The Great Conquest · Part 4

The Great Conquest · Part 4 (4/4)
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tative of an demon whose identity she's not divulged.

Severa collapses to the floor and the higher-ups of the backwater orc nation trip over themselves to thank the imp. Director El collapses into a chair in dizzied relief. Joy responds with quiet superiority, nodding and shaking the hands of senators. Fivette is crying but no one is paying attention beyond making sure she's secured in the cage, the director's cuffs holding her in place.

Nerves rattled and security on the alert, the auction goes forward as planned. The bidding is sedate compared to the drunken revelry of an hour ago, and tension is sharp. A mere one third of those bidding are orcs or ogres. Another fifteen hail from the southern caverns – drow, grey dwarves, cloud elves, and a single illicit with tendrils waving from below its heavy hood. The rest include a sphinx, a human thrall possessed by its dragon lord, and Joy of Regret.

Fivette, quite scandalized at having had a lethal weapon pointed at her, weeps and shivers as the bidding starts. Within moments it becomes clear that there are only three serious contenders at play: a lady of the drow, her lovely form shrouded in layers of gauzy spider silk; the sphinx, a huge feline form with a head and chest like a bust of an ogre-sized man chiseled from coppery stone; and Joy of Regret, not much taller than the halfling bound cruelly at her feet and with a tendency to hunch over, raptor-like eyes concealed behind glasses tinted orange, the stumpy horns over her brow a more metallic blue than the wood-like grain of her face. Her billowing black coat leaves bare only her face, framed by locks of black hair, and her legs, covered in fine black fur and ending in the paws of an animal slid into wooden sandals.

Joy only places a bid when the drow and sphinx hesitate for a few moments, letting them have it out. The sphinx soon drops out, and Joy goes head to head with the drow. She only ever counters with the minimum allowed increase to the drow's bid, no sense of drama, little affect, never hesitating in the least. Incensed, the drow places a bid she regrets a moment later when she realizes she can't pay it without going bankrupt – and is relieved a moment later when the imp counters it just as mechanically. Joy nods as her victory becomes plain, and the director invites her to her offices to discuss payment, having Fivette brought along.

Joy picks up Severa as she follows, showing no strain as she shoulders a strap and hoists the halfling off the ground. The mood they leave behind is sour; quite apart from the threat to their lives the other bidders feel they were never within reach of the princess at all.

~ 4 ~ 8 ~ The Ocharein, vast tracts of fertile land subducted under drooping mountains by some arcane process of tectonics, the breadbasket of crevices worming deep into the earth and of mountains carved into grand citadels, is the northern borderland of the drow empire. A broad trade road leads across it, bridging the human and orc nations with those beneath the lofty Cloudsborne Mountains. So it's the Ocharein's lantern-lit fields, worked mostly by grey dwarves and drowmen, that were Forthlin Aer's introduction to the land of drow.

Now the Musashi Company's convoy has passed beyond this borderland into Pantermaw, a low-roofed cavern of hard stone that descends for miles in a gentle slope. The giant war construct that accompanied them thus far is abandoned in favor of a few extra contingents of Musashi guards-dwarves. The Pantermaw is at the border of the grey dwarves' territory and is itself a fairly direct route between the Ocharein and the Grand Cathedral Cavern, making it ripe for trade but also the scene of fierce military and political maneuvers whenever tensions rise between the drow and the dwarves.

The auction of Forthlin and the others she's been brought here with takes place about halfway down the Pantermaw. The Musashi Company puts on a good show, and Forthlin is sold to a traveling party of silk-wrapped nuns from an isolated bore-convent. They pay worship to a yul-tha-sog, a bore demon, summoned into the world four hundred years ago. In exchange the demon sinks gradually downward, leaving a mile-wide empty shaft and eating any trespassers other than members of its convent. However, since the demon will leave for its own world as soon as it's not bound here by worship, the drow will eventually have ample resources and real estate out of the deal.

The up-front cost of the summons is rather hefty, but the operations can last for millenia, and since they're well-defended by the demon itself they require only a handful of nuns each to sustain the worship, supported by a few servants each.

