Malice Maze

Chapter 26
The Mistress

Hope watched Nanaia rush out of the caves and into the sunlight. She watched Nanaia smile with a sense of victory but no sense of relief. She did not look like a woman who was escaping something she looked like a woman who was entering something worse, purposefully. Hope hesitated too long and the way before her was blocked by a doorway. Hope knew what was behind that door; it was the only option left. She knew behind that door lay the figure of a true man, who would bring her for the first time by masculine fingers and a masculine body, not a feminine body with one masculine part. She knew behind that door lay the most astronomical sex she could ever fathom and it no longer was what appealed most to her.

She opened the door and slid herself into the room and looked upon him. Even with his back to her she recognized his figure. She had seen him from afar since she was a little girl, every time he entered the room she would allow her eyes to follow to him and she would want nothing more than to be with him. His black hair curled about his shoulders, his slender hips held nothing but a small tightening of sheet around him to contain modesty, and she knew his eyes were blue.

“Would Serena approve?” Hope asked. Though she had tried for unencumbered nonchalance she had received a shivering voice aghast with her own sense of jealousy.

“I’m here, Hope, to answer your questions, or to just give you answers, before we do what needs to be done,” King Orphen told her. He turned towards her and she once again was struck by the elfin face that was sheer masculinity and beauty all at once. “Serena hates that I am here, that I must lay with you. Serena, my love, my only, is not here because she can not have children and you, Hope, are here to fulfill a part of a prophecy.”

“What are you saying?” Hope’s pulse jumped into her throat. She knew little of the prophecy but from what she had gathered, from the cryptic answers she had received from the beginning, she knew enough to know his being with her was not going to result in pure coital bliss.

“The Lover born of the Mistress.” He spoke as if quoting something. “You are the mistress meant to bear fruit to a lover.”

“Why must you be the father?” The question came naturally and she stopped questioning everything else. Had she known from the beginning? A virgin to be chosen, why, because Dralnu was a virgin. He wanted to deface all of these women when he had sex for the first time with his true love. Had he been unsure on which of the five would be his true love? No, he had known all along who it was, so why the other four girls? The prophecy. What had the prophecy told? Did any of these questions matter?

“I must be the father because I have something to offer you, something none other could offer you,” Orphen spoke plainly. “I will give you freedom for Andais. In return for the use of your womb, and to give me the child and let Serena and I claim him as our own, I will give you absolute freedom in my kingdom.”

The River Forest and the surrounding areas all belonged to Orphen, for years he had been ruler there, years before this land had truly formed, and he had allowed no one to take that land from him. He had been king there before Dralnu had ever even been thought of. Dralnu feared Orphen, the child would be something else, another notch under Orphen’s emotional belt. A wife, a child, a family to keep him obedient and quiet as a true king went on ruling from the background. Was that it?

“When you say freedom… will I just be thrown out after giving birth to a child, onto the streets to strive for myself?” Hope’s hope was bubbling. Perhaps she would be able to leave her mistress, to have a real life out there, somewhere.

“I will give you enough that you will need or want for nothing until the day you die.” He said it so matter-of-factly that Hope could not even question it.

“I’ll do it!” she nearly cried out. “Anything to be free, to be able to see more of the world than what is behind Andais’s castle walls. I will do it. I will do it!”

Orphen allowed a tickle of a smile on his lips and reached out for her and pulled her to him. Hope stood on tiptoes ready to kiss his lips. He pulled back and shook his head. “I’m sorry, if I give you my body I can not give you my lips. I must keep something for Serena only.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Hope apologized. “I meant no harm, I just, I’m new at this, especially with a real man.”

Orphen chuckled and led Hope to the bed, lying her down upon it. He reached under her shift and grabbed the ends, pulling it up and over her head and then discarding it in the corner. Hope, though mesmerized by the act of making love to a man promised to another, a man she had coveted on more than one occasion, had to ask her other question, the one that bothered her most. “We were all down here to be impregnated, weren’t we?”

“Yes,” Orphen admitted, running his hands over her small breasts, not seeming to care they were a considerably modest size. He licked her nipples and let them grow hard under his attention before speaking again. “Each of you were chosen for a reason. Each of you are to carry a part of the prophecy. Five children are to be born.”

“I thought,” she gasped out as his fingers slid inside of her, rubbing inside of her, spreading her moistness, “that one of us would die, Dralnu promised one of us would die, and I feared it would be,” another gasp, “me.”

“One of you will die, giving birth,” Orphen explained, spreading Hope’s legs and untying the sheet around his waist. He positioned himself, hard and ready, though Hope knew he was not thinking of her she would not allow herself to be bothered by it. “Time moves differently in the maze. One of you may have only missed an hour, one of you have missed a year. The one who will give birth down here is the one who will die down here. Her own baby will kill her.”

Hope shed a tear for whom she knew would die, though she did not understand why she knew it would be Roxy. Something inside of Hope was screaming for the sadness that had overcome them. They were pawns in a prophecy, a prophecy that Dralnu had brought purposefully to life in search of a lover he knew was out there somewhere. They had all been corrupted by this man, everything had, and for what purpose?

Orphen pushed inside of her and all thoughts of everything disappeared from Hope’s mind. She was filled with thoughts of what was happening in her lower regions and the wonderful sensation it caused within her. Orphen moved like a man who had done this a million times and would do it a million times more, his technique perfected but the need still driving him. Once hard any man was happy to be inside any woman, and though Hope was not the one he envisioned it was not Orphen himself any longer that had Hope throwing her head back and screaming in complete ecstasy. Her mind was repeating one word and one word alone: Freedom!

Hope tightened her legs around this man and came full force even though he took much longer to come. He slipped in and out of her with the same rhythm any man would use and now she wondered if it all had been in vain, all her need to be with someone else. Had it all been just a gradual ladder to the one thing she had coveted even more than Orphen between her legs, because now that he was she only knew one thing, freedom, freedom, freedom!

She came again when he came, screaming, “Freedom!” into the night and crying out for joy while he filled her with his potent seed. She knew before he even slipped away that she was pregnant, that this would take. She felt it inside of herself, moving, heating her insides and filling her completely.

“When you leave the maze I will be waiting for you,” he explained to her. “Serena and I will be waiting to take you in.”

Hope sat up as Orphen removed himself from the bed, disgusted with himself and yet, not. He was not being unkind, just unhappy, and there was a large difference in the space of the small room where all of Hope’s innocence had been lost. “Thank you, your Majesty,” Hope said with all the conviction she could muster. “Thank you.”

“No Hope, thank you.”

Hope did not look to his face when he said it, she knew the honesty of his words. Instead she just walked out of the room, exiting through the door that had appeared and then exiting the Maze into the sunlight.