In the Hands of the Priestess Queen

A fresh exclusive for paying supporters, about an indulgent, sex-positive priestess queen, and her adoring follower who really, really wants some strict fire and brimstone treatment.

Thank you all for being here, enjoy!

***

“Please, Your Radiance. Please punish me. Inflict upon me your wise and cleansing penance.”

The supplicant prostrated himself before Priestess Evandra’s throne, kneeling forward and pressing his forehead to the stone floor.

Evandra was not in her throne at the moment, but this particular supplicant wasn’t one to delay his worship for any reason, including to wait for her to finish breakfast.

“Why?” she asked, hopping over the ornately wrought gilded armrest to take her seat, with half of a cheese-filled bread roll still in her hand. “What did you do this time?”

“I am a festering breeding ground for unworthy thoughts,” the supplicant declared.

“Yes, we all are,” Evandra sighed. “But what did you do?”

“I… I created an idol in your image—”

“Sit up, Peter,” Evandra interrupted. “Or stand. I can’t hear you when you talk to the floor.”

Reluctantly, Peter sat up on his heels, and raised his eyes just high enough to look at Evandra’s slippered feet.

He was a pale, skinny man, still in his thirties, though from this familiar angle, Evandra could see the progress of the faintly thinning patch toward the back of his dark hair. His roughspun shirt hung loose around him, giving her a view all the way down to his waist while he remained leaning over.

“I created a poor imitation of your beauty,” Peter continued. “And I…” he cleared his throat. “I—”

“Will you show it to me?” Evandra asked, through her last mouthful of bread and cheese. “The idol?”

“I would not sully your eyes with such a sight,” said Peter.

“What if I refuse to believe that you made it at all?” Evandra proposed, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees. “What if I say, ‘Peter, your only transgression is wasting my time with more fabrications about your transgressions’? What if I tell you to go home?”

Peter hurriedly reached into his satchel. “I did make it, Your Radiance,” he said, producing a clay sculpture about the length of his forearm.

Remaining seated, Evandra held out her hand, and waited for Peter to place his creation in it. He chose to do so by crawling across the throne room and up the steps.

His skin blazed with embarrassment as she examined the idol, and he kept his face downturned, so that Evandra could almost have missed the guilty smirk hiding in the fire, if she had not seen it so many times before.

Watching her examine this latest product of his obsession was a genuine humiliation for him, but simultaneously a favor, the kind that had driven him to walk six miles before dawn to ask for it.

The idol lacked the fine detail necessary for a good likeness, but it made its inspiration quite clear, with little clay representations of Evandra’s ceremonial tiara and her bag of portable herb jars.

Its mouth curled downward in a caricature of sternness, and its skirts opened into a smooth hole of a telling diameter, which continued out of the back of the sculpture.

“Have you fucked it yet?” Evandra asked, wiggling a finger through the hole.

“Tried to,” Peter admitted. Both his blush and his smirk deepened.

“Did you make it too big or too small?” asked Evandra.

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I didn’t get that far. It had been too long since I’d seen the real you. I couldn’t hear your voice well enough in my head.”

“So, you decided to come to my temple under false pretenses, so that you could refresh your memory of me, to use with this?”

“No!” said Peter, looking up.

Evandra arched an eyebrow at him, holding the idol upright beside her.

“I mean, yes,” Peter admitted, casting his eyes down again. “I’m so ashamed, Priestess. Ashamed… and weak.”

“Shall I dispose of this for you, then?” Evandra asked, raising the idol higher over the stone steps at her side.

Peter watched his creation with round, fixed eyes, horrified yet shivering with excitement. “Punish me as you see fit, Your Radiance,” he said, in a rushed, prayer-like whisper.

“I don’t much care for that title,” said Evandra.

“I do, Your Radiance,” said Peter.

Evandra snorted. “I know.”

She surveyed him, sighed, and set the idol gently on the floor.

“Do you know why I sit on this ridiculous throne?” she asked.

Peter’s eyes darted left and right, hunting for the correct answer.

