"Perhaps the Prophecy was not meant to be known by one such as you."

"Such as I?" His shaft moved.

Only gentle fingers of seawater stroked it. Only they, softly flowing and completely inadequate, sought to ease the enormity of the suffering brought on by more self-restraint than he had ever known. He would have her. He would have her now.

Reaching out, he took her arm. Surrounded it with one hand, its slenderness no match for his size, its inherent softness and pliancy no match at all for the heat of power that surged within him as her flesh burned beneath his. Melding itself into his as if this had been...what? Pre-ordained?

Gasping, The Pearl looked down at the hand that held her captive.

Rynom recognized the sound. It was fear. Of the female who knew she had been bested. Who knew she would submit and partner to the male who would dominate and decimate her. It was fear of the unknown. Of ultimate surrender to brute force and brute strength.

Rynom burned. She was pure. She was aphrodisiac. His other hand lifted, to tweak and tug at the ring embedded deep within the flesh of his left breast.

Fascinated, drawing a deep and audibly unsteady breath as she followed the movement with her wide-eyed gaze, The Pearl watched him. She drew in another deep breath.

He heard it clearly. And felt it just as clearly, and for the first time in centuries upon centuries of acceptance of the new conditions of underwater life that had long since ceased to seem odd or awkward to him, he no longer questioned the terms of his continued existence.

"Does the metal not pain you?"

It did. At times it was agonizing. Rynom allowed his smile to grow slow and lazy. Soft and as enticing as it was possible for a smile to be. His hand shifted its grip then. Never letting loose of her, never relinquishing the prize he had readied himself to claim, he allowed it to slip upward and upward, toward the pearlescent roundness of the shoulder hidden beneath the flowing billows of her cloak. "Remove your cloak," he said.

Another gasp. Sharp and startled, as was the quick darting of fear across the perfection of her features.

"I will not!"

"Or I shall remove it for you."

"You would not dare!"

He smiled again. More. Languidly.

The Pearl stood stock-still. Seeming mesmerized by the sight of him, the touch of him, she stood as still as the blue-eyed marble statue the soft sheen and pallor of her flesh and her gems seemed to make her.

A moment pa.s.sed.

Ten moments.

And then, she was upon him. Like a woman starved, a woman starving, she fell upon him with small hands that found and touched the small bit of gold embedded in flesh grown incredibly sensitive.

Her slightest touch, her finest brush, sent wrenching currents of pain throughout him. And then, she grasped the golden length of his torture chain and tugged. She jerked upon it heavily and mightily, without mercy. Summoning from him a harsh cry of terrified pain. She would rip his flesh. Rip chains and rings from it. Summoning forth the heated scarlet of his blood as easily as she summoned his cries of agony.

It was her turn to smile.

Her hands drifted away from him then. Small and pure, avidly curious, they found the thrusting length of his shaft and began to stroke. Tracing scintillating trails of heat and delight through its swollen length. Sending thunderbolts of pure, living agony all the way to the root of it.

"I spoke of the Prophecy," she murmured, her tone taking on the honeyed notes of seduction.

Low and slightly hoa.r.s.e notes that turned the tables on him. Turned every table completely around upon him. Now it was he who caught his breath. He who struggled to overcome its jagged lumping at the base of his throat and in the center of his chest. He could not speak.

The Pearl laughed.

So softly that at first Rynom wondered if he truly heard.

"Allow me to tell you of this Prophecy," she murmured, sweeping her small but preternaturally strong fingers back up to the rings at his nipples, pinching-twisting another groan from him. "Allow me to tell you of the words The One spoke to me at the end."

Barely able to hear through the terrible buzzing that inflicted his ears and the inside of his mind, Rynom fought to retain consciousness. He fought with every facet of his dwindling strength to ward off the faint that threatened to claim him in the face of such delicious, such deliberately inflicted pain.

"Allow me to instruct you in the new catechism to which you will be required to dedicate yourself."

"I dedicate myself to no..."

Her perfectly formed lips quirked beneath the barrier of her medallion. Into the smallest of lush-full smiles. Her brows lifted, and she tugged again at the chain with which he had been inflicted. She tugged harder than before, until he felt the uneasy stirring of flesh at its limit...flesh about to succ.u.mb beneath the enormous pressure exerted, and part in b.l.o.o.d.y, torn ripples before it.

