§
With a sigh, I rose from the bed and then reached across the sleeping courtesan between us to gently shake Mireia by the shoulder.
“Wake up,” I urged softly. “You were going to Rod’s room once your task here was done, remember?”
She opened her eyes and stretched lazily, then looked at the others. Celia, the blonde in the middle, had fed me last. She was sound asleep with a little fist pressed against her cheek, which was adorable. Dana and Crystal, the brunette, were snuggled together on the couch. These three had an excuse to be asleep, but Mireia hadn’t fed me.
“What time is it?” she wondered.
“About an hour and a half before Midnight,” I told her.
Her eyes grew wide, then she let out a ‘pfft’. “We were at it that long?”
I did the math and realized more than three hours had passed since they brought me to the bedroom. We had spent considerably more time on pleasure than on feeding. I blushed and cleared my throat as I nodded.
“Help me get them under the covers,” I told her, quickly changing the subject.
She took care of the blankets while I lifted and carried the girls, and we soon had all three nicely tucked in.
“They look so innocent asleep, don’t they?” Mireia giggled. And it was true. We weren’t looking at three prostitutes but rather three well-bred young women, sweetly asleep in my bed. It made me a bit curious about them. How did such seemingly upper class types end up in their profession, anyway?
“How many other girls came here? How big is the staff of a house of leisure, anyway?”
As she rounded the bed to join me, Mireia answered, “The madam retired, and all the male employees went to war. What remained was the twenty active courtesans.”
“Twenty?” I echoed in shock. “And they’re all here?”
Gathering me up into a hug, she confirmed, “Apparently their residents and part-timers all came. They had a rough time while Parna was in control of Atius. This was a safer choice for them, since Atius could change hands again.”
I realized a much longer story lay behind all this, and made a mental note to find out the details later, but with a comely young woman pressing her naked body against mine and nuzzling my ear, I had other concerns at the moment.
Swallowing, I prompted, “Mireia, remember Rod?”
She giggled, then whispered, “I want you to come along with me, My Lady.”
Too stunned to answer, I just pulled my head back and gaped at her.
“He enjoys watching us together,” she said, with her dimples puffing up with mischief. “And if it’s always the mistress going to his bedroom and never the wife, it won’t look good, right?”
I honestly have no desire for physical intimacy with him, and I don’t know if I ever will. But I had to admit that she was right about appearances. But doing that in front of him again…
And did it actually improve the rumors if it was the mistress and the wife going to his bedroom together?
I think sorting out my married life was going to take some time still.
After landing a brief kiss to my lips, she added, “Rhea wants us to sleep in the same bed, My Lady. She plans to come to you in your dreams, and it will be a lot easier for her if you are beside me.”
My gape returned. A goddess was going to send me some sort of oracle? But that Sirth woman had already said I was receiving oracles during the time of my missing memories, so apparently I was capable of it.
Even so, I asked, “Why?”
“Sirth already told you, right? The trouble you’re having is much worse than anyone anticipated. And when she said anyone, she was including those in Heaven. Think about what that means, already! Even the gods are worried about what’s going on with you!”
Then she inexplicably let out another ‘pfft’, with her dimples blooming once more. She pressed a longer kiss to my mouth, embracing me a bit tighter, before advising, “Just be a good girl and do it because your lover requests.”
Suspicious, I asked, “Was that Rhea speaking?”
“It was me, but Rhea told me what to say,” she admitted, and began touching a series of light kisses across my cheek that ended in lightly tonguing my ear.
I surrendered.
§
A short while before Midnight, while we lay together in Rod’s bed, Mireia gave me one last kiss, and Rhea did… something, sending me into a deep sleep.
After an indeterminate time, I opened my eyes to see Mireia’s maidenly bosom pressed against mine and her lips kissing my forehead as she still cuddled me in her arms, except now it was daylight and we were clearly outdoors! We were laying naked together on a thick coat of moss on a forest floor, near a gently-flowing stream.
Then I jolted as I realized that not only did I not know how I had come there nor where I was, but the woman holding me did not have Mireia’s aura.
“Shhhh,” she urged me, and a sense of well-being flowed out of her through her bosom and arms into me.
It felt familiar. I had felt it mingled with Mireia’s aura before.
“Rhea?” I guessed, with a touch of superstitious awe.
The goddess nodded, while growing the same dimples as my Servant.
“Do you have to look like this?” I wondered, troubled to have an exact doppelganger of someone whom I was quite fond of holding me. It just felt wrong, like I was cheating on the real one, even if it was a goddess doing it.
She nodded absently with lips pressed together, as if remembering something. “That’s right. You don’t like me wearing the image of anyone you know. Last time, I even tried this.”
The woman suddenly shrank slightly in height and grew in bust, to become my exact size, wearing my exact image.
She kissed my cheek. “How ’bout it? Want to find out what it’s like to make love to yourself?”
I grew shocked as I comprehended that the goddess was actually proposing a romantic encounter with me. I know that my objection would probably seem a little late, with me in this position with her, but I had woken up like this, you know?
Old stories of encounters of this nature with gods filled my head and I grew quite anxious. They often don’t end well for the mortal or fairy involved. But before I could reply, she let out a merry laugh.
“Even without your memory, you’re the same person. You had the same reaction last time.”
Her body and face changed again, this time into a woman with perfect skin, delicate features and green hair. She still looked a bit like Mireia, although a bit taller. She gave my forehead another kiss.