“Because you are divine,” he guessed. “But like all truly divine beings, you disdain the very veneration you deserve.”

“I sit here because the treaty that protects my temple requires that I play dress-up,” said Evandra.

“Priestess?” Peter politely requested her elaboration.

“There are people in your kingdom who are very adamant that my sort of ‘witchcraft’ should be outlawed and purged from your borders. There are others who are deeply devoted to the ways of nature and the mother goddess, the pursuit of knowledge, and all the other spiritual tenets that you so rarely ask me about. Both groups are large and insistent enough to wage war over the issue.”

Peter waited in silence, revealing no prior understanding of the most local of history.

“So, the obvious solution,” Evandra rolled her eyes as she continued, “was to make me the legal queen of a few empty square miles, and exile me to this temple-palace, alone and apart from the civilization of the kingdom, but close enough for those who desire my guidance to visit and ask for it.”

“I ask for it,” said Peter.

“Yes, you do,” said Evandra. “Incessantly. Between official congregation days, and in ways I never strictly offered.”

“My deepest apologies, Your Radiance,” said Peter. “Please, teach me to serve you better. Correct me as harshly as—”

“As one of your politician-priests back home?” asked Evandra, sliding down out of her throne to sit at the top of the steps leading to it, just one shallow level above him. “The ones who teach you that you were born unworthy of aliveness, and beat you if you enjoy it too much? If that’s the kind of treatment you want, why don’t you go to them, and beg their punishment?”

Peter shifted uncomfortably on his knees before her. “It’s not the same,” he said. “They’re not you.”

“You mean they’re not women?” asked Evandra.

“That’s… that’s part of it,” Peter admitted. “But it’s also…. They don’t offer a choice.”

“Ah,” said Evandra, laying her hand on Peter’s cheek. He leaned into it and let her turn his chin upward. “I have no power over anyone but what they choose to give me. You understand that.”

“Yes.” Peter nodded fervently. “And I choose to give you all of it.”

“All?” Evandra teased. “And what if I tell you that, under my power, no one will ever hurt you again? That I will never treat you the way they do.”

Peter’s brows knitted together with confusion and disappointment.

“But, Your Radiance,” he collected his words one at a time. “The first time you received me, you punished me so well, so justly.”

“I did no such thing,” said Evandra.

“I don’t wish to contradict you….”

“Unless it gets you a good beating?” Evandra asked lightly.

Peter paused, caught between the fraught options.

“Say what you’re thinking,” Evandra nudged him.

“You caught me spying on you from the thornbushes by the brook,” he recalled. “You chased me out into the open and grabbed me by the wrist, driving the thorns there were stuck there in deeper. You made me bleed, and cry. And you said,” he took in a trembling, savoring breath, “you said, ‘It serves you right, filthy pig.’ And you dragged me back to your temple, and gagged me while you forced me to feel each scratch over again with stinging liquid.”

“That was a disinfectant,” said Evandra. “And I gave you the leather strap to bite on to help with the pain. I didn’t know there were thorns in your wrist when I first grabbed you.”

Peter blinked, matching up the facts with his memory and finding more overlap than he probably would have liked.

“But… what you said?” he asked.

Evandra shook her head ruefully. “It did serve you right. Goddess have mercy.”

Peter’s smirk returned, and Evandra found it contagious, this once.

“Fine,” she sighed.

“What’s fine, Your Radiance?” asked Peter.

“I’m going to give you what you want.”

His eyes widened and lit up with joyful alarm.

She reached down and squeezed his wrist firmly. It had fully healed, but she hoped the gesture still served as a crisp reminder of the pain of that day. Peter sucked in a sharp breath of anticipation.

“But,” said Evandra.

Peter’s whole body tensed as he awaited what came after the “but.”

“I will not indulge your pretenses.”

“What… what pretenses would those be, Your Radiance?” he stammered.

“Spiritual purpose,” said Evandra. “Legitimacy. Contrition.”

He squirmed silently under her gaze.

“I will not provide you with erotic inspiration cleverly concealed under a religious veneer. I will not send you from my temple with your ruse intact, so that you can sneak into a thicket of bushes and fuck your hand, or a graven image of me.”

