The duchess' morning stuffing
"Good morning, your Grace!"
In the grand stately bed, not quite an acre not by much, between the massive phalansters of carved ebony, within the gowny depths of individually and particularly hand-plucked goose down (from geese grown on the Duke's own land, by women grown on the Duke's own land, or even vice-versa, perhaps), captive within plushy silken walls, so soft and yet so cool and yet so warm and yet so satin, bedecked with pillows magical in their consistency and tapestries and brocade in golden weft and stuffiesi and frills and danteleture generally the young woman stirred. "Oh.... Ooooh. Oh Mistress, please."
"Mistress Dobson."
"Oh yes, good morning Mistress Dobson."
The room was strange, and warm. Heated with everflowing steam to the precise temperature best suited for young, newborn spiders, covered in orchids, orchids everywhere, thousands upon thousands of plants -- for they were not mere cut orchids, a day's amusement like could on great occasions perhaps be seen in the hovels of the lesser peerage, such thatch-roofed cottages as mere counts inhabit, and discounts, and lowly barons even, products imaginary of recent titlage and dubious tillage as they all -- save for the Duke himself -- were or could ever hope to be. No, none of that, nothing like that ; but true and proper porphyraii such as befit the Duke's own byproduct, as soon as his grace deemed her grace ready, and worthy, and the stars alligned and who knows what else in arbitrary considerations both lofty and complex.
The woman lying in bed, apparently alseep though her position wouldn't have suggested it, of Lowenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg originally but now of Dorset through and through, through marriage and ownership and self-abasing offering and even more than that, stirred invisibly, perceived by her maid's naked eye through experience but imperceptible to anyone else (were anyone else there with them). The maid the young duchess called so pointedly "Mistress" first reached as if to remove the leather blind from her mistress' golden curls, but stayed herself at the other's manifest (if insubstantially expressed) refusal of such relief as a return of sight might represent.
"How did your grace sleep ?"
"Mhnnnn... What day is it ?"
"Today is Girth, your grace."
"Oh god."
"Aww. But your grace so loves being stretched, and full."
"On the machines ?"
"No, today's with us.
"Oh, Mistress Batch ?"
"She'll be here momentarily, with the dongs, and the lube."
"No, not with lube. I'll make my own."
"But... it will hurt you so, your grace."
"It should. Until I learn to behave myself as befits my station it should hurt me."
Zuleika proceeded silently to remove and replace restraints, unfastening ribbons and leather binds, freeing a calf from a cuff only to cuff the ankle in another in its stead, and then the ruffles and the ribbons and the whalebone and the retractors and detractors and separators and everything else, precious wood and surgical steel and expensive fabrics and mother of pearl such as befits elaborate, civilised womanhood. For it wouldn't do, we're all agreed, it wouldn't do for nude and rude reproduction to overwhelm such fictive sheaths and fields and gauzes as might best maintain the ancient traditions of the wail.
"She has to see!" The slender girl coming in was complicatedly arrayed, her pointed hairdo trailing gauze yet her breasts about, perking bare through the brocade, nude flesh and white merletto comingling sinfully in her appetizing appearance. Her complicated skirtings fell apart in front, exposing her clean-shaven pubis and the substantial implement dangling from it, held in place as if by magic as far as the naive observer might be concerned (but otherwise held in place by its extension inserted deeply, burried within her darkest folds).
"She doesn't want to, though."
"Please, Mistress Batch. Please, may I ?"
"You know what his Grace says, your grace! Cu va cu zoppu a l'anno zuppichia."
"She doesn't want to see the spiders."
"Yesss... pleassse..." hissed the prone, bound figure central to their ministrations, in a timbre most unexpectedly frightening, low and reverberating, as if she were possessed by some unkind spirit.
The spiders in question, numerous, most active, belaboured ceaselessly to the covering of the walls and everything else in their abundant, silky offerings. They didn't seem very normal, if such can ever be properly said of spiders ; they didn't behave in ways coherent with their natural history let's say. Common everyday spiders move but little. They weave their webs and wait, icons of domestic patience, for prey ; and such webs as they weave are small, centered on them, and generally white (though some remarkable exemplars will produce honeydewed meshes of excruciating beauty). The spiders swarming all about the duchess' chamber, though larger, softer somehow than all others, a velvety squishiness about them everywhere like they were large moths rather, or maybe merely dressed as such, or perhaps just crustaceans without their shells, imphormous marine creatures bereft of natural habitat or any place in the ordered cosmos outside their own fanciful existence, seemed to lack any subjective notion of the self. The webs they weaved, of thick and very purple substance, hung like tapestries in miniature over everything ; the spiders themselves seemingly more dedicated to this one task of environmental coverage than anything else. They weren't so much trying to weave webs to trap some prey, they simply attempted to cover every square inch of wall in their purple fabric, and then every square inch of that, in turn. They moved about, rapidly, like ants, though unlike ants rectilinearly, dragging behind their precious trail of drying dusk, to intersect with myriad others and so on.
The newcomer reached out and grabbed a chunk in her fingers, spiders running away every which way. She tore it off with a sound almost audible and placed the resulting matter, of such doubtful consistency as decaying lily petals, squarely on the young duchess face, covering her from chin to nose under the purple substance. The young woman bucked, unmovingly in her restraints. She ceased breathing, she concentrated as if on the point of explosion. Wetness sparkled at the rim where her leather blind touched her cheek, and then she opened her mouth wide. The maid carefully pushed the spiderweb into her mouth, covering her tongue evenly, equally, rubbing it around to soak up all available saliva ; then with practiced, small gestures by degrees pushed it down the captive woman's throat with her own fingers, all the way.
The other maid, having prepared herself in the interval, placed the large accessory between her legs inside the young duchess' mouth firmly, and pushed it slowly, by degrees, without respite, down her throat. Once the duchess' nose touched her maid's bare belly the implement doubtless reached inside her stomach, holding her throat, and oesophagus, and larynx and pharyngeal valves and other sphyncters and everything else in its path as wide open as nature permitted, or perhaps even widerly open still than that. The tied woman tried her best to breathe through her nose, at intervals succeeding ; Mistress Batch tore more of the spider silk and, after placing it on the prone duchess' flower, by untold instruments held amply, turpiously apart, proceeded to engorge the well worked, purple womanhood upon her mighty dong. Atop the quivering form, dying time and time again, she whispered something inaudible, to which the other maid nodded, then pumped her, and then let her die, and pumped her more, extracting life's own rent out of the quivering lithe frame.
Seen from afar, the two edges of the third seemed rather like ants seeing to the needs of a becoming spider queen ; but seen from inside, seen from the dutchess' own unseeing vantage they were simply her whole world, moving in step with the pulsions and repulsions of her own heart, invaginating her margins for the world, softly, thickly, velvety. One day, one great grandiose day she'll finally be ready, and impregnated, and then her life, her new true life will begin. And until then... until then there is always the silk, the purple silk of everyday.
———- Among which the celebrated Goostuffie Goostuffersson (in older source material also spelled Gustuphy Gustuphersohn). [↩]
He found her in the throes of childbirth, in the room set apart long ago for the confinement of one such as her. Our ancestors called it porphyra, hence the world-famous name.
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