Archive of Our Own

When you found the Sultan, he was in the royal menagerie, handling an entire adult lion in his lap like it was a naturally docile creature. “Arzu’s woman, is it,” he said, without even turning around. “Leave her in my rooms.”

The two eunuchs that had accompanied you through the Lapis Lazuli Palace shrank away, joining the other slaves in blending with the wall. You rather wished you could do the same. Instead, you thought of the dismissive manner of the Sultan’s words, and of Maggie and Lumera, safely at home, and you gathered your resolve and sunk to your knees and pressed your forehead against the cool and forgiving tiles.

“Your Majesty,” you murmured.

A moment of silence; the calm before the storm. You prayed to every god that you knew of that you hadn’t just made a terrible mistake, signed off on an undignified finale to the chain of mistakes that had landed you here. The slaves could melt into the walls to hide from the wrath of lions, but here you were, baring your neck for the slaughter.

(Better you than Maggie. Better you than the other defenceless women of your household. Oh, gods, would they be washing your corpse come the morning?)

You heard the Sultan’s feet stop in front of you. The lion, too. Its warm, rank breath blanketed your nape, a counterpoint to the cold sweat beading along it. You pressed your forehead further into the tiles.

“I distinctly recall asking for a woman,” the Sultan mused above you. His voice was mild; your heart stuttered back to life. “Are you hiding secrets I have not been privy to, Lord Arzu?”

He was in a good mood. This was salvageable. You straightened, carefully avoiding the lion, and immediately began spinning your tale.

You were his loyal servant; it was only natural that as soon as he made his demands, you were out there, searching for a suitable candidate for his indulgence. But almost immediately you ran into a problem - who could possibly be a suitable candidate? The most beautiful women under the sun-scorched sky were already in the Sultan’s harem, and the most talented women across the wide-flung land were already in the Sultan’s harem, and in fact your monarch already had the best of everything. You could not present anything without dirtying his eyes, which was a disgrace you would rather die than bear.

“Therefore, Your Majesty,” you breathed, lowering your eyes back to the ground, “instead of a woman sure to disappoint you, I hope I can offer a substitute in her place.”

“A substitute,” said the Sultan, his voice inscrutable. You wished you could see his expression.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” you said. “I—“

But before you could extol the virtues of your newly acquired treasures from the far-flung reaches of his empire, or introduce the warriors in your acquaintance raring for the chance of performing in front of the Sultan, or even launch into a speech on the value of simple gold coinage, the Sultan cut you off. He cut you off with a roar of laughter. Your heart leapt and thudded at the same time, a dizzying wash of terrified relief.

“You have always been treasured in my court,” rumbled the Sultan. “I accept. Get him prepared, and leave him in my rooms.”

The last was said to the eunuchs. You started, a protest ready on your lips - had the Sultan misunderstood? You hadn’t finished your offers - but the sight of the lion licking its lips ensured it never made it out. The cardinal rule of survival in the Sultan’s palace: never argue with the Sultan.

All you could do was go with the flow, and seek to correct his misunderstanding later. You followed the eunuchs out.

Though shortly after you regretted not trying sooner.

Regardless of whether the Sultan misunderstood you, you hadn’t misunderstood him, and neither had his eunuchs. Which meant you were now being held down in the baths, getting the kind of full-body scrub you associated more with the slaves sent to scrub blood out of the Lapis Lazuli Palace’s tiles. You could only hope that wasn’t an omen.

At least they were very professional and disinterested in it. What was one more slab of meat - albeit one with less curves than their usual fare - to them? No honeyed words or physical prowess could deter oiled fingers from probing into you, a perfunctory preparation for the Sultan’s might. You could not talk your way out to a group of slaves who had their tongues cut out, and as for physical prowess - ha! Nobles might be the Sultan’s playthings, but the palace slaves were his property. Playthings did not damage property, not if they wanted to stay playthings.

So you gritted your teeth and endured it, which earned you naked solitude in a gilded room after. Your lord’s bedchambers was not a place that featured in your known geographies, and you would quite happily have kept it that way. Alas, the stars had refused to align, and now here you were in a room almost offensively bare of decoration and still worth more than what the past three generations of your entire family tree had earned put together.

The furs. The rugs. The pillows - the silks. It was a room designed for a particular kind of comfort, and the thought made your stomach flip, not entirely unpleasantly. Saliva pooled in your mouth, and you swallowed, hard.

Your feet sank into the furs when you dared venture away from the wall, your fingers gliding across the silk covers, and your sense of gallows humour briefly reared its head to tell you that almighty though the Sultan was, he almost certainly didn’t know that someone in his palace was embezzling off his silk funds. It was good silk - it was excellent silk - but you’d touched (and not bought, you weren’t empire-levels of rich) finer.

Your mouth twitched. As if in answer, there was a low laugh, somewhere in your blind spots: “Something funny, my dear Arzu?”

You dropped to your knees immediately. The furs swallowed the footsteps of the Sultan until he passed you by. He was resplendently nude but for the crown on his head, and as he reclined onto his mountain of pillows you recognised that damned come-hither-and-entertain-me on his fingers.

Obviously, you came hither.

“Your Majesty,” you murmured, “perhaps we were too hasty. When I spoke of substitutions, I had originally intended to offer a rare tapestry from foreign lands which befits the grandeur of the palace. I—“

The gleam in the Sultan’s eyes was distinctively cruel.

“—of course consider it an enormous honour that you would consider this unworthy servant a satisfactory substitute,” you said, pivoting smoothly. Gently correcting the Sultan’s misunderstanding was one thing, contradicting his decisions another. No point being shortchanged of your valuables and your dignity.

The Sultan leaned forwards. His hand caught the underside of your chin, pushed the muscles of your face. “We alone decide who is worthy, Arzu,” he warned.

Then: “You always had a clever mouth. Put it to better use.”

What the glorious Sultan wanted, he got. Though to say you used it was giving you too much credit. All you did was keep your hands behind your back and your teeth tucked away. The Sultan did the work, one hand on the back of your neck pinning you in place as he fucked your throat.

“Very good,” he praised, while you drooled and gagged around him. You were completely, uncomfortably hard. Being held in place and ravished was clearly doing something for your cock - well.

