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Harrow Nova stood in the threshold of the Reverend Daughter’s cell. It was the first time she had been inside since the space had been hers, and the circumstances could not have been less favorable. The larger cell was neater than her own despite containing many more items. Books and binders were stacked in purposeful piles on the desk, clothing and bones were put away and there was no sign of the licentious magazines the Reverend Daughter often bragged about owning. The only indication of the carelessness Harrow might have expected from the usual state of the Reverend Daughter’s paint and general personality was the robe flung over the back of the desk chair, and the Reverend Daughter herself, lying casually on her front in her trousers and shirt with a book on the double-wide cot, the only piece of furniture that was inauspiciously different in the room.
The Reverend Daughter put her book away with deliberate nonchalance before sitting up and turning her attention to Harrow. She had a cocky smile on her sinfully unpainted face. It was terribly hard to look at her. “So, the Reverend Parents told you? And you didn’t run off screaming? Well, that’s something.”
“I would never shirk my duty to the Tomb, no matter how trying,” Harrow said stiffly, hands clasped tightly behind her back.
“You wound me,” the Reverend Daughter said airily. “Well, come in, and close the door.”
Harrow entered and closed the door with an ominous click behind her, the sound of bone wards resetting. Her heart felt like it was jumping around in her chest, beating too fast and then too slow. The Reverend Daughter got off her bed and approached her, standing between the foot of the cot and Harrow, and looked at her contemplatively for a moment. Harrow made sure to keep her face impassive.
“Nova,” the necromancer said, strangely serious once they were entirely alone. “I won’t force you. If you aren’t willing, I won’t lay a hand on you. You know that, right? Not mine, or anyone else’s,” she clarified with a hint of a smile. “We can pretend that we tried, and it didn’t work. You can just come here when you’re asked and read a book or whatever.”
“You would defraud your House?” Harrow asked indignantly, her hands clenched behind her. “You would allow the Ninth to die without lifting a finger?”
The Reverend Daughter pretended to think. “Hmmm, well, maybe this one,” she drawled, raising her middle finger to Harrow. “Or, I know, how about this one?” She switched from the middle finger of her left hand to the pinky, the finger that was only clean, white bone beyond the first knuckle. It was a mark of the Reverend Daughter’s pride and utter willfulness that was usually concealed by gloves, just as her vile personality was concealed by a mask of mildness before her congregation. “But you know, I guess I would, when it comes to it,” the Reverend Daughter said with a big, calculatedly careless shrug.
“How dare you?!” Harrow growled. She had expected the Reverend Daughter’s arrogance, of course, but in the form of exerting her dominion over Harrow’s flesh, not this unconcerned rejection and refusal of her sacred duty.
“Quite easily actually. I’m of the opinion that two wrongs don’t make a right. You always have been contrary, though,” the Reverend Daughter said, rolling her strange gold eyes.
Harrow strode forward to close the space between them and seized the Reverend Daughter by the front of her shirt. “You will not allow the sacrifice of the Ninth to be wasted!” she snarled into the necromancer’s startled face. “You will not allow both our lives to be for nothing! You are a worthless cuckoo and smear upon the face of this House, but God help me, you will do your duty!”
“So, what I’m hearing,” the worthless cuckoo said with an air of faint hysteria, “Is that you do want to fuck me.”
“I would rather you fell into burning oil. I would rather rip off your kneecaps and give them to Crux for paperweights. I would rather the entire mass of a tier fell upon your overinflated head. But you are the Reverend Daughter, and the Reverend Daughter is for the perpetuity of the Ninth,” Harrow spat.
“Okaaay. Well, I guess we can work with the ‘dutiful rage mixed with breeding kink’ thing,” the Reverend Daughter said, putting her hands up in mock surrender.
“You are disgusting,” Harrow growled. She pushed the Reverend Daughter backward until the backs of her legs hit the cot, and she was abruptly unbalanced into sitting. “You are a fool if you think anything you could do would hurt me. You are an idiot to imagine anything you could say would affect my devotion. Strip, and we will see who is going to hurt whom,” she demanded.
