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Once a year, the Ninth did this. The scion of the Ninth House prostrated herself on the altar, allowed herself to be bound with myriad-old chains, and knelt on the cold, unrelenting stone and bared herself to the person to whom she was giving herself. She wasn’t to know who - only that they had been given a list of things that were off-limits to her.
And after everything - after de-Lyctorization, after returning to her house with three hundred new penitents and a flush of new money bringing the Ninth somewhere back to its former glory, now more than ever they needed a celebration of good fortune and an investment in the future fertility of the House. It was mostly metaphorical - any child conceived on the Ninth would be born from a vat womb, not from the actual body of a parent, but it was hugely symbolic.
So Harrow went gladly, rolling around in her mouth the idea of her House’s fertility, of her House’s need and putting it first, and choosing to submit herself to any member of her House. Not knowing whether they’d be watching - or who would be watching.
The person was chosen by lottery, but of course, sometimes it was less lottery and more rigged. In her parents’ time, it had always been Mortus and Pelleamena, and then she had let the ritual fall by the wayside after their deaths - Harrow was far, far too young until she returned from Canaan House and her parents were far, far too dead to care. So it had been a good decade since this ritual had been observed.
It felt right, though, to resurrect old Ninth rituals that had died during her childhood. There were new penitents, too, and out of three hundred plus the precious few original Niners still physically fit and able to participate - Harrow would well and truly have no idea who was fucking her. Fulfilling her greatest duty in this ritual.
The gritty stone cut into her knees, and she laid her cheek on the altar. It was cold, but not uncomfortably so. The heat had been fixed several months ago with the arrival of the new penitents, and it was merely crisp instead of bitterly cold. Harrow was blindfolded.
“Reverend Daughter,” came the intonation - her Seneschal, ever loyal and fulfilling his duty - “I bring you your people, represented here in body. All of us in one.”
If Harrow squinted, it sounded a lot like One flesh, one end. But she was bound to her altar, breathing evenly, restrained and blindfolded, and didn’t have much brainpower to squint at all.
If she hadn’t been concentrating so strongly on keeping her breathing even, keeping her body steady, she’d be struggling, her anxiety spiking. But she had suggested resurrecting this ritual, and she wasn’t a chickenshit.
If she wanted, she could break the chains with necromancy in an instant; that comforted her. They weren’t manacles, either, just chains wrapped and secured around her wrists, a black cloth blindfold around her eyes. She pulled at them, and comfortingly, there was a little give, but not much. Exactly as she’d wanted it.
There had been extensive negotiations. Harrow, for her part, wanted to act completely autonomously and hold entirely to the ritual as her parents before her had neglected to do. She knew every muscle that twitched on the Ninth - what did it matter to her if her people saw her bare and chained to her own altar? It was a wholly different Ninth than the one she had endured in childhood, and she was a changed scion. Before Canaan House and everything that transpired there - she never would have suggested this. After, she leaned into the rituals that had long defined the Ninth and relished in her control of them.
Her body hadn’t been her own, but here it was, and here it was her choice to give it to her people. The physical representation of one of them, chosen by lottery.
Her cavalier had thought it was an outrage and a debasement.
“Gideon,” she’d said, one hand resting on her desk, the other holding a pen, “it’s my body. My ritual. My people. I’m sure you don’t understand, so let me explain it to you.”
Gideon, who had never witnessed one of the earlier rituals, protested - she had always refused, as was the right of any Niner. “After everything, why this?”
Harrow had looked at her, brave and a little haughty. “It’s an honor. A privilege. To ensure the future fertility and success of the Ninth. I’m sure you want that too.” Gideon had returned, voluntarily, even when Harrow had offered her anything - the Cohort commission she’d wanted so dearly, which she’d batted away after she’d been returned to her own body, a release from her bond and a blank check, a shuttle chartered anywhere she wanted.
“My place is here,” she’d said. “With you.” Harrow had wanted to kiss her so badly then - not only for her mulishness but also for her timing. If Gideon had only chosen to find her place here at Harrow’s side ten years earlier, maybe things would not have happened as they did at Canaan. Maybe they could have trusted one another much earlier.