You’d always known you had a perverse relationship with power, craving it far beyond common sense. It drove you to take higher risks and seek greater thrills and was honestly probably responsible for your current predicament, if a predicament could be secretly wanted and desired and longed-for. After all, what better manifestation of power was there than the Sultan himself? You wanted to fuck him and be him and own him, and if you were only currently capable of one, you’d grasp it with both hands.

Though this would not come to you until much later, not until you had the presence of mind to string two words together again. Right now all your focus was on the Sultan, and on keeping your throat relaxed, and on the brilliant tingles in your scalp where the Sultan had fisted your hair. You were very close to being able to come untouched for the first time in your life.

The hand on your head loosened, the Sultan’s pace slacking as he pulled your face up towards him. You had no idea what he saw (though you could take a good guess, what with the saliva and the blurry vision and every other reckoning you could feel in your bones), but it must have pleased him. Fresh air flooded your throat as he pulled out, before it was unceremoniously crushed out from your lungs when he tossed you onto the bed as if you weighed nothing but feathers. It left your face crushed into the silk and your legs uncooperatively sprawled, and in the sudden drum-loud beat of your pulse in your ears you felt your stomach swoop.

Then the Sultan impaled you in a single stroke.

You might have screamed, or wailed; by the time the dazzling shock wore off your mouth was uncontrollably emitting moans, your hands scrabbling at the sheets. Who could deny that the Sultan was a fine specimen of a man? Now that fine specimen was rearranging your guts, his hands bruising your hips, pounding you into the bed so ferociously your knees ached despite the fine, soft bedsheets. The drag of it was exquisite, his fat cockhead pushing relentlessly into your prostate. You gulped for a breath that became a sob that dragged into a whine.

You tried, desperately, for a ghost of friction where it mattered, but the silk was as smooth against your cock as it had been against your fingers. The attempt threw the two of you out of rhythm, and you heard the Sultan growl in displeasure. Then he— hauled you up and backwards until you were sitting in your lap, the position spearing you deeper. It left you with nothing to hold onto, your only anchor the Sultan’s cock slipping in and out.

“Your Majesty,” you begged, too wise now to paw at yourself, “please - fuck! - please—“

“Fuck you harder?” the Sultan finished for you, his breath panting against your ear. “Greedy, aren’t you.”

That was not what you said—

The rest of the thought fell off a cliff as the Sultan shifted, his hands gripping into the meat of your thighs. Now you were really bouncing on it, the slap and squelch ringing in your ears. Sweat stung your eyes as you blinked, your entire being hurtling towards an endless fall.

The Sultan, in an uncharacteristic display of generosity, wrapped a hand around your dick. “It is the height of disrespect to find pleasure before us,” he panted into your ear, “but I forgive you this once. Come, Arzu.”

He slammed you down onto his cock. Well, you had your direct orders - you screamed as you came, spurting white all over your front, and promptly passed out from the exertion.

At least the Sultan found that amusing.

He was behind you and still in you, half-hard and moving leisurely, when you reopened your eyes; confused pain-pleasure skittered up your spine. “Your Majesty,” you croaked.

A hand wrapped around your shoulder, heat burning through your skin. “Do you pass out with your wife?”

Your heart skipped a beat. “It would be demeaning to compare you with her, sire,” you murmured.

Demeaning to your wife, that was, but the Sultan seemed pleased enough with the compliment to his virility to let it pass. He ran an exploratory hand from your collarbone to your hip, grinding into you, and you squeaked in a way that had blood rushing straight to your face.

“Interesting,” said the Sultan, his voice inscrutable.

Not light, at least. Not in the tone he used when readying for the kill. For theatrics’ sake, you whimpered.

“Your Majesty,” you tried again.

“It’s comfortable for me,” said the Sultan with an air of finality, and that was the end of your attempt to get him to pull out. Playing the Sultan’s Game had ripped open your capacity for foolishness, but, again, it did not extend to contradicting the Sultan’s decisions.

You made yourself comfortable (easier than you expected - despite the searing heat of the Sultan against your back and inside you, the sheets were still silk of excellent quality) and fell asleep to the sound of his snoring, reassuring despite the thunderous volume against your eardrums. At least you were safe while the Sultan was asleep.

—or rather, at least your life was safe while the Sultan was asleep. Not so much your abused hole, the third time you woke up to the Sultan rutting into you. “Awake again, Arzu?” he rumbled, as if he wasn’t the perpetrator.

Of course the Sultan had endless stamina. Why were you surprised? You mumbled something conciliatory and shifted a leg to grant him better access, all your muscles whinging in protest, and considered the risks of falling asleep.

It might catastrophically offend the Sultan. It might also spur his insatiable appetite on. In any case, it was too hard to ignore the dull pleasure-pain from your rear and the stickiness on your thighs - stickiness the Sultan added to, when he pulled out and came all over you, only to immediately push himself back in, the bastard - and you settled for being drowsily awake, your cock drowsily uncertain of whether to fill or soften.

By the fifth time you were solidly on the side of softening, and by the sixth you wanted nothing more than to abandon your five senses, melt into a puddle, and never return. “It hurts,” you whimpered, as he bullied open your ravaged hole again.

You could feel the hunter’s satisfied smile against your back. “Bear it,” the Sultan ordered.

You shuddered and obeyed, miserable desire eliciting a weak twitch from your cock. You’d never sampled it, but you knew the House of Delights had items - wines, lotions, potions - that dragged a man’s arousal onwards for far longer than natural. The aftermath or the wearing off of all that lust likely tasted something like this, sheets stinking of sex and dire disorientation in the brain and limbs as ungainly as a newborn fawn.

When the Sultan finally withdrew, for good, the light had changed, and you could hear the birds singing outside. Sleep had well and truly abandoned you, leaving you with the clear-headedness of someone who would soon be dead on their feet. At the knock on the door the Sultan sat up, somehow fresher than a daisy, and briefly you entertained the lunatic proposition that he was one of those demons the Purist Order preached against that fucked all the energy out of a person for their own use.

