Psychonautics

Psychonautics

We met at the Gate of Horn and Ivory, where the confused waters of truth and illusion enter the Sea of Dream in an unending tide.

Blue sat atop the woven arch of gnarled horn and luminous ivory. Her legs hung over the side, small feet bare to the elements. A foot partly concealed an immense crudely carved rune, one of the many which ran along the arc of the gate. They were old markings which formed older names, names to fear even for such as me.

She smiled as I ascended out of the fog of the myst sea, her sapphire like eyes sparkling with the game to come.

"You're finally here, Red." She spoke loudly so her words carried over the crash of the waterfall.

"The currents are strong, tonight, Blue," I replied. "Passions are stoked and the Atavi stir in their slumbers."

Red, Blue -- in the waking world we had other names but here, in this place, in this Sea of Dream, those names were enough. Not all of the orders dreamwalker adopted such customs but, we were psychonauts and that said it all.

She looked over the Sea of Dream, her eyes following the path of the River of the Gate as it wound to infinity in a great trunk and innumerable branches. It flowed over and threw the boiling grey myst ocean. "Will you catch me tonight?" she wondered aloud as she crossed one leg over the other. Her indigo skirt flared up at the movement and I caught a glimpse of creamy upper thigh. "And what will you do if you do succeed, I wonder?"

The primal hunter roared in my chest, as eager for the chase as he was for the kill. I smiled at her, showing my teeth.

Blue pushed herself upright on long powerful legs, bare toes curved to grip the mist dampened ivory and horn. A curtain of cerulean hair fell down one side of her face, covering one eye.

"The standard rules, binds and bonds?" she said.

I nodded.

Then she moved.

Like a leaping fish, she dived from the top of the Gate of Horn and Ivory. At the last moment she pulled up and fled, flying only a few feet above the River of the Gate. Great knife edges of water slashed up in her wake as she cut down its path. A wave of force whipped my hair and t-shirt. This was the power of a psychonaut.

I cursed and followed. A kick threw me off the gate and I exploded after Blue. The myst sea tore apart into fleeting psychic echoes of dreamers forced suddenly awake. A balding man jerked upright, sweating and gasping for breath. A beautiful redhead rolled over in her bed before returning to slumber. More. I blocked them out. They were only a distraction and grew dimmer as I reached the river and its relatively clear channel.

Blue was only just ahead. I focused and the myst erupted before her, a solid plume of roiling grey, summoned and hardened by my will. She swerved around it, body scraping by.

I attacked again. Walls of myst rose on both side of her and crashed inwards. They picked up great waves of water as they moved, and both crashed into Blue.

Only she was gone.

I snapped my head from side to side, the hanging remnants of my attack stinging my face. I found her high in the sky, hanging like a small blue moon. She'd flown straight up at the last momment.

Even at such a distance I saw her amethyst eyes flash. She moved her hands in circles before her, as if stirring a witch's cauldron, and the myst moved with them.

All around me, the myst stirred. Sluggish at first, but accelerating quickly, it became a whipping whirlpool of fog and water. I tried to fly towards her, but the psychic weight of so much dream stuff bore down on me. I collapsed to my knees and then crashed further, as the power keeping me aloft gave out. I caught myself and held on with gritted teeth.

With each passing moment the whirlpool grew stronger. With each passing moment, its ravenous hunger quested deeper into the Sea of Dream, where more potent and primal layers lay. It threatened to crush me, smash my body and destroy my will. I cast about for escape but only the sky was clear. Blue hung like the moon in the middle of that opening, cerulean hair boiling like sea foam as it was driven wild by the forces she was calling up.

Using all my strength, I raised my hand and pulled together a ragged ball of myst and water. Teeth clenched, limbs shaking, I sent it shooting straight up.

Blue saw it coming, of course. How could she not? I saw her eyes open wide, saw the calculations of necessity run over her face. She couldn't move without losing control of the whirlpool. Could she tank the hit? Could she deflect it in some way? Was their time? No, there wasn't.

At the last second, she spun out of the way, dress flashing. That was all I needed.

With Blue's control gone, I ripped apart the vortex in a titanic mental shove. The myst vaporised and the water of the River of the Gate sublimed to steam. I stood in the air, panting for breath. The Sea of Dream hung bare and empty in all directions as the myst slowly rolled back in and the river recovered.

A blur tore passed me, converting a death-defying dive into pure speed. Blue! I threw myself after her.

The Sea of Dream doesn't run on anything as mundane as Cartesian geography. It is more primal than that, older, the kind of place where thrice round the mountain doesn't take you back to where you began.