"You will dedicate," she declared. "You will submit."

Tortured nearly to unconsciousness, Rynom cried out. Dropping to his knees, he closed his eyes and focused upon the rippling, endless waves of pain and concurrent delight with which she tormented him. Aroused, his shaft thundered. Burning, aching, it reverberated with a movement inside. A pounding heaviness that left it desperate. His entire body pounded. His entire body throbbed. In ways that seemed almost musical in their intensity.

"I wear the badge of my Office as you must wear yours. Through all of eternity. I wear upon my face the abomination that was thrust upon me when I was but a frightened child, strapped to a table in the temple. Strapped down, with hard tubes forced into my throat and my stomach. Helpless while The One infused me with the elixirs and potions that would force me to live forever. Forced to endure the pain of having this medallion embedded in my flesh, where it must remain forever, a burden that can never be removed."

Blinking, near tears, Rynom did not understand. While he had not accepted his piercings willingly, he had drunk the elixirs when they were offered then, eager in newfound drunkenness, had begged for and been given more. He had undertaken everything in the spirit of Adventure and endless freedom that had been offered to him.

"I have borne this abomination patiently," she went on. "Knowing always that the Prophecy must one day come true. That one day I should be freed from my torment by the appearance of the Opposite."

"Opposite?" Rynom shook his head. "I do not understand." He felt drugged again. Drugged, as at the time when he had swallowed the fluids that doomed him to this non-existence beneath the sea, in a land that had outlived its time and been relegated to forgotten legend with no meaning.

Laughing softly, almost wickedly, The Pearl shook off her sacred cowl. Tearing it loose with an impatient gesture, she flung it aside, her medallion dancing provocatively with her every movement. And she followed with the floating folds of her diaphanous robe.

Pristine white dropped to gently sculpted sand around Rynom's feet, to burn there with all the intensity of genuine fire.

"There is no longer necessity for robes," she murmured, caressing his shaft again with both hands. And in the caressing, she drew him forward. Drew him near. "There is need only for this." She tore away his robe as well. And dropped it to the sea floor, where l.u.s.trous and gleaming white folds intermingled with brash and craven scarlet. Seeming to become one. "I am a woman." Without warning, The Pearl went to her knees before him. Moving her mouth as close to him as the obstacle, the gem-crusted oval, allowed.

Though she could never take him in, never wrap the ripe succulence of her lips and her mouth around him, never even brush their warmth across him, sweet-hot warmth overtook him and a guttural cry rocked him, driving almost the last shred of sense from his mind.

"I have desires," she murmured.

A steaming burst of essence seared Rynom's already heavy and dragging sac. Very quickly it rose into a shaft that could only struggle and writhe, seeming deprived of any way to relieve its enlarged, engorged agony.

Leaning closer, she stroked the heavy roughness of her medallion against that very, suffering flesh. Along it.

The medallion was hot, and he jerked. Trying to escape.

But she would not allow it. Catching his hips between her hands, she chastised him with a strange power that simultaneously enchanted and enticed.

Her medallion emitted a terrible electricity, an unforeseen one that flashed some incomprehensible but clear warning.

"You are the Prophecy," she murmured, stroking harder. "And I imagine the taste of you. I yearn to know the sweet-wine duskiness of you. And if I cannot know with my lips, I must..."

"What?" Rynom gasped. "You must what?"

Releasing his hips, The Pearl swayed against him. Provocatively. Perhaps experimentally, the embodiment of the as yet unsullied creature of legend sprung to life. Thundering, leaping, Rynom's body reacted as he had expected. Weakness felled him, dropping him shuddering to his knees upon the soft carpeting of sand that covered in drifts and whorls, the harder, unforgiving white marble floor.

Moving to and fro, back and forth, The Pearl undertook to torment him with a constant, futile search for a way to penetrate the barrier. Her tongue flicked, and for the very shortest of instants in a universe composed of agonizingly short instants, she succeeded. Her tongue found a way through the constricted opening at the center of the medallion, so that the merest tip of it touched his shaft.

He cried out. And around them, beneath them, the sea floor quivered. Not violently. This was only a slight movement. Only the suggestion of something more insistent and altogether fantastic that might lie in store if they continued. Though it was strong enough to visibly shake the truncated remains of crumbled columns and the corroded domes of the ruined city.