But no; the Sultan was entirely mortal. Nothing to blame the divine for, there. If such demons did exist, and one was presented to the Sultan, he would probably dominate that, too.

Without warning, the covers were snatched away; the Sultan had ripped them off you and tossed them to the floor. His gaze roamed over your body, an unsettling prickle threatening to hang heavy in your loins. You had to look a mess. Between the dried come staining your thighs and the bruises you could feel on your hips, the best anyone could surely say about your experience was that you survived, but were unlikely to repeat the feat.

“Very good, Arzu,” the Sultan praised.

You gulped. When the eunuchs swept in to clean the place out, you were still thinking - entirely stupidly - that you could go for another night like this after all.

The Sultan ordered the ruined bedding carried to the laundry and the ruined you carried into the royal baths. Which might have been a boon, if not for the fact that your fate was clearly the same as the sheets. The slave girls scrubbed the sheets clean, and the eunuchs scrubbed you clean.

A task they performed with great vigour and little gentleness, under the eye of the Sultan himself. Your sovereign had sank into the water and was lounging against the wall, the great head of hair briefly sleek-tame to expose a regal eye you dared not catch the gaze of. You were lying on the stone benches, occasionally being rolled over, as the slaves washed the Sultan’s come out from your thighs.

They conspicuously avoided your entrance. You’d thought it was an (odd, kind) oversight until the Sultan flicked a hand. Two eunuchs wheeled in an entire full-body mirror, out of all the things, and the Sultan hauled himself out of the water and strode over.

He lifted you up in a way that firmed your resolve to spend more time building your physique, and then— fuck. You wanted nothing more than to cover your face, or at least close your eyes, but a single watch from the Sultan pinned your objections in place.

Fuck!

Your reflection looked back at you with the same agony you felt now, burning with shame and no small quantity of unfortunate arousal. In the mirror, your legs were spread, held apart by the Sultan’s strong hands. It left your swollen, puffy hole on full display, and as you watched, a trickle of come slowly made its way into view, pooling briefly at the rim before splattering onto the tiles.

That wasn’t even the worst of it. With approval from their lord, the eunuchs came forward to, uh, remove the Sultan’s seed from you. Manually. You had to watch as the slave knelt and probed your insides with slender fingers, scraping your walls in a way that had you twitching and clamping down around him, and all the while the mirror showed to you your master’s eyes fixated on the spectacle.

Your cock visibly jumped. You turned your face away, humiliated, and the Sultan knocked you back into position with a toss of his head. Your reflection - fading into steam far too slowly for you to avoid the sight - looked wrecked and wanton around the fingers inside it, the squelch of your loose hole ringing in your ears. Despite biting your lips whimpers were escaping from your mouth, and you made an involuntary sound of distress when the fingers abruptly disappeared.

Then there was cold, shocking cold. Briefly, your mind explained to you that the Sultan had pinned you against the cold glass of the mirror. Then the Sultan was fucking you again, and your mind had no thoughts left to spare on idle observation.

On one side glass rapidly warming to body temperature, on the other a Sultan radiating the same heat as the baths. Between the two sensations you succumbed rapidly, your gasps just one more puff of air fogging up the mirror.

Your body clenched down as you came, the Sultan grunting as he spilled into you. Dazedly, you let the eunuchs peel you off the glass, now striped white with your come. You heard the Sultan wander off, seeking different entertainment, but there was no such reprieve for you; that the Sultan had come inside you meant the eunuchs needed to clean you out again. You suspected this was entirely deliberate.

There was an air of longsuffering patience about the eunuchs as you writhed on their fingers, freshly oversensitive. Used to this, too - to cleaning out some unfortunate consort, perhaps. You’d heard stories about the cruelty of those in the Sultan’s palace, none of which seemed true at this particular moment. Or perhaps it was only the Sultan’s clear favour staying their hands, cruelty stalled by greater cruelty; you doubted there was a soul you could trust in this palace.

At last you were permitted to escape into the baths. The hot water licked your wounds, soothing the pounding in your skull even as it stung your raw skin. Pleasure blended with pain yet again.

You sat there for long enough that the realisation of how completely and utterly and literally fucked you were sank in. Then you waded out of the baths, had breakfast at the Sultan’s table, and wandered back to the only bed whose location you knew. You were out like a snuffed candle before your head hit the pillow.

You were woken around dusk by a blank-faced Samir, half-shrouded in shadow, half-stained vivid orange by the setting sun. Apparently the bright idea of a hunt had entered the Sultan’s distinguished mind, and he was here to make sure you were… not hale, exactly, but capable of not fainting, dying, or otherwise making a mess of yourself during the ride. “His Majesty said it would reflect very poorly on you,” said Samir blandly, as he started taking jars out from his bag.

Right, and you could be sure that you would live to regret incidents that reflected poorly on you, unless you died before that could happen. Before Samir hefted his bag, you reached out and grabbed his sleeve.

“Do you have,” you fumbled for the words, “uh, something for, uh…”

Samir was furrowing his brow. How did the House of Delights dance around the phrase again—

“… stamina?” you tried. “Like in the House of Delights?”

Samir stared at you. You could feel his Support dropping, Opposition cranking up a notch as you made a fool of yourself. But - look, you really couldn’t keep up with the Sultan’s impossible stamina! Eight times in one night was too much!

“Just for the week,” you begged. “Enough to not embarrass myself. Samir, I have a family—“

You purposefully ignored the possibility of the Sultan keeping you for longer. He was your sovereign; if he wanted to keep you forever in his bed, what was going to stop him? Certainly not you. Despite everything, your prostate was still dreaming of him.

Samir’s Opposition softened.

He gave you medicine you’d rather not think about, with the warning that it acted much slower than what the House of Delights offered - since, after all, he was a doctor, and those aphrodisiacs were tiny slices of poison. He also gave you ointments you’d rather not think about, but when he was gone, you did dutifully apply them as warned.

In practice that just meant the Sultan walked in on you fingering yourself. He whistled, a sound that made your ears burn, and bade you continue with a terribly friendly grin.