Altogether the convent, suspended over the roughly octagonal shaft, holds around fifty people. It's a rambling but sturdy arrangement of cloudwood held aloft by the ferrous webbing supplied by the convent's coop of ironwatchers. They keep chickens too, only slightly larger than the spiders, and a couple of undermountain goats. They import plenty of luxuries, Forthlin included, but they cultivate enough of their own food to be self-sufficient for quite a long time if need be.

The nuns, well capable of defending themselves and their purchases, trek for days along a crevasse at the bottom of the Pantermouth, one of a fan of offshoots that are being slowly developed as the yul-tha-sogs at their termini work their way into the stone. As more and more resources are uncovered, futures in each convent sell at more and more of a premium, driving up the value of the crevasse's real estate as well as shares of the particular bore's futures, which the nuns sell off continuously to support themselves.

As the traveling party arrives at the boreshaft, elegant Sister Umi pulls forward Forthlin, arms and torso bound in silk, big fuzzy ears twitching with nerves, collared and leashed. Sister Yria comes forward too, producing a small blue-tinged jar, and Forthlin breathes a quick sigh of relief. She's been worried for Yria's purchase from the Pantermaw, picked out from a shop specializing in imported goods from the Cloudsborne Mountains above. Though rare in human lands, cloud fairies are common enough in the Mountains that the flesh markets don't even bother with them. Most people just find them annoying, but a fair number of drow enjoy subjecting them to torments in miniature.

Sister Yria opens the jar and fishes out the protesting fairy, a three inch tall woman with tangled red hair, dragonfly-like wings crumpled around her. The sister smirks as she pins the pathetic thing in one fist, ignoring its whining and the beat of its papery wings against her.

The other two nuns lower Forthlin to the floor as well. They cut one of her forearms with a sharp knife and hold it over the edge of the black pit. As drops of blood fall to the bottom, they sing an incantation that designates Forthlin a devotee of the yul-tha-sog. Her feelings on the matter don't factor into whether it will eat her as soon as she passes over this threshold, only her newly bestowed status. She doesn't understand any of their singing except for her name, which she was forced to tell them when they purchased her.

They go through the same rigamarole with the cloud fairy, holding her over the hole and extracting a tiny drop of blood. Her hollering is impressive for a being of her size. Her name, Forthlin gathers, is Eit.

The nuns stow Eit and Sister Umi leads Forthlin across a suspension bridge, the deergirl's shoulders brushing against the ironwatcher-web supports. If it was any narrower she'd have to walk sideways, and without the use of her arms she could fall – it would have to be a really awkward fall to get over the netting around the sides but she feels it could happen – and the only one holding her up would be Sister Umi, a skilled mage but a slender and delicate one…

She tries not to look down. The floor of the shaft is steeped in darkness, but there's certainly movement down there, sinuous and unsettling. She has no idea how deep it is either, the sheer scale of things and the total darkness past the lights of the convent confusing her sense for it.

The three nuns are greeted in the convent's gatehouse by each one's contingent of servants as well as the sister on watch. Sister Umi and Sister Mag have two drow servants each, and now Umi has Forthlin as well. Sister Yria keeps one drow, one harpy, and one cloud elf, plus Eit.

The returning sisters shrug off the shrouding silk in which they wrap themselves when leaving the convent. Underneath, they wear the same uniform as Sister Ruta, who's turned back to the entry bridge, keeping watch: a leotard of metallic silver cloth, high-necked but with ample cutouts at the chest and back and sitting quite high of leg as well; fingerless gloves of white leather and a heavy silver bracer on each arm; funkenwood sandals with an inch of heel, tied on with silvery ribbons; and silver ornaments in their tightly-plaited stark white hair.

The clothes of their servants are not so flashy: a silken breechcloth tied with a leather cord around the waist; wooden sandals held on with cord rather than ribbons; a flimsy silk vest open in front, not even ribcage-length, the name in drow characters of the particular sister they serve embroidered on the back; and lastly a slender collar, a simple silver loop.

Umi's other servants are excited to take Forthlin to the dormitories and get her cleaned and outfitted. They're a pair of nearly-identical drow, and perhaps the novelty of a deer-girl is refreshing when so much of their existence is routine, because they pet and exclaim over her through the whole process. The rather conservative drow of the convent, even the other servants, tend to view above-grounders as oddly-clever pets, especially those who don't speak their language, and most especially a deergirl like Forthlin, whose antlers, big ears, and fluffy tail are marks against her.