Unsteady beneath their own faltering weight, they swayed. As vulnerable as he. Surely it was entirely inside his mind. A trick of his fevered imagination. Rynom decided to ignore it.

Then she flicked again. In the same fleeting way, tantalizing with the warm and sweet brush of a tongue that could not manage to sustain the effort. Could not manage to remain where he wanted it most. Needing desperately to scream, he could only whimper.

She would not be his.

He would belong to her.

Very soon now, utterly impotent, he would surrender himself up to the very one he had thought to conquer with the most satisfying effort of his existence. She repeated her attempt to ply her tongue in long and luxurious strokes along the parched length of his shaft. And he clutched himself. Surrounding the thick-swollen base of a shaft filled to bursting, he held it between unsteady hands, eager to steady it for her.

"I cannot," she said at last, her tone one of absolute, genuine regret. "It was not meant to be."

"Perhaps..."

"We must fulfill the Prophecy."

"If only I understood-"

"The Red One shall endure above all others," she intoned, sinking into a trance.

Rynom saw it as much as he heard. A soft-voiced, flesh-quivering trance that softened the light in her eyes and her very features as well. A trance that set her apart yet again from the merely mortal, from any woman he had known or attempted to know.

"The Red One shall be my curse and my deliverance. The Red One shall come before me." Her voice took on the music of rapture. Holy rapture. "And he shall partner with me. He shall claim me, and in the claiming there shall be new life. For me, and for my people that have been brought to ruin. My land that has been decimated by treachery and deceit that shall be no more. That shall be wiped from the earth in the face of...of..." Her hips rose. Her hips fell. Her hips matched with exact perfection a whole new series of undulations in the sea's floor.

Terrified, Rynom twitched. He would have pulled away from the strange force of her, might even have fled her entirely, if he had been able. As it was, he could not control his movements...could not control the arm that swept out through the swirling, disturbed water that felt lighter somehow. Lighter and airier than in any recent memory. Wild in its abandon, his arm caught the sea-lit marble of The Pearl's abandoned podium and dashed it to ruin.

Pearl-ringed, her fingers scrabbled at his chest and his piercings, her small nails attempting to sc.r.a.pe away the outer layers of his aching, suffering flesh.

Rynom took her between his hands. He took her shoulders, then turned her. Laying her upon her back upon the sand so he could move himself over her and place himself above her.

Maddened with excitement, his shaft strained for her. Never hesitating, he plunged. He had not felt such terrible throbbings of heat in so long. In so many ages. And that made him impatient. Almost vicious. He stabbed his full length into her small, tight flesh and The Pearl cried out.

The deed was done.

Parted for him, her flesh surrounded him. Her last barrier disintegrated before him, she encompa.s.sed him with tight evidence of her virginity. Fragile and vulnerable, her flesh ripped slightly, unquestionably, when she moved around him and he moved inside her. She did not struggle. Legs already spread for him, she offered herself up to him in answer to that ancient, incomprehensible prophecy.

The sea floor rippled again. The columns shook, the domes groaned uneasily and somewhere a shaft of impossibly golden-blue light burst through a haze of risen sand.

Behind her medallion, The Pearl's lips twisted into a grimace.

Pa.s.sion riddled Rynom's body, and blurred his vision. Unable to stop himself, unable to understand why he should want to stop himself, he ground himself deeper into her tearing, struggling softness. He ground himself all the way into what had to be the farthest sanctuary of her, seeking to root out and completely destroy every last vestige of her virginity. And her body rippled in response.

Softening for a moment upon a swift burst of heated nacre, it immediately re-tightened to encompa.s.s his length. And enclose it. She gripped him with her private flesh and shook him.

Or was that the sea floor, shifting again?

There seemed no distinction between outer and inner. No separation between the universe in which he had existed for time out of mind and the new one he had entered a scant instant before.

Rynom shuddered. Deep in places he could not control because his mind would not allow control, hot maroon gathered. Began to press. Aided and abetted by the enfolding softness of The Pearl's layer upon layer of pressure upon the outer layers of his shaft.

Confusion flickered in her eyes, and more of it fluttered to life upon her features, even as a new and softer wafting of her inner essence further blurred the edges of reality. Her brow wrinkled and she frowned. As if she, too, sensed that all existence had fundamentally altered. Or was about to.

