I dreamt.
I was with the first peoples of the world. It was a mythic age of change and malleability. A woman had come among a tribe of men and she had been beautiful, her breasts heavy with sensuous promise, her hips wide and thrust forward by the strength of the desire she felt. And her eyes, her eyes held the promise of great things to come.
She had raised her arms and we fell on her, a tribe driven mad with a lust we had not hitherto known, but which now that we felt it, had to be sated. As we had our turns with her she began to metamorphose. She grew, first to the size of a giantess, her cries of passion loud in our ears, and then larger, so large we fled to watch her from the plains.
When she first came to us, we had lived in the plains. The land was flat and barren for as far as the eye could see, but as she grew we saw great hillocks where her breasts had been, her legs became a mountain range, and her head, pressed back in pleasure became a great plateau. When the land ceased in it's shaking, the bravest of us went forward to investigate and we found a great mountain range where she had lain. And drawn by the same force that had drawn us to her when she was human, we followed the smooth gentle slopes of her thighs to the meeting place, where there now lay a cave. From that cave flowed a stream and its waters were pure and sweet. When we entered the cave we found that it's softly folded depths only extended a short distance. Awed at all that had just happened, we wondered at this amazing transformation.
While we stood there in the darkness, inside this earth mother, we were again filled with the same desire that had been awakened by the arrival of this woman. One by one we spilled our seed on the ground in the cave, and thereafter the compulsion left us, and we left the cave.
We rebuilt our small village at the feet of our earth mother, within easy range of the waters that flowed from the cave. As time passed, a few at a time our young men would be taken by the desire that had first pounded in our veins as we saw the first mother, and every time they would retreat to the cavern and spill their seed. This ritual led, as it had the first time, to the birth of fabulous creatures. They came forth fully-grown, and in their hair nestled the seeds of plants we had never before seen. Indeed we had never seen plants or animals at all before this time. First came great bison, and from them fell the seeds of grasses that fell and covered the first mother's thighs with soft green growth. And when we saw the bison and the grass we knew hunger and learned to hunt and gather food. Then came the fish, swimming forth from between the first mothers thighs and on their backs they carried the spores of water lilies and mosses. Later came the birds and other beasts of the land, they carried the seeds of trees and mosses and everything that would come to bloom in our great land. Finally came others like the first mother, but where the mother had inspired in us the urge to breed immediately, and the beasts had carried the seeds of our hunger, these women carried the seeds of civilization.
We bred and where before we had been immortal, now we shared our lives with our world and were richer for the companionship and the joy our children brought us. The women came to us knowing the tale of the first mother as well, but in the tale they told a great man had come to them and when they lay with him he too grew to great size, and in his open mouth lay a passage to our lands. They told the completed tale to our children as they grew, and the men added their own tales, those that told of hunting and fishing and gathering the fruit and grasses that lay all around us.
I grew old among my tribe, and the women with whom I had mated grew with me. We aged gently, our years slipping away as they renewed our people and the earth on which we lived. Finally, when it was time for me to die, I was carried in the arms of my children to the feet of the first mother and given back to her. The foothills towered above me as I felt the last of my life slipping away to feed the trees that towered above me, and the grass that cushioned my withered body. I smiled, happy in the knowledge that cycle was now truly and fully set in motion; and with that...
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...I woke.
For a brief moment I lay there remembering the dream that had awoken me, unsure of where I was or how I had gotten there. I lay in a pile of furs, pillows and people. My head felt a bit like someone had wrapped it in lead bars and used it as a battering ram, but in a good way. I lay back, aware of the sounds of breathing that surrounded me, awake, but not yet ready to wake up. I could tell by her scent that Bettie lay next to me; I could feel her thigh thrown over mine, her arm encircled my chest. But her breathing could not account for all the voices I could hear, voices raised in the hymn of slumber. Someone snored softly, as though they slept with their head tilted back over a pillow. Someone else sighed in their sleep and I could tell a moan of somnolent pleasure was not far off. I had slept in a sea of humanity, and even had I been deaf, the warm heat that enfolded us was one you can only get from sleeping in a nest of humanity.