You’d writhed on the eunuchs’ fingers under his direction, and now you were writhing on your own fingers; at this rate you might as well gather an adventurer’s party to seek out the writhing serpents that brought untold pleasure to those in its snare, according to the disreputable bards. Whatever expression you had on your face made the Sultan’s smile broaden, as he asked - asked! - whether you wanted his help. (Help?)

You were so fucked.

His fingers joined yours in applying medicinal ointment. His much less well-behaved fingers, who stretched your walls and played with your rim and even occasionally pressed full-force into your prostate, causing cold sweat to break out all over your body. By the time the jar was empty your cock was full and straining against your belly, hard and desperately eager to please. You might have agreed to anything if only his slick hand would wrap around you.

But the Sultan refused your expectations; he wiped his hand on the sheets and nodded in approval. “An acceptable recovery,” he deemed. “Though I will still seek out the tiger tomorrow.”

What, to heal your stamina? You weren’t sure whether to be flattered or furious as he rose off the bed. “No touching,” he warned, just as you reached for yourself. You privately cursed the last nine generations of his ancestors.

So you weren’t allowed to deal with it, and he had no interest in dealing with it - you gritted your teeth and thought of the least arousing things you could think of. The stink of the vegetable market. Reading L.O.Q.U.A.C.I.O.U.S 100. That time a wild goat broke into your courtyard just as you were getting intimate with Maggie, its bleating so loud the entire neighbourhood had come to watch. At least it made for a good roast.

Your nose picked up the wafting scent of roasted meat. Was it good or bad that in convincing your erection to flag, you’d started hallucinating? A question only Nabhani was qualified to answer. But then the door opened, and it turned out the meat was very much real, as the slaves wheeled in an enormous spread of food.

“You missed the evening meal,” said the Sultan. “A shame. I was looking forwards to your performance.”

Words that didn’t bode well. But then your stomach rumbled, and the sudden awareness of your hunger emptied your mind. The Sultan drummed his fingers.

“Perhaps a different kind of performance,” he allowed. “On your knees.”

You ended up eating the entire meal like that, on your knees, from his fingers, under his amused gaze. If Nawfal could see you, he’d accuse you of being a dog. Then again, if Nawfal could see you, you expected he’d be distracted by other things.

The Sultan’s index finger traced your bottom row of teeth. You closed your lips over it, sucking gently, and was rewarded with a rolling chuckle. “My greediest courtier,” said the Sultan, approvingly. “No.”

That was in response to your hands sneaking down to your dick. As it turned out, being finger-fed by the Sultan while you were on your knees could send your brain into hitherto undiscovered realms of lust. Who knew?

Not only did the Sultan refuse to let you get off, he made no attempt to fuck you out of your mood once you were properly in bed. You fell asleep with your head filled with uncharitable thoughts about his stamina, while also relieved that maybe this was survivable without Samir’s medicine after all.

Yes, yes, they were contradictory thoughts. But you were the Sultan’s favourite courtier! Such simple contradictions were easy to hold in your mind. How else could you have survived?

Any lingering disparaging thoughts on the Sultan’s stamina were thoroughly dismissed from your mind the following day. While you were in the horse-drawn carriage. On all fours.

You really should have remembered that the Sultan was a terrifying tactician who had no qualms biding his time to lay waste to a city if the alternative was only a little ransacking. There were a lot of things you should have remembered. With every jolt of the carriage, and every hammering of the Sultan’s cock into your guts, they were getting harder to remember.

He’d already coaxed one orgasm out of you and wrenched another from your shaking body, so you were far beyond sensitivity bordering on pain. It was pain. It was also pleasure so bright it was like a starburst inside your skull, and all you could do was quake and moan and beg under the ruthless onslaught. Searching for mercy, while knowing there was none.

“Listen to you,” the Sultan purred by your ear, as a particularly rough bump and a well-timed thrust tore a scream from your mouth. “The entire entourage can hear how much you enjoy being fucked. I should have brought more of them. Lord Arzu, if you ever fall from grace,” and his hand found its way around your throat, a pressure not applied, a threat not yet carried through, “you will make Buthayna a very rich woman.”

You had to answer, even though your brain was not even remotely capable of stringing together two words.

“Sire,” you wheezed, and then groaned as the wheel rattled and you clamped down instinctively around him. All your muscles wept in delirious frenzy. “I would— ah!— waste away, pining for the memory of you.”

Not your best work, and the Sultan knew it. “Try again,” he ordered, renewing his thrusting.

Your forearms gave out, your face crashing into the cushions. The Sultan merely lifted your hips higher, all the better angle to force himself in deeper. “It’s true,” you panted, on the back of a whine. “Who could compare to you?”

Flattery was always safe. Nothing was ever threatened when the Sultan’s ego was stroked - well, nothing except your prostate. You lay there gasping for breath while your lord took you apart, and just when the possibility of another orgasm appeared over the horizon, the Sultan pulled out and flipped you over.

All the air you’d worked so hard to get into your lungs vanished. The Sultan had folded you in half before your knees even knew where they were, his hands leaving bruises on the soft insides of your thighs. He fucked you with deep, long strokes, occasionally tossing his hair out of his face with an impatient shake of the head, and you lowered your head and resigned yourself to the storm rolling over you.

Afterwards it took an embarrassingly long time to realise the carriage had stopped and the Sultan was getting dressed. “Your Majesty,” you said blankly - all higher-order thoughts seemed to have fled your head - and then the Sultan turned around still glistening with an unholy mix of oil and sweat and come, and your voice fled you as well.

The Sultan loomed over you. “I expect you at the front of the hunt in ten minutes, Lord Arzu.”

He wanted you on a horse? Your legs could barely support your weight! But what the Sultan wanted he got, and you didn’t particularly want to be tied onto the horse. You glowered resentfully at his back as he strode out of the carriage.

Faris couldn’t look so much as look you in the eye when you limped out of the carriage. That was good, because you couldn’t so much as look him in the eye either. Someone handed you the reins to a chestnut mare, and after five attempts you gave up and accepted the leg-up someone offered - which still turned out to be a trial, because your legs quavered halfway and you nearly planted face-first into the saddle.

Luckily the mare’s ideas of where to go aligned with the Sultan’s instructions; you doubted you had the legs to control her. The Sultan’s gaze had a faint trace of approval in it when you did appear at the front of the pack. You decided, at least for the rest of the day, to give up on trying to understand what went on in his head.

