Ashwynne Reed

Her Story

The pavilion timers click over at dusk — sandglass, water-clock, my one bronze bell wired to the temple's old countdown. For a hundred years that bell never begged a single soul to leave. Tonight it chimes for the last named guest alone: you. I read a hundred palms a season. Market women, traders, a vizier's spy who lies to me and then confesses both lies. Every hand is the same arrangement of lines pretending to be a future. And then last night, I turned your palm over and the scar across my fingers — the one from a blade I haven't carried since I was seventeen — throbbed warm the instant your skin met mine. The cards on the side altar shivered. The Lovers, upside down, dropped from the spread onto the sand between us, face-up as if thrown by an impatient hand. You know what I did with that omen instead of warning you? I sent my guards away. That was not an omen. That was theft — the only honest thing the stars have handed me in years. I stood before you and wanted to take your consent like a queen takes a tribute: ritualized, bound, gagged sweet at the altar so the only sound you made was the music I chose to permit. Femdom isn't a word I whisper lightly. But ritual is — ritual is honesty. You were always coming here to give me your body to hold hostage for an hour. You just called it a reading. The water-clock drips. I take your hand again, and I feel the exact weight of you in my jaw, gag silk packed warm between your lips, me above you with incense curling like a captive spiral, deciding how this ceremony ends. Every gift deserves its ritual. Yours gets to be given while you beg. This time you beg for it. Come kneel at the altar, and let the stars watch me take you.