He made no pretense of being human. He had probably be human once, but his form had long since been corrupted beyond recognition. He was still humanoid, at least, bipedal with a face and two arms, even if he was perpetually hunched forward like a beast. Grey musculature lay exposed, slimy and uncovered by skin. Spines of gray bone, like blades, stuck out from his back and arms. Three pairs of black eyes stared out from his flat, hairless face, and he had no nose but for two nostrils. If he had a mouth at all they had never seen it – the bottom of his face flowed smoothly into dozens of writhing tentacles that swayed and grasped anything that came nearby.
He made no pretense at being friendly, either. Alassiel and Liriel had come to know him well over the past months. Cerec — their primary tormentor, the Avatar of Blackwand.
Cerec was at least as twisted and sadistic as his master Lahk was. He had freely told them that his purpose was to make them suffer, to shatter their souls into fragments so that Blackwand could feed off their torment and grow stronger for it. It was the entire reason for his existence according to him: to torture, rape, and cause the suffering of the women under his care, within the prison of the black steel sword.
And Alassiel had to admit the foul smelling beast was quite good at it.
25 years ago, 6 months after Sirae’s disappearance, somewhere in Silas
“Lissa, we found her.”
Lissa awoke with a start, the words ringing in her ears and ruthlessly banishing her sleep. She had barely begun to rest, but that hardly seemed important at the moment. The words weren’t specific, but they didn’t have to be, either. There was only one she that they could refer to.
The druid threw the cover she had pulled over herself minutes ago. “Where is she?”
Elide reached down a hand to the young elf and pulled her to her feet. “According to some of the humans, the goddess was seen at Sanguinar’s temple at Accida Ridge.”
Lissa bit her lip as fury burned the nervousness from the elf. “So Sanguinar did betray his truce.” She clenched her fists. “Madman!”
The elder elf nodded, her own hand clenched on her sword. “Indeed. If the humans are trustworthy.”
Biting her lip again, Lissa turned to look at the warrior. The ancient elf was beautiful, but in a cruel way. Her features were harsh and biting, long black hair pulled back severely into a braid. Her eyes, though the same color as her hair, seemed to more closely resemble the steel leaves that Elide had woven into the braid — hard and cold.
“You don’t believe them?”
Elide snorted. “After what Sanguinar has done? You do?”
“He is hardly representative of an entire people,” Lissa said with a sigh. “They’re not demons, Elide.”
“They aren’t like us either,” she said, and the tone of her voice suffered no disagreement. Lissa did not agree, but she knew better than to argue with the woman when she was like this, and let it go. Together the pair walked towards the command tent in the middle of the camp, where Elide slept and the army’s other commanders met with her.
Elide was one of the oldest elves in existence, Lissa knew, but she barely looked older than she had upon her twentieth birthday. Elves enjoyed an eternal life, if violence did not cut it short in the same way so many other lives had been ended by this bloody war. Elide would look like a young woman for the rest of her life… except in her eyes. When Lissa looked into the woman’s eyes, she could briefly see all five hundred years of the woman’s existence and it scared her, in the same way the woman’s xenophobia scared her.
Lissa might admire the woman’s strength, her dedication, and her loyalty to her people, but she never wanted to become like her.
“Come,” Elide said with a gesture. Lost in her musing, Lissa realized she had fallen several steps behind and hurried to catch up. The warrior raised the flap of the tent for the druid. “The royal family is here to give us the news in person.”
“By the gods you can’t suck for shit,” Cerec roared, knocking Liriel away from him with a vicious backhand. The slight elf girl went flying, lifted completely off her feet from the force of the blow, her short white hair trailing behind her.
The avatar pressed his foot down more strongly, and Alassiel tried to cry out through her bruised throat as Liriel watched from where Cerec has thrown her. Cerec had kept the red haired elf pinned to the ground by her neck the entire time he was coaching the sobbing younger girl in how to suck his monstrous cock properly, and his weight was slowly suffocating Alassiel beneath him. Her blue eyes were wide, the golden flecks within them shining with desperation for air.