Harrow shook off the thought and returned her focus to the altar upon which she was chained. The reassuring hard iron pressing into the bones standing in sharp relief on her wrists.
So much had changed that this was the thing she chose to cling to: first, returning to the Ninth, second, that Gideon had come with her, and third, that she was resurrecting this ritual. The Ninth had changed into something nearing hospitable with regular transports. Snow leeks were a side dish to regular meals, and the heating units almost always worked. Gone was the old corpse of a planet with its filth-strewn madness and rotting end. When Harrow squinted, she could almost see it thriving, one day. A real future, if she worked hard enough.
And this - this ritual - it was part of that work. It signaled to her people that her flesh was their flesh, her successes their successes, her needs their needs to fill. It didn’t really matter who it was, to her - in this ritual she became Lady of the Ninth completely and let Harrow Nonagesimus fade away, her anxieties and worries and exhaustion fading away into something that could serve her people.
It was all she ever wanted: to be redeemed in service of her people.
So Harrow went gladly and allowed her cavalier to tuck a pillow under her knees and tie a blindfold around her eyes with the tenderness of reluctant hands and ignored token protestations. She hadn’t worn underwear - she hadn’t worn anything under her robes except sacramental paint on her face, which was likely smeared by the blindfold. It was quite warm in the cavernous chapel. The hot air blew around her, missing her, settling around her like a blanket.
Here was the whole of what Harrow was submitting herself to: someone from the Ninth would come and lift her robes from behind, her on her knees, and fuck her to mutual completion on the altar. Then they would leave, and she’d never know who - only that, for a short amount of time, they’d been joined in service.
So she pressed her eyes closed, even though it was useless, and shifted a little on the pillow that Gideon had brought her, and waited. The whole room seemed to hold its breath with her.
There were warm, big hands on her hips. Or maybe Harrow was just small and cold in comparison. She forced herself to breathe steadily and hold still while they moved up her hips, under her robe where she had shoved it up, up her ribcage - Nine Houses, but that tickled, and had she less self-control, she would have wriggled and shrieked. But instead, she made herself stiff and submitted.
No one spoke, but Harrow felt the hands withdrawing - had they sensed her tensing? They returned to her hips, ghosting across the curves and dips of her jutting hip bones.
She hadn’t expected roughness, but this tenderness, it seared. She had expected the clinical touch of duty, a Niner who touched her devoid of desire -
There was passion here, no touch-desert for the ritual’s purposes, and she wondered who would touch her like that. Who would want to touch her like that. They took their time, caressing the backs of her thighs under her ass, up and down her legs. Were they teasing her?
If Harrow hadn’t been biting the side of her mouth already, hard bone into soft tissue, she’d have cried out. Just from hands on her hips - God, but she hadn’t ever been touched like this. She didn’t have words for it.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but it was happening, and Harrow was coming undone from the touch of hands to hips, hands to ass, hands to the base of her spine and the ridges of her sacral curve traveling to her lumbar curve.
Fuck, but she was wet - when had she become wet? - and she hadn’t even been properly touched.
In the past, these rituals had been stiff, frigid affairs, rote and duty-laden, as dead of any real emotion as the Ninth had been of real life. Now the touch burst, floral, on Harrow’s body. Was this the way that touching other people was supposed to be like? Human touch was a thing as foreign to Harrow as sunlight, as the blood-pulse through fingertips after exercising, as the headiness of staring into another person’s eyes for too long.
The hands moved between her legs and parted her thighs. She shifted on the pillow as the pleasant ache of the position change zinged up her knees. She bloomed as there were fingers - rough, big - against her cunt. Not shoving into her, but knocking at the door of her body, and asking permission.
They already had permission - Harrow had willingly submitted to and organized the ritual, of course - but she gave it again, and again, spreading her legs further, pushing her hips a centimeter back. Someone with less self-control (or less dignity) would have let a please slide from her lips and drip across the floor.
