Mardo snatched up two wine glasses sitting innocently on a tool chest and filled them with a blue liquid from a tall, unlabeled bottle. Maximillia’s curiosity was piqued when he offered her one of the glasses.
“What is it?”
The silver-haired brute downed the contents of his glass in one shot before returning a boastful grin. “It’s good.”
She smiled and drank from the glass. The pungent flavor tickled her tongue and went down smooth. Mardo plopped down on a massive couch at the far side of the room which
could’ve doubled as a bed. He slapped the cushion beside him and Maximillia quickly set her empty glass down and sat beside Mardo.
“You didn’t come here for drinks or food. I see a bit of desperation in your eyes.” Like some wizened sage, a somber aura swelled about him. Maximillia was entranced because he was right. “I can recognize that desperation because I used to see it in my own eyes when I looked in the mirror. That was the day that I learned how cruel and unfair the world can be. That’s a revelation that you’ve recently come to, isn’t it?”
She nodded, eyes locked onto his.
“What was it that made you realize this? What happened to you?”
Emotion overtook Maximillia and her face cracked, her eyes welling up. She lowered her head and put her hands in her lap. With timely shrewdness, Mardo nodded, caressing the side of her head with his meaty paw. “Family. Your father?”
She shook her head through incessant sniffles.
“Mother.”
She nodded.
He analyzed her carefully. “I would’ve said that she refused to let you go, but I think it’s more that she refused to stay. She left you, didn’t she?”
Maximillia’s sniffles turned to a violently trembling sob.
“I’ll tell you a secret. So did mine.”
She looked up at him, eyes red and raw as he nodded with measured emphasis.
“I cried, too, but then I realized she was liberating me. She wouldn’t be there to lie those lies about the world to me anymore. The world is cruel and the lie of blood is the cruelest of all: that your blood and kin are always going to be there for you simply because they’re your blood. They have no obligation. That’s when I learned that the choice of the bonds you make are more powerful than blood. We can’t choose our parents. We have no choice with that, but we have a choice in who we decide to populate our world with. I was just one person when I found the first members of my new family. We formed a circle and then we found other lost souls such as ourselves and our ranks grew.”
Maximillia kept his gaze, captivated by his every word as he continued. “We became a family, a true family in every sense of the word. We shared everything and loved each other unconditionally, the way the world told us our families were supposed to but didn’t. We’re free here. We’re a family. That’s why you came. You want what all of us wanted before we found each other. What you want you can have. We’ll give it freely, and that’s love. Love and unconditional acceptance.”
The naive waif listened intently. Unbeknownst to her, Mardo had mastered the art of the speech after having spoken it hundreds of times. At this point he delivered it with effortless efficacy.
“I can offer this gift to you, Flower,” he said, near to closing the deal. “...but I can only offer it once. There can’t be any indecision. You decide, but the choice is yours.”
She looked down at her knees, her mind swirling with a hundred possibilities.
“You can stay or you can go, but you can’t do both,” he reminded.
The possibilities for Maximillia narrowed, falling away as her focus grew more emboldened. Finally, her eyes rose, fearlessly resolute. “I want to stay.”
Mardo smiled, rising off the couch and refilling their glasses. “Then, we should celebrate.”
He handed Maximillia her glass as he sipped from his own and sat down beside her. They spoke for hours and her meek, soft-spoken veneer slowly melted away. He complimented her almost constantly, his eyes boring into hers with an angelic potency. For that stretch of time she felt like the all-important center of the universe.
The two of them had exhausted several jugs of the blue, tangy liquor over the course of their prolonged exchange. The once aggressive throbbing of the music outside had become a gentle, soothing cradlesong that dissolved into the background. Mardo spoke with clinical precision, dissecting Maximillia’s history cunningly, creating a mental profile based on the answers to the questions he asked and how she visibly responded to the various comments he made in passing. She wasn’t an impenetrable, stone-faced puzzle box. The truth was quite the contrary: Maximillia was criminally predictable, a hopelessly naive quarry for Mardo’s consummate hunter.
