Page 67 of Her Viking Guardian

Herra Henrik gave it to me without hesitation.

In my imagination, Mary seemed to surge past me, and then another thrust from my master caused me to lurch beyond Mary, and then find her again at my shoulder. She turned to me, not speaking, but with a look that conveyed the same wild imperative I felt myself: search. Find her. Find out what stood behind the Chinese girl and the men who used her.

The… the… the Fellowship.

The name didn’t appear in letters in the air. It took shape in my mind as if I had come to an inevitable conclusion. It’s called a fellowship. And I knew it had a Chinese name, too, but I knew also that I wouldn’t find it because I didn’t know Chinese.

The rational observer in my mind noted the fascinating quality of the interplay between my conscious and subconscious minds, and how it shaped my imaginary journey among the boughs of Yggdrasil… how having a man’s rigid member in my anus made me see things that felt as if they lay beyond reality.

The branch beneath me and Mary forked into several great limbs, each trailing smaller growths like pathways of consequence, and somewhere below them, through leaves and shifting glimmers, I sensed power flowing. A different kind of power from the one that propelled us… and…

A different tree?

I couldn’t have explained it, but it felt to me as if the current I sensed represented a leakage between two worlds’ different Worldtrees. As if different worlds—Norse, perhaps, and Chinese—shared the idea of a tree without sharing the details, and thus the women who could go to the tree in one culture could sometimes see and feel what took place in the other Worldtree.

The power I felt seeping into Yggdrasil felt less wild and more… connected. Networks. Transmission. Extraction. The image felt totalizing, almost industrial in a way that Yggdrasil itself didn’t. I knew I had to learn more.

I reached, and I felt Mary do the same.

In the Viking bridal chamber where my Herra brutally fucked my no-longer-virgin bottom, the next climax struck me. My body on the saddle seemed to have become less a body than a receptacle for repeated shocks of pleasure and pain. Henrik’s cock filled my anus with the same hard, sovereign certainty, while the bride’s consolation kept rubbing me into helplessness. I felt my cunt pulse around emptiness, my belly tighten, my thighs strain uselessly against the old leather, my pendant swing against my chest. Then release broke over me again and Mary and I traveled down in the canopy, to another level.

The bough under us narrowed and bent over darkness full of moving lights. I understood that Mary and I remained in Yggdrasil, but could see the imaginary world of the other tree—the Chinese tree, my mind couldn’t help calling it.

The lights looked, at first, like stars caught beneath leaves. Then I understood that they resembled cities seen from an airplane at night: linked nodes, glowing lines, grids of consumption. Some of the lights pulsed green-gold, sickly and rich. At the center of one cluster stood something that was not a tree and not a tower but somehow both—a trunk translated into steel and glass, drawing force upward and downward at once.

Shanghai, some part of me thought at once, though I had never been there.

Or maybe not Shanghai literally? But the place in the language of this vision that meant their center.

Mary shuddered beside me. I felt her fear, but also her need to know, just like mine. She had the same scholar’s greed, perhaps in a different key, that I felt in myself. The branch beneath us trembled and hummed as if carrying a massive current.

Elsewhere, in Sicily, I heard voices through the roaring in my body.

Not words at first. Only the fact of speech around me while I remained bent and spread and used.

Fragments sharpened.

“Rouen…”

“Ask him…”

“Aksel says…”

Giovanna’s voice, cool even now. Mateo’s lower murmur. They seemed very far away, yet somehow threaded into the same structure as Mary’s awareness of another chamber, another observer, another man trying to make this impossible thing submit to analysis.

The name Aksel flashed through my mind with no image attached at first except precision. Then, faintly, from somewhere that was not exactly my own perception, I got an impression of a tall blond man in a stone room beside Sven, his gaze fixed and technical, as if he meant to dissect a miracle into usable mechanisms.

The thought itself might have made me laugh, if I had had any breath to spare.

Henrik drove deeper and the almost-laughter became a cry.

“What do you see?” he demanded.

I tried to answer at once. The answer fractured under another climax.

“Lights,” I gasped. “A tower… no… a trunk made of power lines… energy⁠—”

“Be precise,” Giovanna said somewhere behind or beyond me, sounding infuriatingly professional while I was impaled by my master’s manhood, atop a Viking relic and coming out of my mind.