Dig Two Graves 1

In the beginning, there had been the war between the humans and the dark elves. Syllia vaguely understood that there had been centuries and millennia of history preceding that conflict, and that for a long time, humans and the elven kindreds had lived relatively harmoniously together. But one day that had come to an end, and the humans and the dark elves fought bitterly to destroy each other. Syllia’s masters had taught her that the blame for that war lay on the elves, that the dark elves had been cruel and treacherous, and that they had deceived humanity and stabbed them in the back.

Syllia didn’t want to believe that that was the case. There had been a time, in her early years, when she had believed it and submitted to the cruelty of her master’s out of a sense of ingrained guilt and self-loathing. It had taken her decades to shake herself free from the shackles of human indoctrination, and even if she knew no positive truth contradicting their claims, she was certain that the blame for the war lay at human feet – that they had feared and hated and envied the elves. She was certain that her people had been blameless, that their treatment was unwarranted and egregious. Nay, even if the dark elves had done everything her master’s claimed they had done, she refused to accept that that justified what the humans had done to them.

It was nothing but cruelty and malice on the part of humanity. They were petty, hateful, violent creatures. They were low, ignoble, contemptible… vermin deserving eradication, deserving to be expunged from the world or subjugated and enslaved by their betters. Everything they claimed to justify their deeds was false, all lies and trickery, and they were less than beasts, worse than fiends, responsible for all the suffering and misery that had come forth in the half millennium since the war. If they had lost and been wiped out, it would have been for the best. But humanity had not lost the war. Her masters credited this to brilliant strategies, powerful magic, and superior numbers – and in that much, at least, Syllia believed them.

Horrid and dishonorable as humans were, repugnant in their insatiable lasciviousness and their beastly fecundity, they had pushed the dark elf nation to the brink of destruction. Though the elven wizards had been superior in their individual might and prowess, humanity’s battlemages had numerous and expendable, more than willing to cut their already brief lifespans that little bit shorter to spit in the eye of their superiors and crush the elves under the sheer weight of their corpses. Indeed, so numerous were the humans, and so careless with their own lives, that they readily doubled the fronts on which they had to fight when they began to believe that the distant kin of the dark elves—the high elves and the wood elves—had been aiding the dark elves.

Her masters had long praised the insight and valor of their ancestors, who had played some trivial part in the war, and Syllia had been told many different tales many times over – the tale had gradually mutated and enlarged the role of their ancestors over decades and generations. The tales of her masters promised how selflessly the noble human troops had dared the enchanted forests and hidden cities of the light elves. How many times had she been told those damnable war stories and shown the dusty, antique commendations passed down in that house as heirlooms? How often had her masters told her in fanciful and offensive detail of the fate of the elven kindreds, of the dark elves who had already been pushed back into their last strongholds, of the high elves and the wood elves who were taken seemingly at unawares by the “insight and daring” – ruthlessness and treachery – of the humans? Too often. If she wished, she could have recited the stories from memory. She hated them.

But whatever the cause of the war, and whatever the truth or falsity of human suspicions regarding the actions of the other elf kindreds, one truth was undeniable. It had ended ultimately in utter defeat for the elves — for all elves, everywhere. Those elf men who had led and fought in the elven armies were executed to the last one, and of the rest, most were lost to persecution and slaughter. While unlike with humans, both elf men and elf women were equally strong and agile, and their forces comprised nigh evenly of men and women, of the female generals, soldiers, and mages, as few as possible had been killed. “As few as possible”, of course, still meant thousands of dead bodies strewn across battlefields, cut down in combat and defiled in the rush of victory, raped while they lay dying or hacked apart and used as rations. Her masters had told family accounts of this as amusing tales, passing down the rapacious deeds of their forebears like dirty jokes to tell in the parlor.

Of elven men, only one in ten survived the war and the purges of the decades following, killed in battle or lynched by mobs for the least imagined offense. Many of elven women had perished too, whether valiantly as soldiers (if later dishonored in their death by wicked use or degrading disposal), or more ignobly as captives made to suffer the hatred of their masters – a hate still fresh and cruel from the war. Every single survivor of the elven lands had been enslaved, branded with Oathmarks by the mages of the human empire and doled out as payment to the noble families whose sons had shed much, though not all, of the blood spent in the war effort. If this slavery had ever had a pragmatic or remotely reasonable purpose – as far as such things could ever historically be called “reasonable” – to begin with, by the time of Syllia’s birth it devolved into cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and despite their incredible longevity, the lives of many elves were cut short, and their race was gradually dying out.

