Winter’s Tale
13 Daylight reflections
“Speak truly, Winter. Exactly what is that we want?” Summer asked, her face an inquisitive dance of apprehension and longing. She did not meet my gaze, focused instead on grinding the arnica we had gathered between two rocks.
I kept my silence for a moment, hoping the cool of the stream about my toes would for my subtle trembles. In truth, the shakes were muted aftershocks from the massive row we had with Ma earlier. Try as I might to put it out of mind, it left me off-kilter. Arguments in our family did occasionally happen, of course, but they were rare. This one had been ferocious. With frightening ease, we had become attack dogs savaging an intruder. Overwhelmed by our hostility, Ma had retreated, leaving us reeling in our panic and rage. We had dressed in a furious hurry and stormed out of our home without a word of apology. And over what? To protect our precious pact.
So, we sat among the tall grass beside the stream, puzzling over our behaviour, dissecting it, trying to understand how we had spewed such fierce invective. I had an answer but dreaded itting it aloud. This morning’s fracas was not the only issue. All our priorities had been transformed over the seven nights we had shared with our beloved Layla. Our mistress. A vampire.
Watching the river, I tried to let the flow carry my turmoil away as I mused over what we had become. We knew exactly what we wanted but, in the shafts of daylight dappled by the branches above, we feared it. Everything we had once sought, our dreams of travel and exploration, now seemed childish. I could barely recall why we had ever held them dear. All lay sacrificed on the altar of our love.
Summer separated the stones in her hand. Satisfied the arnica had been sufficiently pulped into a paste, she whispered elvish words over it to manifest its healing properties, as Mother had taught us. With the tip of her finger, she applied it to my bruised temple as I held my hair out of the way.
“We are of one mind,” I replied while she worked. “We want to be more than lovers; we want to be slaves. We must be hers. It scares me how necessary it is has become.” I shuddered at the memories that smouldered in the darkness behind my eyelids.
Summer’s shoulders unclenched a fraction, releasing some of the tension she had held since we stormed out of the cabin. I knew her desires like they were my own, yet she was grateful to hear me voice our mutual yearning.
“We must,” she agreed, a hint of sadness and resignation in her voice. “It is all that matters, somehow. Our fate lies with Layla. Falling in love was easier than I imagined but also much, much harder. I no longer value anything that is not her. I still wish to travel, to explore, but…” she paused to sigh, “…only if Layla wills it. There, that should do,” Summer added as she finished coating the bruise Layla’s inhuman grip had left by my hairline last night.
The arnica paste felt soothing as it rapidly dried across my skin in the midsummer heat. I fancied I could feel it begin to draw out the discolouration. I was grateful our beloved’s grip had not caused greater damage. Perversely, I was proud to endure her grip’s intensity and would have worn my injuries openly save that it would have exposed our pact.
“She has us under her spell, literally, though her magic does not affect how I feel about her at all,” I said hesitantly. I had told that phrase to myself a hundred times over the past few days. It irritated me. The notion Layla had left a spell upon us, aroused us. In fulfilling our deepest fantasies, having tasted it, we refused to live without it. Of course, it affected how I felt about her. How could it not?
“You keep saying that,” Summer commented, her tone tinged with doubt, “and it is in my thoughts too. Why is that?”
“Deference to our beloved?” I ventured, making empty excuses on the fly. “She made her displeasure plain if we only wanted her for the magic she wields, so now it is an article of faith, part of our pact.” My words were plausible enough to make Summer shrug in agreement but neither of us were convinced. In my heart, I knew what drove the phrase’s repetition in my head. The answer was obvious, but I denied it one more time.
“There is a peculiar sensation writhing within me. I cannot tell if it is Layla’s magic, or I am just aroused by the honour of bearing her spell. Either way I am altered. What did I miss last night?” Summer asked, reminding me how mindless she had been.
“Oh, sis, it was wonderful. Layla made all our dreams come true. She bound us to her will,” I said as carefully as possible. The salacious significance of that statement almost overtook me. In that moment, I wanted to kiss Layla, run my hands over her body, fall before her, but her absence confounded my impulses. “How much do you ?”
“Not a great deal, but this astonishing feeling lingers, perhaps an echo of having my mind leashed to hers. It was like she touched me everywhere, my whole body held on the cusp of rapture. That impression remains clear. I could live all my days like that. Truly,” Summer said, staring at the river, trembling at her ission.