Peter stared sadly down at his knees, apparently unable to summon a joke about how he’d continue a little farther away than the bushes first, if that pleased her.

“Any carnal pleasure you reap from my attention,” said Evandra, “you will reap it here, openly, in my company, sharing every part of it. Do you accept these terms?”

Peter looked up again, jaw open in a silent, paralyzed cheer.

“In return,” said Evandra, “I will shed my own pretenses.”

Peter’s eyebrows pricked up with curiosity.

She leaned in close, to whisper her confession in his ear. “I look forward to your visits, Peter.”

A gurgling sound game from the back of Peter’s throat. “Y…?”

“Take off your clothes,” she directed him, letting go of his wrist, while he was still stuttering over his response.

Peter immediately grabbed his shirt by the back of its neck and pulled it off, with such gusto that Evandra could hear stitches snapping.

He hurried to stand — something he usually refused to do in her presence at all — so that he could unfasten an remove his trousers as well. The waist hooked on his erection on the way down.

Maybe that was part of why he usually refused to stand. It was easier to hide the lump while crawling.

“What would you like me to do, Your Radiance?” Peter asked, dropping back to his knees.

“You came here to ask me to do something,” said Evandra. “Ask it again.”

“Punish me,” said Peter.

“Again,” said Evandra. “More specific.”

“Hit me.”

“Where?”

Peter looked down shyly, and then put a hand on his ass. “Here.”

Evandra pulled his hand away and slapped him right where he’d indicated. “Like that?”

Peter nodded, but there was something reserved in it.

“What would you change about it?” asked Evandra.

“Well…” his face was even redder than she had seen it before. “When I dream about it, you’re sitting on the throne.”

Evandra smiled, stood, and took her seat, holding her spine regally tall. “Like this?”

Peter nodded and crawled to follow her.

“And where are you in those dreams?” asked Evandra. “Show me.”

Peter tentatively sat up on his knees, pulled himself up by one of her gilded armrests, and draped himself over it, so that his head and chest were on her lap. His toes barely grazed the floor, and his ass was propped high in the air, right where her hand naturally wanted to rest.

“Ready?” asked Evandra, placing her hand gently on his bare skin.

“Yes, please,” said Peter, breathlessly.

Evandra slapped him again, across the nearest cheek of his ass.

Peter moaned.

“Is that it?” Evandra teased. “Is that what you think you need?”

“Harder,” said Peter. “Hold me down.”

Evandra dug her left elbow into the spot between his shoulder blades, anchoring him in place in her lap. His toes lost contact with the ground altogether.

She raised her hand a little higher and spanked him harder on the other side. The sound echoed off the temple’s vaulted ceiling.

Peter moaned louder. “More. Teach me a lesson.”

“What lesson would that be again?” Evandra asked, though she obliged him with more smacks in the meantime.

“Not to think unclean thoughts about you?” he suggested.

“I doubt anyone could teach you that lesson,” said Evandra.

Peter smiled with mischief. “Will you try anyway?”

Evandra paused his spanking. Something deep in the pit of her stomach chafed against the very idea of punishing the innocent activities of his private mind, even in jest. But if she attached his “punishment” to something she truly wished he’d stop doing, she knew perfectly well that it would only encourage him to do it more, in the hopes of more punishment.

“Whenever you think about me with lust in your heart,” she chose her words carefully, raining down more blows. “I’ll be here to remind you what… lust… gets… you!”

Peter moaned and bit the skirt of her green silk dress. Evandra could feel his cock trapped between her right thigh and the inner wall of the armrest, throbbing with each smack. His balls must have been crushed even tighter between his hips and the armrest’s upper ridge.

“You asked for this,” Evandra reminded him. “You did everything you could to deserve it.”

“Yes, Your Radiance. I’ve been so very bad.”

No matter how hard she hit him, he just looked happier and happier. Eventually, Evandra couldn’t help pausing to shake out her hand, first once, then every few slaps.