The Reverend Daughter stared at her in shock for a moment and then scrambled to comply, fingers moving nimbly down the buttons of her shirt. Harrow glared down at her and hated how she was barely looking down even though the Reverend Daughter was seated, and she was standing. She didn’t hate the Reverend Daughter’s soft-looking brown breasts or their wide-peaked nipples nearly as much as she should. She didn’t hate the starkness of her clavicles or the smooth plain of her stomach, or the shockingly red curls that were revealed to her as the Reverend Daughter took off her underclothes even close to as much as she wished to. She had a necromancer’s body, all long lines and shallow curves, but without tending to excessive skinniness; a nearly flawless ode to thanurgetic hunger just barely sated. When the Reverend Daughter was bare before her, sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs slightly spread, expression mixing greedy anticipation, and surprise, and hopefully, a hint of nerves, Harrow stepped into the space between her legs.
Keeping a careful eye on the necromancer, Harrow began swiftly to undress. The Reverend Daughter’s hands lifted as if to assist, and Harrow smacked her away. When she removed her belt she removed her sword, which put her at the Reverend Daughter’s mercy. The necromancer, after all, still had her bone jewelry, and she could do far more with that than Harrow could defend against empty-handed, but it seemed the Reverend Daughter had no intention of putting up a fight. Harrow removed her belt in short, sharp movements and lowered it carefully to the floor. She dropped her robe beside it with no hesitation. She seriously considered not taking her pants off and just lowering them, in contrast to the Reverend Daughter’s stark and wanton nakedness, but decided she would be safer with more freedom of movement. She bent to unlace her boots. Then she took a deep breath and willed her fingers to the fastenings of her pants. It was essential above all else to pretend this cost her nothing. She looked at a flagstone on the floor to her left as she uncovered herself: pants, then the short black shorts that were the universal underclothing of the Lock Tomb congregation.
Harrow looked up and met the Reverend Daughter’s eyes defiantly. The Reverend Daughter looked Harrow over and grinned at her with that crooked smile that always aggravated her to no end. Harrow hated her with the fury of a forge fire. Harrow Nova was not a thing that should ever be seen. The last time she had been less than fully dressed in front of another person she had been a child and the shame of her body and its multitude of failings, exposed in the cold of the chapel, was quickly blunted by the hot sting of the whip. The passage of time had made things immeasurably worse. Harrow had honed her body into a weapon, a tool in service of the Ninth House; she had tried to think of it only in those terms as the gap widened year by year between the things she ought to have been and the reality of herself. It was with a boiling sense of shame that she had come to understand that the greatest service she would ever be permitted to do her House would be done here, in the Reverend Daughter’s bed. It had been made abundantly clear to her that the sum total of her value to the Ninth lay in her blood and in the convenience of her possessing the appropriate anatomy to transmit that bloodline via the heir the Reverend Parents acknowledged in her place. The reason, Harrow understood now, she had needed to be formally and legally disowned, and the reason she had been suffered to live ever since stood up between her legs, conveniently and humiliatingly indifferent to her varied sources of misery and in fact to everything in the universe that wasn’t the flagrantly naked woman in front of her. That Gideon Navisvotum should be that woman, that she should be the one obliged to observe any part of Harrow was intolerable. And further, for the Reverend Daughter to know that all her jibes of the past several years were as true as a sword’s thrust through the heart, that Harrow responded to her against all reason and against her will…it was just another injustice at the top of a stack so large it could fill the drill shaft.
Harrow wanted to wipe that stupid smile off the Reverend Daughter’s face. She wanted to make her regret the suggestion that Harrow might fear any treatment she could receive at her hand. Loathsome as the fact was for a myriad of reasons, Harrow wanted the Reverend Daughter to remember that in this particular exchange, it was Harrow who held the power.
“Can I touch you?” the Reverend Daughter asked, one hand creeping upwards again, reaching for Harrow’s cock.
Harrow unwillingly imagined what it might feel like to have that soft, long-fingered hand wrap around her. The prospect of contact with anything that was not her own hand made her cock throb and leak pre-cum in a way that was frankly excessive.
Harrow pushed the Reverend Daughter onto her back with a palm in the center of her chest, giving no reply. The feeling of warm bare skin and the tiniest bit of softness where her fingertips had grazed one breast was a shock to the system. In response, the tall necromancer only scooted herself up the bed on her elbows with her knees bent, putting herself lewdly on display. Her smile had not yet faltered; she was entirely too eager.