“So, is this it?” she asked. “Am I a part of your club?”
He laughed at the nature of her question. Nervously, she laughed too. “This is a family, my dear Flower,” Mardo remarked, brushing several errant strands of her dark hair aside, revealing the dark pools of her eyes. “To answer your question there is one final step that we all must make before joining the family. A small token which is given to us by you. It’s a promise symbolized by a gift.”
“A gift? Like, something I’d have to buy and wrap?”
Mardo chuckled again. Maximillia’s shy rawness made her even more delectable. “No, this gift is one you can already choose to give. It costs no money but is more valuable than anything that can be bought.”
“What is it?”
“A gift of the flesh,” he said with a grave somberness. Her brows raised and her eyes widened. “Spoken promises mean nothing. They can be broken, but when you give up something through an act of devotion, that has meaning.”
“Did you give a gift?” she asked.
Mardo held up his hand and revealed a mangled burn mark on his palm. “I was the first. I chose to give pain to show the family the level of my devotion. The first members begged that I not, but it was my choice. I didn’t ask that they do the same. They gave their own gifts and they were enough. So, the tradition has been that the men give a gift of pain and the women give a gift of love. Both require giving something and losing something. Are you prepared to give a gift of love to this family to secure your place?”
She thought about it for several long moments before giving him a firm, measured nod. With that, he rose from the couch and walked over to a countertop built into the wall. He picked up a small device that sat innocently amongst other sundry items; a thin set of compact binoculars composed of a transparent material. The eye pieces glowed a soft, brilliant aquamarine.
Mardo sat back down, holding the eyepiece up to her. “You’ve been living your life with blinders on, as we all did. Look through these lenses and see the light.”
“Just look through them?”
He nodded. Maximillia took the eyepiece and held it to her face, resting it on the bridge of her nose, and glared through it. The blue light shone into her eyes and soon a kaleidoscopic display revealed itself to her. She could hear the harmonic rhythm of her heartbeat and everything else fell away: A dripping water faucet turned into a slow-motion ballet where the sound of each drop hitting the metal sink seemed to stretch on for minutes; her irises dilated and her breathing slowed; her arms grew weak, falling to the cushions beside her and dropping the eyepiece as her body lost all tenseness and slumped back into a boneless heap against the couch.
She stared up at the ceiling, hearing only her breathing and seeing only a flittering cascade of sparks dancing across the convex stage of her eyes. The peculiar light had interacted with the blue liquid she’d spent hours sipping at creating a most diabolic reaction. The compound resulted in a catalytic process that tricked the brain into releasing a particularly potent series of naturally-produced hallucinogenic neurochemicals. On the street, this was called a Gatekeeper. The results were blatantly clear as Maximillia’s limp form lied there, a faint, conquered smile revealing her anesthetized elation. Her eyes, while open, were glassy and distant,
blinking weakly every other second.
Mardo allowed her to settle into her intoxicated state before leaning over her. “Flower, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said, quietly euphoric.
“You understand every word I’m saying, correct?”
She nodded.
“Some would say you’ve been drugged, but to initiate into this family we all volunteered to see the light and we did. What you’re feeling right now isn’t inebriation but liberation.”
Again, she nodded in passive agreement, clearly in no state to give a lengthy, carefully constructed response. Delicately, Mardo brushed the hair from her face, admiring her sinless beauty; her virginal, unmarked youth was something to behold. “I want you to stand and see the world with your new eyes, Flower. Can you do that for me?”
Maximillia nodded once more as Mardo helped her rise from the couch. He pulled her baggy sweatshirt from her shoulders and peeled it off. “Let me take this, so you can get comfortable. I want to see my beautiful Flower.”
She didn’t resist, only helping him to help her remove it with muted obedience. He tossed the sweatshirt to the far side of the couch and sat back, taking in the sight of her. She was a diminutive waif, her features not fully matured. Her hips hadn’t flexed to their final width and her bust was still little more than two swollen lumps bulging from beneath her slim-fit
long-sleeved shirt. Cast in a pair of black, form-fitting exercise sweats, Maximillia’s legs were long and slim like the rest of her, yet her rear-end showed an unusual plumpness when compared to the rest of her body which lacked voluptuousness.
