Power

They say that gold is power, but "they" are mostly male, and thus idiots.

On the day she decided to stop living on goodwill and bland virtue, instead using her power for its hell-intended purpose, the witch did not begin dabbling in alchemy. After all, what do men pay gold

for

? Surely that's more powerful.

So, she planted a garden. An innocent, beautiful garden of Eden, with every delicious fruit and herb that was good and fair, all that was delightful to the scent, touch and taste. She laced each fruit with just a drop of magic, nestled deep inside, and when her garden was heavy with fruit she loaded a cart and took it to the market. She wore a crone's habit, her hair tucked away and her voice a sweet seduction over the market crowds, her eyes as trustworthy as ponds.

Apples, peaches, cherries sweet

All the fruit you'd like to eat,

Rampion, for long, lovely hair,

Free tastes for the ladies fair,

Come, come, taste my wares!

Fruit after fruit, pouch by pouch, she served her fruits and herbs. Every woman that tasted wanted, then craved, then demanded. They came. Then they came back. They offered gold if they had it, chickens, grains, cows, or cabins if they did not. Finally, all the couples where the woman had eaten the witch's fruit were destitute. The witch had more than enough of everything she could want. She was renting the peasants farms to them and living on their bread and their beasts, while they worked as slaves on their own land.

Yet still, they wanted more. The women were frantic, eye-hollowed, and... pregnant. What else could they offer? But what were children without that fruit, that wonderful, wonderful fruit...

The witch selected only the most beautiful girl-children. She took them to a tower recently vacated by a lighthouseman and his frantic, pregnant, and regrettably plain wife. The witch planted one child on each floor, cultivating them as she had cultivated her garden.

The eldest had a room at the top of the stairs with a trapdoor up to the lighthouse's firepit. She was a rampion child, with hair the color of sunlight, and it would not stop growing. She delighted in sitting at the edge of the firepit and combing those twinkling locks in the cool evening breeze, watching the road that ran not too far from the tower and sighing for a man to come and rescue her from a life of boredom.

The witch listened day after day, and soon sap after sap of useless pansy-boys came mincing to cry their love to that barely grown slip of flesh and magic, and she sighed her heart to each of them.

The witch became steadily more annoyed. Although fatuous men were all part of the plan, the young girl was and would always be

hers

. It was coming time for that baby girl to grow up.

The witch stood watching the young woman sleep. She had a petulant pout on that pretty little mouth. The witch just wanted to slap it off. The girl's near-white hair was curled across the pillows, entangled with the blanket. The witch brushed the soft curls from her forehead. The curls arched into her hand like a cat seeking its master.

When the rampion child awoke, her hair was creeping across her throat. She gasped and tried to sit up, but her hair had tied her wrists to the bedposts, her neck bound to the headboard. She screamed, but the witch standing over her was the only one who heard, and

she

just smiled, hovering, her hand splayed in the center of the girl's chest.

"You've been wanting something, little rampion child?"

The girl screamed again, as the witch ran her hand from her chest over the mounds of her breasts and the softness of her stomach to the damp patch in her cotton nightgown. Her scream dissolved into a sharp intake of breath.

"You don't need a man, Rapunzel, to fulfill your

deepest

,

darkest.... Dampest

dreams..." The witch whispered.

The young woman's hips rose, pressing against the witch's fingers as if she could not help herself. The witch began to stroked in lingering circles, slow and steady. Then, her arm followed her hand, then her shoulders, then her body as she slithered on top of the girl. Rapunzel tried to close her legs, but her own silky hair bound her ankles spread. She was helpless, here in the darkness of the tower, as she had always been helpless though she did not know it.

The girl let out a small, breathless gasp as the witch's body pressed against her sex. The witch's eyes seemed to glow in the dark, inches from her face.

"No, no, no. Please..." She begged, but her tingling sex dripped

yes, yes, yes.

The witch slapped her across the face, leaving a stinging handprint on her tear-streaked cheek. "Your mouth is not for speaking," the witch said, thrusting her tongue between the girl's lips. She ground her knee into the wet patch between Rapunzel's legs and rode the swell as that body surged in response. She steadied herself with her hands, locking the girl between her arms and ground again and again, enjoying the roil of the body beneath her.

Rapunzel bucked one last time and screamed an orgasm to the night, feeling the hot rush of it prickling every inch of skin. Below, the other girls listened, breath held, wondering what was going n above.

The witch licked her finger and ran it over the girl's open lips. She sat back, straddling her charge, trailing her fingernails from the young woman's lips, down her neck to the scalloped lace bodice of her nightgown. There, she gripped the cloth, relishing the tearing noise as she ripped it, slowly and deliberately, exposing those soft breasts, quivering like frightened rabbits, their pink peaks erect and swaying, then exposing the taut, expectant stomach.

The witch laid a hand on the pearly breasts, smiling in anticipation of the red and black bruises that would soon paint those snowy peaks. She grasped the coral nipples, rolling them between her fingers. The breasts shuddered as Rapunzel gasped in equal parts pleasure and pain. Then, the witch kissed her between the breasts, again and again, then her kisses became bites, and her bites began to move down, across the expanse of her smooth stomach, until Rapunzel felt the witch's breath, hot on the petals of her lower flower, which bloomed and dripped nectar in response.

"Please, please no," she begged, but those feral eyes glowed up at her through the soft curls of her sex, as the witch's long tongue slid between her lower lips, curling and flicking as if it had a life of its own.

Then she was curling, bucking and screaming her throat sore as she came and came and came, so much that the tingling turned to burning and she felt as if her skin were barely containing that wild flame of passion, lashing her time and again as she shuddered and quaked, squirting time after time down the witch's face, nearly drowning her in sweet juices.