Harrow was aware of the required mechanics in a general sense, and the involved anatomy to a higher degree of precision, but she found herself momentarily at a loss for how to proceed. The Reverend Daughter would surely know better from all of her filthy magazines, but Harrow refused to lower herself to ask. She crawled onto the cot and knelt between the Reverend Daughter’s legs. Aiming to orient herself, she located the necromancer’s opening carefully with the fingers of her sword hand, hoping this was a normal sort of thing to do, before realizing she had no reason whatsoever to care. This first bit of contact sent a shiver through the Reverend Daughter’s body. She was wet; Harrow didn’t have any notion of relative scale, but her fingers slid easily between the necromancer’s soft folds, and then the tips of two fingers went easily enough inside of her. Red curls obscured much of her view from this angle, but her fingers might explore quickly and subtly this area of yielding softness and wet heat between the Reverend Daughter’s legs. Not wishing to appear to be hesitating, Harrow roughly thrust her two fingers into the Reverend Daughter and was gratified by the shocked twitch and quiet gasp she got in response. When she did it again, she got a low groan. She wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad sound, so she did it a few more times. The Reverend Daughter stared up at her, seemingly transfixed with her mouth just a little bit open.
“Oh, fuck, yeah, that’s good. Just curl your fingers a little, right there,” the Reverend Daughter breathed.
Harrow followed her directive without thinking and the Reverend Daughter let out a quiet moan. Harrow’s anger and mortification flared. “I am not here for your amusement,” she bit out.
“I know,” the Reverend Daughter said wryly, “but there’s no rule against fun. I checked.”
“I am not interested in fun,” Harrow growled.
“Your loss. You know, the chance of conception is increased by up to eleven percent if I get off, though? Just saying, if you’re really serious about your duty, it’s something you might want to think about.”
Harrow added a third finger forcefully so that the Reverend Daughter was momentarily silenced and let out a little gasp. The distraction didn’t last long, she was definitely getting wetter and her hips were moving in tiny little thrusts onto Harrow’s fingers, like she only wanted to take them even deeper. Harrow was horrified and transfixed by this lewd display.
“Let’s get on with it,” Harrow hissed, as if the Reverend Daughter had been doing anything to prevent her.
She withdrew her fingers and rubbed the slick covering them onto the Reverend Daughter’s thigh. The Reverend Daughter unabashedly reached between her own legs and gathered up some of the wetness to rub over her own clit as she looked up at Harrow with obvious anticipation. Idiot.
Harrow grabbed the Reverend Daughter roughly, pushing her so that she lay all the way back, clambering partway on top of her, and pressing down on her costals with unnecessary force. “Lie still,” she hissed. She couldn’t think too much about it, or she would lose her nerve. She was here, her cock was in her hand, and she would do what was required of her. Harrow lined herself up, sent up a little half line of prayer, and pushed inside Reverend Daughter’s cunt in one smooth motion.
The Reverend Daughter’s gasp was mingled with her own. Oh, Harrow thought wildly this is why some people are so obsessed with sex. Nothing in her existence had prepared her for how good it felt to be inside the Reverend Daughter. Her cunt was warm and slick and tight around her, and oh god Harrow had no idea how to cope with this new information because it was just wildly unfair that she had discovered heaven, and it was inside of the person she despised most in the world.
“You know you have to move, right?” the Reverend Daughter’s obnoxious voice said, breaking into her reverie.
“Of course, I know that,” Harrow snapped, suddenly realizing that she had been kneeling there between the Reverend Daughter’s spread legs for an unknown period of time having an existential crisis. Really, it should be impossible for her to sink any lower. She should just die of shame right now. But she had a duty to perform.