Equally damning, long before the death of the elven race was even a question, the death of their culture was fated. Of this much, Syllia had infuriatingly thorough knowledge. Not of her culture, of course not, but of how the humans had broken them and erased it. With the Oathmarks upon their brows and the Oathwords that activated them entrusted to the families who received the war’s spoils, the elven slaves had been broken and brainwashed wherever it was possible. The ones who resisted were most utterly subjugated, their minds shattered by the excruciating torment of the magical obedience and torture. Oathmarks, one of the finest creations of human High Magic, was an enchantment that weaved itself through every fiber of the bound being’s body and soul. With but a word spoken by the slave’s rightful owner, the spell would exact indescribable punishment on the mark’s bearer. In a heartbeat of blistering agony it would shut down the victims magic, light their nerves aflame with a mortal agony, and all but blank their minds with anguish in a way that only a second utterance of the Oathword’s second utterance could stop. The humans held absolute power over their slaves, and systemically and systematically, they had quashed out any sense of the original elven identity.

Syllia did not know what her ancestors had been like… and she had searched long and hard to try to find out. Her masters had been the keepers of that dim, unknowable history, and they had colored it deeply with their hatred and contempt. Even then, if they had told her anything useful, she could have consumed it like a starving elf slave licking her meal of cum from the cobblestones, but they told her nothing of the ways of her people of old. At this point, Syllia was fairly sure that they didn’t even know the truth any longer – only the rote, ancestral grievances they laid at the feet of the elves, of how Syllia and all her kind deserved everything that had happened to them. Syllia’s mother had certainly told her nothing. Syllia didn’t even know if her mother had known anything, if the woman had been old enough to have lived before the captivity and degradation of their people. She had never had a chance to find out – her masters had raped her to death when Syllia was barely a babe. As far as Syllia knew, she could be two or three generations removed from any free ancestors, and she had been nursed at a human teat and given no more care or instruction than a lowly slave needed… she knew nothing of what it meant to be an elf except that it meant to be a slave. Any history lessons taught to her had only been to ingrain that sense of inferiority and convince her that she deserved it.

She knew so little about what her people had once been like. Only fragments. Even now, she knew little for certain, and back then, she had known nothing — nothing, except that she hated her masters. They had treated her cruelly, and the bare minimal care they’d given to see her grow to maturity had been no more kindness than a farmer feeding and sheltering a hog. If she’d felt any fondness or gratitude for them, knowing nothing else at that time, the trauma of being made into a woman forever solidified her into her hate for them.

Somewhere in her thirties or forties, Syllia had finally lost count of the number of times the humans had raped her – how many times they had shoved their digits or their tongues or their cocks into the various orifices of her body. It was nearly a constant, a barrage of sweaty, pallid flesh that left an acrid stench in her nostrils. Even now, centuries later, the stink of human was enough to make her want to reach into her throat and pull out her own lungs to get rid of it, but she kept counting anyway, until the number was, at last, lost to her. Even now, centuries later, Syllia could still remember that first night… when the young master of the house sneaked into the dark and lonesome room where she slept and taken her. He had sneered at her when she’d struggled in fear and confusion as the rags were torn from her petite, undeveloped body, saying that she was twice his age and more than old enough for something like this. Elves grew slower than humans did, maturing slowly, and she was still small compared to the brutal man. He had raped her while she sobbed and begged him to stop, thrusting himself into a body barely ready for intercourse, bruising her physically and scarring her mentally with his brusque and violent insertion.

She had only dimly understood what he was doing, at the time. She would learn. It had not been the last time, either – He had continued to make use of her while she slowly grew — secretly at first, perhaps concerned about seeming abnormal to the rest of the family for taking interest when she still looked so young, but more openly as he aged, and by the time he was the master of the house, he shared her freely with his likeminded friends. He had said all kinds of things about how he cherished her, and about how what he did with her was something special, yet then he passed her around to his buddies and laughed at her looks of fear and her cries of pain, and he had mocked her and called her a useless piece of meat.

His interest in her waned by the time he was middle aged. Not from a failing libido, surely, for his predations on the youngest maidservants had been an open family secret by that time, but likely more because she was then finally coming into full maturity and she was no longer of interest to his particular deviant proclivities. It wasn’t a relief. That master’s son had been a more natural type, and the rest of the household moved in to take the place of the man who had stolen her virginity. More frequently and more openly, she was used and humiliated, and by then she fully understood that this was the norm for elves. That was how her mother had been treated, and possibly her mother’s mother, maybe even her great grandmother.