“Your Radiance,” Peter ventured. “I think I might need more severe discipline than can be administered by hand alone.”

“What do you imagine would get through to you?” asked Evandra.

“You could try with your trowel.” He glanced over at one of the temple’s side exits, the one leading to Evandra’s vegetable garden.

“Go fetch it, then,” she directed, releasing him from under her elbow with one more bare-handed smack, the lightest one yet.

Peter scrambled to the gardens and returned immediately with the nearly flat metal tool she used for preparing planting beds and digging roots. He placed it in her hands and threw himself back across her lap.

The trowel was light, but its grip did allow her to hit with more force while sparing her hand. She dug her elbow back between Peter’s shoulders and spanked him in alternating strokes across both cheeks. The pinkness she’d left there with her hand progressed to bright red patches of abrasion, as even the flat smoothness of the trowel began to wear away at his skin through force and repetition.

Peter only moaned louder in Evandra’s lap, nestling his face against her thigh.

“How do you feel?” she asked, stopping to twirl the trowel in her fingers above him. “Are your thoughts any cleaner?”

“Not yet, Your Radiance,” he admitted.

“Well, I’m not sure how much more of this your poor mortal form can take.”

“Perhaps it would help if you cleaned me, the way you did last time?” Peter suggested slyly. “A good scouring might soak through my skin and clean me all the way through.”

Evandra chuckled. “That would be a good idea regardless. Go lie on my altar.”

She let him up, and he ran naked across the stones to the polished wooden table she used for patient exams, and sometimes for her more space-intensive rituals and preparations. With reverence for the shelves full of herbs, stones, and tools that surrounded it, he arranged himself face-down on the smooth surface.

“Would you like something to bite this time?” Evandra asked, as she retrieved the jar of marigold-infused vinegar.

“Only if you tell me to shut up when you stuff it in my mouth.”

Shaking her head at his silliness, Evandra found him a clean leather strap, folded it in half, and crouched down in front of him. She held the strap out for him to bite, brushing his hair behind his ear with her other hand.

“Shut up,” she whispered, ever so gently.

Peter pouted at her tone, but then reddened. The fresh humiliation of having his fantasies scrutinized and changed at her whim seemed to have as powerful an effect on him as the sternness he’d envisioned for himself. More, if anything, from catching him off guard.

He opened his mouth meekly and bit down on the leather.

Evandra circled around to his ass, still even redder than his face, and removed the lid from the jar.

“You brought this on yourself,” she told Peter, allowing him a little more of what he wanted, though still in the same soft tone.

He grunted in agreement through his biting strap.

Slowly, Evandra trickled the acidic liquid over his blistered, abraded ass. When it made contact, he took in a sharper gasp than at any point during the spanking itself, and a stream of tears flowed almost instantly from his eyes.

Evandra set the jar aside and began massaging the orange-tinted vinegar into every patch of redness she could find. Peter squirmed and breathed raggedly under her ministrations, but did not spit out the leather to speak.

“This treatment may be one of the only things you and I agree on,” Evandra mused as she rubbed him down. “You take for granted that hurting someone is how you help them. And you’re wrong— usually. But even someone like you can be right by accident now and then. This concoction is terribly painful on broken skin, isn’t it?”

Peter sobbed into his strap.

“Yet that’s exactly where it’s needed,” said Evandra. “It may not save your soul, but it will save you from feeling these wounds fester instead of heal as the days go on.”

Peter shifted slightly onto one side in his squirming. His cock poked out from under him, looking harder than ever.

“Still no luck banishing that lust, I see,” she said. “This is around the time you’d usually run off to satisfy it instead, isn’t it?”

Peter wavered a moment between nodding and shaking his head, then finally spat out the strap to answer with more precision.

“I wouldn’t call it satisfying, Your Radiance. Out there, crouching in the dirt alone.”

“I see,” said Evandra, attempting a mocking smile that turned out a little too grim.

