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The Shrine to the Ascended had been established at the edge of Kurobuchi in 1734, although the monstrous trysts it hosted had started some years earlier. In any case, it was known that without them, the Ascended would ransack village houses looking for girls and young women, and drag them by their hair screaming out into the street, push them to the ground, and rape them under the stars, thrusting their huge cocks into their vaginas while roughly groping their breasts, one after another, leaving them in a state of distracted shock. The following day, and for several days after, these women would become erotically fixated on the memory of their violation, and of their violators. They would masturbate obsessively or endlessly demand sex or occasionally act out in inappropriate ways, such as stripping or masturbating in public, or propositioning unsuspecting men. It is likely that some of them became the first Consorts.
Unable to prevent this directly, the village had organised the “Night Visits”, as they were euphemistically known. Despite the huge problems the Ascended caused, the village held their great power in respect and awe, and they were widely considered to be “divine beings”. But when the famine of those days largely spared Kurobuchi, it was accepted that the Ascended protected the village in return for the offering of the girls selected to be their “Consorts”. The foundation of the Shrine to the Ascended was a natural development, albeit one carefully separated from the compassionate ministrations of those who chant sutras. This divine protection was of a spiritual nature, while the offering was very much physical, nonetheless, the village continued to prosper for at least the next one hundred years.
The Ascended lived on the mountains on the other side of the Tsue River. They appeared as (or were) very large lean unkempt men, possibly two metres tall, always naked, with unusually large genitals. They appeared almost witless, with slack faces but strangely staring eyes, apparently incapable of speech, physically strong, apparently driven only by bodily desires, but with at least some small amount of cunning in their pursuit. They disliked being enclosed indoors, and were not bothered by rain. And they had a strange and terrible aura about them, at once magnetic and bestial. In any case they could not, apparently, be injured or stopped. The Consorts said that they had a kind of earthy woodland smell which they found arousing, although the Ascended were presumably kept clean by having to swim or ford the mountain river separating their territory from the village.
The Night Visits took place in a large raised “dance pavilion” on the grounds of the shrine in front of the prayer hall, with a roof to protect from rain, but open enough around to satisfy the Ascended. The pavilion featured four raised wooden platforms covered with rush mats, as well as posts and railings for Consorts to use to display their bodies to the Ascended and to brace themselves during certain sex acts. On warm summer nights, sometimes one, sometimes two or three Ascended would approach the village, loudly grunting and shouting with their penises firmly erect. The road came past the shrine first, and when they heard the sounds of approaching Ascended, the Consorts would become flushed and aroused, and start moaning. Then they would strip naked and make their way to the pavilion, and moan and cry out to attract the Ascended to the shrine, like some animal mating ritual. Some would lie on the platforms, while others would stand against the railings to present their nude bodies. When the Ascended arrived, they would stare fixedly at the girls’ bodies as they approached them, and the Consorts would embrace them, stroke and kiss their swollen cocks, or present their wet cunts to them to be fucked from behind or on top, or kneel before them to suck their heavy penises and greedily swallow their cum as the Ascended grasped their heads, or do whatever it was the Ascended seemed to want.
The Ascended could be enticed but not controlled. Generally, each would pick a Consort, fondle or suck on her young tits, or grope her ass, and fuck her cunt or her face for no more than about two or three minutes. Then he would push his penis forward into her and copiously ejaculate inside her while loudly groaning, as she shuddered in climax, and then move on to another one. The other Consorts would assist by holding or fondling either of them, or compete to attract the attention of the Ascended, dancing and displaying themselves while wanking and moaning and calling out to be mounted next. After each Ascended had ejaculated his hot seed into five or six tight young Consort vaginas and occasionally throats, they would return back up the mountain, their now-sated wet and occasionally bloody cocks flopping as they left, while the Consorts, still naked, with fresh cum dripping down their thighs, bowed to them at the gate of the shrine in gratitude for their blessing. These Visits would repeat more-or-less randomly, on average about every two or three nights, and typically for as long as the weather stayed warm, around fifteen to twenty times in a season.
This seemed to be enough to satisfy the passions of the Ascended for several days at a time at least, and they would not cause further trouble, or approach the village proper. If the arrangement was successful, it was only due to the reliable predictability of the Ascendeds’ behaviour. They ignored everyone besides the Consorts, and barely even acknowledged them except when fucking them or being sucked off. They were not put off by menstruation. They showed no interest in food or anything else besides sex, nor were they destructive provided their desires were not impeded. Nor did groups of Ascended ever fight among themselves or really seem to communicate with each other much at all, except to arrive and leave together. As much as possible, the Ascended were kept away from everyone else in the village: indeed this was the precise purpose of the shrine.