She was a pale-skinned doll with all of the dangerous features that accompanied that. Her dark, ribbony mane hung drape-like, tickling the top of her chest and cradling her lower back. She swayed gently there, thanks to the Gatekeeper, but Mardo’s eyes delighted in every bit of her.
Mardo stood up and put his thick, strong hands on Maximillia’s shoulders, towering over her. “You’re beautiful. Do you know that?”
All she could do was smile in her stupor as he cradled her tiny face in between his palms, his thumbs gliding against her cheekbones. “I’ll ask one final time. The choice is completely yours. Do you want to join us?”
“Yes,” she boldly pronounced.
“Are you ready to prove yourself and give your gift of love to the family?”
“Yes.”
“Close your eyes.”
Maximillia obeyed and the silver-haired, barrel-chested brute tilted her face up to his and wrapped his lips around hers, kissing her softly at first but then with a growing voracious hunger. She didn’t resist, yet struggled to keep up with him. Between his size and clear strength, she was just a frail, conquered creature in his grasp. It was apparent that she had little experience in kissing but played up a false confidence.
Everything was happening so fast that she felt as if she was being swept along by an uncaring tide. Being so far from home and deeply into the strangeness of this alien place bombarded her senses with a constant wave of fascination, from the lingering industrial scents wafting invisibly by, to the rolling clamor thumping faintly from distant speakers and then this thick, grey-capped monolith of a man who was laboring to consume her.
She didn’t know what to feel when Mardo’s muscled fingers snaked around behind her, clenched her ass and began to knead her virginal flesh. His breath was mildly pungent and would otherwise be instantly repugnant, but for some reason she accepted it and this added to the wild unlikelihood of the situation. There she was, this lost girl, now in the arms of a man she’d just met, their mouths entangled and his strong hands massaging her backside to breathtaking effect.
Mardo effortlessly lifted the little nestling off the ground forcing Maximillia to throw her arms around his neck to keep from flopping backwards. He gently laid her on her back on the couch. She was limply splayed out across the cushions, completely sedate yet gazing up at him with a quiet acquiescence. The Gatekeeper had done its job beyond expectations. Maximillia was little more than a conscious marionette. He laid next to her, tucking his arm under her head to pull her close, and began to kiss her again, slyly snaking his tongue into her mouth. She moaned, surprised, but didn’t relent in kissing him back.
Maximillia’s knees were still together as she clung onto the last vestiges of her self-control, but the Gatekeeper had slowly eroded her every inhibition. Mardo pawed at her knees, pulling them apart and then ran his fingers up and down her inner thighs. Growing impatient, he brought his hand up and began to cup her crotch, his fingers worming against the fabric of her sweats and panties. She moaned into his mouth, seemingly trying to resist but was mentally unable to get her body to comply with her momentary burst of gumption.
Her bent legs were completely bowed out and spread as Mardo continued to massage her exposed crotch. His erection was brazenly pronounced, bulging up against his pant leg.
She finally put her hands on his chest, prying her lips from his. “Wait,’ she uttered breathlessly. He’d have none of it and kissed her again, not slowing the pace or pressure of his massaging fingers against her nubile sex. Her nipples had hardened into stiff little nubs. There was good reason for all of this. Unbeknownst to Maximillia, there was a component in the blue liquor that was a potent aphrodisiac taken from the petals of an Arcean flower. It effectively kicked her hormones into a supercharged state of arousal.
Mardo climbed off the couch, leaving Maximillia with her eyes shut, drunkenly enraptured. He tucked his fingers down past the waistbands of both her sweats and panties and slowly peeled them both off in one smooth motion until her lower body was naked to the air, save for a pair of sneakers. Spreading her thighs to get a clearer look, he cocked his head back, taking in the sight of her dewy gash, which was wreathed in an unkempt mane of dark, frizzy hair. He sighed, containing an intoxicated awe.