Did it count as satisfying, she wondered, when she did more or less the same thing here in the comfort of the temple, rather than outside in the bushes? Yes, sometimes she could honestly use that word. But when she thought too long about the fact that she was alone, not just alone in the room but alone in an entire country, and had been alone last time, and would be alone next time, and the time after that, a melancholy did tend to set in around the edges.

“Are you ready to reap your pleasure in my presence?” she asked him.

Peter nodded.

“Lie on your back.”

Peter rolled over, wincing as his stinging wounds touched the table below him, and lay still, with his erection in the air.

Evandra observed it with temptation for a moment, while she rinsed her hands off in her wash bucket. It had been a very long time since she had gotten to enjoy a ride on something just that size and shape, and her body was hungry for attention. The intensity of handling Peter the way she had been, and watching his responses, had been admittedly exhilarating, even if very little of it had happened the way she would have envisioned for herself. Perhaps they were due for some simpler contact.

She discounted the idea quickly, however. It was unlikely that Peter would be able to stand up to that sort of attention long enough for her to do much enjoying. She doubted he’d even tried before.

No, she would have to take care of herself after she was done with him.

“Will you touch me?” Peter asked, voice breathy with both anticipation and the disinfectant’s lingering sting.

Evandra ran the backs of her fingers indulgently up the underside of his cock.

“Not there,” Peter said quickly.

Evandra withdrew her hand.

“I mean, not nicely,” he tried to explain. “Not yet.”

“What else would you like to happen first?” Evandra asked.

“Tell me I don’t deserve it,” said Peter.

“Still?” she teased. “Not even after enduring all that?”

“Never,” said Peter. “Tell me that I will never deserve to feel that good. Not with you, not alone, not ever. Tell me that if the world were just, no hand would ever touch me there without a layer of stinging nettles in between.” He paused for a moment’s thought. “Do you have any stinging nettles?”

“I do,” Evandra admitted. “But this is not what they’re for.”

“Yes,” he moaned. “Tell me I’m a waste of your stinging nettles.”

Evandra removed her tiara to run a flustered hand through her hair. “Peter….”

“Please,” Peter begged. “If I don’t hear it, it won’t work. And you wanted me to share everything with you, so I can’t just tell it to myself in my head, not without betraying you.”

Evandra’s heart ached. She sighed, replaced her tiara, and leaned over the table, over him. She ran a hand over his chest and down to his thigh, carefully avoiding his cock, even his nipples, as she went.

He took a rapturous, shivering breath in and out as she went.

“You’re infuriating,” she hissed at him. “Any other woman would have banished you from her presence forever after one instance of spying. She’d smash that vulgar statue to pieces, and she would never offer to touch your cock. She would take it away if she could. And if she ever got her hands on your balls,” Evandra grabbed them, firmly, making Peter gasp, “She would squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze them until she finally felt some kind of peace.”

Evandra gave him three tight pulses of pressure with her words.

“It might take hours, or years, or never. Or maybe…” she stretched her leg up onto the table, resting the toe of her low-heeled slipper on his scrotum. “Maybe she’d get it all over with in one good stomp.”

She pressed down slowly until he yelped.

“You’re a whining, manipulative little creep, you know that?”

“Yes, Your Radiance,” Peter choked out.

“You come here pretending to worship me and the goddess and the other forces I channel, but really, you’re here because you hope I might be almost as lonely and pathetic as you.”

Peter’s face went from pink to blotchy pale, and he failed to voice any response at all.

Leaving her foot on his balls, Evandra moved her hand to grab his cock and pumped it roughly up and down.

This time, he didn’t stall.

“You don’t deserve this,” she told him.

Peter moaned happily and shifted his hips to thrust deeper into her hand.

The particular pocket of truth that Evandra had drilled into, in search of those gratifying words for him, seemed to have a mind of its own. It did not wish to be resealed.

“I’ve been patient with you. Understanding. Forgiving. Beyond the point of reason.”

“Yes,” Peter murmured.

“Because that’s what I do. That’s what I am.”

“So good, so kind….”

“And still you make demands,” said Evandra, pumping him faster. “How much patience to give you. On what schedule. I’m the one person in the world who hasn’t rejected you, and all you want to do is make me more like everyone who has!”