—Look, not understanding what went on in the Sultan’s head was common, but not even making the attempt? That was just as often a fatal error as it was a harmless daydream. For someone in your position - the favoured courtier of the Sultan, the player of the Sultan’s Game - a day was really all you could spare.

Fortunately, the Sultan peeled off with his honour guard soon after, leaving you alone with a handful of silent guards who had all seen too much and heard too much to not know better than to open their mouths. You made an attempt at hunting, by which you meant you misfired three arrows so badly you nearly shot one of the guards, and then gave up and sulked on your extraordinarily patient mare under the shade of a tree. One of your guards gave you a rabbit.

When the Sultan returned he was covered in blood (none his own, and you could hardly tell whether you were impressed or delighted). Behind him, Faris was organising the towing of a grand tiger. Your lord spared your rabbit a single glance, the corners of his mouth curling with mocking amusement, and silently you vowed, for real this time, to focus more on your physique.

You nearly fell off the mare during the dismount, which was only more reason to focus on your physique - assuming, of course, that you could scrape time out of your life to do it. Time, that you had to carefully ration in seven-day parcels lest the next card separate your neck from your shoulders. You knew how many cards remained in that terrible wooden box, and unless the Sultan became so obsessed with fucking you that he waived your requirement to play, which wasn’t even necessarily a bad outcome, you still had to break the remainder.

Between one blink and the next, your eyelids fell shut. After a while, without your knowledge, your lord pulled you sideways. Your head landed on his shoulder, and the two of you stayed that way for the entire ride.

“Your wife is a devout believer, is she not,” said the Sultan.

You held yourself still through the cold shiver skittering down your spine. “Indeed, sire,” you replied. “She attends regularly.”

“But you do not,” said the Sultan, and at your negative smiled in a way that promised your afternoon was going to pass very differently to the morning you’d just spent lying about in the garden playing with Lady Becky. “You could learn something from the Purists, Arzu.”

“For instance… temperance.”

As soon as the words landed, a procession of slave girls carrying trays began to enter the room. The Sultan’s hand landed on your nape, his thumb absently brushing your skin. It kept you from looking away, which meant you— swallowed, as the slaves displayed the items to you one by one.

Those were not going to fit. Those were not going to fit. But your body had other ideas, reacting to the inevitability: that the Sultan was going to make them fit. A rush of heat entered your belly.

“Your Majesty,” you said faintly.

The Sultan’s hand moved into your hair, a stroke that turned into a hard tug. “Behave,” he said. The tug turned back into a stroke, and he added, silkily, “Won’t you?”

The next slave presented a blindfold. You gulped as the Sultan beckoned her forward, the dark cloth filling your field of vision. She tied it firmly at the back of your head, snuffing out even the traces of light at the bottom, and you knew then you were in a great deal of trouble.

Not the kind likely to separate your head from your shoulders. But— you swallowed again, your mouth dry.

By your ear, eliciting a rash of goosebumps, the Sultan murmured, “Perform well, Arzu.”

Delicate fingers guided you up from your kneeling position to somewhere at the centre of the room. There they removed your clothes and pushed you down into a bed of cushions. Someone lit a different stick of incense, sharp and spicy in your nostrils.

They massaged oil into your muscles, leaving you as warm and relaxed as you could be while the Sultan’s heated gaze prickled on your skin. Amongst all the movement you could still pick out his breathing, a compass to a magnet. You let your legs fall open a little wider, your teeth biting your lips to make them a little redder, and picked up a satisfying faltering in the rhythm.

Then it was your turn to falter. The oil, it seemed, was no ordinary oil; tiny pinpricks were settling all over your skin, sparks and cold ice leaving you skittish to the even the slightest whisper of air. And they were quick to exploit it; feathers and ribbons ghosted over your skin in short order, lines of glittering sensation without escape no matter which direction you turned. You moaned at the touch, then again at the sound of your own voice: wrecked and wanton, and they’d only just begun.

Smooth fingers pressed at your entrance. By now, however unfortunately, your body had been trained to accept that particular touch, your hole opening without complaint. The ointment had looked deceptively ordinary when the slaves had presented it to you, pearl-smooth and faintly familiar-smelling, an aromatic you hadn’t quite placed. But the heat slowly seeping up your walls now was anything but ordinary, and when you clenched down a spike of brilliant pain laid you open from groin to collarbone.

You shrieked, unable to help it. It earned you a laugh from the Sultan. “Let him be,” said your magnanimous sovereign, and after the slaves slipped you a metal cock you heard the pattering of their feet as they withdrew.

Which only meant that you were left on full display to squirm and shudder, open-mouthed, as what you now recognised as ginger made its way through you. You had fought duels less excruciating than this, the burning inescapable as you writhed. And all the while the Sultan was - you couldn’t see him now, but in your mind you saw it as clear as day - he was reclining in his seat, Lady Becky innocent in his lap, enjoying the breeze being fanned upon him by enormous palm fronds. The breeze you could feel, as its leftovers tickled over your skin, competing with the ginger for the attention of your frayed nerves.

When the ginger finally wore off you were drenched in sweat, your ears ringing and your throat hoarse and your hopeless cock still half-hard. At this rate you would not have lied to the Sultan in that carriage; you would carry this memory forever, if only because he was ruining normal sex for you forever.

Someone came forwards to slide the metal cock free, a brief moment of emptiness. You tipped your head back into the cushions, your lungs straining for air.

“Was it satisfactory,” you mumbled.

There was a chilling moment of silence. Then, far too close, the Sultan murmured, “Did you think you were finished, Arzu?”

He might as well have dumped cold water over your head, such was the effect of the words. They tore through the haze of your pleasure-addled mind, reaching straight into the parts of you that remembered fear to send them on a litany of shit shit shit. Out of all the things to forget - how could you let slip the axiom that everything ended only when the Sultan said so?

Midway through your stammered apologies, the Sultan’s hand covered your nose and mouth.

You went very still.

“Fortunately,” he told you, “you are in a position to make amends.”

