Another story from the vault, fresh and ready for public release! This one's really more of a coda to the first chapter, but I hope you enjoy regardless!
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Jasmine felt spectral eyes upon her from the moment she approached her Mistress' door, knew ahead of time that it would be the most watched room in the entire manor. The things that watched from the corners now, though, could not have been tethered to any specific room, were not ghosts in the same way that the denizens of the outer chambers were; Jasmine doubted that they corresponded to any given individual living being at all. More likely they had simply... always been there.
The door was not locked, though Jasmine would not have been surprised at all to learn that it had been, right up until the very second she had touched it. It glided open for her, the space within a simple anteroom, deep red carpet laid over dark wood trim, other doors leading off into more of the Mistress' chambers on every visible wall.
It stayed that way until the maid crossed the threshold. Only then did the boundaries of normalcy begin to blur.
It felt very much to Jasmine like she imagined vertigo must feel like, a dizziness beyond mere disorientation that hit her in waves and, by degrees, altered the way the room around her seemed. The floor fell away first, carpet literally sliding away beneath Jasmine's bare feet, descending as though it were the facade of some set, changed as the scene transitioned from one to the next. Jasmine herself remained in place, standing now on air as the plane of the carpet began to drift and spin below her, something that had never been moored to anything at all, no earth, no reality, nothing but the momentary illusion, now gone.
Below her were stars, throbbing in a dark sky that she had never seen before. The sensation of standing normally but with nothing at all to take her weight was somehow more upsetting.
The walls blurred, the doors along their surfaces coming together, slithering around corners to meet and draw into a single point, the sight like a drug-induced hallucination made real. It even opened wrongly, sliding upward like the eyelid of some terrible third eye, revealing the Mistress herself within.
Standing on nothing, the Mistress looked resplendent, clad in a black robe that clung to the thin curves of her body, the depth of color within it stunning and unreal, reminding Jasmine of those experimental pigments that absorbed light. Just looking at it felt like looking at something that had been photoshopped poorly.
'Ah, good morning, my dear,' the Mistress smiled from the thing that was once her doorway, the background of the room behind her little more than a churning mass of light. 'How was your night? If you're here then it can't have been too strenuous on you, none of my attendants would let you in if you hadn't impressed.'
Jasmine did open her mouth to answer, but the Mistress hardly seemed interested, turning back to the chaos of the space behind her. Her robe's long black tail followed along behind her as she went, descending further into this space that was not the manor anymore as she did. Naked but not cold, tentative but no longer frightened of what she would find within the Mistress' chambers, Jasmine followed.
Once the strangest things had come to pass, what did one have to lose in going further in?
The walls continued to blur as she approached them, each step a fight between her trust for her Mistress and the simple observation of empty space beneath her. The door frame persisted the longest, but it too dissolved into the interplay of light and dark that had been slowly swallowing the room since Jasmine had entered. Stepping through the second threshold and into the Mistress' chambers proper replaced the chaos with something more orderly, if no less confusing to look at.
A cauldron of stars below, spiral stairs wrought of thin and delicate glass descending into its midst. The Mistress was now more than halfway down, closer to the bottom of the celestial tower that had somehow come to rest, penetrating down through the middle of a two story building. The light of it all shone blue and white as Jasmine began her descent, through the layers of nighttime that had settled around her; starlight ran in rivulets over the brown bareness of her skin, a thousand luminous eyes gleaming out from the void.
She followed the pure black cape behind her Mistress down into the depths, its trail cutting a swathe of nothingness through the inexplicable stars. For a while there was only the sound of footsteps, her Mistress in heels, but eventually other noises rang out through the dark; songs that had no names, the clanging of distant bells cast from unknowable metals.
It became clear to Jasmine that the things she was descending toward were not stars at all, but points of light that were something else entirely. She had been in many rooms populated by ghosts before, she knew the feeling of unseen eyes drawing down her body, and drawing closer to these strange constellations, walking steadily toward the stars felt very similar. Something like a photo negative of the specters she was used to; luminous where the manor's ghosts hid in shadows, open in their surveillance, singing their existence to the world.
Insofar that what was down here, this vast and draining void, could be considered a part of the world above...
