and it’s nothing like her fingers; I can feel her stretching me, feel what I know should be pain, but everything is nothing but pleasure and the feeling of slick motion.

When she bottoms out, grinding her hips against my ass in a gentle circle, I can’t feel anything but the glory of her for a moment. The orgasm, if that’s what it is, and if so I’d never had one before in my life, hits me like a tidal wave; I’m bobbing in its wake afterwards as she pulls out of me and slides slowly in again, and then I’ve lost count and lost track of what she’s doing or where my body is other than where it touches hers.

“You’re doing so well,” she whispers. I can still hear her, and I cling to her voice, somehow terrified that if she stops talking, I’ll lose some vital connection to the physical world, will drift and never return. “This is where you’re meant to be. Floating, falling, flying. Helpless, vulnerable, open. Loving and loved, giving the gift of your body, receiving the gift of being used.”

Her hands wrap around my hips, giving me another physical anchor. She picks up the pace slowly, or maybe rapidly; there’s no sense of time between her thrusts, only the yearning as she pulls out and then the flare of pleasure as she slides back in. “You can seek this,” she murmurs. “Where I could have done this or even more with my domain, you would never think to tread again; but this? This is you, Adam.”

My world encompasses only four things: her thighs as they press against me, her voice, her hands on my hips, and the way she fucks me. There’s nowhere higher for me to go, no further degree of pleasure my mind turns out to be capable of; the moment simply extends as she speeds up, as her hands clench rather than resting, as her breath hitches and her voice becomes unsteady.

“Hunt me, Adam.” She’s husky and almost hoarse, breathing deep. “For a thousand years, even if you never see me again, that’s—” Lady Sheid’s breath catches, and she moans softly, the pace of her hips slamming against mine becoming irregular. “Now, now, show me, feel me!”

We don’t precisely come together. Her hand grips my shaft, suddenly and ungently, but even with the additional stimulation it takes feeling the first surge of her, deep in my ass, filling me, before my senses fail me and my every muscle twists and spasms.

It’s long moments afterwards, as the crystalline clarity washes over me, that I start giggling, audible even through the gag. Lily unhooks it, restoring my freedom of movement without so much of a snap of her fingers, and I roll over to make eye contact with her, still giggling.

There’s a knowing look in her eyes. “Do I even… fine. Go ahead.”

“You don’t…” I, masterfully, manage to contain myself, necessary as it is to speak. “You didn’t have balls. I only just realized that. You totally did use your domain; that’s where your cum came from, because you didn’t have balls.”

“Balls,” she says firmly, “are extremely silly.” She holds my gaze in seeming total seriousness for a long moment as I start losing the battle against the oncoming gigglefit, then grins broadly. “Protean, a goddess is many things, but I draw the line at balls.”

She cradles me in her arms as I laugh, head resting between her breasts, one hand stroking my hair. I fall asleep like that; on my side in the silk I’d been bound in, pressed up against her, a wild and fey joy filling me as the aftershocks shatter me with shudders and bliss.

She wakes me up once in the night, pulling me onto her body on a bed in the darkness. With my mouth and hands on her breast, she teases me as I float between wakefulness and slumber, eventually sliding inside me to milk an orgasm out of my ass and cock, letting it pool between us for a moment as my legs twitch their tension out. I fall asleep to the feeling of warmth as the stickiness simply disappears, amusement at the convenience of her magic percolating through my awareness, and she doesn’t rouse me again till morning.