She withdrew most of the way and pushed forward into the Reverend Daughter again, and then again, shifting to bracket the Reverend Daughter’s torso with her arms. The Reverend Daughter dropped her head back onto the bed and let out a low, unsteady sound. Harrow was bewildered and enthralled and mortified. On the positive side though, this at least meant the Reverend Daughter wasn’t talking, so Harrow continued as she was. It was...it really very good. Physically, it felt phenomenal in a way Harrow hadn’t known was possible. The Reverend Daughter was pliant beneath her and using her big mouth only for inarticulate noises. Harrow would have preferred noises of pain, of course, which it was obvious these were not because clearly the Reverend Daughter was such an insatiable slut that she could derive pleasure from anything, probably. Harrow shifted her weight to one hand and dug her blunt fingernails into the soft flesh of the Reverend Daughter's breast, which squished gratifyingly, and caused her to yowl. The necromancer’s fingers were still moving frantically against her clit, and she muttered, "God, Nova - fuck - more."
"You're a deviant. You have no shame," Harrow growled.
"Hah,” the Reverend Daughter breathed. She observed Harrow’s face like she was fascinated by it (how easily could she read Harrow’s unwilling pleasure there?), and her chest rose and fell rapidly, as if with exertion. “You're the one who – uuuugh - decided to get rough with me our first time though, so who's the bigger deviant really?"
Harrow snarled and grabbed for the Reverend Daughter's throat. Her fingers made contact. Then she was seized and hoisted into the air.
An instant later, Harrow found herself flat on her back with four constructs apparently coming out from the corners of the bed holding her wrists and ankles. The Reverend Daughter stood over her as she thrashed. "Ah, ah, Nova. Breathe play is something that needs to be negotiated first," she said, shaking her finger as if at a naughty child.
Harrow snarled and twisted, but her bindings held. “Fuck you,” Harrow hissed.
“Well, you know, you would still be doing that if you were just a little bit better behaved,” the Reverend Daughter said archly.
After watching her struggle for a brief but humiliating moment, confident in her dominion over Harrow’s flesh, the Reverend Daughter moved to straddle her, rubbing the slick petals of her cunt against the tip of Harrow's cock. Harrow couldn't help herself; she whined. She was aching, she realized, she wanted in so badly it actually hurt. She had fucked up, and now she was going to be tortured until she came pointlessly on her own stomach or maybe died. Could you die of erotic torment?
The Reverend Daughter loomed over her, teasing her with her tantalizing opening. “I know you're trying to be hurtful, but joke's on you 'cause I'm into that shit. “However,” she added with mock thoughtfulness, “I’m not quite masochistic enough to get into that sort of advanced stuff with someone who actually wants to kill me, you know? So play nice, or you lose limb privileges. Ok?"
The Reverend Daughter pushed Harrow's cock down against her stomach with two long fingers and started to grind against it, rubbing herself along Harrow's whole length. It was wonderful agony. Harrow struggled not to whimper.
"Are you gonna play nice?" the Reverend Daughter asked.
It wasn't like Harrow had a choice; she was thoroughly bound. There was little she could ever do if she made the mistake of letting the necromancer get the upper hand. She could only say no and have that perfect pussy only rubbed against her until she went insane, or say yes and maybe be allowed inside again. "Fuck you. Please, My Lady, yes," she breathed.
"I knew you could be a good girl," the Reverend Daughter said, tapping her on the nose. Then she rose up on her knees and sunk down onto Harrow's cock with a little pleasured sigh.
Harrow could only watch in horrified fascination as the Reverend Daughter rode her with vigor and obvious enjoyment. Harrow could only make small, restricted thrusts upward as she was too stretched out for anything else. The Reverend Daughter played with her clit with one hand and fondled her own breasts, which bounced as she moved, with the other, pinching the hard peaks of her nipples with her fingertips, using Harrow for her pleasure.
And then the Reverend Daughter shifted the angle of her hips, and Harrow's breath was punched out of her because it got even better.
"Oh shit, Nova," the Reverend Daughter groaned, riding her even harder, "You feel amazing. Oh fuck, that’s perfect.” And not long after, “Fuck. I'm gonna cum."
Sparks shot in front of her eyes from the effort of restraint, and Harrow vaguely realized that she had been clenching her jaw hard against the need to cum since the Reverend Daughter had climbed on top of her. She felt the Reverend Daughter's cunt start to flutter around her, and Harrow thought she would lose her mind from it.
She totally fucking lost it as those slick muscles started to clench and the Reverend Daughter threw back her head and shouted an inarticulate noise to the ceiling, grinding down hard against Harrow’s pelvis. Harrow’s orgasm was dragged from her with the force of a landslide and with a choking gasp.