Reaching the bottom was like falling to the floor of a star-spangled well, surrounded by light that glimmered and moved, the very touch of it upon Jasmine's skin like the touch of the ghosts upstairs. Mistress seemed to move through it all unrestricted, the light glancing off of her robe as though it were trespassing, but for Jasmine the experience made it difficult to even walk straight. After an entire night of spectral caresses her body was overly sensitive and the ghostlight uncaring where it touched her; even the smallest of motions across her bared form seemed to her like a deep kiss.
'Do keep up, Jasmine dear,' the Mistress called over her shoulder once she overheard her maid panting to herself. It felt like the sound should echo in a chamber so large as this one, but it did not, instead sounding as though it had been whispered directly into Jasmine's ear. 'Time doesn't flow the same in here as it does out there, but I don't like to be kept waiting either way. You understand.'
The stars stroked at Jasmine constantly as she walked through them, light that kissed and licked at her skin with a distant intensity she could not fully describe. She forced herself to continue in Mistress' footsteps, though the temptation to stop and sate her aching pussy on even the cool regard of starlight was overwhelming. But the watching lights were just as much a part of the manor as the human ghosts above, things that, through one process or another, bent to the Mistress' will; not a one of the spotlights that breathed across her clit, or worshiped temporarily at her nipples, gave up enough pressure or attention to bring her over the brink that Jasmine had been on since the night before.
That didn't stop them from gathering focus as she progressed deeper into this hidden cosmos, however...
The stars knew where to shine on her, their wandering lights honing gradually in on the centers of Jasmine's pleasure; her chest, between her thighs, even the well of her navel, where she had always been secretly sensitive. There was no way to deny these twinkling eyes their sentience anymore; whatever they were, and whatever they intended, those lights were alive, observing.
Weighing up Jasmine as she walked, naked, into their midst.
When the change happened, the transition from one space to another, it did so instantly, almost randomly. The stars surrounding them flickered, changed color and rearranged themselves; suddenly the staircase they had descended was gone, the floor a flowing celestial river cast in the same pale blue as the stars themselves. They thronged now behind the Mistress, a single wall of glittering sapphire, marking out the sheer darkness of the lady of the manor's silhouette.
The Mistress allowed her robe to fall open, and within there were more lights, things that coiled and uncoiled. In their closeness Jasmine could see what they really were.
The lights were the smooth, glassy surfaces of countless sinuous tentacles, writhing in the dark spaces of the Mistress' clothes. They were eyes, and hidden, speaking mouths.
Every star was alive, and down here, in the heart of the manor, they composed something like the board of caretakers for the spectral throng above.
A curling tide of strange flesh, tentacles uncoiled from within the Mistress' robe, fanning out like the tails of her robe, veils of starlight that moved according to their own internal rhythms. They curled about her feet, drew up to drape themselves over her shoulders, rose to frame her rail thin body with a writhing, twinkling background. She stood in its center, its fulcrum, as though she had been born to be there.
'Welcome to the true manor, Jasmine.' The Mistress did not smile, but her expression was at peace in a way the maid longed to replicate. 'We don't invite many down here, but those we do... let's say that my employers here can see their potential from the first.'
'Potential, ma'am?' Jasmine's voice lay thick and strained in her throat, the physics of the chamber itself working to drag down and distort the words the moment they left her. It was the first time she had spoken since entering, and the lights brightened to hear her.
'A place like this doesn't just work, dear,' the Mistress said. 'The departed up above, they exist as they do due to the largesse of my employers, and that takes effort. So when my paymasters, with their... wider field of vision, see someone upstairs who might be of use to our little operation, in time, they want to meet them. They want to meet you, dear.'
'I... suppose I am at their service as I am yours, ma'am.' Jasmine would have curtsied, had she been wearing anything with which to do so.
'Precisely the kind of answer that will make you big in this business, my dear.' Clapping, the Mistress let her robe fall open completely, revealing a pale strip of a body beneath it, all but dwarfed by the immensity of the tentacled creature that... what, exactly? Clung to her back? Inhabited the inside of her clothes like some kind of symbiote?
It was impossible to tell.