“I…” Peter panted, still participating as much as he could in the rubbing between his cock and her hand. “I can’t help….”

“No, of course, you can’t help what your body wants,” Evandra sighed. “So go on, take it. Take the brutal, grudging treatment you chose for yourself.”

She increased the pressure on his balls slightly, and moved her hand even faster, his natural lubricant making wet clicking noises with her movements.

“It’s still too good for you, but take it. Take it before you waste any more of my time.”

Peter groaned, and his hands slammed to the edges of the tables, holding it in a death grip as his hips thrusted once more, expelling a pulsing deluge of white fluid into Evandra’s hand, across his own chest, and down onto the altar.

“Thank you,” he panted uncertainly, as if he were only guessing at the right thing to say to such a service, and rolled onto his side, curling inward around the mess he’d made.

Evandra washed her hands in the bucket and moistened a rag.

“Sit up,” she instructed.

With hazy grumbles, he did, so that she could scrub both his skin and the altar beneath him.

“You’re going to fetch me a fresh bucket of water,” she told him. “Before you get dressed.”

He smiled with guilty delight. “Yes, Your Radiance.”

#

When Peter returned from the brook, still naked, with the bucket thudding against his shin as he walked, there was a long silence.

He placed the bucket on the stones of the floor.

“Will that be all, Your Radiance?” he asked.

“I should be asking you,” said Evandra. “This has all played out more to your visions than mine, hasn’t it?”

Peter shuffled his feet. “I couldn’t dream of anything that would make this visit any more perfect.”

“No, I’ll bet you couldn’t,” said Evandra.

He blinked at her, clearly perceiving a joke at his expense, but no specifics.

“Well…” he said, taking a step toward where he’d left his clothes. “I suppose I should—”

“I want you to stay,” said Evandra. “Here. With me.”

Peter dropped instantly to his knees. “For as long as you’ll have me!”

“On one condition.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t say that,” said Evandra. “I want you to stay and let me help you, my way. But only if you’re willing to give it a fair try.”

“Your way?” he asked, a little more hesitantly. “As in, healing herbs and potions and things?”

“Not just herbs,” said Evandra. “Talking. Meditation. More talking.”

Peter sat back on his knees. “What would we talk about?”

“About why you do the things you do,” said Evandra. “And why you want things the way you want them.”

Peter hunched his shoulders and fidgeted his hands together, looking more sincere in his uncertainty than she had ever seen him.

“Is there…” he asked softly, “Is there something wrong with what I like?”

He looked up at her, eyes shining, as if she were the one authority in the world on his worth. If the heretical priestess-queen of the forest said he was wrong, then he must be.

Evandra picked up his shirt from the ground, helped him pull it on over his head, and kept her arms wrapped around his shoulders.

“No, my sweet caller,” she told him. “There’s nothing wrong with it, if it makes you happy, and if you can learn to be honest with the people you want to share it with, and take no for an answer.” She held him still and looked into his eyes. “That means no more false piety, unless you can acknowledge that it’s a game, and definitely no more watching people from bushes without their knowledge.”

Peter nodded vigorously. “I know. I’m sorry about that day, truly.”

“I hope so,” said Evandra. “But you’re not the only one who should be sorry.”

“Priestess?”

“I strongly suspect you were broken into this shape, with your pleasure and shame all twisted together like a string. And if so, I’d like to help untwist you.”

Peter let a long, dubious breath out through his lips, rocking his head subtly from side to side. “I can’t imagine ever not wanting what you just gave me.”

“Fine,” said Evandra.

“Fine?”

“Yes, fine. If you search inside yourself with me, try to heal what’s broken, and you still want spanking and humiliation until the end of your days, fine. I’ll get used to giving it. But you might find that you start to like more different things as well. Someday, when you’re a little less tangled in your own self-centered knots, maybe you’ll even be ready to learn about what I like.”

“Of course!” said Peter. “You have only to teach me how to serve you, and I’ll live for it!”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” said Evandra, kissing the top of his head. “But we have plenty of time.”