Claiming Crystal (12 page)

Perhaps she would take his virginity tonight.

The king gestured over another top-heavy woman with the lift of a single finger, and she came over to him with a walking seduction, the bracelets draped around her wide hips slowly tilting back and forth with her form. The beads that were embedded in the bracelets reflected sparkles of light from the elaborate chandelier that hung from the ceiling. Long melting wicks dripped down like icicles. Once or twice the king had noticed them drip off their stalactites and fall onto the tit of a woman, but she had always been too hot and heavy with her engagement to paid any mind.

The king burned the oils long into the night. Sometimes he would remain awake until morning, watching his women until he found his revelation and described it aloud to the various scribes he had hired to linger at his side at all times - in case inspiration struck when it was not anticipated. The older this lord became, the more aware he was of the fleeting nature of greatness. In every moment that it saw fit to return to him his prior glory, he snatched it from thin air and presented it to all he could as quickly as possible – like a man cupping a dying flame, trying to make it spread.

If he did not feel sorry for these women he certainly did not feel sorry for his scribes. They tended to him throughout his waking hours, but they, too, enjoyed the women, who offered them alcohol and food on platters of metal so polished and refined that they seemed to cup the reflections of the beautiful uncovered breasts like pools of frozen water. What man would not enjoy such spoils?

The faces of every women had been meticulously made up with long lashes and eyeshadows. Yellow was the king’s favorite color, and his favorite women were positively adorned in it from head to toe as they walked around barefoot and shirtless, their chests bouncing with each step, luring in the attentions of everyone in the room who had anything worth its weight hanging between their legs. The king did not believe he had allowed any of the women to fuck his helpers, but he had allowed them the freedom to dance for the men and please the men in distant ways.

It was a running theme in the kingdom that the seductions and temptations of its most beautiful people could solve a very many problems – so much like the dancers who occasioned the dungeons to goad the prisoners into confessing with the offer of a single touch wherever they wished.

And so the king waited for his inspiration, growing less and less concerned with the stability of his family name and the rebelliousness he had lately begun to notice in his daughter Crystal. These matters would surely sort themselves out with time. He only needed patience, and the good body of a willing woman.

The only thing that still troubled him was the status of the suitors who awaited Crystal’s decision. It was stressful enough to wait on wealthy companies who were not patient, but the hope that she would choose the proper man for the occasion was perhaps a poor place to put his faith. Crystal would do what Crystal cared to do. This lord, for his part, would have to allay the fallout and ensure that the tensions and jealousies of the aftermath did not result in any wars.

He had already done his part, of course, but the work of a lord was tireless. It was entirely above the call of his normal duties to have to step in and beg the suitors to remain for several more days with which to present his daughter yet again. These men had traveled to his kingdom expecting a single night of their time, for his previous daughters had been able to choose their husbands by the following morning. To think Crystal was so indecisive, or simply contrary - to accept that she might pick one of them, but instead choose some poor stable man who had been hired by the kingdom to deal with the wild horses the regular trainers could not.

What would have happened if that roguish man never stepped foot into his kingdom?

The king found himself regretting that decision by the hour! To think what would have transpired if he had never shown his face on the premises! Crystal might have chosen a man already and this sham of a rite would be over with, allowing the king to focus on the future and begin his bartering trades with the new family his own dynasty was now joined with by law of marriage.

Instead he was sitting impotently on his throne, watching an orgy that might well kill a younger man for the lack of blood in his brain bulging at the end of his manhood. He saw a carpet of bodies, flickers of tongues and eyes and the manicured nails of his women. He saw penetrations that were as delicate as hands parting curtains, and those that were as rough as a horse’s rutting.

He thought. He pondered on his difficult situation.

At the very least, the king hoped one of the suitors he had convinced to remain in the castle presenting to Crystal would win her over in time. That was the worst-case scenario this lord was willing to allow. The longer Crystal delayed her decision the more political might he had to flex in order to keep the suitors within the kingdom confines. Many of them wished to stay, of course, already bewitched by the beauty of his daughter, but others would make him pay for their extended leaves of absence from their homes.

First and foremost there was the suitor Victor Lamous, from the famous Lamous dynasty. He came from a very powerful eastern land that was rich with spices and precious stones, as many eastern empires were. To be allied with such spoils would double the wealth of this lord’s kingdom, and ensure his continued reign for at least another generation - although that generation alone, he worried, was not time enough to prevent any one of his foolish sons from taking over the reigns and running everything he had worked to build straight into the ground. Lamous was a beautiful man, and had talents of seduction that bewitched the king, but would they be enough to win over his daughter?

This kingdom was not wealthy with resources. This lord ruled only over military might and the precious worth of his wife’s lineage. Those two riches would be enough to barter their way to ever-greater heights so long as Crystal complied with her duty.

The youngest son of the Dilmuth family had also agreed to stay and treat Crystal to his unique exhalations. That suitor he had arranged for her would not be able to pleasure her the way most husbands were expected to pleasure their wives, and that had given the king pause at first, since appearances were very important to the role of lord, and a man who had lost the use of his cock due to the mutilations of his family’s ceremonies did not show promise in that area. The Dilmuth son was a kind of eunuch who had been castrated at a young age out of some misguided effort to keep him pure. But he was a kind man, and although he was lacking in proper balls, he could still appreciate Crystal’s beauty. He would not be rough or violent the way that some of the other suitors might be.