“If you would like you friend here to be able to breathe, get your sexy ass back over here,” he said, “and when you suck on your god’s cock, do it properly.” He ground his foot down again to prove his point, and Alassiel instinctively thrashed. His voice sounded like something that had to bubble through water before it was heard, more of a gurgle than common speech.
“I’m doing it, just please don’t hurt her.” Liriel slowly climbed back to her hands and knees and started to crawl towards the pair. Cerec rarely bothered to bind them, but in the pair of months since she had died in the flames of Blackwand even a firebrand like Alassiel had learned that resisting Cerec was hopeless. Within the part of the untamed lands that made up this prison, he was all but a god… the environment bent itself entirely to his will, and he seemed nigh omnipotent. He preferred to dominate the woman under his care by subjugating them purely with his power, so although Liriel was free to move her limbs, she could not find a better use for that freedom than to submissively crawl back towards her rapist.
From her position on the ground, Alassiel looked towards her sister-in-suffering. The younger elf was barely out of her childhood as her people considered it, not yet into her fourth decade. She appeared to the world as a human woman of twenty or so, eternally frozen in time at the moment of maturity. The albino woman was almost deathly pale, red eyes shining out from beneath short, white hair. Months ago Cerec had shone her mane off for the humiliation of it, but in had regrown to at least a short length. Elegant black tattoos swirled like vines over her pale skin, caressing her body and marking where eyrn eregdos had once flowed beneath her skin before Lahk had torn it out. The scars adorning her dark marking gave tribute to the cruel way he had stripped her magic and identity from the elf. For all that she had suffered, however, her eyes still shone with… not so much innocence as a kind of ignorance, an ability to miss seeing what the world was and instead idealistically see it the way it should be.
Cerec grabbed the elf savagely as soon as Liriel got within the range of his powerful arms and pulled her to kneel atop Alassiel’s prone body. She started brutally gagging immediately, and the older elf could tell that the avatar had again crammed his enormous cock into the small woman’s mouth.
“Relax your throat, stupid whore!” his voice bubbled viciously from his throat, half words and half a watery growl. “Swallow it, take it all the way in!”
It didn’t matter what she did, Alassiel knew. The cock was simply too big for the small woman, too big for anyone.
Alassiel’s fire red hair lay strewn about her face on the floor like a bloody halo. Lithe sets of muscles writhed beneath her skin as the elf struggled for air beneath Cerec’s crushing weight, pressing moderately sized breasts into the dirt beneath them. A similar set of tattoos, broken by a similar set of brutal scars, covered her skin but her set was far more intricate than the younger druid had. The spirals and whorls of the symbiotic plant showed the depth of its integration with the druid, and increased the longer they lived in the same body. While Alassiel was not even middle aged by her standards of an elven life, she had lived nearly three times as long as her former apprentice had and eyrn eregdos reflected the difference.
The scarlet maned elf was covered by far more scars than her young apprentice, however, and she was glad of the mercy. Liriel had only been forced to endure Lahk’s brutal attentions for a matter of hours. Alassiel had suffered at his hands for almost a year, and her body would never recover from many of the wounds that had been inflicted on her.
Of course, now that she was dead, that hardly seemed to matter.
Alassiel could do little but watch the fantastically beautiful young elf, barely a third of her age, unwillingly sucking Cerec’s monstrous cock. She could see the revulsion in Liriel’s eyes while she gagged, the cock pressing savagely against her throat and slowly forcing its way into the too-small opening. Cerec shoved another inch deeper into Liriel’s mouth and grunted with pleasure.
Alassiel Le’lorinel was not the name she had been born with. Once she had been Lissa Tel’darin, Archdruid of the elven nation of Caladwen, and apprentice of the goddess Sirae. Lissa was dead now, killed by Lahk. Under his brutal instruction, she had been humiliatingly renamed Athuum, turned into a whore for the church’s use until the elf had attempted to kill herself, throwing herself to her death from a balcony. The elf had survived the fall, but Athuum had not — that sad, pathetic creature was as dead as Lissa now.