But the fingers moved away from their place between her labia, almost at her entrance, and went to stroke her bud instead, almost reaching under her body. She saw little bouquets in the dark of the blindfold - or maybe she was just pressing her eyes closed too hard. The fingers were firm but not rough, two of them making repetitive motions across her clit. She bit her bottom lip so that she didn’t gasp. There were no rules about the sounds she could and couldn’t make, but Harrow wanted to hold out as long as she could. For her own dignity’s sake.
She heard their breathing increase and felt frissons of motion down the arm that held steady, touching her, and realized that the person - the penitent? Harrow didn’t know how to refer to them - was taking off their pants. Shoving them down. She shepherded her own brain away, knowing that if she perceived much more she might find out their identity, and that wasn’t the point.
Fingers coated in cool liquid slid up against her, not warm and dry like before. One, then two sliding easily into her. She’d been well worked up for almost half an hour, she received, time slipping across her brain like a smooth stream of water. She welcomed the fullness inside her and received the physical manifestation of her congregation into her body.
During that moment she felt herself, previously split cleanly into two pieces, come together messily. Harrow Nonagesimus, lost war crime, shattered, ex-Fist of the Emperor, ex-immortal, meeting the Reverend Daughter, confident leader and guide, whole and authoritative, and as they clicked together, she felt her heart jerk through her cunt as the fingers crooked inside of her.
She pressed back, asking for more, and they were gone as suddenly as they had entered her. Harrow allowed herself a sharp breath out that was just to the left of a whine.
“Shhh,” she heard soothing her, but the familiar voice fell silent before she could identify it.
Something new was pressing into her now, big and blunt but not too much, settling into her like a claim. It had a gentle curve and texture that kissed her as it split her, and it was perfect. A sound rose in the back of her throat unbidden, and she found that she couldn’t keep it silent.
Those hands returned to her hips, their familiar place at this point, and braced, beginning to move slowly inside her. Her body accepted it like an offering. She felt made for this, and if she could only sacrifice herself like this endlessly, maybe she would make up for her monstrous birth.
The pleasure came over her like the dizzying scent of something green and lovely, bright and beautiful, the kind of thing Harrow rarely saw in her life. It pushed all thoughts of monsters out of her head.
She gripped the chains that bound her to the altar and pulled at them a little, rattling them, tossing her head and pressing her cheek to the cold stone so hard that she knew it would bruise. Let it bloom. She’d wear it like a badge of honor. Let it scrape and bleed and scar - it would mark her as Ninth as much as the ceremonial paint.
She wanted to continue. She wanted to press on. The hard thing moved, the want crested inside her, she bucked her hips, and she was coming around it, choking out little cries that surely would have been embarrassing to someone else who hadn’t already exited her body and floated above the scene, the faceless penitent clad in black behind her, pushing into her body with tireless vigor, holding her in place as she panted and keened, sacrifice and sacrificer, holding her own pleasure and salvation as tightly as the chains with which she had bound herself.
This time she really did beg, shamelessly and determinedly, for more, her broken voice shot through with honey-soaked need and destroyed from vocal fry.
“Please, more, faster,” in a tone that suggested begging but words that were orders: “Your Lady commands - ah! - commands you, keep going. More.”
And because, whoever they were, they must have been loyal to a fault and tireless too, they gave their Lady exactly what she asked for. She was coming, she realized, so out-of-touch with her own body that its reactions were alien to her if they weren’t painful. This wasn’t painful - this was like submerging in a warm pool and feeling her limbs turn to liquid. Like being taken gently into someone’s arms and squeezed.
She heard their ragged breath as she returned to herself and they stopped moving, resting heavily inside her, those hands still on the small of her back and her right hip.
“Thank you,” she said, normal voice returning. “You’ve done your duty to the fullest,” she said, and there was a sharp exhale that she chose to interpret as mutual gratitude. Then a careful withdrawal, her body crying out still to be comforted and filled and held.
Harrow closed her hands around the now-warm chains so that she wouldn’t ask for further gentleness. She had already received too much. For now, she shifted, waiting to be released from her chains by her cavalier, and looked forward to a long sonic and a short sleep.
The Lady of the Ninth House had fulfilled her ritual; Harrow Nonagesimus had been touched, experienced intimacy, and opened like a sunflower to it. It was enough. It had to be enough.
She still wanted more.