“She let me experience a little of what you were feeling under her power. It was… extreme,” I said softly. Summer nodded. “She spoke words with your mouth, do you recall?”
Summer gasped, her head snapped up, staring out across the water into her obscured memories. “Yes, oh yes. Words echoing inside my head. My tongue bound to their recitation, though I knew not what was said, nor did I care. The compulsion was total, exquisite,” she mewled. It was a relief to see my sister so happy at that thought.
“There was a moment when I thought she put her hand inside my head, literally through my forehead, to squeeze my brain like a washcloth. It was incredible but cannot have been real. And the shackles! She made me see silver shackles about my wrists and ankles, yours too. Like our collars but with no latches, forged in place like a proper slave’s. Illusory or not, it was… I have not the words for its glory,” I confessed. Letting it all tumble out of me, sharing it with my sister-slave, stoked my quim. I wanted to rapture, to plunge my fingers in me, which made another memory resurface. A vivid one.
“Oh yes. There were fingers inside my quim last night, at a moment my sight was denied. They might have been yours. I could not say,” I itted apprehensively. Summer gasped again.
“I do not recall,” she said, shame faced. “But it is possible.”
“Layla told me that if she commanded me to fuck you then I must. That did not happen, as far as I am aware, but the possibility was real. If she had insisted, I would have obeyed,” I divulged, hoping Summer would not be repelled, but also realising something else. “There was a shift within me when she presented the possibility. I did not find the idea as… unappealing… as we once did.”
Summer stared at me; an incredulous insight being born in her wide eyes. “It is not just that it is no longer unappealing, is it? We are Layla’s creatures now, without restraint. She has changed us. Her magic lingers in us still and I am glad of it. What we want or do not want matters little in the face of whatever she wishes. There can be no doubt she finds us desirable and so it must be true that we are desirable. The three of us are one. How can I not desire you if she does, nor you I?”
“But it was wrong. A line we would not cross. We were always so adamant about it. I am not mistaken, am I?” I asked, grasping for memories that no longer seemed real.
“No,” Summer said simply. “But if Layla prefers us this way, then this is what we must be.”
The forcefulness of her declaration masked her misgivings. I could tell since they mirrored my own. But the truth was I did see my sister with different eyes now. We were slaves to a vampire, entirely at her disposal. But how enslaved were we? In the darkness last night, it had all seemed so clear. We were well past the idea that our submission was a mere game, but had we really abandoned all possibility of freedom?
“I suppose. So, are we her slaves now? Truly?” I voiced the crucial question. One of us had to. I did not know the truth of it, but the churning desire the statement instantly wrought through my loins testified to the answer I wanted.
“We were slaves last night, beyond all doubt. But we are free now. She let us go,” Summer’s conviction weakened as she spoke.
“I… I wish she had not released us,” I confessed.
“Aye,” Summer itted. “But her spell still rests within us. I trust she will reclaim us.”
“So, are we actually free? If she pulled on our leash, would we not be delighted to come to heel?” I ventured my concern.
Summer looked thoughtful and nodded. Silence fell between us as we absorbed our prospects.
“So then, that is the answer to what we want? To be sister-slaves to our lover? Forever?” I asked, scared at the enormity of what I was saying.
“It is so,” Summer replied succinctly. “I want to be with Layla always. That is clear. She is good to us, generous, kind. I have no doubts of her love, nor ours for her. Everything else is a struggle to comprehend. Look what her love has done to us. Her experience so vast, her ion so fierce, her command so strong. Every moment with her, I want to prostrate myself, submit to her, and my heart tells me I should be grateful for the opportunity.”
“Poetic,” I noted wryly. “But true.”
“Perhaps we have lost all reason, but time not spent with her now feels wasted,” Summer mused. I nodded. “Now, tell me more of last night.”
It seemed more important to discuss the changes our beloved had wrought upon us, or what we were going to do about our row with Ma, but, as ever, I was inclined to indulge my sister. So, we lay concealed in the long grass, birdsong serenading us, and shared our differing perspectives on the latest tryst. Summer’s recollection was patchy, but she took writhing delight as I revealed all she had been compelled to do. Now and then, she bade me stop if she grew too excited, then she would gather herself and I would continue. I quietly enjoyed playing with her emotions.
Once I had recounted all I could recall, I steered our chat towards how we had changed so drastically in such little time. We were in complete accord in adoring what Layla had done to us, marvelling at the depth of our feelings but we were both disturbed by how unimportant anything else in our lives now seemed.