Holding her down, though there was no real need to, Rynom continued to press his swollen hardness against her and into her. "Is this a part of the Prophecy you meant to fulfill?" He wanted to know. "This quaking and shaking, and rolling of the entire world?"

"I know no quaking." The softest of ripples quivered through her flesh and infused her voice. "I know no rolling." Lifting her legs, she spread them wider. Abandoning any pretense of the virginity that had been required of her by ancient laws and holy robes and the strictures of an Office she had clearly never wanted. She partnered with him. Willingly. In the ages-old way of women partnering with men, she became one with him.

It was unlike any virginal capitulation he had known. It seemed...ordained?

A curious way to think of it. A curious word choice that seemed somehow to have been implanted in his mind. So dazzling him and dumbfounding him that his thoughts no longer resembled thoughts. They had devolved into little more than a remnant of survival instinct.

The Pearl burst around him. "I am Iora," she whispered. Another hiss of her superheated nacre escaped to surround him and sweeten him as she pressed the no longer forbidding heaviness of her medallion against his ear. "As I give you the gift of myself in fulfillment of the Prophecy, I now give you the gift of my name. The one with which I was graced at birth, and which I was forbidden to utter once I had been made Numen and thrust into my Office."

"Iora." Rynom's voice quivered. Violently. "It means purity."

Her laughter was low. Soft. Insidious. "No longer, I fear."

Upon the utterance, Rynom found a new depth to her. A new and much sweeter depth inside her. He wanted to pause to enjoy it, wanted to savor it and imprint it upon his memory before sensibility erased itself and he lost himself entirely in the tip and engorged extremity of the buried flesh with which he sought to explore more and ever more of her. But he burned. And seethed. As terribly as living flesh had once boiled and melted at the time of the Destruction, he bubbled with the heaviness of internal heat accompanied by pressure that would soon kill.

Something tried to burst inside him when he began to withdraw. Something feral and vital struggled, wanting to keep him there even when he knew withdrawal was necessary if he was to know the agonizing joy of claiming her again. To possibly, probably, greater depths and larger degrees. Reaching her outermost limit, he did allow himself to pause, if only briefly.

Groaning, she moved. Barely.

Stuttering and shuddering, he struck the bottom of her for a second time, his shaft once again dragging and forcing entry through layers of tightness that resisted his advance even when the woman herself did not. She moistened. Offering up a smoothness he had not encountered before. Freeing up new and ever more potent flows of her essences...nacres...she writhed softly beneath him as he whirled. Wild with unquenchable abandon, he cried out at the unexpected heat that flowed from her and within her.

"I did not know," she murmured, obviously struggling to form even the simplest of words and syllables. "I did not guess..."

More of her vital warmth gushed, cutting short her attempt to speak. Wrapping his fingers tight around her hips, Rynom lifted them and steadied them, though steadying of any kind was becoming increasingly difficult upon the sandy bed that had taken up its uneasy stirring and shivering again. Still, he pulled her spread-eagled body closer. Searching out new angles. New ways of staking his claim to her and his mastery over her.

"I desire you," she murmured upon another violent plunge of his body claiming hers. And she cried out then.

"I desire to possess you. To create a future with you. To..."

The sea floor heaved. Unmistakably this time, it quaked with a sudden vehemence that tumbled the crumbled remains of towering columns and stirred up strangely golden clouds of murk.

The cobalt towers were no longer visible. All around water fizzed and sizzled with vague echoes of another disturbance seen in times long forgotten. Disturbance that felt oddly familiar, oddly portentous, oddly alarming. Aroused, schools and mult.i.tudes of blue and golden fish darted in panic, then fled altogether.

The Pearl's...Iora's...eyes opened wide.

"That was..." Lifting his head, Rynom tightened his grip upon the hips he held tightly jammed onto his full length. "That was real. The columns...the earth-"

"The Prophecy." Iora fixed her gaze unflinchingly, unwaveringly upon him. "It will be fulfilled."

Rynom's head buzzed. His thoughts whirled and his eyes hurt in the sudden glare of columns of increasing, awe-inspiring golden light. When Iora began to erupt, when the waves of essences and nacres began to release themselves in earnest upon him, thoughts lost their meaning. Concepts lost their validity and all that remained was sensation. Incredible sensation that instantly became the focus and center of everything.