“We’ll just talk then,” she stated.
My anxiety decreased a bit, although she still wasn’t showing any sign of letting my body go. I remained trapped there, as we lay in the moss with our arms around each other, bosom-to-bosom.
I asked, “What last time, Goddess? Have I been here before?”
“You have,” she confirmed, a momentary hint of sadness tinging her voice. “But let’s save that for another time. I have an important purpose for bringing you here, after all.”
“Does it require us to stay in this position, Goddess?” I asked meekly.
She only replied with a merry laugh, while staying in that position.
I decided to give up and relax. She was going to do whatever, and this was some kind of a dream I couldn’t escape from on my own, so resistance would be meaningless.
“Much better,” she judged.
“Are you really Rhea?” I wondered. “I always pictured a mature, motherly woman.”
Not a fellow teenager, I didn’t add.
“Immortals do not age,” she stated. “I can look older, if you wish.”
I shrugged. “It’s fine.”
“Tiana, you’ve already met Sirth. Do you understand what she is?”
“I don’t know if understand is the right word,” I answered. “She is some sort of being from outside our world, and she’s somehow connected to my great-grandmother, and both of them are using me as a gateway into this world, because… well, they claim I could die if they don’t. It’s all stuff that’s impossible to believe, and they keep leaving out the reasons for it, so I don’t know what I actually know about them.”
Rhea nodded. “Naturally. They have avoided explaining exactly why you are their gateway, and they have not explained the danger they are protecting you from either.”
I nodded, frowning. Did any of them even understand how frustrating this was?
“I will just have to say it now, while I have you here, and can fully protect you.”
She pressed her lips together while considering her next words, then simply stated, “They are your previous lives, My Lady.”
I just blinked at her, not sure if I had understood correctly.
“You have been reborn many times. You are the reincarnation of your great-grandmother Senhion, as well as Captain Sirth and the girl called Lhan who is currently with the expedition in Kasar. Your soul has traveled through each of their lives, and remains connected to them. You are the current living embodiment of their essence. That’s why they are connected to you, and that is why they are working so hard for your sake.”
She waited while that soaked in.
It didn’t. Not really. Most of it, nobody would accept after being told, right? But I wondered, “Why were they so careful not to tell me that?”
After a pause, she said, “Immortal knowledge can be dangerous for denizens of the mortal world. Do you understand why?”
“Immortal knowledge?” I echoed, confused.
“I suppose you would think of it as Heavenly knowledge. Knowledge of the gods.”
I frowned. “In the first place, I’m not sure if I even accept such a claim. Maybe there are things in Heaven that we here below can’t understand, but why should knowledge itself be dangerous?”
She sighed and brushed my hair with her fingers. “It’s because mortals and non-mortals do not yet have sufficient capacity to hold that knowledge. It would overwhelm you.”
I wasn’t very satisfied with this as an answer, and I showed it with a deepening frown.
With a sad smile, she nodded. “Yes, of course. Then let me just say, there are parts that I can’t let you hear yet. But the metaphor describes the truth honestly. You will learn the whole truth properly later, once you are safe from it. In the meantime, please accept the metaphor and do not inquire further.”
“What metaphor?”
“That you have insufficient capacity to contain the knowledge of your past lives. You are a mere three gallon bucket, but a thousand gallons of your past lives are standing ready to pour into it. If we allowed that to happen, your mortal vessel would burst, killing you.”
Because I simply stared at her, unable to accept what she was saying because I didn’t really understand it, she gave me another sad smile and stroked my hair again.
“Is this a metaphor, or a simplification?”
“A metaphor, although also a truth in itself. The literal danger I cannot describe to you, but the knowledge is tied to it in ways I can also not explain to you. So I can tell you that the literal danger is the reason the knowledge cannot be easily released to you.”
She kissed my cheek lovingly. “It’s a circumstance that would never happen in nature. A series of freak circumstances caused it. But we have a means to deal with it, My Lady, if you cooperate with us and trust us.”
“What means to deal with it?”
“You grew at an astonishing rate over the last three months, due to the memories you had gained from one of your past lives and because you leveraged several extraordinary opportunities. You might say that in three months, you created a hundred gallon tank that you now carry with you, ready for you to use. It is still not the thousand gallons that you need, but once you know how to use it, you will have enough strength to protect yourself, and grow from there.”
She laughed slightly at my distrusting look. “You don’t believe me, despite everything you’ve heard about what you’ve been did during those missing three months?”
“It’s more that I’m having trouble following you.”
“Just roll with it for now,” she advised. “Your difficulties with blood management are part of this. You’re having to take in all this extra blood. Twelve girls in the past week, and six in the last two days! How many girls did you feed upon in the six months before your memory ends? Four? Five? You’ve become an absolute glutton!”
I pouted at her teasing, and earned a squeeze of reassurance. “It isn’t your fault. Your previous incarnations have been forcing your vessel to do all those things while you aren’t able to manage your vessel properly. A lot of the blood you are drinking is going to waste, frankly. Well, not really to waste, but it’s just getting stored in your blood core, out of your reach. The problem is, you don’t know how to tap into that storage, and they can’t seem to do it for you.”
Vessel? Blood core? These had a vaguely familiar ring to them, but I had no idea what she was talking about.
“And the helper we gave you has been trying and failing to communicate with you. You can’t seem to hear her. That’s why I brought you here. It’s time to introduce the two of you properly.”