“When she first took us, above the waterfall, I wanted her to do that to me every night,” Summer groaned as the memory of that first pleasure took her. “But I could never have imagined there were delights greater than that ahead.”
“I suppose the trouble with being a novice is one does not know how in the dark one is until a guide with experience illuminates it,” I reasoned.
“Or one submits to the mysteries of darkness,” Summer interjected, touching her forehead, pristine now but so recently blackened to honour our goddess. I copied her worshipful motion by reflex.
“I had always imagined sex was sex. I never understood how one could have a preference for how one had sex, despite our predilections for vampires. But deferring to Layla, submitting to her, obeying her, being her pets, her slaves. It was like some part of me that had always slumbered suddenly roared awake and was now in charge and ravenous,” I added.
“Only in charge of putting our Master in charge. There’s a decision made by our quims if ever there was one,” Summer laughed. “Her dominating us, revealing Dahlk to us, nurturing the darkness from within us. I never imagined we could adore this as much as we do. It has all been so much.”
“When she first took us, it was overwhelming, and we only wanted more. Then she dominated us, and then we only wanted to submit more. Then she fed from us… oh, by the goddess. That was the most extraordinary experience. I do not care if her feeding from us is a risk or not. I do not care if it could kill us. I cannot, I will not, be without it,” I said in earnest, running the backs of my fingers lightly over the tender side of my throat.
“It’s like her bite conjures a quim on my neck and then she fucks me by feeding from it,” Summer luridly imagined.
“Crass. But not inaccurate,” I conceded. “Even if her magic has had no effect on how we feel, her bite changed everything. I would do anything to bleed for her again.”
“Just what I was thinking, Win,” Summer nodded absently, then said, “I thought nothing could get more…,” she struggled for the right word, “sublime than that but then what she did to my mind. Nnn! It was never-ending bliss. Only Layla can do these things. We need her.”
“She can do anything. Shoving her fingers into my mind through the mark of Dahlk; I thought I was insane, but I want her to do it again. I want it all,” I was turning myself on with every word.
“Oh, by the goddess. Thank you, Win. It is coming back to me. Nnn,” Summer moaned. “Layla carved my true name into my soul: Slave.” Her hand began to glide over her quim. I let mine do the same.
“So, Slave, do you know my true name?” I wondered.
“Yes, I do. Your name is Thrall,” Summer spoke my true name with a slow, sultry drawl, ing over me like a breeze across a meadow. “Our Master ensured that was clear to me. It is a beautiful name, like mine.”
“Yes, Slave,” I said, my arousal undisguised. Summer’s eyes closed tightly, stimulated by the sound of it. With our lover far away, I looked at my sister with an animalistic hunger. We had always been diffident about telling each other we were beautiful as it necessarily seemed vain, but as she lay back amid the long grass, she looked so lovely. I felt an urge to kiss her, hoping I would be kissing that part of her that was now forever Layla’s. I lay beside to her, resting my arm across her belly. With a smile she brought her arm over mine, eyes shut tight. “Slave,” I repeated, which made her gape.
“Say it again. I can see Master’s face in my mind’s eye. Can you do her accent?” Summer requested.
“Slave,” I impersonated poorly, but it was good enough for Summer.
“Yes, Master,” she breathed and writhed her hips, a vision of submission. Blind, obedient and eager to fuck. I pulled her silk down to peer at her bite. It was angrier than yesterday, the flesh about the punctures more ragged. Our lover’s fangs had largely hit the same mark but not perfectly. If I did not know how heavenly it felt to receive the injury, perhaps I would have been concerned by its seriousness. Instead, I felt reverence and a deep-rooted need.
Summer craned her head away from me, displaying our Master’s blessing. An irresistible impulse drew my mouth to where Layla’s lips had latched on to Slave last night and I began to suck.
No blood flowed into my mouth, but my suction drew a long, low, moan from Summer.
“Master,” she called, low and soft. Her vulnerable cry transported me to last night when Layla shared her dominion over my sister. The seed our beloved had planted, revealing a new dominant world, bloomed within my mind, granting a nascent appreciation of power. I saw Summer not as my sister but as a slave bound to her mistress, her submission a sacrament, her pleasure an offering, made to be used.
Easy ecstasy arched Summer’s back and she pushed my hand towards her quim. Ripe for the taking, I wanted to accept her sacrifice, pull up her skirt and dive into her flesh. My head spun as the shock of what I was contemplating. I was not her mistress, though I felt our Master’s dominant tendrils spreading through my mind. With effort, I reminded myself I was Summer’s sister. I was a slave, the same as her. How could I think of myself as a master? I pulled back confused, appalled. Summer’s eyes flickered open.