She was perhaps a hundred and fifty or so when she lost count of how many masters she’d been given to, passed from man to man, from woman to woman as a fuck toy and a rape doll and a torture slut for their pleasure. There had been a point when Syllia was resigned to that reality, when she had been ready to accept it. Her Oathmark throbbed on her forehead, magic she had been completely unable to understand. She’d lost count of how many times it had been used too, for every slight – or perceived slight – for any hint of rebellion, for failing to please them enough, or for no reason at all but to make her scream, stamping out her will beneath an ocean of dark pain. The few times she had openly defied her masters, they had put her in her place by invoking her Oathword and leaving her to scream and writhe in unceasing agony in a dark, quiet room for a day or two. Almost they had broken her, and almost she had accepted it. Almost, but not quite. For most of the life of her first master’s son, Syllia quietly obeyed, and she was used as his sex slave and personal plaything, sometimes beaten when she failed to please him, sometimes tied up outside the manor for passersby in the lane below to jeer and gawk at. Occasionally she saw other elves, and she saw the absence of spirit in their eyes, forlorn and submissive. Still, Syllia counted.

Her case was not special, in that regard. The treatment to which her masters had subjected her was the norm for elf slaves, be they dark elves or otherwise, and despite their long natural lifespans, it was common enough for an elf to die before her time after being used a bit too roughly a few too many times, restorative magic from the humans being a little bit too slow in coming… And that was only when the elves died by accident. Syllia had also heard tell once or twice of more vicious masters who would do unspeakable things with their elf slaves, asserting the uttermost depths of contempt for them by devaluing them below even slavery. Slaves would usually at least be given enough care to survive and keep serving their masters, but they would disregard the rarity and slow maturation of elves by willfully and brutally cutting those already shortened lifespans even shorter in depraved, gruesome displays.

The one kind thing Syllia could say about her masters was that even the worst of them had spoken disapprovingly of those wasteful, macabre debaucheries… But they had done everything else to her, and by the time her second master had passed her on to his son, Syllia had made a decision. Some days she couldn’t remember what broke her out of the dull, unhappy trance of reflexive submission. Almost she could convince herself that maybe it had been a spontaneous sparking of her own will within her, or maybe it had been some final trespass against the barest shreds of dignity and happiness she was able to muster in that life, or maybe it had been seeing the suffering of some other, unhappy elf at the extremity of human cruelty…

And that thought would always lead to her remembering.

It had been the first time she had met a male of her race. They were so rare, precious few kept alive with any thought of continuing the elven species. Mostly humans expressed total contempt to whether their slaves lived or died, treating the elves more like objects than living things — to live the life of a cow in a pen, wallowing in filth and doing nothing but eat and breed and get milked before finally being slaughtered and served for dinner, would have been a fate nobler and more generous than that to which so many of them were subjected —but at least one or two families seemingly made an effort to keep male elf slaves in order to breed future elves.

When she’d first heard of this practice, Syllia had imagined the males being kept like prize studs, well fed and somewhat kindly treated. There were so few male elves left, and contrary to the old forgotten fables and romances it was not possible for elves and humans to produce offspring together. At the time, Syllia had retained at least some minutest modicum of belief that her masters were good to her. Perhaps it had been only a self-delusion, even back then, but she had wanted to believe it. She had needed to believe it. She had clung to the idea that she would one day at least get to have a child, and her only aspiration was to live long enough to be their for that child as her own mother had not. That was the only thing she could have then hoped to have.

Then she had seen how the males of her race were actually treated.

She had no idea how old he’d been, and he wasn’t in any state to tell her. In his mouth there had been no tongue – only a scarred, long ago cauterized stump, and upon his throat were scars that told of his voice box’s removal decades or centuries in the past. His arms went no further than the elbows, ending in stumps, and he was forced to crawl on his knees, apparently hobbled. His frame was bony and emaciated, and his face was an unhealthily pale ashen color that made it impossible to tell if he was an especially dusky dark elf or an sickly elf from the surface. Whatever kind of elf he was, his back was layered in scars after scars after scars from extensive whipping, and between his legs, bolted sadistically into his thighs, was some wrought iron contraption like a primitive chastity belt to prop up an ill-used phallus. It had been a sight to at once make her pity him and feel privileged.

She hated that feeling.

It hadn’t helped that her master — the third one, only recently having inherited her — had only laughed at the sight of the male elf and slipped down his trousers, before handing its owner a fistful of coins and straddling the starved, crippled, belted, and blindfolded wretch of a male. When he told her her they were going to see a male, she had dared to hope that she would be permitted to have a child… to pass something on, to have someone to care for. Instead, he had looked at her with a practiced scorn as he pressed himself into the degraded male, meeting her eye as if daring her to speak out.