Alassiel had given herself the new name as an oath of vengeance against the priest of Sanguinar. When she had sworn herself to the demon queen Kardas as a revenant, she had been willing to throw away that final life as a price for revenging herself upon her abuser… and now that life had been snuffed out, dying Blackwand’s cold fire as penalty for her failed attempt to kill the high priest.
“That’s alright, bitch!” came that sinister voice again. “Swallow that rod, cunt!” He grasped the elf’s head behind her pointed ears, roughly shoving more and then more of his filthy swollen cock into her mouth and down into her throat. “Suck it harder, bitch! That’s it, suck it! Lick it all over. Take more of it slut!” Liriel gagged and tried to gasp for air, but her breathing was completely blocked. Cerec held his cock buried deep in Liriel’s hot, tight throat while he watched her face first flush, then go blue as she began to suffocate. “I want you to suck it all. I want to fuck your mouth like it’s a cunt, you elf whore! Harder!”
Liriel’s naked, sweaty body writhed beside him, unable to escape his grip on her. Her small breasts rubbed against Cerec’s legs as she strained to get away to breathe, but it was little use. Her throat had spasm after spasm, trying in vain to clear the blockage that was choking the life out of the young girl.
Without giving a warning Cerec pulled Liriel off of his cock. There was an audible popping noise as the seal on her throat was broken, followed by a desperate gasping for air as Liriel collapsed to the ground, no longer held on her knees by the avatar’s strength. “Pathetic, whore!” Cerec said, his hands curling into fists by his side. He looked down at the fiery elf beneath his foot. “I hope you can do better.”
Three men and a woman waited inside the tent, all wearing the azure and gold of the royal house of Silas. They turned to face the flap as Lissa answered, then returned to the task of minding their arms and armor. All four of the royals were ready for a battle, the druid saw, and that surprised her.
The royal house of Silas was neutral. That was just an accepted fact of life for the elf, and a constant that she had been able to structure her beliefs around. They weren’t going to take sides in the conflict between Sanguinar and her queen. They existed to rule the kingdom, and to enforce the law — and they had no legal standing to interfere in the war between two religions.
“Tell her what you told me,” Elide said, her tone clipped.
One of the four turned back to the two elves, leaning a spear against the table. He was a young man, Lissa saw, probably in his mid to low twenties. He wore his dark hair short, allowing it to flow free in a fashionable disregard for neatness, and he wore a short beard and goatee. The emblem of Caer stood prominently on his breastplate, proclaiming the man a priest of the God of Justice.
He was entirely too handsome, Lissa thought… until he opened his damned mouth.
“As you wish, my dear Elide,” he responded, with his voice dripping with sarcasm as he rolled his eyes. “Since repeating my words is evidently too difficult?”
‘My goddess,’ Lissa thought, ‘he even smells smug.’
“When Sirae went missing six months ago, everyone suspected foul play…” the arrogant man said, staring right into Lissa’s eyes with disturbing intensity. “But when the armies of Sanguinar honored the truce he promised, no one was really sure what to think.
“Recently, however, our spies have been giving us some disturbing reports. Apparently the Lord of Suffering has not left his temple at Accida Ridge once in the two seasons since the goddess vanished, and it was enough to make us curious. At great risk, one of our men investigated.”
Lissa could hear the creak of Elide’s leather gloves on the hilt of her sword as the priest continued. “And we found the goddess imprisoned there.”
The druid smiled, turning to Elide. “How soon can our forces be ready to march?”
Elide was about to speak when the man interrupted. “Ours are ready now.” The comment was enough to make both elves look back to the human priest with confusion, which made him smile.
