Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
The insulation had disappeared. My fingers had found the truth of my body. That truth was urgent and specific and very difficult to reframe as scholarship.
I lay back on the bench. The wood was warm along the full length of my spine, and the iron ring was cold against the back of my wrist where I accidentally touched it. I looked up at the ceiling of the cavern lost in darkness above me, I let my knees fall open, and I stopped pretending.
The vision came slowly at first, the way the mosaic had emerged from the earth, a detail at a time. First, a deep forest. A root descending into dark water. A branch moving in a wind I couldn’t feel. Then… I was on a longship—not this one, not a preserved and landlocked relic, but a moving ship on a cold gray sea. There was a man looming over me, his huge body framed against the sky. He stood there, looking down at me with the unhurried certainty of someone who had all the time in the world and no intention of wasting a moment of it.
He was naked. His enormous cock jutted from his lap in wordless threat. Of course it was enormous. The carvings had established this as a categorical feature of these men, and my imagination, apparently, had taken thorough notes.
His hands were on my hips. His voice was in a language I shouldn’t have been able to understand and understood perfectly.
Be still, he said, or something that meant that. The sea will take us home. You will learn.
I had never… I was a virgin… I had never had a man’s hands on my hips in that specific configuration of hungry intent. The fact that these hands existed only in my own mind made them no less vivid and no less effective.
He turned me over. In the real world—if this fantastic cavern could be called that—I turned myself over. I realized that my unconscious mind had figured out the way the iron fittings worked and transferred the understanding to my fantasy. Two rings to secure a girl’s wrists… two to secure her knees, face down and bottom up, at the end of the bench, so a warrior could…
I felt the blunt pressure of him against me, from behind, mounting me like a stallion… finding me, the impossible size of him pressing at the entrance to my desperate pussy. My back—my actual back, on the actual bench, in the actual cavern—arched, pushing my bottom upward.
A girl restrained on the bench wouldn’t have been able to touch herself, but I could. I thrust my right hand down inside my shorts, inside my panties, and I made it real. I pushed two fingers inside, up against the barrier of my virginity. I whimpered at the heat and the wetness I found. My fingers moved faster and faster as in my mind’s eye my new master took what belonged to him.
The pendant felt hot against my breastbone, confined by my tee shirt and moving slightly with the obscene bucking of my hips against my hand, over the ancient rowing bench where, surely, dozens of medieval girls had met their maidenhood’s end.
The rune-carved disc pressed against my sternum, feeling almost like a brand.
I gasped and my eyes flew open. The cavern… the ship… the rowing bench opposite mine… they all swam back into focus and the vision…
The tree. Yggdrasil. Not the mosaic version, not the carved limestone version, but something vast and real and absolutely indifferent to me, its roots going down into places that had no names, its branches touching worlds I had no framework for. The shape of it, massive, somehow overlaid atop my sight of the cavern’s dimness, the sound of the ancient wood creaking under me.
I snatched my hand out of my shorts and rolled off the bench onto the deck of the ship.
My heart was slamming against my ribs. I gripped the bench edge with both hands and breathed and waited for the tree to recede. Slowly, it did, though to my dismay it seemed to remain in my vision, too, like the outline of an after-image.
The cavern came back more fully, though. The ship. The torch I had set on the bow thwart, still lit. The iron rings. The smooth wood.
I stood up, pulling myself upright with the help of the bench, warm now with my body’s embarrassing heat. My legs felt unreliable.
I was a doctoral candidate in archaeology and I had just almost masturbated myself to orgasm on a Viking longship in a secret sanctuary.
I picked up my torch and I walked further into the cavern. I understood, without examining the understanding too closely, that I had no intention of moving toward the entrance, though I also understood that that’s where I should have been headed. The inscription had said this chamber as though there were others.