I lived my childhood in the service of the goddess, prayers at first and last light, mornings spent gathering fruit or baking bread, bringing food to the poor and homeless in the afternoon. It was not always an easy life, but it was a good life. I may not have had others of my own age to play with, and my education was sparse and of little value in the outside world, but I seldom went hungry and always had a warm bed to sleep in, cleaning myself and my clothes was a daily ritual, and - until my twentieth year, at least - I was kept safe.
I always knew I was different, and that I had to keep that difference hidden. I understood also that there was something dangerous and shameful about it too, and that it was important for me to remain spiritually and physically pure. There were many restless nights when I wrestled with temptation, but being in the presence of the goddess helped me to endure.
As I matured into a woman, my body seemed determined to betray me, my breasts growing until no looseness of clothing could conceal them. Too often they provoked an envious glare or some lewd and lustful comment. I hated them and prayed often for the goddess to flatten my chest, but such prayers went unheeded, as did my pleading for her to do away with my difference.
I was cursed with a voluptuous sexuality I no had desire for or use for. I would have traded it all away for an unremarkable normality.
Only a handful knew the truth of it, and only one man. The old priest had always been kind to me, assuring me always that I was not cursed but in truth blessed, and that the goddess would look after me. Never once did he touch me or even look at me in a sexual way. I loved him dearly.
And then he died, and in time a new priest took up residence, a young man of frustrated ambition, carrying the weight of some far-off scandal that had seen him banished to our humble temple with its mission amongst the poor. From his first arrival I felt his eyes on me, undressing me in his thoughts the way the men in the marketplace did, as if beneath my habit I was no more than livestock to be bought and sold.
A time came when it was no longer possible to avoid being alone with him. There was something inevitable about it, as if not even the goddess could have prevented it. My prayers on this had also gone unheeded.
It was late at night. I had awoken, afflicted with a terrible craving after a lustful dream - the intensity of these dreams and their lingering aftereffects had worsened as I matured into adulthood - and sought comfort at the feet of the goddess. As I knelt to light a candle in the eternal flame (that regularly failed to live up to its name), I heard the brush of feet against stone behind me.
Startled, I struggled to my feet, backing away from the unexpected presence, even as I turned to face it. In the dark, all I saw at first was a firefly light tracing a path in the air, looping and swirling, burning a symbol into my mind that I recognised too late. A dark and forbidden magic snared my thoughts. To flee, to cry for help, to deny in any way the shadowy figure, was beyond me.
Like a fly in a spider's web, I was caught, helpless before my captor. The priest moved closer, close enough for me to see him in the dim candlelight, close enough for his cold hand to caress my cheek, his rough-skinned thumb to brush my lips, his wine-sour breath to assault my nostrils. "Your face is fair," he said, "and you play the innocent so well." His other hand unbuttoned my nightgown, until it parted to reveal my breasts. "But you have the body of a whore."
I knew what he was doing was wrong. I knew it was wrong for me to let him see me and touch me, but my thoughts of resistance scattered like butterflies. The bright symbol continued its devastating weave through my mind as my breasts were mauled by his cold hands, as my aroused and swollen nipples were squeezed and pinched by his brutal fingers, as his foul mouth sought to plunder mine.
I knew it was wrong for me to find any pleasure in the assault, but my body reacted like a whore's, eager for every abuse. My caged mind was unequal to the challenge. My sighs became gasps became whimpers became moans. Never before had I allowed myself to become so aroused. I felt on the edge of some profound revelation, my body as potent as my mind was impotent.
"Yes," he hissed, his expression a sneer of delight, "your true nature is revealed, whore." He tore off his cassock in an eager frenzy, his member hard and pulsing.
I knew it was wrong to laugh, but he suddenly looked so ridiculous, waving that tiny instrument at me. I laughed, and couldn't stop laughing. The magic that contained my thoughts did nothing to curtail this heartfelt pleasure.
"Quiet!" he hissed, shaking me angrily. "Stop it!" he screamed a moment later, his eyes bright with fury, and he struck me savagely across the face.
I stopped laughing. Stunned from the shock of it, I barely reacted as he thrust my nightgown down about my ankles, exposing my body to him entirely, save for the undergarment that concealed my difference.
Striking me had broken the spell, though the lingering afterimage of the symbol slowed my reactions. He snared my arm as I flinched away in horror, the muscular strength in his hand and arm too much for me.
He struck me again as I tried to scream, and I tasted blood. My eyes blurry with tears, I yielded as he tugged down that last protective garment, revealing -
With a strangled cry, he threw himself away from me. "You're a -" he said. "You're a -"
Whatever he thought I was, he couldn't say it. Nor, it seemed, could he tear his gaze away from my difference. As horrified as I was to be exposed like this, to be abused like this, I felt again that I was at the point of revelation.