I tracked Blue's eldritch vector through the Sea of Dream, forcing the sluggish myst to part before me as I followed and matched it. Ahead, the silver ribbon of the River of the Maw appeared, the second of the two great rivers of Dream. Where as the River of the Gate branched, the River of the Maw was straight and narrow, cutting a highway from the Maw of Guf to the Crucible of Birth.

Blue reached it and shot forward, heading for the Crucible. She sped up, gaining speed as the water let her escape the claws of the myst. I joined her a second later and felt the pressure of the myst lessen too. No longer were sleepers jolted awake at my very passage.

We both shot forward -- Blue no more able to pull away than I was to gain ground. Ahead the Millar's Wheel grew. Its immense dark form appeared on the horizon, a wheel of black ice, driven in eternal motion by the power of river. Blue reached it and climbed up and over. Thick heavy water mist hung in the air. It glittered like diamonds. I followed and felt the grinding power of the wheel grate against my soul. The River of the Maw carries the souls of mankind towards rebirth, and on the Millar's Wheel their lived experiences are scraped away. On the Millar's Wheel they are made ready to be born anew. It would eat me as easily as the souls of the newly departed.

I shot down the far side of the wheel, gaining speed, but had to pull a hard left. Blue had left the river and was headed back into the depths of myst.

Her course cut an arching path towards the immense psychic well of the Beast Below. Even from half a world away, I could feel the Atavi's call. Blue's will combined with the Beast's hunger to shorten the distance. The Beast Below appeared. Myst fell towards an unseen depth in an endless whirlpool, far larger, deeper and stronger than what Blue had used to trap me. The centre was a black void, disappearing into the deepest abyssal reaches of Dream.

Blue rode the edge, using the pull to gain speed like a gravity slingshot. A manic smile crept onto her face and her hair whipped in the perverse current.

I followed. The closer I grew, the louder the Beast Below's call became. It screamed at me, a cry full of anger and rage and sexual sadism. The Beast Below's mark filled my mind, the sigil that linked to its very nature. Three lines formed the mark, crossing each other so as to make an internal triangle surrounded by six open areas. I sealed the sigil away in the dark depths of my mind, walled off from conscious thought. To dwell upon it was to invite the Beast Below's attention and that was a dark thing indeed.

We both shot out the other side, going so fast landmarks disappeared almost before they appeared. The Lighthouse of Ego flashed by, its blazing beam a momentary flicker. The Black Tower seemed to stab from the ground on its way to the sky. The Lull of Enki barely had time to register before we were again in thickest myst.

Gradually, though, the myst stole our speed. By the time the Falls of Despair drew into view, we were both struggling forward again and I started to gain. I clawed at the myst, yanking myself towards Blue with all my psychonaut tempered will. She shot a look over her shoulder. Realising her situation, she did perhaps the only thing she could: she stopped in place, took a breath and dropped straight down. The last thing I saw was her blue hair disappearing into the myst sea. Only a few seconds later I followed, diving in head first.

The fog of the myst sea deadens, hides, conceals and obscures. Heavy myst battered my face and my senses. It was puissant with energy of the collective unconscious of mankind, and that's a power potent enough to block all but the keenest of senses. Of all the orders dreamwalker, only the terminal order, the order psychonaut, could have done it. I was of that order.

Senses straining, I caught the wisping trail of her presence and followed her deep into Dream. Down I went, passed the strata of idle thoughts and fleeting fantasies. I struggled through the waves of memory, passed the normal dreams of sleeping men and then deeper still, into heart's desires and deep primal fantasy. The trail led to a single bubble -- the dream of a single focused mind.

I entered the bubble in a flash of crimson light.

Thousands of elegant men and women in evening dress spun in a complex dance. Individual couplings waltzed around their central points of gravity. These couplings then moved in larger patterns, which formed larger patterns still, epicycles within epicycles within epicycles, like a Ptolemaic solar system written in flesh.

A full orchestra played from everywhere at once, the rhythm of the music controlling the dance. I heard Blue laugh somewhere in the depths of the dream. She was here, hidden. I just needed to find her.

I transformed my clothes into something appropriate for the setting. It was an easy thing, a parlour trick even an oneironaut could have performed. My t-shirt and jeans became a tux and tails, black and white as was proper but off set with a vivid red rose at the collar.

Slightly harder was banishing the nearest gentlemen dancer but I did so and slipped into his place. He dissolved into a wisp of grey myst. Before his partner even had a chance to notice, I took the lady in a waltz grip and joined the dance.