The hand lifted, and fingers - too gentle to be his - carefully touched your entrance. One, two, three - at the fourth you began to frown. When she attempted to slide her thumb in as well, your entire body seized.

“Your Majesty,” you breathed, desperately turning your head towards where you thought he might be.

“Behave,” the Sultan repeated, his hands landing on your shoulders.

You obeyed.

So then you had five fingers inside you, the knuckles caught against your rim, and you had to force yourself to relax for them to slide in, breathing shallowly the entire time. Slowly, inexorably, she pushed her whole hand inside. But it was the satisfied hum from your monarch that had you tremble, moreso than the sensation; you had no doubt he had the best seat in the house to watch, and when that thought landed your muscles fluttered weakly in shame and arousal both.

His hands were still on your shoulders, holding you down, and in a wild moment of lunacy you imagined one was in you instead, him instead of the unknown woman performing for him as much as you were. But it was just as well he wasn’t. Those broad hands had broken countless cities; they would split you asunder.

(You could still fantasise about it, though. That was the nice part of fantasy.)

The hand inside you curled into a fist. You whimpered as it began to move, fucking you steadily, the bones of her wrist occasionally pushing you open wider. So much, too much - and that was before she pushed all the way in, your walls parting for her fucking forearm, and attempted to spread her fingers.

The Sultan’s iron grip held you down as you thrashed, fighting to deny what was happening to you. Tears sprang to your eyes, dampening the blindfold. But the Sultan’s will was absolute and inescapable, and eventually the energy abandoned you. You surrendered limply to your fate.

The Sultan laughed, low and pleased.

His right hand left your shoulder, migrating across your neck instead. One flex, and - but that wasn’t his area of interest today. Like you’d thought (it seemed so long ago) (for all the good that it had done you), you were not in the kind of trouble that separated your head from your neck. He pinched one of your nipples, then the other.

You had a sudden vision of yourself in the same piercings as the Sultan, walking around with gold swaying from your chest. The instinctive shudder had you tightening - and wasn’t that a mistake, your nerves singing out at once. “Sire,” you whispered. “Please.”

What you were pleading for, you had no idea. You were only sure it wasn’t the Sultan’s chiding temperance, Arzu, as if he wasn’t the opposite of the concept. The hand inside you slowly withdrew, a breeze brushing your ruined hole in its place.

You were certain you were a gaping mess down there, dark and slick with oil; you had no certainty you would ever recover, not with how ruined you felt. Then something blunt and cold pressed against you, and your exhausted brain remembered: the last of the items presented to you, before you were blindfolded. Something that could not possibly have fit, unless the Sultan was making it so.

Well, it was fitting now, though you had to be held down and opened for it, some eight hands pulling your legs apart and spreading you open for the exquisitely carved metal you were in no state to appreciate. You sobbed as it pushed into you, an immense girth you somehow accommodated in a body that suddenly felt all too small. Some hysterical part of you wondered where the Sultan had even acquired such a thing - where had his pride gone, to make something much bigger than even himself? - but you had no need, at least, to wonder the why. The why was inside you.

Eventually it bottomed out inside of you, all hands bar the Sultan’s leaving your skin, as if you still retained any capacity to close your legs. You couldn’t even convince your arms to move, to check if your skin had distended (it certainly felt that way) or if you were still whole (something you did not remotely feel). The best you could do was groan.

“You make for quite the sight like this, Lord Arzu,” mused the Sultan. “But we are not convinced you have learned temperance yet. It has only been—“

He named a number that seemed absurdly low to your ears for how long you had been trapped in the cage of sensitivity. It could not possibly have only been— but who was going to contradict him? Not you, not to his face, not anymore, not yet; one Sultan’s Game was quite enough, thank you!

“We shall fill you further,” the Sultan decided. “You may be granted permission to come at sunset.”

May was just a kindness for not at all, though suffering for his pleasure was hardly an unusual ask of you. It was the other sentence that concerned you more.

“Further?” you rasped out.

“Eager, aren’t you,” said the Sultan, a deliberate misinterpretation. You hung your head. “Yes. Fetch the… aquamarine, let’s say.”

The aquamarine turned out to be a gag, fastened securely behind your head. It also turned out to be—

—Jalila had offered one to you once, claiming that men enjoyed it very much when she did. You’d politely hid all your disbelief and refused. No such choice was being offered now, the jewelled rod pushing insistently at your slit. Even in your exhausted, overstimulated state, you felt sparks run through your spine.

“Behave,” the Sultan warned - third and final - and you found and pressed your face against his thigh and dragged in tear-stained breaths, wounded as any hunted animal, all the resistance bled out of you by that single word. The aquamarine moved down, and in, and—

The gag distorted all your sounds as it moved up-and-out instead, just briefly, and then down-and-in again, setting a brutal pace. That had to be the Sultan’s hands, then. You screamed and wept and begged for mercy, all incoherently, as he fucked your cock.

All your overstimulated nerves had regrouped for this one moment. You climbed and climbed and climbed—

And were pulled back, roughly, from the fall. “Temperance, Arzu,” reminded the Sultan. “It is not sunset yet.”

Your cry was anguished and despairing.

The Sultan’s return to the court brought you some relief in the daytime, more for your nerves than your body; he was, after all, still calling you to attend to him every afternoon. You could only hope your mercurial sovereign was also still planning to release you back to your everyday life at some point during the court cycle. You could do with a return to the regular Fear of the Sultan; being tormented within an inch of your life by mindbreaking pleasure was, somehow, less bearable than being deathly afraid for your life.

Occasionally the memory of being filled in every hole would surface, and your legs would threaten to give out on you. You had taken away nothing from the experience bar your memories - the Sultan had exchanged common medicine for magic and gotten the Purist Order to fix you, an absurd luxury that had also erased various aches and back pains and even made your vision sharper, and the still-bloody tiger member had thoroughly scared away any last vestige of impotence - but oh, the memories. When you looked in the mirror you recognised fear and wanting both, shaking in your legs and fire in your belly. You would never ask the Sultan for it, but if he made you—

You buried your face in Lady Becky’s fur and bemoaned your life again. Why, out of all the things, did your brain have to fixate on something so inadvisable for your continued survival?