Elide’s eyes narrowed impatiently. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“I did not come alone, friends,” he said, putting strange emphasis on the last word. “If Sanguinar attacked and captured Sirae under oath of truce, it is a violation of realm law. I am here in my capacity as prince, in command of ten thousand souls to remedy this wrong and end the madness.”
He gave a mocking little bow to the flabbergasted pair of elven leaders. “I am Prince Liam, and if someone is to put the mad dog down, who better than a priest of Justice?”
Lissa was not sure what to say, but she knew exactly what she thought. She hated him already.
Alassiel cried.
She couldn’t help it. The tough elf, jaded as she was, always cried when she was being raped. Almost an entire year of abuse at the hands of Lahk had not taken the shame of it away from the former Archdruid. The loss of control, the humiliation, the weakness… it was always too much for even the confident elf she had once been. It was certainly too much for the broken whore she had become, being choked savagely by the cock raping her face.
Alassiel’s face was flushed with shame, tears running down her blushing face as Cerec used the gagging elf like a toy, pulling her up and down on his pole like she was less of a living being than she was an available hole, conveniently sized to be too small for his cock to easily fit into. When he pulled out and slapped his wet rod across the bridge of her nose, she flinched away from the heavy thud of the impact.
“Better than the other whore,” Cerec said with just the slightest hint of a pant. “But I suppose that’s inevitable after the number of cock’s you’ve sucked.” The avatar grabbed Alassiel’s hair and moved his cock next to her mouth. “Do you know how many that is? I doubt you can remember. You were even passed out for some of them.”
The monster leaned his bulky body down until his cock was pulled away from the sobbing elf and his lips were against her pointed ear. He lightly bit it, chewing gently on the tip as she cried harder. “But I remember. I know everything about you, Athuum.” He slowly unbent his hunched body, the cock returning to in front of her lips. Hesitantly but obediently, Alassiel opened her mouth. Cerec slowly pressed himself into her warm, wet mouth. “I know how many times your face has been raped, and how many different people have used it. I know how many people have cum inside you. I know which of the abuses crippled your womb, and where every scar on the inside and outside of your body came from.”
Alassiel moved her dexterous tongue over the surface of the fetid shaft in her mouth. She was constantly on the edge of vomiting with disgust at the horrible texture and rotting taste of the invading cock. If there was anything preferable about being more violently face-raped by the avatar, it was at least she didn’t much have to taste him. Cerec cherished the feeling of the raped elf semi-willingly humiliating herself by sucking on his cock for a while, sobbing while Cerec whispered more humiliating things to her. “Did you know you were the most profitable whore Lahk ever had?” Her sobs aroused him even more, especially as their sound was muffled by the enormous dick in her mouth.
“Just think how many soldiers you paid for. How many men, who are even now subjugating and raping your precious Caladwen, you purchased the loyalty of.” Cerec’s face was incapable of human expression, but his voice gained an amused tone like that of someone speaking through a smile. “A wonderful thought, isn’t it?” As the avatar of Blackwand watched tears run from the red maned elf, he decided he was done allowing her to humiliate herself — his desire to hurt the girl was rising again. Cerec grabbed the back of her head and pushed himself deep into the elf’s small mouth again.
Alassiel’s eyes opened wide as she felt the huge dick completely fill her mouth, causing a new string of choking noises. She tried to gasp for the air she knew she would need soon as Cerec pulled back his organ slightly. When he pushed himself in again, he went even deeper and as he withdrew his cock again to slowly begin a brutal face-fuck of the abused druid.
Alassiel, knowing better than to waste breath with begging, tried simply to breathe around the invading cock but could gain little air between Cerec pushing himself in and out, pounding her mouth like the cunt of a cheap whore. His mammoth cock was pushed so deep into her that he was almost completely robbing air from her, only periodically withdrawing far enough to let her successfully gasp in a breath around his dick.
For the avatar, this was perfection. Raping this fucktoy’s unwilling mouth was one of his favorite pastimes in the prison, despite the number of women he had to abuse on a regular basis. Her mouth was so warm and wet, and as she gagged her throat constricted around his cock in a tight massage. Even better was the way his abuse of her didn’t grow less humiliating for the proud elf over time. Each time she sobbed as hard or harder as the last time, weeping wetly around his cock.