We spun with the dancers, a tiny cog in a perfectly harmonised whole. As we did, I searched the dream. The mind behind it was clear, bright, focused. Perhaps even that of a clarum or near such a breakthrough. The subject was strange, though. This deep in the myst sea, desires were old and primal -- sex, food, violence and similar. This was too formal, too civilised.

The pattern of the dance took us in a giant circle around the hall and despite how hard I searched, I could find no sign of Blue. She clearly wasn't on my orbit or anywhere that intersected with it.

"Oh Lord Byron," said my partner in a breathy voice. "You dance so well."

"Of course my dear," I said and spun her, just as every man in the room did at that very moment. A thousand dresses rustled in the air. As she swirled, I searched again for Blue but she could be any of the ladies in the room and I couldn't get a good view of most of them.

This dream was a good place to hide. The orderly dance limited my actions and movement. To go against it I would need to rip apart the dream or seize control. In the confusion of the first, Blue would surely escape and she could block any attempt to do the second. The order did have one advantage, though. I knew where the clarum must be -- at the very centre.

In a single smooth movement, I slipped one orbit closer to the centre and caught the nearest spinning dancer. A small mental prod propelled the displaced gentleman towards my erstwhile partner and the shape of the dream did the rest.

And so I went. Each time we approached an opportune position in the epicycle, I moved an orbit closer to the centre of the dance. As I did, the character of the dancers changed. Their clothing grew racier, risqué even. The cuts of the dresses grew tighter. Open slashes ran almost to hips. Cleavage opened up, revealing shapely breasts. The colours shifted from black to red, and red, as they say, is my colour.

My current partner breathed deeply, which caused her mocha coloured bosom to swell up and down. Her skin was flushed, her lips full, her pupils wide and black. I danced with her until I made my final orbit change.

On the inner most orbit, I found five mercuries of whip and leather. They were leather clad dominatrixes, with stiff black corsets, high black heels and sheer stockings. This explained the dream. Fetishes always sunk deep. At the centre stood a sandy haired man, his eyes shut. This would be the clarum -- a lucid dreamer, the lowest of the dreamwalkers, able to do little more than control their own actions within a dream. Still, that was enough to place them above most of humanity.

I stepped into the grip of one of the dominatrixes, a Japanese beauty with lustrous straight black hair and skin so pale I feared arsenic poisoning. We spun in a fast waltz as I waited for my moment. When it came, I let go my partner and stepped into the very centre.

"Let's talk," I said and placed a hand on the clarum's shoulder. With control of him, I could take control of the dream and Blue wouldn't be able to stop me. His body dissolved to myst. A trap!

At once four of the innermost dancers struck. Their whips uncoiled with a single staccato crack and stinging leather coiled around my limbs. They yanked back, muscles straining, as they locked me in place. I attacked at once, but my will met a wall able to match it. Blue's power infused the dominatrixes, protecting them from me.

"So predictable," whispered Blue in my ear. She stalked around and I saw her disguise. She was the fifth dominatrixes -- the Japanese beauty I'd danced with. I'd been so close, touching her even, but the rules for capture were more involved than that. Her disguise dissolved into wisps of blue light and she stood revealed. She must have already found the dreamer, woken him or her and sustained the dream herself. That explained the focus and power of it. Her amethyst eyes caught and held me, all the power of a psychonaut showing in their depths. I noticed one part of her disguise hadn't disappeared: she still held her whip.

She struck. The whip's tip hit my chest and two dozen invisible identical clones hit the rest of my body, like red hot sparks. My tux exploded into a cloud of destroyed cloth. It left me naked, my lean, hardened body bare for the world to see. The four women holding me in place giggled like hyenas.

Blue placed her palm flat on my chest, nails short but sharp as they pressed against my skin. She drew the nails down, scratching white marks into my skin.

Her hand reached my crotch and tightened around my cock. "And this," she said, "is very predictable too." Hot pulsing blood filled the organ and it jumped at the touch of her soft fingers. Slowly she began to masturbate me, hand sliding back and forth, back and forth.

I groaned and closed my eyes. The ball of her thumb played with the head, rolling around and over it. I bucked my hips, trying to fuck the cunt which wasn't there.

"To think," she whispered as she leaned close. I could feel the heat of her body against mine, part physical, part the psychic manifestation of her passion. "If you had caught me, it could be me tied up here, all ready for you to ravage and defile."

Her hand kept up its ministrations, but not for long. She let go and placed both hands flat against my chest. With a shove she pushed me back. I fell and the dominatrixes kept pace, ensuring my bonds stayed tight even as I landed on my back. My cock pointed at the sky, as hard as ever.