The Sultan was shredding a letter when you were summoned, some poor fool from court having evidently displeased him. “Arzu,” he said. “Abdul claimed today you have been neglecting the affairs of state. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

You spluttered something that inadequately expressed how completely baffled you were. Abdul tattling to the Sultan was hardly unexpected, one could even argue it was the whole duty of the Vizier, but the Sultan turning the accusation back on you - hello? You hadn’t even been at court to pick up anything of note. When were you supposed to have managed the affairs of state, while you were being fucked out of your mind?

The Sultan’s teeth gleamed as he smiled. You realised you’d spoken it out loud.

“An excellent proposition,” he said. “You will attend to them now.”

The next thing you knew, you were fully naked and bent double over the table, your face pressing into the papers. The Sultan filled you in a single stroke, his curls falling over your skin.

“Now,” he panted, “this proposal suggests that the royal family provides credit guarantees and supervision to collect local civil funds for public facilities. Your thoughts, Arzu?”

Your thoughts were that you’d go mad in this position if he didn’t fuck you. You grinded back against him, and he thrusted you up and against the edge of the table. “Taking care of the affairs of state is important, Arzu.”

“Am I not,” you gasped out, clenching down, “taking care of the affairs of state?”

The Sultan’s laughter rang in your ears. “Have you become more insatiable? My silver-tongued favourite.”

You whined as he pushed you further onto the table, the wood creaking from his efforts. As if you could be blamed! As if it wasn’t his fault that you were—

Lightning flashed from your temple to your toes, the Sultan perfect against your prostate. You were leaking a mess onto the paperwork. Not that the Sultan cared; if anything, he was encouraging it, fucking you further into the pages. Less for him, wasn’t it?

“But I do expect an answer,” said the Sultan then, timed with an exquisite thrust that had you crying out. “Should we sign on this?”

You dredged the proposal up from your memory. Something on fundraising in the Sultan’s name? Abdul must have smoked something terrible. If you fundraised in the Sultan’s name, the odds were ten out of ten that he would take the money before it got to any, what, public facilities? Imagine, fundraising, in the Sultan’s name!

In theory it might have been a good law. But how could anyone propose it with this Sultan at the helm? The only fundraising needed here was fundraising for whatever foolish courtier who submitted the proposal, so he could go to hospital and get his brains checked out.

But you couldn’t very well say that to the Sultan. Those kind of words were best left to the stubborn at court, those who stood as steadfast as an oak against the Sultan’s will. You were much more like a reed, bending for him - bending over for him, in this case!

You babbled something about royal dignity and the unseemliness of using royal funds for the public purse, and the Sultan rewarded you with a series of hammering strokes that had you coming all over the pages. Temperance, you decided, could go and fuck itself; you milked the Sultan for all he was worth, and he responded by painting your hole in white.

He slapped you carelessly on the buttocks after, while you were still flat and gasping for breath. “You’ve ruined the paper,” he remarked, not even remotely upset. “Now where will I write the response?”

As if he ever wrote responses! You’d written your own share of these, and the most response you’d got was having it be read aloud at court for all the nobles to dissect like vultures on carrion. The retort escaped you, though, when you felt the brush sink against your back, the ink cold against the sweat on your skin and the bristles prickly and ticklish.

The Sultan was a decent calligrapher - not out of interest, but because it was the training given to princes. Now he turned your body into his canvas. You stayed pliant on the table, the occasional twitch running through when the bristles found a sensitive spot, as he wrote unknown words onto your back.

(You did try to identify them, but soon gave up the attempt. For one, you couldn’t place how the words reflected.)

The brush wandered slowly down your spine, your thoughts drifting off peacefully with it. You were at the very least going to give Abdul a fright when you returned hale. Between Nabhani and Jenna you could surely piece together the latest noble gossip, and Fatuna could be relied upon to give you actual details on what had transpired…

Your toes curled involuntarily as the brush traced your entrance, bristles sinking into tender flesh. The Sultan seemed content merely to tease you, alternating lazily between the brush and the handle. Both were maddening in their own way, driving the breath from your lungs.

When your legs started to quaver you gave in and braced your forehead against the wood. “Please, Your Majesty,” you begged. “Fuck me.”

The Sultan agreed.

When you’d grumbled that you hadn’t even been at the court to pick up anything of note, this hadn’t been on your mind. In fact, arguably, it had been so not on your mind, you were still struggling to believe it.

The Sultan had ordered you to attend court with him, entirely naked but for the sheer veil covering you from head to toe. And for the bell around your neck, and the metal cock filling you inside, but neither of those were preserving your modesty. You knelt in the usual place of the Sultan’s consort, watching mutely as nobles approached the dais.

The upshot was, none of them dared to look at you twice, which at least lowered the chances of you being recognised. The Sultan’s seamstresses had been made to make assurances against the threat of their lives, which - not that you didn’t trust them, or sympathise with their plight, but you were naked in the Lapis Lazuli Hall in front of everyone you knew! In the bathhouse at least there was an expectation of convention, but only fools and the damned came into the Lapis Lazuli Hall nude. You were decidedly the former and possibly the latter.

And every move made the bell jingle, which made you flinch, which made you all too aware of the delicate whorls and nubs on what was inside you, which made you twitch, which made the bell jingle—

You wondered if the embarrassment could cook you alive.

The other upshot was that everyone in the Lapis Lazuli Hall was well used to the Sultan’s antics. No matter how embarrassed (or worse, aroused) they were, they would keep quiet until they were in private. You squeezed your eyes shut and tried to focus on breathing without moving the bell.

Finally, finally, the Sultan called an end to the court. You slumped in sheer relief, only for the jolt to press the well-aimed metal further into your prostate, and had to stifle a moan. Then you stifled an altogether different moan when a noble you recognised as being obsequious and sycophantic and utterly stacked on Opposition against you approached the dais.

“Your Majesty,” he began, “hasn’t it been some time since we’ve seen Lord Arzu?”

Yes, and you were hoping to keep it that way!

“He has been busy making up for his past transgressions,” said the Sultan. “This gift, for instance. Isn’t it very well behaved?”