With no fairie-sized uniform on hand, Sister Yria finds a simpler solution. In her private workshop she holds Eit down with the fingers of one hand as her other wields a scalpel. She slices lines through the skin of the helpless fairie's abdomen and thighs, none-too-neatly forming the characters of Yria's name. The fairie herself did her best not to make good penmanship easy, it seems. Additionally with a curved needle and a sturdy strand of silk Yria sews along the top edge of one wing, through the skin of her center back, and to the tip of the other wing; with another pass through her back Yria ties the ends together tight enough that she can't extend her wings and any movement of them is uncomfortable for her.

Yria keeps Eit in a jar for a few days to allow her time to heal, taking her out at breakfast and suppertime to rub her wounds with a paste of herbs that encourage clean scarring as well as stinging quite badly. Once her wounds have closed, Yria takes her out and wraps cords around her ankles and wrists in a strict hogtie, suspending her by it from a braided belt she wears at her waist.

From then on she carries Eit slung beside her hip most of the time, picking her up and fidgeting with her when she's got idle hands. Since so much of fairies' respiration occurs through their wings anyway, Yria typically quiets her pet's incessant complaints by simply keeping her mouth stuffed with cotton-like fibers (occasionally soaked in drow piss if Yria's feeling particularly nasty) and wrapping her entire head in thick silk dyed black.

Forthlin's duties are, though more complex than Eit's, not much less unpleasant or humiliating. In addition to waiting on Sister Umi hand and foot and servicing her sexually, she also has more than her fair share of drudge work, tending crops and livestock and keeping the convent clean and maintained. She's slow to learn the language and Umi often gets frustrated when she can't communicate her orders

Though worship of the yul-tha-sog is the central purpose of the convent, the day-to-day prayers and rituals are the domain only of the sisters themselves. However, there is one practice, a rite of appeasement, in which the sisters include their servants.

Suspended at the center of the convent on arm-thick lines of webbing is a complex arrangement of magically-charged metalwork, hung with crystals and wrought into delicate spirals. A huge, rectangular cage, its top replete with similar curlicues, hangs beneath it, accessed by the series of suspended catwalks that connect all the convent's structures. One hair-thin line, visible only in its faint bluish shimmer, is inscribed vertically from the top of the cage, and it's this unbreakable and variably-long thread the magical circuitry above is designed to evoke.

Each fortnight, eight of the coven's fourteen sisters, along with each one's retinue, file into this sturdy elevator. Though suspended from a single filament, the cage never shakes, swings, or rotates in its steady descent into the dark pit below.

The appeasement is performed the very day after Forthlin's arrival to the coven, but neither Sister Umi nor Sister Yria participate, still weary from the road. Therefore, it's not until the start of her third week on the job that Forthlin enters the cage hung on its elevator filament, surprised at how rock-steady the contraption is even as the congregation steps inside.

Sister Umi is the first through the door and leads her three charges to stand against the far wall. She and the other sisters are still in their silver leotards, but the less privileged members of the convent leave their clothes behind. Forthlin, nude, stands huddled close to Umi and her drow servants Ime and Imit as the elevator becomes crowded. Imit – or possibly Ime, Forthlin's lost track again – places a hand on the deergirl's trembling, dark-freckled shoulder, speaking a few reassuring words in the drow tongue. Forthlin doesn't understand very well, but what she saw two weeks ago when the cageful of exhausted worshippers returned from the pit was not reassuring. She feels herself tremble.

As the iron cage drops noiselessly into the dark, the convent falls away and only one dim red orb of light fixed to the cage's ceiling illuminates the members of the coven. Forthlin, not wishing to gaze into the abyss, watches Sister Yria in the nightmarish light put Eit in her mouth from the waist down, sucking and licking and nibbling and ignoring the pathetic thing's struggles. Then Forthlin's distracted by Ime, or Imit, pulling her into an embrace. Umi amuses herself through the long, silent minutes in teasing Forthlin from behind as Ime sticks her tongue in the deergirl's mouth and gropes her ass. Forthlin surrenders and forgets her dread for a few moments.

