Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 109099 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 364(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109099 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 364(@300wpm)
“Ascending the Silver Throne and wearing the Midnight Crown will help with that,” Krynn assured her. “But it will still be some years before your magic matures completely.”
“Why does it take so long?” she demanded. She had the impatience of a human, though I supposed I couldn’t blame her. The Mortals live such short, desperate lives, it’s natural that they should be impatient and want to hurry things along. Otherwise they’d never get to do anything before they died.
“It’s because you spent your first half century among the humans, who have no magic at all,” Krynn explained. “If you’d been living here in the Palace, your magic would have been nurtured and it would have grown along with you. Instead, it stayed dormant—like one of these seeds,” he added, holding out the handful she hadn’t managed to sprout. “If I plant a seed in fertile soil and give it sun and rain, it will grow and mature. But if I keep it in a dark drawer with no light or water or nourishment, it will remain dormant.”
“So…my magic is like a seed kept in a dark drawer?” the Princess asked, frowning. “I guess that makes sense.” She sighed. “I just wish we could get rid of Mordren altogether!”
“Even if you could, another would take his place. Possibly lady Elgiana,” I pointed out. “The lust for power is universal.”
“Not in me!” she protested. “I don’t really want to rule all these people. I mean, I’ll do the best I can and I’m certainly going to make some changes around here—especially for the Lesser Fae,” she added, frowning. “But it’s not a responsibility I would ever ask for.”
“Which is why you’re going to be such a good ruler—a wise and fair Queen,” Krynn told her, smiling. “It’s because you don’t want the power that you will wield it well.”
He rose from the table where the three of us had been sitting and paced briefly, fluttering his wings. I frowned as I watched him. I knew what the pacing meant—he hadn’t gotten enough pain to truly take the edge off his Needing.
I wasn’t surprised, actually. Often I had to whip him for hours—until my arm was tired—to satiate the magical parasite inside him. We had just been at the beginning of our whipping session when the Princess had stopped us.
It made me worried to see my oldest friend like this. I wished at times that I could give him what he truly craved—that I could fuck him. But besides the fact that my shaft was much too large for him to take, I simply couldn’t feel that way for him. Krynn was a lover of both males and females but for myself, only females would do. Despite his beauty, my shaft didn’t rise for him and never would.
Besides, fucking can fuck up a friendship faster than almost anything else. So we were stuck with the whip and the pain it caused. Though I knew my friend would rather submit sexually, the whippings I had been giving him kept the Needing at bay. Which meant that he didn’t have to go crawling back to that bitch, Lady Elgiana, who had infected him in the first place.
I thought of asking him if he wanted to go someplace private so I could whip him again, but I knew it shamed him when I brought the subject up first. He would come to me when he was ready—he always did. And then we would deal with his Needing the only way we could—with pain.
38
Krynn
I flexed my wings, enjoying the feeling of letting them stretch wide around me. For the first time in years the skin between them wasn’t tight with scar tissue. Somehow Princess Lilliana had healed me completely—well, she’d healed my wounds, anyway. But the Needing was still inside me—still clawing at my soul and gnawing at me with insatiable need.
Sometimes I pictured it as a monster inside me—a beast made of shadows with sharp, white teeth that was never truly satisfied. Sel did the best he could for me, beating me much harder than he wanted to in order to sate its cravings. But no matter how he bloodied my back, I still longed for something more than just the superficial pain.
I knew what I needed—I needed to submit. To be taken and fucked—to be used sexually. It was the one thing Sel couldn’t give me, though I knew he would if he could. But that kind of relationship simply wasn’t to be between us—he was my best friend but he could never be my lover.
But I would have to find someone to use me soon. The Needing was growing stronger with every cycle—and the beatings and whippings Sel gave me no longer completely satisfied the cravings of the beast inside me. I didn’t want to have to go crawling back to Lady Elgiana. She had been a cruel Mistress who delighted in my pain in a way that Sel never did.