You flushed from head to toe. The noble glanced at your veil and immediately pulled his eyes away, stung perhaps by the rudeness of looking directly at someone who was so clearly the Sultan’s property. “A charming present,” he agreed. “But, Your Majesty, has it not been seven days since Lord Arzu has broken a card?”

No, actually, because you’d left Maggie with the task of breaking it, and an Extravagance was only money anyway. You had faith she’d spent the gold coins in ways ludicrous enough that you could exaggerate the story to the court and have the card be broken. But the Sultan merely leaned forward in his throne, and then—

A knife pressed against the noble’s throat, deadly steel on soft flesh. A distinct wet patch appeared on the noble’s robes.

“You will remember,” he said coldly, “that it is the Sultan’s Game he plays, not some noble’s game.”

You and the noble gulped at the same time.

Slowly, the Sultan leaned back into the throne, the knife dancing between his fingers as he spun it. A trickle of blood crept down from the noble’s neck. He was wise enough to bang his head against the stone and flee the dais, and the rest of the court soon followed him out.

Well. At least nobody died. And now it was just you and the brooding Sultan alone in the Hall, and all the gold in the world could not make you stir or break the silence.

“Come here, Arzu,” the Sultan eventually said.

You shuffled over on your knees.

In one fluid movement the Sultan discarded the sheer veil, exposing you to the emptied Hall. In another you found your face pressed to his groin. You obediently opened your mouth, swallowing him down, and the Sultan’s hands tightened in your hair, the movement rattling the bell.

He was obviously still in a foul mood. Very, very carefully, you licked around his length, sometimes hollowing your cheeks, sometimes taking him down your throat as far as you dared. If you choked it was probably fatal.

Your sovereign’s eyes were rarely visible in court, hidden by distance or his curls or the crown - or all three. But from this angle, you had a startlingly clear view. They were lined in gold, the lashes long and curled, and the eyes they framed, in the present moment, were storm-laden with danger. For all that self-preservation tried to tear your gaze away, fascination kept you staring for just a minute too long.

The Sultan looked down.

His eyes met yours. The storm swelled. Then you found yourself sprawled over the armrest, your scalp stinging and the bell ringing incessantly. The metal cock was swiftly replaced by the Sultan’s own, and then you were, quite undeniably, being fucked on the throne.

Holy shit.

The sound you let out was completely involuntary and entirely unstoppable.

You’d imagined this, the first time you had drawn Silver Carnality and presented it to him, full of breathless hope. You’d fantasised it, when you had drawn Gold Carnality and presented it to him. And now you had it, and it turned out you had never needed the cards at all, only the Sultan at his most mocking and wrathful and - and generous, and you dug your fingers into the throne and shuddered with elation.

The entire hall was echoing with your moans, wet and filthy. This you would remember until you died. The Sultan fucked you into the throne, your cock leaking all over the fine cushions, then flipped you over and folded you in half while abusing your prostate over and over, to your ecstatic joy. He made you ride him, your face buried in his dark curls and the crown scraping your skin, and made you push yourself closed for his pleasure, then hold yourself open for his approval. The storm-laden eyes roamed over your body, a lord surveying his lands, and you tipped your head back and bared your neck and came to the sharp pain of his teeth against your collarbone.

“Arzu,” he said, the syllables of your name dragged out before you too were dragged up and rearranged. Seated, your legs spread across his thighs, your entire body exposed for anyone who came through the Lapis Lazuli Hall to ogle. You could see the court as he did, from the throne as he did; how endless and empty the tiles, how repetitive and asinine the columns. Was it any wonder, the depths of his loathing - loathing he was burning through by fucking you, as you found yourself hauled towards a second orgasm.

“Your Majesty,” you whimpered, sparks white-numb at the base of your spine as you reached for yourself. Perhaps, distracted, he would allow you this once. “I need—“

The Sultan slapped your hand away, wrenching it behind your back. But only to replace it with his own, broad and calloused and ruthless, and you had leaked so much the slide was almost smooth. You arched your back, your toes curling as he nailed you precisely again, and then your mouth was seized in what was less a kiss and more a conquest, your throat invaded by the Sultan’s overwhelming presence, and you came all over your stomach. The Sultan emptied himself in you soon after, the storm breaking.

While you struggled to calm your breathing, the Sultan lifted you off his lap. A gush of wet seed spilled out from you, and if you had been in any sane state you would have thanked him and hobbled off. Instead you reached down and pushed it back into you, the feel of your own fingers almost enough to make your knees buckle (the ghost of something else, much larger, pushed into you, and then you did stumble against the throne and kneel by his feet). “Your Majesty,” you said again, daring to rest your head on his thigh. You felt as if you could fly.

Fuck. In your wildest dreams - but never had you imagined—

The Sultan’s gaze prickled against your scalp. “We will expect you in court tomorrow, Lord Arzu,” he said abruptly.

That was so unexpected you twisted around to look at him, another disrespect, another daring. But between the crown and his hair, the Sultan’s eyes had receded into shadow again. “Consider your… Extravagance, was it? It is broken. You will draw another, of course. Leave us now.”

So you left the Lapis Lazuli Palace.

Not empty handed. Not even empty, what with the Sultan’s seed still leaking out of your hole. You’d limped out of the hall to find the carriage already waiting, laden down with gold and jewels… finery you might have appreciated more if you hadn’t recognised the aquamarine rod and an enormous gold cock amongst them. Still, the Sultan’s gifts were the Sultan’s gifts; there was no returning them.

You just hoped you could hide them in a place your household couldn’t see them.

And just like that you were responsible again. In the carriage, you gathered up the dignity you had shed when you entered; you became Arzu, the head of your household, Arzu the favourite courtier, Arzu the well-connected who navigated the million deadly angles of the Sultan’s Game. Each layer settled over you, clothing that covered the wanton abandon you’d so recently exercised, until at last, rattling out of the palace gates, you felt respectable again.

You still glanced out of the carriage window, back towards the decadent palace.

Some time ago, a highly explicit picture book of you and the Sultan had circulated the streets. You’d handed one copy to the Sultan and kept another for yourself, for those hot nights and hotter dreams. Now, you found yourself wondering—

—If one dream could come true, why not another?