When the cage comes to a halt the three drow finally untangle themselves from their toy and Forthlin casts a wary glance through the bars. An acrid scent hangs in the air. The cage rests on a smooth surface, but in the scant light she can't tell what kind. It's only when she finally gets out of the elevator that her hooves hit the ground and she realizes it's some kind of bone or ivory. Antlers? She shivers.

Sister Taina, face solemn, speaks an incantation and brings another globe of red-drenched light into being. It hovers midway between the cage and a circular depression several paces from its door, a couple meters wide and with wide pillars on either side, sculpted into rough ivory hands like a giant's growing from the surrounding crags of bone. The imprint into the ground is smoother than the rest, and from a black-streaked hole in the very center comes a slight waft of steam. When Sister Taina approaches it and the thirty-odd others down here keep pace, that earlier feeling of dread flies back at Forthlin full-force.

Then Taina kneels down and climbs into the hole on a ladder set into one side, and her servants follow, and then the rest of the coven after them, one at a time climbing out of sight with measured steps. In the last two weeks, Forthlin hasn't pushed back against her captors much. What could it possibly get her? She avoids conflict by nature, and has no interest in antagonizing those who hold such complete power over her fate. But there's a limit to her passivity, and that line is the lip of the bowl-shaped depression overhung by those massive hands.

As the crowd drains down the pit like sands through the hourglass, Forthlin is drawn closer in. She dares not set hoof in the shallow depression for fear she'll slip on the smooth surface right into the shaft. She can see down it for a body length or two. It's only barely wide enough that the shoulders of the girls climbing down it never touch the other wall. She doesn't know what the dark streaks up the sides are, but a heavy warmth emanates from it, smelling of eggs, not sulphurous but not pleasant either.

Sister Umi notices Forthlin's hesitation. She commands the deergirl to come, but it only causes her to freeze in place. "I can't," Forthlin says, and repeats it in the tongue she's now learning. When Umi grabs her arm and jerks her toward the hole, Forthlin's knees buckle and she sits down.

"I can't," she repeats, "my hooves." She gestures at them, then at the heavy ladder rungs set into the shaft. She can climb wooden ladders, but she doesn't like the notion of trying to scale this one without shoes. Perhaps she'd try it if she could stand back up, but her willpower simply won't carry her into the horrible opening.

Umi seems to understand and turns to issue instructions to Ime and Imit, handing them a coil of silk rope from her bag. They grin and set to trussing up Forthlin like a venison roast, and in a flash they've got a harness that can support her weight without injuring her. That's not to say without pain, because when they drag Forthlin over to the hole and lower her down, crying and shaking, the rope digs into her tender parts quite cruelly.

The streaked ivory of the narrow shaft gives way to a cavern of some softer material, the rungs of the ladder set into its shorter side. The air is warm, which should be a relief given her state of dress, except it's humid enough she breaks out in a sweat across the expanse of her bare back. Another red light bathes the space, and Forthlin feels sick at the unreal colors. The ground is slick and could be gray or red, she can't tell the difference. With trepidation she squats to touch it and shudders when she realizes it's hotter than the air itself.

The few remaining worshippers climb down into the chamber, Ime and Imit kneeling beside Forthlin to comfort her with petting and reassuring words. Umi rolls her eyes and joins the other sisters in a quiet chant, the result of which is that, with a faint groaning sound, the floor rises up on the side of the room with the ladder and seals them all in a roughly dome-shaped chamber.

Forthlin falls over when the floor pitches and scrambles to get away only for Umi to grab her by the hair and throw her to the floor. "Shut up and be still or you'll regret it," she spits. Forthlin gets the gist and huddles trembling in place.

Her fear is justified, however: the red-bathed floor and ceiling of the cavern bloom into a morass of writhing tendrils. Long and thin, short and round, stubby or pointed, they all have a common goal, or rather a score of them. Each of the nude offerings is grabbed and pulled into some compromising position, leaving only the eight sisters relatively untouched, though a few tendrils caress their ankles.