“I-I-I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “That was shameful. I lost myself.”
“As did I. We are so wanton,” I sighed, sitting up. “Our master has made us so. This is her will. We must be as she desires us, embrace who we are becoming. But I fear it. Our urges are out of control. At times, I feel on the verge of hysteria; filled with joy but as if I might scream at any moment. We were wild animals with Ma this morning.”
“Perhaps what you say is true. So much of Layla lingers in us. I am elated, but it is almost more than I can contain. Just now, it was so simple to give in to my urges. I could not stop myself. I am sorry. Please tell me you understand,” Summer asked. She knew I did.
“I do. Master’s will is strong, our thoughts have aligned. I can see you as she does,” I confessed. Summer squeezed my shoulder briefly in sympathy and pulled her hand away.
“Tell me you feel no attraction to me,” Summer challenged, cutting to the point as she so often did.
“I… do not,” my hesitation was as unavoidable as it was revealing. “I do not.”
“You cannot lie to me, Win,” Summer said. “I feel it too. I do not seek it, but I cannot deny it. If Layla commanded me to make love to you, I would obey and not be ashamed. You agree?”
“Yes,” I confessed, defeated.
“Whatever we want is no longer as important as what Layla wants. Is that not love? To place our beloved’s wishes above our own,” Summer pushed.
“I thought, from Mother and Father’s tales, love was finding your partner, discovering a match whose differences balanced who you are. Layla’s love has taught us that is not necessarily the case,” I itted. “She is clearly our superior in all things. Her love elevates us. To be slaves to one so exalted is to be exalted ourselves. We have found such purpose in her love and completion under her control. Is that mad? It seems to fly in the face of everything we held true. What is wrong with us?”
“I do not sure there is anything wrong with us,” Summer asserted. “We are changing, growing, embracing darkness, falling deeper into love, learning our place in the world.”
While that felt true, a troubling thought swam to the surface, so I shared it.
“We are going to die. Our trysts escalate every night. Where else could this be leading than death?” I reasoned and puzzled at how alluring I found the thought of my own death if Layla was its cause. “I feel weirdly calm about that. It does not scare me, though it clearly should. The idea of dying under her fangs… it calls to me.”
Summer ran one hand over her wound, wincing, and the other over her skirt above her sex. Clearly, she felt the same as I.
“Perhaps you are correct. We may be doomed if we follow this path, but we cannot stop. The wonders Layla brings are worth any risk. We are altered by this love, but we are still ourselves. We are not under her control right now, we are making our own decisions, and we want this. I accept we are quite changed from who we were before the fayre. The darkness growing within us shapes our desires superseding our simple dreams from before. Does that matter? We have never felt so alive and I accept that comes with a risk of death,” Summer mused.
“My heart says it is worth it. You say we are not under her control at this moment, but I wonder if I feel this way because we are influenced and do not realise it. We know there is a spell within us, but we cannot know its full purpose. Could she have placed commands in our hearts and made us forget they were there? Has she been doing that all along? Shaping us, making us brazen?” As I spoke these suppositions aloud, my breathing grew faster, my arousal heightening. I was so enamoured of subjugation that I wanted my assumptions to be true, even though I knew Layla’s magic had no effect on my feelings for her at all. The swirling contradictions of my certainty clashed with the evidence of my wildly seething emotions. I recognised the truth that she had planted that phrase in my mind and bound me to its belief but my inexorable fetish for control made the truth immaterial, blinding me with adoration.
“By the goddess, I hope so,” Summer pursed her lips, mulled over my words, then announced a plan. “We are our beloved’s creatures; this we know and welcome. We love everything about her, everything she does to us, everything she has found within us, no matter how dark. Whether it was some wickedness that was always within us or something Layla has awoken or a corruption she has wrought upon our souls, whatever the case our feelings are as real as flesh. We desire what we desire. If that means we were destined for death then so be it, we should embrace our fate to live and die in ecstasy. We must pledge ourselves to her, as subjects would to a monarch, and we must do it tonight. Let us leave her in no doubt that we are committed to being hers above anything else.”