Slowly, the night before came back to me. I remembered Bettie pulling me to the side and saying it was time for some down time. We wound our way through the club to one of the seating areas that seemed to be everywhere in this club. She brought drinks and lit me a cigarette before she allowed me to rise from the floor and settle back into the soft cushions of a loveseat. She perched on the arm of an overstuffed smoking chair.
"How do you feel Xeno?" She watched me carefully and asked deeper questions with her eyes.
I thought for a minute, smoking slowly and enjoying my drink. "Good, strange, Strangely good and at the same time unfulfilled. Maybe I don't understand the question." I was confused to say the least. I should have felt replete and ready to roll over and fall asleep, but something deep inside me still prowled my mind with desire hanging livid from its body.
"I think you understand perfectly, and I think, so do I." She sat back and left me to ponder her statement for a moment.
I probed her words with my mind, turning them over and over like a Rubik’s cube. I had just had amazing sex, and overall I was having a great time, but I still managed to feel as though I wasn't getting my, what, my fix? I looked at my drink and the smoldering butt of my cigarette and boggled at the analogy. It felt right, I was addicted to something, but it was so subtle it was like an addiction to air. You don't even notice you are addicted until suddenly you are breathing pure helium or something. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew I yearned.
Bettie sat back and watched me; her eyes were bright as I considered. Thus far I had been pulled through a set of events so outrageous my mind had refused to spend more than a few minutes in contemplation and I had been unable to think about the turns my life had been taking. Life in general was no longer a valid term and life in specific had been reduced to periods of several hours. Overall I knew I liked the things I had been doing and the things that had been done to me, but this evening, this specific day of servility had not fulfilled me like the night before had. Knowledge burst upon me like a deluge. I was missing the sense of domination. That thing that had been missing all day was the feel of the leash in my hand. Although I had truly only experienced the sense of being in control for a short while, I suddenly knew that it was right for me. I needed to be on top as it were. I smiled, suddenly gleeful in the knowledge of self that I was aware of and when I looked up at Bettie she was nodding as though she could read my thoughts.
"Just figured it out did you?"
"Yeah, I never realized-well, I had never even had the chance to realize that it was missing, but now that I know, it's like a vital part of my body that I just now know has been underfed. I'm sorry Bettie, I'm not slave material. I must have been horrible for you today."
"Not at all Xeno, you have not exactly been a model slave; but you have been fun to Top. You are a good lover and you strive to please no matter is in charge, but my first clue was that you also try to control the situation at every turn."
I felt the urge to apologize, but my swelling sense of self told me it was unnecessary, I felt whole, where before I had only been half a person, I now knew myself in a way that I had never known, much less been willing, or ready, to accept. "This is really weird. I feel different, like I know so much more. I feel more confident and centered."
Bettie laughed and refreshed my drink. "You will feel like that for a few days to come, and it will come and go throughout your life; if experience is anything to go by. You might be interested to know that this epiphany isn't much different for slaves who realize and accept that they need to belong to someone. It's the knowledge of your natural place in the world that sets you free. Knowing where you are on the path of life lets you see so much more than the usual guess and check method so many people use. I know that right now you are feeling like you can take on the world, but a word of caution as well. Outside this club is a whole other world. Some of them are aware of their natural inclinations, what I call their place in the world. Others have no idea, they scoff at the idea of submission and Domination, they call it degrading to the slave and they regard bondage and sado-masochistic play as aberrant behavior."
"There is something else you need to know. This realization and acceptance of your dominance is not just about the fun, it comes with a great responsibility. You've already heard some of your responsibilities towards your slave, or slaves; but now, I think it's time to talk about the rest of the world. What were your plans for the future before you came to us?"
I thought about this for a few minutes, I had never really had plans in a concrete sense. I'd always been happy to just float through life and hope for the best. I knew I had an interest in things; sex, computers, books and literature, just to name a few. But I'd never built any life plans around or in spite of my interests. I finally responded with a lame murmur to the effect that I didn't have any, not really.
