Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
“Yes,” I said through my teeth. “That’s how a vǫlva serves.”
* * *
Ilsa
Something about the way Herra Henrik’s thrusting cock felt, when he had taken hold of the handles—yet another feature of the terrible saddle that I somehow hadn’t noticed—the change in his rhythm and his angle… it felt, in my vision of the Worldtree, like a gale-force wind at my back. The pressure of it seemed to drive me bodily along the bough.
Mary came with me. Somewhere in the back of my head, a rational observer said, In two senses. Mary’s orgasms matched mine, and she accompanied me. My reason told me I might have giggled, if I had thought of the wordplay under different circumstances.
The movement itself, our progress among the branches of the tree, had become shared between us, as if my master’s cock in my ravaged bottom and her own master’s in hers had put us under the same pressure, accelerated us through the same unreal medium. I felt her there beside and slightly behind me in the branches, red hair streaming in a wind that was not wind, her pale face bright with the same terrible astonishment that must have been on mine.
Below—or elsewhere, in the chamber my body still occupied—Henrik drove into me again with that new, brutal leverage, and I cried out and climaxed so hard that the branch under my dream-feet flashed white.
The orgasm seemed to deepen the vision.
Until now I had assumed climax would represent an apex, a breaking point after which one either returned to oneself or lost coherence entirely. Instead my body’s repeated surrender seemed to feed the spell. Each climax made the Worldtree more legible. The bark, the leaves, the twigs… they ceased to feel merely symbolic and acquired detail: fissures, mossy damp, ancient sap, the grain of some living thing too vast for ordinary cognition.
“More,” I heard myself sob in the chamber. Whether I meant more cock, more vision, or more understanding I couldn’t have said.
Herra Henrik gave it to me without hesitation.
In my imagination, Mary seemed to surge past me, and then another thrust from my master caused me to lurch beyond Mary, and then find her again at my shoulder. She turned to me, not speaking, but with a look that conveyed the same wild imperative I felt myself: search. Find her. Find out what stood behind the Chinese girl and the men who used her.
The… the… the Fellowship.
The name didn’t appear in letters in the air. It took shape in my mind as if I had come to an inevitable conclusion. It’s called a fellowship. And I knew it had a Chinese name, too, but I knew also that I wouldn’t find it because I didn’t know Chinese.
The rational observer in my mind noted the fascinating quality of the interplay between my conscious and subconscious minds, and how it shaped my imaginary journey among the boughs of Yggdrasil… how having a man’s rigid member in my anus made me see things that felt as if they lay beyond reality.
The branch beneath me and Mary forked into several great limbs, each trailing smaller growths like pathways of consequence, and somewhere below them, through leaves and shifting glimmers, I sensed power flowing. A different kind of power from the one that propelled us… and…
A different tree?
I couldn’t have explained it, but it felt to me as if the current I sensed represented a leakage between two worlds’ different Worldtrees. As if different worlds—Norse, perhaps, and Chinese—shared the idea of a tree without sharing the details, and thus the women who could go to the tree in one culture could sometimes see and feel what took place in the other Worldtree.
The power I felt seeping into Yggdrasil felt less wild and more… connected. Networks. Transmission. Extraction. The image felt totalizing, almost industrial in a way that Yggdrasil itself didn’t. I knew I had to learn more.
I reached, and I felt Mary do the same.
In the Viking bridal chamber where my Herra brutally fucked my no-longer-virgin bottom, the next climax struck me. My body on the saddle seemed to have become less a body than a receptacle for repeated shocks of pleasure and pain. Henrik’s cock filled my anus with the same hard, sovereign certainty, while the bride’s consolation kept rubbing me into helplessness. I felt my cunt pulse around emptiness, my belly tighten, my thighs strain uselessly against the old leather, my pendant swing against my chest. Then release broke over me again and Mary and I traveled down in the canopy, to another level.
The bough under us narrowed and bent over darkness full of moving lights. I understood that Mary and I remained in Yggdrasil, but could see the imaginary world of the other tree—the Chinese tree, my mind couldn’t help calling it.
The lights looked, at first, like stars caught beneath leaves. Then I understood that they resembled cities seen from an airplane at night: linked nodes, glowing lines, grids of consumption. Some of the lights pulsed green-gold, sickly and rich. At the center of one cluster stood something that was not a tree and not a tower but somehow both—a trunk translated into steel and glass, drawing force upward and downward at once.