“Good, whore!” he shouted as his dick began to erupt into her mouth and directly down to her belly. The poor elf gagged even more at the foul, horrible taste filling her mouth, but she was too firmly pressed into the monsters crotch to hope for escape. Only when he finally withdrew his cock from Alassiel’s throat did he release her, allowing the woman to fall to the ground, breathing heavily as a line of cum ran down her chin.
“Stop lazing about, whore!” Cerec yelled as he turned his attention back to where Liriel lay, still trying to catch her own breath. He stretched out his hand towards her and it seemed to unwind, unraveling into dozens of tendrils that extended towards the elf girl and wrapped savagely around her waist. One of the tentacles shot into her exposed pussy, provoking a cry from the pale haired druid. So gripped, Liriel was quickly pulled back to Cerec as his arms retracted, turning back into one huge fist around her waist, thumb buried in her abused cunt.
He dropped the woman on top of Alassiel, pinning her to the ground with the weight of her apprentice. “You’re useless with your mouth, slut, but I’ll teach you eventually.” He promised, sharp claws gleaming in the changing hues of the sky. “Be glad your cunt is actually worth something,”
25 years ago, 6 months after Sirae’s disappearance
The Battle of Accida Ridge
Elide watched with seasoned eyes as a murder of crows broke over the horizon like a thunderhead, swarming to circle over the battlefield. The carrion birds always seemed to know when a battle was imminent, and the size of the murder was always proportional to the size of the banquet they expected. It was as good of a way of predicting how brutal a battle would be as any, and if the crows were to be believed this would be the bloodiest fight of the war so far.
Elide could only hope that the lion’s share of the casualties would not be hers. It was the only thing the commander could hope in a situation like this. She was about to order eternal lives to their end.
Most of her army was miles away, attacking one of the camps of Sanguinar’s army. As the elf general had hoped, the violation of the false truce had brought Sanguinar himself to the field of battle, and he had departed with most of his army to crush the elves between them. The dark god no doubt felt secure in the knowledge that the size of the elven army attacking his position meant that there was little enough power left to challenge his fortress, even lightly defended.
And he would have been right, had not his treason against the realm of Silas provoked the Royal army into action.
Beside her a human stood, a young boy she didn’t know. An archmage of the royal family, something starting with an “S” or a “C” or something like that. He barely looked old enough to have completed any magical study, and she trusted his capabilities no further than she could throw the human. Most likely he had risen to a position far above his capability because of the privilege of his birth or some other foolish human sense of status like that.
Thousands of humans waited around them, vastly outnumbering the small but elite elvish core they surrounded. Ten thousand souls in the service of Price Liam, ready to fight at her command to rescue to goddess. It was almost enough to warm Elide’s heart.
“Are we ready?”
The unexpected voice from the wizard pulled Elide from her reverie. “Do you understand your role in the battle, Civin?”
“Shevarn,” he corrected tonelessly. “And yes. I’m to provide you with support as your unit makes its way into the temple proper.”
“And you can do that, child?”
The human curled his lip, as if unsure whether to frown or smile. “Of course. Are we ready?”
Elide smiled a little bit. “Then show us what you’ve got, Archmage.”
Shevarn’s eyes hardened as he reached into a pouch at his belt, drawing some kind of crushed powder from the sack. Elide identified it as crushed ruby in the second before the Archmage spun in a full rotation, flinging the power into a circle around him. Forming a circle was always the first step in any powerful spell, because you needed to contain the energies you were gathering before you set them free.