My heart leapt to embrace Summer’s suggestion while dissonance swam in my head at how easily the prospect of death was swept aside by the desire to give myself, body and soul, to our beloved. It happened time and again. No matter how troubled I was by our situation, whenever we got a chance to think things over, I arrived at even greater enthusiasm for giving myself to our Master. I could not be objective about it no matter what I tried. At the time, I chalked it up to the depth of our love, oblivious to how deeply our beloved had sunk her claws into our souls.
“That is a wonderful idea. We must do it,” I agreed, overcome with enthusiasm. My doubts laboured against some taint within me that coated them in darkness, turning them into fuel for my fetish. “I know it is impossible for our feelings to be the result of her magic,” I lied, “but I wish they were. I would thank her for it with my life.” And that was the truth.
“If she had used her powers to inspire our desires to be fucked and controlled, that would be perfect. It would only make us love her more. We need to obey. It is undeniable. If she had sculpted our souls so we want that, it would be all the sweeter. To have been enchanted to want to be enchanted would be the supreme gift,” Summer enthused.
We laughed at the possibility. In the face of our total capitulation to corruption and doom, we hugged each other and laughed. As thralls eager for the leash, we promised to pledge ourselves and our fate to our lover that very night. Exactly how we could bind ourselves further than we already were was a problem for after dark. My mind raced to prove the sincerity of our devotion.
“We must make our promises to Layla before she takes control of us again. That way she will know our desire is sincere and not something we are only saying because we are under her power,” I insisted, enslaved to my needs in the moment, heedless of the insanity we were embracing.
“Agreed. And we should ask her to embed our vows in our hearts, carve them into our minds with her magic so all doubts are banished and we can never be freed,” Summer declared.
Though that felt like the opposite of what I had first intended, the prospect of Layla burning our pledges of submission into our brains was unbearably seductive, sending a shiver dancing down my spine.
“That’s settled then,” I stated with a sense of manic relief that our fate was now finalised, scattering my worries to linger at the corners of my awareness. With scarcely a thought, I switched subjects. “Now, how are we going to face Ma after this morning’s fiasco?”
The sobering memory of our rude awakening returned. In truth, we had panicked. Unwilling to ignore another late rising, Mother had knocked on our chamber door. We had collapsed into bed hours before, so exhausted that we had spared no thought to waking on time. Without waiting for a response, Mother had opened the door. A quick swish of my hair to cover the bite side of my neck and a fearful glance to Summer was all I had time for. In response, she made a hurried gestured back at me, urging me to brush my hair forward. There was no mark of Dahlk on her brow, so I assumed it had vanished from mine, but with no time for finesse I ruffled my locks before Mother entered our chamber.
Ma’s tone was soft with kindness and concern when she asked if we had stayed up late again, then she fussed over how pale we looked. She was correct, our exsanguination had left us wan. With no alibi prepared and the risk of exposure imminent, Summer immediately resorted to rage.
We were adults now. We could do what we wanted. Our sleep was our concern. How dare she intrude. Get out of our room. All that and worse shrieked from my twin’s mouth.
Caught in the rush of fear, I had ed in the tirade to drive Ma away. Shrill accusations poured from me about her still seeing us as children, ignoring our privacy and wanting to keep us trapped in the cabin forever. Summer picked up on that idea and hurtfully screamed that she could not keep us prisoners and one day we would be gone.
Mother reeled from our hostility, reflexively clutching her pendant as if to ward off evil. In a rare moment of uncertainty, she apologised for her intrusion and left, closing the door gently behind her, much to our relief and shame. It pained us to abuse her so, but the pact was too important. It had to be protected at all costs.
Summer had then darted over to me and brushed my hair back from my face. She whispered that I had a dull blue bruise half out of my hairline where our beloved’s thumb had ground into my skull last night. It felt tender under my probing fingers. Four more welts were hidden under my hair where Layla’s hand had tightly clamped. We needed to find some arnica to relieve the contusion.
Dressing quickly, covering our wounds with our silks and arranging our hair so my bruise was obscured, we kept our anger burning and stormed out of the house. Father wanted to stop us, but Mother insisted he let us go, avoiding further confrontation. A small mercy.
And so, we gathered fresh arnica as we drifted to the river, shaken, guilty and afraid we had just broken something that we could not repair.
Summer broke the silence of my recollections, “I am sorry. I over-reacted. I was so scared she would discover our bites.”
“I understand but it was weird. We suddenly had all this rage. Like Ma was our enemy. The hateful things I spoke. I would have said anything to get rid of her. We are going to have to do some serious apologising when we get back,” I realised.