“Now, would you look at that? No need to die because I’ve already seen Heaven,” he grinned.
Mardo ran his fat middle finger along the crest of her engorged crevice, finding the tip of his finger dabbed with goo. “You’re wet already! That didn’t take much.” Leaning forward, he pressed his cheek against the cool skin of her inner thigh, dragging his tongue along her sodden slit and letting her curly pubes tickle his nose. Maximillia gasped as she felt his tongue curl along her moistened flesh.
“Is this the first time a man has ever licked you down here?”
With her eyes still shut, Maximillia nodded. He went back to prodding her delicate canal with his monstrous tongue, violating her soggy hole. She began to squirm, grabbing at the sheets on the couch. He willfully snaked around inside of her quivering gash, dragging her deeper into a cloudy morass of faded inhibitions.
Still drunk on the sensation of having her nethers so sloppily lapped at, Maximillia’s eyes lazily yawned open to the sight of Mardo’s rotund frame casting its shadow atop her, perched between her legs. He partially collapsed across her mid-section, keeping himself propped up on one wobbly arm, his other arm anxiously fishing around inside his trousers. With a complete lack of cool measurement or romance he pulled his thick erection free, his chest worriedly heaving and his guttural breaths labored and beast-like. Her slim thighs were still gaped open, leaving her pussy dangerously exposed as Mardo hung over her with predatory anticipation.
Maximillia peered down between her legs only to see a quickly hardening appendage shimmying closer to her unprotected pussy. The silver-tongued cur’s trunk of a cock was monstrously thick and tangled in a stringy network of bloated vasculature. It made no attempt at chivalrous gentility, rather it lumbered towards its prize guided by a single-minded stupor. Mardo took it in a firm grip and licked the blood-swollen head along the length of her
dew-dabbed labia. Her eyes widened and her breathing shuddered, unable to protest, speechless and awestruck at the sight of this turgid monstrosity which intended to violate her immaculate canal.
The sheer dimensions of the head of Mardo’s spear seeme
d that it would be an impossible feat to guide it through Maximillia’s tight opening, lubricated or not. He stroked it a few more times to ensure its rigidity and slowly pushed the tip against her, splitting open her defenseless petals. She gasped, her eye lids fluttering uncontrollably. He groaned with animalistic satisfaction as he sank deeper into her. The pressure of his girth splitting her open was tempered by the numbing effects of the Gatekeeper. Before long Mardo was almost fully buried into her and he was boisterously thrusting forward into his petite, pale-skinned toy.
Mardo rutted into her unchallenged, and with an excited savagery. One of Mardo’s
dirt-caked acolytes, having not immediately recognized the intimate ravaging in-progress, haphazardly peeked into the room, knocking softly on a pipe to announce himself. Then, he noticed Mardo’s bare rump cresting above the back of the couch and driving down with fervent purpose.
The acolyte noticed too late. “Out!” Mardo growled angrily with a dismissive flap of his arm, sending the wincing acolyte scurrying off.
The portly regent continued to pump away into a largely wilted Maximillia, whose crinkled face registered an incapably feeble protest. His shuddering movements accelerated into a spastically urgent display. His groans became shorter, louder and more demanding. He threw his face into her neck and slobbered into it as his blunt member rolled around inside of her, releasing a lazy drool of pre-cum.
“Tell me you want this,” he grunted, his nose mashed against her ear.
She was too inebriated to process his request. “Huh?” she asked.
“Tell daddy you want this,” he persisted.
Maximillia couldn’t answer. Mardo suddenly belted out a vicious rolling grumble, hunched forward and began to convulse. She suddenly felt warm pulses washing around inside her as he bucked achingly atop her. Her pussy became inundated with a peculiarly slick substance that came in sloshy waves. She knew something monumental was happening, but was confused by this carnally mechanic consummation. It was a painfully exciting sensation. She was worried, repulsed and excited all the same, helplessly inundated by a torrent of irresistible impulses.
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