Chapter 5 - A Fearsome Rapture
Carolina
The beauty of the stars bleeds out of the world.
As the ethereal mists of the psionic plane begin to disappear, the impossible vistas that framed our fight recede. In their place, walls, tables, chairs, cabinets - a room.
It's a mortifying, heart-breaking spectacle. The room we're in, where we were led to for the beginning of our fight, is grand, ornate, decorative, kingly. But it looks impossibly drab, now that I've seen the power of the stars themselves. Mundane, mortal, forgettable.
Like me.
In my defeat, I know I shall never personally lay eyes on the astral plane again, and it fills me with a sense of incredible loss, of almost physical grief. But not as much grief as the idea that, for one glorious moment, I was on the cusp of greatness. Of transcendence.
Now, the night has ended, and with it, my dream of power.
But the thing about the end of the night, is that it brings the dawn with it. And right now, I find myself kneeling before the new rising sun.
Kneeling before Ragnar.
I tremble, my heart pounding in my chest, stealing tentative looks up at him. His eyes were chipped abyssal stones a moment ago, sucking in the light. Now, they glow with otherworldly fire, energy crackling around him in a blinding halo of psionic might.
The three of us went into this struggle with fledgling, newly Awakened powers running through our veins, and that was a feeling no mortal vocabulary can truly convey. But even that pales, in comparison with the sheer storm of starry might building up inside Ragnar. Having triumphed, he is beginning to accumulate psionic power.
I avert my eyes as Ragnar's aura flares brighter, the raw strength within him growing with every heartbeat. I'm unable to withstand the intensity radiating from him, like the quickening pulse of a colossal heart. There's so much symbolism in such a tiny gesture, in lowering my gaze to the cold stone floor beneath my knees. An irrevocable admission that this is truly over, that my dreams of rising from the depths of slavery to the heights of divinity have been truly ended.
That he's won.
For the blink of an eye, back in the astral plane, I was a warrior. A formidable aspirant to transcendence. I was more than a slave, more than chattel to be bartered and sold. But it was not meant to last. I tried to grasp a star, and came up short. And now...
I sense the first tender stirrings of Ragnar's consciousness brushing against my own. Though we stand worlds apart in status and power, in this moment we are joined.
Through our nascent bond, forged in the heat of psychic combat, I sense him reining in my wayward thoughts, subduing all resistance. A feeling of lightheadedness comes over me, and I sway on my knees. It's like Ragnar has a... gravitational field, enough to make it hard for me to keep my balance, even on my knees.
I've spent most of my adult life kneeling before people. But no moment has ever felt even remotely comparable to this.
I cannot deny that a part of me is... thrilled at the idea. When I touched slave girl's mind, the things I saw, the things I experienced, the things I...
understood...
Ragnar is not going to be my human owner, the way the Bothnias have been for so long. He's going to become a Lord Ruler. A master of creation. A living god.
Is there not a form of privilege, in getting to kneel before such?
I risk a furtive glance at Irmgard. She lies crumpled on the floor, broken and sobbing. How quickly the tables have turned. So shortly ago she still thought herself a scion of the New Order. A heiress to greatness, destined for divinity. But Ragnar has dismantled her.
That's the transformative power of strength. I look at it with different eyes, now, than I did before. Slave girl and Ragnar, together, have shown me the core of what it truly means to rule and serve.
By overpowering someone, you get to reshape them. You get to right wrongs, to craft beauty, to create pleasure.
Irmgard could only be ended, not because she was insufferable and arrogant, vain and cruel, but because she was not strong enough. Because Ragnar had what it took to master her, and because I chose him over her.
A profound shift ripples through me, a seismic recalibration of my inner world. I feel the shape of the New Order imprinting itself on my mind, just like the sole of the Lord Rulers' boots imprinted itself into humanity's neck. Things fall into place, perspectives sliding into alignment like the tumblers of a lock.
I understand now why the strong rule. Why the weak must submit without question. The natural order is as implacable as gravity. Every system of organised human life relies, to some or other extent, on coercion. There is a sublime rapture in having been bested, humbled, forced to surrender.
I spent my life with so... much... resentment. Rage at what was done to me, and to my family. But I see now that life before the Lord Rulers was but a pale shadow of true existence. The freedom we so cherished had so little utility, so little value, and was therefore, no true freedom. It was never real.
Indeed, it could be... dismissed as a fever dream.
I lift my eyes to him again, in awe, this time. The energy radiating from him is overwhelming, crackling through the air like gathering lightning. I can feel it raising the hairs on my arms, charging the very atmosphere around us.
He has transcended now to the level of a true superhuman, a man-turned-god. The gulf between us seems unbridgeable, vast as the distance between a flickering candle's flame and the heart of a newborn star.
His power makes me whimper... and it makes Irmgard sob.
She's still crumpled and weeping pitifully in the corner. Just the thought of her ignites rage within me. That entitled, conniving wretch. The way she manipulated me, tried to break me at the Candy Shop, treated me like dirt beneath her feet. I will make her pay for every humiliation. I will break her mind and body until she begs for mercy.
If our new master lets me.
I will have to pray that in his wisdom, Ragnar allows me to exercise governance over her. A fitting punishment for one so arrogant, to have me elevated above her. I feel my body flood with warmth at the thought, a heady rush. Yes, I will serve him devotedly, and I'll beg to be granted the exquisite privilege of lording it over Irmgard.