Blue stood over me like a giant. She placed one foot on my chest, heel held aloft so only the ball and toes touched. My eyes followed the arch of that foot, a subtle curve. I followed the arch to her leg, and then up her toned thigh, to her slightly flaring hips. Her sex was bare.

At some point she'd banished her clothes, not that I really understood that fact right then. My eyes and mind focused completely on the sex. It was my world. The lips were flushed with arousal and slightly open. It begged in every way it could to be roughly fucked.

She shifted her stance and sunk down. The tip of my cock pressed against her sex, not quite penetrating but I could feel her heat and the beat of her heart. Our eyes met, hers like cut gemstones. They sat on her china face, framed by falling cerulean hair.

She dropped.

God! My cock bottomed out within her, almost on fire as her velvet walls squeezed down upon me.

"Mm," she moaned, eyes half closed. "This is very good." She started to bounce, legs moving her up and down, up and down.

Her breasts swayed with the motion. They weren't overly large -- just small swells on her chest -- but they were topped by the cutest and hardest nipples. I just wanted to roll them between my lips, teeth and fingers, but trapped as I was, that was impossible. About the only thing I could do was move my hips and I met each dive of Blue's with a thrust of my own.

It felt amazing for me and I could read Blue's body well enough to know the reverse was true too. She bounded and bounded and I thrust and thrust.

Blue started to mutter under her lips. "Fuck, cunt, whore. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!"

She orgasmed, cunt spasming on my cock as she ground down against me. At the same time, I felt her will waver. I leaped at the opportunity.

In a surge of will, I seized control of the dominatrixes. In a single, synapses fast moment, they transformed from intimidating agents to mute, limp and dumb statues. Their whips fell from their hands and the ends uncoiled from around my limbs. I surged upright, wrapped my arms around Blue and pulled her still quivering body close.

"Caught you," I growled into her ear as the primal hunter in my chest screamed in victory. Blue just climaxed all the harder.

Once her orgasm had abated, I pushed Blue onto her back and crawled over her. A small effort of will warped the dream and a soft silk covered bed grew under us. It would make what was to come all the more fun.

"You're mine now?" I said, meeting her eyes.

She bit her lip and nodded. "Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes, Master."

"That's better." I summoned the dominatrixes and they joined us on the bed. Their complex, black and shining fetish gear made any actual intercourse something of a challenge, but they would only be the garnish on today's event.

I set a curvy brunette to work on Blue's left breast and pointed a waifish blond with a spine of steel at the right. They leapt to their tasks, lips, teeth and hands all going to work. Blue moaned and squirmed under their ministrations.

I set my cock at the entrance to her cunt. Both organs glistened with juices.

"I'm going to fuck you senseless," I said and slammed home. She felt beyond belief – hot and tight and like living lightning. I fucked up a storm.

"Fuck my cunt. Fuck my slave cunt," she gasped, almost like a mantra.

"You like this, don't you?" I said and ground my hips hard against her. "You like being my fuck toy."

"Fuck your fuck toy," she screamed. "Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her."

Yeah, Blue has a dirty mouth when she gets going. It only served to get me hotter. Even as she muttered more obscenities, I kissed her hard. Our lips bruised together, not that that stopped her diatribe.

After almost a minute, I broke the kiss and motioned for one of the dominatrixes to take my place. There were four of them on the bed with us, and only two were busy. This one looked like BDSM dungeon Barbie, with a waspish waste and flaring hips. They kissed with heat and passion, toys battling for dominance.

I continued to fuck Blue hard and deep as I watched the show. Slam. Slam. Slam. It felt impossibly great, as only sex with another psychonaut could. She was realer than the dolls conjured up by dreamers, realer than sleepers, realer than even the lesser orders of dreamwalkers such as those available in the Brothel on the Sea of Dream.

The pressure in me built, built until I had no choice but to explode.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I thrust one final time and exploded deep within her. I pumped out my seed, hot and potent. Blue climaxed at the same time, as our passions fed upon each other.

When I was done, I waved the dominatrixes away and gazed down at her dishevelled, sweaty and cocksure face.

"That all you got?" she said, all the brat.

My cock stirred within her. As it turned out, that wasn't 'all I got' and she certainly got a lot more from me. We fucked long into the night, until day returned to the waking world and the consequences of her capture were ended. Hot, sweaty, naughty fun was had by all.

"Perhaps we'll do this again," she whispered to me before vanishing back to reality. "Soon." The word was a whisper in the myst.

The End

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