The Consorts naturally gave their own pet names to individual Ascended, and these were also used by the shrine priestess in her records. The Ascended showed no signs of recognising or responding to them, however. Around seven to twelve Ascended would come to the shrine over the course of a season, each one about three or four times. Some certainly preferred whether to come alone or in a group, but this was not a firm rule. Individual Ascended often seemed to have their own preferences to penetrate particular Consorts first, though they never seemed to compete with each other. For their part, Consorts frequently discussed the merits of this or that Ascended and how they fucked them, which ones were their favourites, how much semen they ended up swallowing, and so on.
In those days contraception was difficult, so a certain number of pregnancies inevitably resulted. These were never aborted. All village households besides those with serving Consorts were obliged to make certain material offerings to the shrine, and most of this supported the care of the “Children of the Ascended”, as they were known, and their mothers. As adults the Children did not particularly resemble Ascended or appear different in any way; for this reason it was assumed (correctly) that their fathers were once ordinary men who had “ascended” to their present state, although perhaps this simply meant that they lived high up in the mountains. None of the Ascended were recognised as particular individuals at the time, in any case.
“The season” lasted from about the solstice to the autumn equinox, although in practice the Ascended only ever turned up around the warmest six weeks. During the season the village girls selected as Consorts slept in a dormitory room attached to the Shrine. On nights when Ascended didn’t turn up they would assuage their incessant desires with various sex acts with themselves and each other, teasing and fondling each other’s bodies, licking each other’s pussies, or playing with penetrative toys and the like. Then they would fall asleep, often cuddling naked in pairs or threes, and were permitted to sleep late into the morning.
With six to ten hot-headed teenage girls living together in continual erotic frenzy isolated from the rest of the village and periodically competing with each other for monstrous penile attention, jealousies inevitably arose, especially as some Consorts were inevitably more popular than others. This was a particular problem when only one Ascended turned up to a Visit and did not get around to them all. It was the established practice of the Consorts to resolve tensions between themselves with mutual masturbation and oral sex, although the priestess of the shrine, almost always a middle-aged former Consort herself, sometimes had to intervene in disputes to maintain harmony.
The priestess, more of a ritualist perhaps, was usually from the Kuroki family, either directly or more often by marriage or adoption. The Kuroki family had funded much of the original shrine construction, and various other members remained responsible for its general administration and upkeep. She looked after the ordinary needs of the girls during the season, and they addressed her as “mother” during their time together. In exchange, the girls cleaned and maintained the pavilion and the rest of the shrine, tended its vegetable garden, drew water, prepared meals, preserved foods, laundered clothes, gathered fuel and wild plants, made small repairs, cared for sickness and injuries amongst themselves, assisted the priestess with preparations, and so forth, tasks that if nothing else provided welcome distraction from their unceasing physical urges.
The priestess also ritually purified the Consorts beforehand, and attended each Visit in vestments to formally greet the Ascended as they arrived, by deeply bowing before them, although they never responded. When the Ascended left she would lead the naked Consorts in bowing to them again, before seeing that the girls washed up and went to bed. She also monitored the Consorts’ safety, such as it was, and intervened where appropriate, such as she could, although she had no more control over the behaviour of the Ascended than anyone else. She also carefully recorded the details of each copulative act.
A special council was responsible for selecting Consorts, and took care to maintain at least six at any time, for the safety of the village. Being selected as a Consort was not typically voluntary, though there were certainly exceptions. A girl would have to be unmarried, of at least fertile age, healthy, suitably pretty, not herself the child of an Ascended, and not the sister of another Consort. Girls who had previously served as Consorts and gotten pregnant were also exempt, even if they had miscarried. Girls from larger families were somewhat preferred, to even out the burden on the village. A girl’s service would last until she got pregnant, and in any case never longer than five seasons, after which she would not serve again.