Finally, the witch slowed her tongue, and the young woman fell panting to the bed. "Please, please, please..."She begged, though she didn't know what she was begging for. Her mind felt as if it were floating somewhere far away, held to her body by tingling jolts from her soaking, slippery cunt.

The witch kissed her throbbing secret, laid so bare that it jumped and jolted in response, then stood. "Later, my dear." She said, and vanished into the dark, leaving only a lingering musky scent to tell that she had been there.

Rapunzel's hair lipped silkily across her skin, as if innocent of all betrayal, and her mind slowly came untied from her throbbing cherry and drifted off to sleep.

The next day, a horseman rode up, a prince of noble birth, to tempt the tired maiden with his clumsy tongue, dripping with stories of palaces and balls and love. That night, Rapunzel braided her hair tightly before bed.

It seemed that her candle had scarcely been snuffed, and she had not yet laid in the bed when she was the glint of the witch's eyes in the dark, and heard her mocking words. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your

hair."

The witch spat the last word, and in response the girl's hair leapt from its braid, lashing out like a whip. "Climb, climb, climb on heaven's stairs." The hair slipped around her body like a charmed snake, not yet confining, but threatening. She did not try to stop it.

"What a wicked child, trying to defy me," the witch whispered, holding Rapunzel upright by a handful of that treacherous hair. "Bend, and hold your ankles."

Rapunzel shook her head, but her hair seemed to pull her forward, warm golden strands lashing her wrists to her ankles and pulling tight.

The hem of her nightgown seemed to drift up, revealing the moon of her ass, round and expectant in the dim slivers of moonlight. "No, no, no..." She began to beg, even before she felt the sharp sting of the witch's relentless hand on her bare backside, low enough that she could feel the motion of the air as it brushed the quickly swelling hair of her sex. She felt her blood rushing to her rump, ruddying her pale, pale skin until her "no's" faded into pants.

The witch pulled the girl's bare ass against her, sliding her hands around the smooth sides to find her velveteen breasts. She squeezed them gently and the girl gasped. Then, she slid her fingers down and over the girl's swollen cherry, feeling the rivers that wet her thighs, sticky and silky.

"It feels like 'yes' to me," the witch sneered. Rapunzel tensed as the woman stroked her, slowly, carefully, as if playing a stately soliloquy for which the girl's body was her only instrument. Rapunzel felt her body coming to peak, and she took a breath to scream, but the witch spread her fingers into a vee, just at the last stroke, and rubbed the swollen mound around it.

"You lie to yourself too much, rampion child. Don't pretend you weren't waiting for us all day," the witch whispered.

The girl began to move her hips, moaning as she sought release, but the witch's nimble fingers evaded her. She had nothing to say, for she had, indeed, dreamed of this heat all day, longing.

The witch slipped a finger into her, stopping a little short of her hymen. Rapunzel's hips thrived against it, dripping, drawing once again to orgasm, but the witch pulled her fingers away, leaving the girl's pussy swollen and quivering in frustration.

The witch petted her captive in long, soothing strokes, coating her in the thick nectar as she thrilled against those long fingers.

The girl began to beg as the witch knelt behind her, her long tongue flicking at the delicacy between her legs. "Please.... Please.... Please..." she begged.

But, the witch withdrew once again.

"What would you do for me?" The witch asked.

"Anything, anything." The girl sobbed, her back aching, her legs shaking and her sex throbbing like a second heartbeat.

The witch pushed her so that she fell ungracefully, then the older woman lifted her skirts and alighted her own secret parts on the girl's soft, innocent lips. "Eat," she commanded, leaning forward to stroke her prize. "Tonight, you must have supper before you shall do any singing."

The young woman ate as if it were her last supper on this earth, lapping at those sweet lips, quickly becoming accustomed to the salty taste and drinking it in.

Throughout the night, the girl and the witch screamed again and again, while the prince waited below in great agitation and worry.

When the witch rose to leave, she told her charge "Tomorrow, when the moon sets, I will be on the roof. You may come to me." Then she was gone.

The prince asked Rapunzel what the screaming was the night before, but she only stared off into the distance. He decided that she must be under a spell, and resolved to listen carefully for any phrase that might free her, any key word to make her his.

As soon as the moon neared the horizon, Rapunzel put her hair into a bun and hurried up to the fire-pit, long since scoured clean by rain, looking eagerly for her lover, but she was alone. Melancholy, she sat down, and presently fell asleep.

She awoke to the witch's voice behind her. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair," the witch sang, and Rapunzel's hair tumbled down around her shoulders.

"Why did you come?" The witch asked.

"To please and be pleased," Rapunzel breathed, feeling her hair begin to slip and wind around her once again.

"Then let us welcome your birthday together," said the witch and so they did, as the prince listened, frantic, far below.

The next morning, Rapunzel awoke in the fire pit. She sat up groggily, pulling her hair out of her eyes. She wrapped it around itself, tying it back.

Next to her was a long, long rope. On it rested a note, two letters long: "GO."

A timorous voice called from below. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!"

As her hair shimmered down around her, Rapunzel secured the rope to a beam and shimmied down it, to a man as flat and bland as the ground he walked upon. They rode to his city, and he threw pink roses before the pair, and their silky petals reminded her of a pair of dripping lips.

She was the lover of a witch and the wife of a king. Raised by a witch, she raised a king. And so did the witch become powerful, for even on her wedding night, the queen woke to that ominous whisper she could never deny: "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair..."