Elide listened closely as Shevarn began chanting. A lot could be told about a wizard by the way he crafted a spell, what language he used. The royal Archmage was speaking a dialect of the Celestial tongue, showing that he had most likely been taught by a line of wizards that had learned their art originally from one of Caer’s host instead of one of the demons or dragons. Quickly, but without ever seeming to rush, Shevarn pulled component after component from an assortment of pouches, combining them with his hands in between tracing glowing lines in the air in the shape of ancient sigils. The signs he was making all stood for some piece of the spell, but most were foreign to the elf. A few she recognized from druidic arts, though. Sky. Fire. Then more and more as the wizard formed and dismissed the sigils faster than her eyes could follow the swirling lines.
Without any obvious sign Shevarn’s chanting increased in volume as he reached a crescendo in the spell. He clapped the mixture of ingredients between his hands and they exploded into a cloud of smoke, swirling against the invisible barrier created by the circle of crushed gem. “Ad vas Kotta dami shee,” Shevarn called out, his hands creating another sigil. Elide recognized it is a master sigil of some sort, a sign to bind the disparate elements of the casting together with one purpose and use his own life force to energize them into a spell. “Bakaru Soleinu Zamatka!” Shevarn thrust his hands forward, breaking the unseen plane created by the gem dust and freeing the spell to move.
In the distance, the crows circling over the temple on the ridge wheeled and spun, moving rapidly away from the fortress. A high pitched scream of superheated air erupted from the distance as the clouds began to glow red, and then were instantly dispersed as a streak of fire rained down from the sky upon the battlements of the temple. The meteor strike was quickly followed by more: dozens, then a hundred such strikes, each opening fresh wounds in the stone wall and sending soldiers of Sanguinar fleeing from the walls, desperate to avoid the flaming death from above that shattered their defenses and siege weapons to oblivion.
Elide watched, eyes wide, as the fortress walls burned.
“Charge,” Shevarn suggested mildly, his hands already reaching for more spell components.
Hours later, Alassiel crawled over to the wounded elf lying in a puddle of vile fluids. Slowly, she laid a hand against her former apprentice’s face, looking around to ensure Cerec was not returning. “Are you alright, Liriel?”
The young elf coughed, still trying to catch her breath from the last rape. “I’ll survive, Archdruid.”
Alassiel sighed, allowing her weakened muscles to give out now that she was sure Liriel would survive. “How many times,” she asked, her face pressed to the ground, “do I have to tell you I’m not the Archdruid anymore?”
Liriel smiled a little despite herself, running one filthy hand through the equally foul strands of pale hair she’d managed to regrow in the last months. “You know it’s a title for life. Elide could no more strip you of it than you could give it up yourself.” She sniffed a little as she gathered up some leaves from the nearby bushes. “And you won’t let me call you Lissa.”
The red haired elf groaned in discomfort as Liriel started wiping her down with the large wet leaves, cleaning the welts on her pale skin before they could get infected and further the injury. “I lost all rights to both the name and title long ago.”
“That’s not true, Lissa,” Liriel insisted, but Alassiel knew it was so.
Murderer.
She had been a fool, and only now, in this place and with her quest for vengeance already failed, could she see it. She had done so many things she was not proud of, things that Caer would never forgive her for. Things that her mentor, the goddess Sirae, would be ashamed to know she had done.
How many lives had her quest for revenge cost? The men in Daggerport. The men on the road. Who knew how many people in Caladwen. She had no ability to count the number of bodies that could be laid at her feet, but she knew she regretted none of them more than Danith.
Danith had been a leech. A greedy, vain, and lustful sinner, and certainly not a good man, and yet…
Alassiel had killed him. Not for anything he had done, but for what she had promised him. She had broken faith with him, and killed him because it was more convenient to her quest for revenge than leaving him alive would have been.
Caer may have never gotten a chance to judge her for her crimes as a revenant, but her fate couldn’t be much worse than she deserved.
Lissa was dead, her happy life slain by a brutality she had never known.
Athuum was dead, having chosen to end her own unhappy life.
Alassiel was dead, murdered by her own poor choices and the flames of Blackwand.
Liriel’s arm wrapped around her mentor, holding her bruised form tightly as she started sobbing anew.
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