The naked priest raised his hand, a bright firefly scoring through the air, as hypnotic as it was terrifying. No doubt to capture my mind once again - but this time his arm was captured, by the marble grip of the goddess's fair hand. With her other, she beckoned me to approach, and when I did, my eyes drinking in every feature of her expressive face, impossibly beautiful, she plucked the firefly from the priest's immobile fingers and multiplied it into a swarm that became a brightly glowing mist.
The priest screamed as the mist condensed, his eyes shut fast in denial, but mine was the flesh that absorbed its energy until my blood sang with it. Aroused beyond measure, my breasts swollen and aching with the need to be held, my nipples painfully hard, my difference jutting out proudly and dwarfing the priest's that now dribbled limply.
I screamed as I exploded, streams of bright moonlight hurling from my convulsing member, each pulsing contraction sending a burst of pleasure rippling through my flesh. The priest screamed as if burned, and perhaps he was. Years after, I spied him once, a broken man, his face crisscrossed with pale scars.
At last, drained, exhausted, I slumped to my knees, the temple echoing to the sound of the priest's fleeing footsteps. Above me the goddess had returned to her statue form, the only echo of her divinity the pulsing aftershocks of pleasure that rippled out from my twitching member.
My difference, I understood then, was something to be embraced.
*
I am, in every way that matters, a woman. I just have a difference. An addition. I have a member much like a man's, though few men match mine for size, and none that I have knowledge of exceed it. Like a treacherous companion, it stirs excitedly in response to the idlest of lewd fantasies, and sulks at being kept hidden when it would roar proudly like a lion.
And why not, when it has been blessed by the goddess herself? Certainly it adores to be worshipped. I am seldom as happy as I am when a pretty young woman kneels before me, her lips pressed adoringly to my rampant member.
But I am feared for my difference too. The priest fled from the temple, but his ravings soon brought others in search of me, inquisitors who cared not about a divine intervention, only about the contravention of natural law and the implication of dark magic. I could have told them about the priest and his firefly spells, but I was hidden from them in a dark space beneath the floor, cold and miserable, flinching at every cry from above, at every thundering footfall over my head.
I hardly dared sleep, though I must have. When at last I dared to emerge, dizzy with thirst, there was no sign of those who had hidden me, who knew the truth of me. Those who remained, though they had known me for years, bore the scars of terror. What affection they still bore for me was tempered with dread, and though I was given water and food, and given garments suitable for the outside world, I was not welcome to stay longer in the temple that had been my home longer than I could remember.
I knew nothing of the world. Had I been a man, and not merely possessed of a man's part, perhaps I would not have been so afraid, but the memory of the priest's grip on my arm, his mouth and hands on my helpless body, was too fresh. Men were the enemy.
I hid and lived and slept in the shadows, emerging only to beg for food, or sometimes steal it. I, who had grown up feeding the poor and homeless, was now one of them, and I dared not return to the temple. By figure and face I was too recognisable, too in danger from the inquisitors who still hunted me. Too in danger too from men who, like the priest, saw in me only a whore to be abused for their profit and entertainment.
Fear kept me in the city too long, when fear should have made me run, but the city was all I knew. The outside world, with its forests and mountains seemed as deadly as it was beautiful, and vast beyond comprehension.
And then I met a girl. A whore, as it happened, though all I saw at the time was a young woman, her clothes torn from her, being savagely beaten by an ugly bute of a man. Good sense would have seen me walk away, leaving her to her fate, another sad victim of a cruel world. But I had received help in my moment of need, and could not turn my back on another.
I took a desperate risk. I, who had never attempted magic before, closed my eyes and imagined a bright firefly at my fingertip, and traced out that same symbol that had stolen my will. On instinct I reflected it too, left to right, to send the magic outward.
The brute, who had ignored my approach, seeing no threat in me, gave a cry of fear, and I cringed in anticipation of fist against my cheek, or a heavy boot in my belly -
But nothing. The silence broken only by the woman's mewling whimpers. I opened my eyes to see the man staring at me in confusion, his fists clenching and unclenching. I could sense the spell at work in him, and in her too, though there was no struggle left in her.
Somehow, impossibly, I had used the dark magic - but this wasn't the time to question it. "Come," I said, helping her to her feet. She clung to me, trembling, sobbing fitfully, limping painfully at my side as she guided me through the dark alleys to a decaying house that was home to many women who worked the night. With the help of those others, I cleaned her wounds and got her to bed, and as she surrendered at last to sleep, the firefly ceased its buzzing.
*
