Once she'd worn a soft robe of flesh and privilege beneath silks and gold chains; carried upon the shoulders of lower-caste in a palanquin of bamboo and cushions bulging with cotton like a stuffed prawn. Now there was barely a digit's worth of softness clinging to her frame, hardened like an oak training spar in Winter. Her flat belly was scored with muscle-lines like a war god's idol, her hips flaring outward - beneath the red linen panels of her loincloth her posterior formed a taut convex; in her yielding, plush life of indolent lounging broken up by fits of strangling court drama, she'd been as the pale flesh of a lychee, lush and eager to soak the lips of a strapping young noble.
That beauty had been pared away by the lash of Daevite servitude and, when she'd proven to her new mistress she was possessed of an unyielding will to kill in the name of survival, the arena had painted sinew and strength over skin and bone. Her breasts, once heavy and soft, were now far too firm and round for a lady; thighs once pillowed and tender for questing lips and fingers were defined by a line of muscle that ran suggestively to her groin.
Sliding her meager garments from her frame, she stepped into the cool water, and her small, dark nipples hardened in response. Filled up to her hipbone, the sandstone gritty beneath her bared feet, she bent forward and stared at the water, inches from her face, clapping her hands to splash it over her eyes. The challenge had always been not to flinch, not to blink - an errant movement of her eyelids had cost her a little finger fourteen months prior, and its phantom presence still ached.
"Hesitation is death," she breathed to the ripples; her eyes burned.
"Pity is death." Askara clapped again, gritting her teeth against bodily reflex.
"Now I am become a dread wasp, and bite without regret." A final clap...followed by another, another until she was churning the water and pretending that she hadn't been turned into this murderous thing, like an Ashura had been forced down her throat and into the space where dwelt her soul. That which had once been a tender, loving flower was mutating into a brambled, blood-soaked tree hanging with the corpses of people she couldn't even call enemy.
Askara had always eschewed armor - her claim, of course, that it interrupted the flow of her virtuosity was a cover for the simple fact that it chafed - but instead adorned herself as befitted whatever role she adopted. Emerging from the water, tears streaming gladly down her cheeks and dripping from her chin to her breasts, she clad herself in a skirt of red pteryges, lined in soft, crimson velvet. Over the supple grace of her neck, the slave draped a broad collar of red-painted lamelles, lined in black, rolled cotton; her breasts she bound in a simple strip of leather she'd painted red. With crimson and vanta pastes, mixed with rosewater, she painted edges and lines upon her jaw, over her lips and eyes to give her a vespid aspect.
At the entrance of her quarters, a key turned in its latch, the lock to her gilded cage creaking open as her mistress' claviger tapped the end of his ranseur twice against the stone floor. She never stopped smiling as she turned to regard the Daevite, looming over her by a few hands like some milk-pale steppe ghost. In her eye, her captor's people were all beautiful in a sense, though there was an uncanny sense of disconnect...as if she were looking upon a man that wasn't entirely human, or at least, not the same way as she. The shape of his ribs beneath his bared chest were segmented, rather than smooth, and while his developed musculature had its own mouth-watering quality, his belly seemed...almost sunk. A simple cloth garb was wrapped around his waist, doing little to obscure the long, low-slung shape of his masculinity.
Inspired as she was, she couldn't help but wonder at taking one to bed.
After spilling blood, Askara would be as a rosy flame, her desire desperate to be quenched.
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In the aftermath, when the gore had flowed, the spider and the scorpion lay dead, and her mistress had won glory through her:
"Welcome back, victorious mistress."
The cage-door clattered closed behind her, sealing her within the luxuriant glow of her stony nest, and the world of her audience...here, instead, she was a hierophant in a dramatic ritual she herself had devised, a self-designed reward carefully curated by her own attentive slaves. The victorious warrior held her arms out at her sides as they painstakingly removed her blood soaked velvetine vestments, stripping her down to hard-edged, firm-fleshed nudity with worshipful adoration. "You are truly an artist of blade and lance, delighting the Good Masters and Mistresses...come, lotus of our desire, it is our dharma to cleanse you of sand and blood."
Valyn's touch was subtle as a dragonfly's pricking legs, barely tracking across her scarred, almond-dark skin as he undressed her; she saw no need to restrain herself with her Egyptian catamite. Askara's fingers combed through his luxuriant black curls, nails hissing across his defined, smooth jawline, painted similarly to hers; an edge that reminded her of a terribly handsome grasshopper. Her feelers drifted down his flank, his hip to touch the defined, powerful muscles of his thighs...she inspected, without any trepidation, the chitin-hardness of his masculinity, of his orotund crown, gently pressing the tip of her finger into the opening; a squish of his thick, pearlescent nectars that she tasted with a furtive, pink tongue.
"She's a'ready a'flame for our touch - yet methinks...it's the slow, honey-drip of our love our mistress hungers for, no?" She wasn't wrong - her other bed servant, Fyrrahl, was a passionate and fierce treasure her mistress had collected at great cost; her other hand quested for the crimson haired girl's heavy, lush breasts, cupping each pale orb in turn and enjoying the caps of her pink nipples. A golden collar around her neck held a pair of diaphanous, iridescent blue demi-cloaks that wafted across her shoulders like gossamer wings. Her wide, fertile hips were gently cupped by curled filigrees of gold, teardrop shaped rubies pointing alluringly at the trimmed patch of red hair hiding her creamy, swollen folds. The musk of her arousal was, to Askara, a calming incense.
"Cleanse me." The simple command, uttered in the gladiatrix's haunting alto poorly suited for hymnals, now scarred like smokeflash paint from howling in the arena, stirred them to vernal instinct and heat.
They all stepped into the water, a belt of crimson, leathern petals spreading across the surface.
Vahn's Elfin, muscled chest glowed with the special dye the Daevites had produced themselves, vivid greens and purples in silk-thin lines; his penis bobbed pleasantly at the surface of the font, long enough to fill her fingers and palm down to her wrist...his girth made him an almost taxing lover until she'd learned to handle him. Fancifully, she thought of his cock like a stinger of his own, plunging deep, thrusting into soft, yielding tissue and gushing so forcefully; she stroked it idly as he poured warm water over her hair, sluicing little rivers over her scalp. "My mistress' hair is the envy of Saphava; how the pale, ruddy Daevites must chitter in envy." His smile was the delicate pincer movement of mandibles to her fruitful imagination.
"Mere helots as we are unfit to serve such as she." Fyrrahl's kisses floated down Askara's oil-gleaming shoulder like butterfly wings, her breath like little flutters of wind. Each press of her lips sampled the warrior-poet's bouquet of sweat, of pheromones enticed forth by her little season of war until they found the sepal curve of her breast. The sound from Askara's throat was the buzzing of vespid wings, the quiet gnash of her teeth the click of mandibles as the freckled, lush girl's probing tongue traced around the dark anther of her nipple.