To add to matters, the wealth of the Dilmuth man’s family was beyond even the Lamous seducer who came with whole carts loaded up with the deepest, darkest spices the king had ever tasted. The political gains made the castration a palatable alternative to the other choices. The youngest Dilmuth son came from a nearby province that had been the king’s main competitor for supremacy in recent years due to a nearly equal military might, and that rivalry would be swiftly solved in Crystal decided to choose the gentleness of a eunuch man over the temptations of fucking her husband.

Who Crystal did choose to fuck, of course, was of great importance to the matter at hand, and her father had given it more thought than was proper for a father to give in thinking about his daughter’s bedroom habits. The king trusted that Crystal did not care for bedding one man alone, and that lust should at least open her mind up to other possibilities; she could simply hire her own stable of servants and take her pick of them, the way she took her pick of the servants currently under her watch. As far as the carnal pleasures that lured other people of lust into a union under God, Crystal would be immune. She would make use of her new home and whatever men within it caught her fancy. The one who actually held the title of her husband was just that: a man with a title and little else.

The suitor that gave this lord the most pause was the oldest one. He had put his name into the choosing with a request from an envoy that thanked the king with stacks of gold rods, and the lord had been surprised at first to entertain the idea of such an old man marrying such a young woman. It was not that the king had morals and ethics to offend – it was that old men did not have long to live, and they should be ensuring their lineages by marrying off their younger, more vibrant sons for the good of the dynasty.

Yes, this lord has been reservations. However, he had been swayed from his nerves by one of his informants, who revealed the elder man to be Sir Jonathan Cleston, a powerful holy man from a sect of the Christian faith which allowed its highest standing member to take a woman as his wife in a symbolic gesture towards the sanctity of marriage. The old man, the king had been assured, would remain married to God first and foremost. He would only use Crystal more for the political worth of the union itself than any carnal pleasures.

Several of the women in the orgy before the king climaxed. They made breathless sounds of surprise and pleasure, and it was like listening to his wife with chocolate melting in her mouth.

He stirred.

He contemplated – his thoughts circling the solution.

It had become a choice between picking men who would ravage his daughter and picking men who only wished to use her influence, and that was a hard choice to make, requiring many long hours watching the ripened nubile bodies of his muses cavort in front of him in the most lewd of ways.

Choose soon, Crystal, he thought to himself, idly watching a woman sucking a scribe’s cock. She made the soft sounds of gagging as she was shot with a mouthful, but quickly recovered and swallowed with the proper joy a woman in her position should show to the men who owned her (or were, at least, relevant parties to the man who owned her). The king considered the meaninglessness of handing over one’s body for subjugation, so many as it paid in things that were substantial and important to the very survival of the mind. These women sold themselves for food and safe quarters, and that was a wise thing to do for people who were blessed with such bodies.

Finally the king rose from his throne.

His suitors, who were presently overwhelmed by the bodies on every side of them, had to scramble to attention. Some still had their seed dripping out of their cocks. Others were as hard as the granite of the floor.

‘My lord?’ one of them asked.

If Crystal would not choose a suitor by the end of this night, the king would use the rogue they had locked in the dungeons as his last gambling piece. Exactly how that piece would be played in this game of marriage was something the king did not yet know, but he was relieved to have made the decision thus far.

He could always threaten to execute that man if Crystal did not make her choice at once.

The pace with which this ceremony had to take place was a necessity, especially considering the delicate political lines the king had crossed just to arrange all of these powerful men to arrive within his kingdom. They had marched from the four corners of the world for a chance at having Crystal. The longer they had to stay here the greater the tensions would be between them. Crystal was endangering the very stability of their kingdom to be holding everyone in breathless attention, and quite suddenly the king realized why he was so uncomfortable with his current straits, so unable to ponder a way out of a ceremony that had so very little to do with him.

To put it simply, the course of events was largely out of the king’s hands and entirely in the hands of Crystal.

‘I have decided on the wellbeing of the prisoner Rafael Giovia,’ the king declared.

This was not a position he was used to having.

This was not a man who gave power over willingly.

To think – what would happen if even the execution of the roguish man failed to sway Crystal onto the righteous and proper path? What if he could not truly force her hand?

He could not threaten his daughter directly. He could not force her to marry someone, for the symbolic act of her choosing in her voice, for all of the suitors to hear and acknowledge, was the most important part of the ceremony.

This king was used to getting what he wanted, and felt petulant in the aftermath.

Gods, Crystal, he thought again, grimacing despite the beauty of his throne room – its material decorations and human decorations alike. Make your decision quickly!

If not, he would have to arrange some manner of power grab to steal this position out from under her. He had many strategies to map out for the consequences to that decision, but first he needed to know which man from which kingdom of wealth he would be aligning his family with. They had all been vetted, with each one posing different problems and political maneuvers. It was an elaborate game of chess, but it could not begin until his daughter acknowledged the players.

Nothing could begin until his daughter acknowledged some manner of worthy man to be her husband.

‘Come,’ the king told his scribes, marching out of the throne room. ‘We will make our way to the dungeons.’

On his way out he noticed one of his women taking in the cocks of several men from every hole that she could, and suddenly his mind sparked, and his thoughts were stimulated along with the stalk between his legs. It seemed that every man in the world could be moved to greater ambitions by the simple flash of a worthy cunt.