A new Consort would typically be apprehensive before her first Visit. On hearing the approaching Ascended, the other Consorts would take hold of her, forcibly strip her and carry her to the pavilion, restrain her front-facing on one of the railings, and hold and rub her body-to-body and moan in her ear while stroking her clit, while waiting for the Ascended to arrive. Her first encounter with an aroused Ascended usually terrified her, and very often two other Consorts would have to forcibly hold her legs open to properly “present” her to him, while another stroked and slathered his penis with a carrageenan lubricant made from red seaweed. The Ascended would then push his huge lubed member into her tight young pussy, inevitably causing her to cry out. The whole experience, from initial terror to forcible penetration to ejaculation and (usually) her own violent orgasm, would make her enter a kind of dissociated trance state, where nothing seemed real. This would typically persist until the next day, and then give way to intense sexual fantasies and desire for the Ascended, together with bodily feelings frequently described in terms such as “like shining fire everywhere in my body” or “burning everywhere without pain” and accompanied by frequent masturbation. After about her third or fourth Visit, though, the girl would generally calm down somewhat, or at least learn to manage her feelings, although her service would continue to be very eager for the rest of the season.
After the season ended, the Consorts largely forgot their sexual frenzy and obsession with the Ascended, at least until the start of the next one. They returned to their households, and if they hadn’t gotten pregnant, lived normally. During this time, the girls typically reported that they felt neither desire nor disgust for the Ascended, but perhaps some abstract fondness, and recalled the Visits in a kind of unreal reverie, as if they had only been imagined or dreamt. They often showed “normal” romantic interest for their age at this time, although it was clearly much informed by their half-forgotten experiences, and tended to focus on older men rather than boys their age, and also with a strong sexual and genital focus with themes of being physically dominated. In any case, the village strictly forbade any actual involvement until their service was over. Serving Consorts were not entirely forbidden from contact with each other out of season, particularly as such a prohibition would be impractical in normal village life, though it was broadly discouraged where possible.
The beginning and end of the Visiting season were marked with festivals at the shrine, organised by the Kuroki family and ritually led by the priestess. At the festival beforehand, the village gathered to bless and purify the Consorts, and to pacify the “rough spirit” of the Ascended. At the ending festival, the village formally expressed gratitude to the Consorts, especially to those whose service was complete, prayed for the safety of any pregnancies, and asked the spirits of the Ascended for their protection over the village. The Consorts also had their own private informal “warm-up” ritual on their first night of the season at the Shrine, involving singing and dancing in a circle naked outdoors, which was repeated a few weeks later when they heard the Ascended approach for the first time. The songs recounted how beautiful each Ascended was, how much the Consorts wished them to come, what they planned to do with them, and so on, sentiments not much shared by the rest of the village despite their formal respect.
The beautiful men with shining faces
will soon come to fetch us;
holding us in their arms,
they will carry us away to the high peak.
The Shrine was off-limits to everyone else during the season, especially to males, except for medical care and urgent repairs, and boys of the village were strictly forbidden to court serving Consorts at any time of year, as they were held to be “married to the Ascended”, albeit temporarily. This inevitably gave rise to a certain amount of drama and shenanigans. Besides that, in recognition of their sacrifice for the safety of the village, Consorts were treated with a certain degree of care and solicitude, and many did go on to marry after their service.
How many Ascended actually lived in the mountains across the Tsue river was never precisely known. Nor was it known, for example, how they lived, or what they ate, or whether female Ascended existed. There were no bridges over the river, and rare expeditions into their territory either found nothing, or else did not return. Or occasionally they would find the remains of previous intruders, apparently killed by blunt force. Occasionally Consorts and former Consorts would run off and cross the river into their territory: these were never seen again nor were their bodies ever recovered – it can only be hoped that they found what they were looking for.
At least two kabuki plays feature the Ascended, both said to derive from tales from Higo province. One is a comedy of an older widow who, missing her late husband, manages to become a Consort, only to discover the Ascended seem uninterested in her no matter what sexy antics she gets up to. Undeterred, she comes up with an absurd plan, and much ribald hijinks ensue. The other is a tragedy about a boy in love with a girl who is selected to be a Consort, leading to his eventual and inevitable destruction at the rough hands of three Ascended (who do actually have gruff spoken lines, curiously).
Nowadays there have been no reports of anything resembling Ascended around Kurobuchi or anywhere else for almost a century, and even some of the later accounts are dubious. The Night Visits are long since over, the last Consort long dead, and the traditionally-forbidden territory of the Ascended has also long been settled. The shrine still exists however, and indeed prayers are still offered there to the spirits of the long-departed Ascended, still said to protect the area. The dance pavilion is also still there, although without its old furniture. Nevertheless, popular DNA testing services have revealed certain unexpected relationships, and together with the comprehensive shrine records, the identity of three past Ascended can be determined with reasonable confidence. All such were apparently-normal teenage boys who entered remote mountain regions or forests and were not seen by their communities again. Surprisingly, in all cases, they had disappeared more than five years earlier and over 100km away from where they first appeared as Ascended on the road to Kurobuchi.