Forthlin finds herself suspended in a hogtie. The demonflesh that wraps around her, tugging at her fingers and hooves and tweaking her swollen nipples, has a texture like a slightly-fuzzy slug shrouding an inviolate core of something hard yet perfectly flexible. The point of each tendril opens into a tiny mouth, no wider than a finger and rimmed with tiny needlelike teeth. Fat twin tentacles wrap her hanging breasts and squeeze them, then turn to fasten their sucker-mouths right over her nipples. When they bite closed and begin to suck, Forthlin wails, only for another tendril to force its way past her teeth.

She chokes and sobs as it closes its mouth around the end of her tongue and pulls it out of her mouth, holding it tight enough she works to keep it extended as far as she can. A few small ones lace around her hands before enrobing her pointer and little fingers up to the knuckle, gnawing gently.

Sister Yria, nearby, releases Eit from her belt and into the custody of a cluster of five tendrils. They swallow up each of her limbs and the last one slithers between her legs before enveloping her whole head, pulling it backward and simply breathing oxygen into the fairy's mouth and nose.

The sea of tendrils begins working its victims into a frenzy of pain and pleasure intermingled, while the eight sisters hit or pinch or kiss or caress their slaves, hoping to add to that overwhelming flood of sensation. Slender tongues unfurl from the mouths of the tendrils and lap at the fluids emitted by the sacrifices, trailing a slick of salty goo in their wake.

It's not until the tendrils have wrung every drop of sweat and juices out of their prey and the girls hang limp that the sisters take off their leotards and fuck each other in the center of the chamber, letting the tendrils sip at the aftermath, though they never intrude past the sisters' lips or cheeks as they so delighted in doing to the sacrifices.

Only when the sisters have all made their offerings to the mouths of the demon do the tendrils unwind from the exhausted and slime-slick sacrifices. Forthlin tries her best to get up the ladder on her own, but the demon's slippery spit only makes it harder. Ime and Imit have to pull her up as they lower her, and to add insult to injury as soon as she's out of the damp air of the demon's insides the spit hardens into a thin crust of salt over her skin and all through her hair and fur.

As the cage returns to the top of the shaft with its considerably-more-bedraggled passengers, Forthlin leans against its bars for support. She's out of tears to cry, but she also came more and harder than she ever could have imagined. The feeling of having been ravaged by a demon and covered in its weird spit is a filthy one, but it has nothing on the feeling of having, on some level, enjoyed it.

~ 5 ~ 7 ~ Joy of Regret, leading Princess Fivette and her would-be savior Severa on enchanted leashes, makes good time over the mountains. The two girls are nude aside from the ropes wound around their arms and chests, though Joy easily maintains a bubble of warm air around their caravan of three even in the chill autumn nights. On their feet are tied slippers whose careful embroidery lends the two the same lightness of step enjoyed by Joy herself, allowing them to travel as long and fast as the finest steed and to outpace any possible trouble along the road. The leashes, meanwhile, render recalcitrance impossible as the collar moves with an irresistible force whenever the holder of the leash gives it even the slightest tug. For all their dread at reaching their destination, the pair of slaves make every effort not to let the leash go taut lest they be dragged forward by the neck.

The Alabaster Keep squats in the southern foothills of the Cloudsbornes, at the borderlands of a vast empire to which the orcish nation is a barbarian backwood. The wagon road through the pass to the north is maintained by the Temphet corporation of the grey dwarves, whose oligarchy among the states north of the Keep deals most closely with the empire. This, through company towns pulling lumber, ore, and flesh out of the mountains, is the orcish trade route to the Keep. Joy of Regret has followed along it for the most part, though her little caravan can skip switchbacks by simply leaping off cliffs and landing light as a cat with the aid of her magic.

Where at last the rock of the mountains falls away, Fivette and Severa are astonished not only at the pure white of the squat cylinder that rises from within the Keep's curtain wall but at the number of wagons that throng its front gates. Colorful tents and market stalls spill down its approach.

Joy circumvents the crowd, taking her captives to a rear entrance of the keep mostly used by military patrols. Her demonhood is obvious enough to the guards there, who let her through having barely glanced at her identifying papers.

The grounds within the curtain wall hold many quartering and administration buildings, but Joy makes right for the hundred-foot-high wall of white. She digs a heavy silver key from her rucksack and brandishes it high as they approach. The white surface pulls apart to reveal a doorway set behind it, wood painted bright red.

A door to the Center of Everything.

The Great Conquest · Part 4 (4/4)
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