“As soon as her knock woke me, I was aware of my bite. It seemed so huge; I thought it would be too obvious to hide. Then I saw your bruise just before she came in,” Summer said as she stroked my hair aside to inspect the dried arnica paste. “I panicked. I should have distracted her, lied, been less aggressive. But anger was all I had in the moment.”
“I felt it too. Keenly,” I confirmed, as I tried to assess how our emotions now teetered on the very edge of control. “Do you think it will bring the bruising down?”
“We will clean it off before we go back. It should be fine. But our injuries are stacking up. We cannot hide these forever,” Summer pondered as she gestured to her neck. “We have not been thinking clearly, our heads spin in love and darkness. It has made us careless about protecting the pact. Keeping these a secret… it cannot go on for much longer.”
“No. It cannot,” I agreed solemnly.
Examining Summer’s neck, I marvelled at her wound. She tilted her head to give me a better look. The punctures were puckered divots, dark red centres, haloed in blue, a fraction wider than yesterday, made livid by my sucking on them earlier.
“I made your bite look angry. Sorry. Should we use some of the arnica on it?” I suggested. “Is there enough left?”
“Yes, plenty. Please do, sis,” Summer agreed and handed me the remains of the pulverised arnica smeared across a stone the size of my hand.
Taking it, the paste had dried out a little, so I dipped my fingers in the river to drizzle a few drops, worked it into the paste with my thumb and whispered the elvish words mother had taught us over it as I did so. I tentatively daubed a blob between the four incisions. Summer’s gasp made me pull back.
“Carry on,” she ordered, frowning but not in displeasure. “Gently. It is… ever so sensitive.”
With care, I smeared the paste around the injury making sure not to get any inside the punctures. Summer gritted her teeth in an enthralling mask of pleasure and pain, which I tried to ignore to focus on my task. In moments, I was done.
“Fuck my goddess, that felt good,” Summer proclaimed, dreamily. “Thank you, sis.”
“You are welcome. Do mine?” I asked.
Summer nodded and daubed me. Forewarned about the sensitivity, the peculiar mix of sharp stinging pain and lingering sensuality was hard to handle, nonetheless. Did I now take pleasure in pain or was it only stirring rapturous memories of our beloved’s bite? Either way when she finished, I longed for her to continue.
Instead, I drank deeply from the stream, clearing my head enough to grasp how badly my libido was spiralling out of control, underlying all my decisions. It was momentarily obvious that our lovesickness inhibited our objectivity. Every day we thought only of what our mistress would do to us that coming night. But our pleasures were taking a toll, our injuries, our pallor, our beshadowed eyes. It would take weeks for our bites to heal if we were not bitten again, and that seemed unlikely. We were dying and despite what we had agreed, there in the heat of the dappled sunlight I had a moment of clarity.
“What are we going to do?” I wondered aloud.
“Leave Ma to me. I will conjure a convincing apology and be sorrowful and sincere. That should not be too hard; I genuinely regret that we went so far. I shall tell her she was right about our late nights, and we will make up our chores or something,” Summer calculated as she went. She had a knack for faking sincerity that I lacked, so she usually handled our apologies—something else I relied on her for.
“I am sure we can smooth things out with Ma, but I mean what is happening to us? The only things we seem to value now are sex and blood and slavery. They crowd everything else out of my thoughts. The chance that the pact might be compromised put us in a wicked rage. That is not like us. And I am vexed by constant arousal. It leaps into life at the slightest provocation, so I can barely keep my hands off myself. My mood swings with such volatility. I balance on the cusp of hysteria. One moment I am elated that we are going to pledge ourselves to our beloved, the next I am appalled by what she is turning us into, yet I cannot wait to be with her again. Loving Layla is turning us into something I do not recognise. Why?” I implored, finally getting my misgivings out.
Summer looked straight through me; a sudden placidity draining all expression from her features. Coldly, she said, “Because we are her slaves. We are what she wills. We shall do whatever she demands. Our function is to serve. Our purpose is to obey. Nothing else matters. I am Slave. You are Thrall. We live only to obey the Master.”
Showing no concern for my outburst, the dreadful force of Summer’s words struck me hard. My qualms drained from me like blood from a wound. With growing dismay, I realised I had seen that same expressionless visage last night. Here, in broad daylight, she was mindless once more and some potent remnant of our Master’s power lingered in her, activating some latent compulsion within me.
“I live only to obey,” was all I could say as I sank into slavery, my mindless sister holding my leash.