Harrow felt like it went on forever, wave after wave of pleasure, until at last it was over, and the Reverend Daughter was still.
Harrow lay there bewildered while the Reverend Daughter panted on top of her, feeling like her soul or maybe her bones, or both, had been sucked out. Maybe that’s what necromancers did when they had sex, just took all your bones, and left you to die as a formless puddle of flesh.
"That good, huh?" the Reverend Daughter said, suddenly leaning over her and grinning.
Harrow realized again that she had been lying there, staring unseeing at the ceiling for God knew how long. It was humiliating that she was so undone by this act when the Reverend Daughter seemed largely unaffected.
"Are you going to let me up, or am I to be imprisoned in your cell for your use?" Harrow grumbled, shaking her head to clear it.
The Reverend Daughter laughed and let the shackles dissolve. She picked up Harrow's wrists and examined them, and then lifted herself just a bit shakily off Harrow's now soft cock and went to check her ankles while Harrow struggled much more than she should to sit up.
The Reverend Daughter was covered in a fine sheen of clear sweat, something she doubted the necromancer had any previous experience with, her wild red waves of improperly shorn hair looked tousled, and she had Harrow's cum dripping down her long slender thighs as she leaned over the bed. Harrow thought the look suited her much better than her half-assed efforts at looking civilized ever did.
"That was fun. I think this is going to work out great," the Reverend Daughter said cheerfully, looking down at her. "I'd offer to cuddle, but I'm pretty sure you'd rather disembowel me, or yourself, or everyone, and I kinda need to get going in like five minutes anyway. I probably shouldn't be dripping your jizz everywhere when I have to talk to Crux. Then again maybe it would make him like me better."
"You're disgusting," Harrow muttered, annoyed that the Reverend Daughter had preempted her intended retort more than anything.
“I’m gonna use the sonic real quick and then you can use it and my paints if you want.”
Harrow did not want to use the Reverend Daughter’s bathroom or her paint. She didn’t think her paint was more fucked up than it would normally be from training. Just to be sure though, she would dress and then wait to check her face in the mirror.
Harrow wiped herself off on the sheets and went on unsteady feet in search of her clothes. She felt entirely at sea. The only familiar point was the soreness of her wrists and ankles from where the Reverend Daughter’s constructs had held her down; the rest of her felt breathtakingly unfamiliar. She had been inside the Reverend Daughter, but it felt like somewhere in the process the necromancer might have gotten inside of her. The vision of the Reverend Daughter above her was burned into the back of her eyelids; the feeling, she was very afraid, was burned into her soul.
The Reverend Daughter returned from the bathroom quickly, already painted in her usual haphazard fashion, but still fully naked, and began to dress at high speed.
“Wish I’d allocated more time today, but I’m already running late,” the Reverend Daughter said, shoving things into her robe pockets.
Seeing the transition from the woman she had just fucked to the Reverend Daughter’s everyday appearance in real time produced a profound sense of disorientation. How was Harrow expected to go through life knowing exactly what was beneath the tall necromancer’s ordinary trousers and shirts and hidden behind her robes?
“When am I expected here again?” Harrow asked, trying to make her voice flat and disinterested, as she buckled her weapon belt back on. Her fingers found the nearest portion of the chain, and she rubbed her thumb against the link.
The Reverend Daughter paused, pulling her gloves on by the door. There was amusement in her golden eyes that never boded well. “Oh yeah,” she said, “We never got to that part of the conversation, did we? In four days. You can come in the evening, any time after the last bell. Or any time sooner, if you’d like to practice some more.”
“What?” Harrow said. There was something she had not understood here.
“Four evenings from now. That’s when I’ll be ovulating, so that’s when you should come.” The Reverend Daughter smirked and reached for the door handle. “Pun intended.”
Harrow’s brain crashed to a halt. The blood drained from her face, and she said very slowly, “Why did you call me here today?”
“To talk to you, remember?” the Reverend Daughter said, as if to someone very stupid. “But then you ordered me to strip and climbed on top of me, so I figured you wanted to have sex instead. I’ll lock the door after me so you can leave whenever you’re ready. I look forward to our next rendezvous.” She winked extravagantly, and before Harrow could begin to think of any response, she was gone.