Bettie nodded. "I thought so, that's the problem with this generation, myself included. We all spent so much time hearing the world was going to end tomorrow, either from nuclear war, or some religious apocalypse, or even natural disaster; that we can't be bothered to plan for the future. Next week seems so unlikely that it's easy to blow off next year. That ephemeral idea of a career that spans so many years of our lives that it becomes part of who we are is a lost concept. When I came to the club, my longest term goal was to survive my twenty first birthday party, which coincided with the day I came here!" She laughed and leaned back along the arm of her chair. For a moment I was distracted by the lines of her body and the sensuous promise in her smile, but she snapped me back to the present with a few choice words.
"If you want to be part of this club, at least in any real sense; you have to have goals." She uttered the last phrase in a strange warbling accent, and then sighed when I obviously didn't get the joke. "Let me make this one easy for you Xeno. We are not just some underground sex club that happens to have a few rich members. Devon and the few other founders decided a long time ago that this was not just going to be a hangout for the dissipated rich. They liked the dissipated part, but there were too many lives being wasted that had too much value in the world to be idly passed over. Now obviously we're not your average Brit-club with too much brandy and education and not enough entertainment." She paused and gestured as a half-dressed couple walked past giggling and fondling each other's leather clad genitals. "My point is made for me. We are however a tightly knit group, to some extent." She trailed off again and I could see she was considering our earlier run-in with Rogue. I started to move to her, but she shook herself and continued.
Bettie shook herself and sipped from her drink. "To get straight to the point, you have a responsibility to yourself, those you would be master too, those you would be friend to, and the world at large. You now have an idea of your place in the world, and knowledge as they say, is power. I'm not going to go into some big speech about the powers of good and evil, for one, those are such relative terms that we could sit her and talk all night about them. I am however going to tell you to try not to fuck people over. You don't need to add more pain to this world. It's got enough as it is. We also believe that with full knowledge of ourselves we have the power to make changes; not power in some mystical sense, but real power; the kind of power that can makes or breaks peoples’ lives. "
I listened quietly, trying to absorb what she was saying. For the most part, everything she said seemed really obvious, but there was an undercurrent to her words that said she was speaking from experience. People needed to be told this kind of thing. Not in some proselytizing, preach it from the mountain kind of way; but up close and personal, when the moment was right. I kept listening and tried to remember if I had lived my life as though all of this was obvious. I thought of the women I had slept with whose names I couldn't remember and the lives I had changed with a thoughtless act. The women swam through my mind in that hazy half-light of memory and with the exception of one, I knew they would never remember my name either. They had been looking for the same solace in the arms of a stranger that I had been. But there was one, there was something familiar about her, like second hand déjà vu. I couldn't place her, but I knew my subconscious would continue to worry at it until I wiggled the memory loose.
The lives I touched, I realized, had been too numerous to quantify. Had I even been aware of the things I had done that affected them? I had to answer “not really”, if only to myself. I realized I had no idea what my actions had done to the world, whether they had had a positive influence or a negative one, whether they had caused pain or pleasure. I paused, for a moment a thought struck me. "This isn't all some huge wind-up to you telling me I need to forgo all my sins and devote my life to some western god is it?"
Bette laughed. "No Xeno, we didn't drag you down here to tell you that you are even now rolling in the pits of hell and need to be saved. It would be a hell of a marketing ploy though wouldn't it? Actually, I was wondering when you would ask that. I remember I did when I first got the 'Be good, don't cause unnecessary pain' speech." She laughed again, the mirth in her voice at complete odds with the cold hard bouncer I had met on my first night here. That fateful first night when I had met-
"Oh damn." I muttered, and convulsively reached for my drink.
"You just remembered didn't you?" Bettie refilled my drink and waited for me to regain my composure.
I sat in silence for a moment, remembering the slide of soft flesh against mine. I remembered the whispers in the middle of the night as my forgotten woman whispered in my ear. "This was different, so different. Please don't leave me yet. Just hold me for a few minutes and let me rest." I remembered my muttered excuses and hurried exit as I left. I remembered turning back as I opened the door to her room. I had surveyed the wreckage our love play had made of her room, and as the slight breeze of the door stirred her curtains, I remembered the moonlight falling over her face. It was Dream's face. The face of the girl I was half in love with already, and I thought I had only seen her face-to-face once.
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