“Elves are pathetic, aren’t they?” he’d said caustically. “This is all that your men are. This is all that any of you are.” He had sodomized the stud like he was just another worthless elven cocksleeve before he did the same to Syllia, then sent him home, mute and hopelessly submissive without ever letting her touch him.

Syllia had cried without stopping for days afterward. She wasn’t even sure what had bothered her so much… the dashing of her hope for even a scant future, perhaps? Maybe it was that she had clung to some bizarre hope that the males of her race, being so rare and thus surely more precious, would have been better treated. Her mind had warped through what she had been taught by brutal experience that her suffering was because she was an elf female – that that was why she deserved such violent, degrading treatment. Maybe she had possessed some fanciful idea, some barest romantic hope of meeting a male of her own kind and knowing a worthy and lovable embrace, even were it only so that she would bear forth a new generation of slaves. She had clung to the meager consolation of some nebulous, now half-forgotten fantasy to keep herself sane, but whatever it was that she had latched onto in order to endure her wretched existence, that display had wrenched it from her grasp and forced her face-first into the total, awful reality.

That was when she decided that she was going to take revenge.

At first, it was only a petty hate for her masters, Syllia wanting just to be able to avenge herself on this accursed house and its line. But eventually her visions grew broader, and her hopes creeped higher, and she fantasized not just of revenge for herself, but for all elves everywhere. She hated her masters — she hated humans — and she wanted to make them suffer the way they had made her kind suffer. When she was less honest, she couched her aims nobly and presented an admirable, high-minded conviction, but in her heart even Syllia knew that the root and source of her passion was more selfish. It was a pure, simple, personal hatred and a visceral, gnawing resentment for humanity that had motivated her over the next centuries.

Syllia had heard stories from her masters before then about the elven warriors and priests and mages, and even if they had denigrated their enemies at every turn, the fact that they related their ancestral war stories with so much pride contained a secret they should never have told her… that her people had once been strong. As a female elf, she was treated as a meat toilet and a sex slave, used and degraded until she’d resigned herself to it, but she had retained some idea that, once upon her time, her people had been great and magically powerful… something that humanity had been proud to have defeated.

The secrets of elven magic had long since been lost along with their culture and society… but it wasn’t the only strength. In secret, taking care not to be discovered, Syllia had taught herself to read with agonizing slowness… and then she had begun sneaking away dusty, neglected spell books and studying them. She wasn’t always able to hide what she was doing, and sometimes they would catch her with something she shouldn’t have and punish her. But she was careful, and she was patient. She knew the thing that humans hated the most about her kind… how long they lived compared to humanity’s mere handful of years. Even if ill-use cut short her full rightful span, she should still have a long enough life to take her time, and after a mere several years of good behavior, the humans would forget that she had ever been doing anything inappropriate. Even if they remembered, they would think of it as innocuous after how much time had passed… she didn’t give them enough instances of her being caught for them to notice a pattern. She was careful to act obedient without being too obviously, suspiciously, excessively so, and little by little, decade by decade, she had taught herself in patchwork fragments the high magic of the humans — the very same magic that had defeated and bound her race so many centuries ago.

At around three hundred years, she had lost count of exactly how old she was – too many sunless rooms, too many endless days. She used to count how many times they had nearly killed her, raped her within an inch of her life for their own sick pleasures before dragging her back from the brink, but then she she lost count of that too. Still, Syllia counted. It didn’t matter what she counted… The number of other elves she had seen with her own eyes (eighty nine). How many spells she had learned (three hundred forty seven). How many times she had been whipped today while bound in her frame (115, now 116, 117…). How many times her current master had cum in her mouth this session. (3, so far… her master was having an energetic morning). The number of times the vile bastard had crunched her nose with her pubic bone (31 and counting).

Day and night, she was a dutiful, simpering sex slave, servicing her masters as they bade her, suffering for their amusement. Some of her masters she could escape the attention of by acting sufficiently pathetic… they didn’t all have the heart to use her as brutal as the worst ones. For some, she could bore them by acting just overly affectionate enough to make them tire of her company and dismiss her. She knew all her rapists like she knew her own hands, and she would do anything she had to to earn the right to wander freely just a few minutes earlier and find time to learn and practice. Syllia was always careful… she could never to be caught with something truly incriminating. She had to assemble the entire picture of magic from the corners, using bits that were individually inoffensive and unsuspicious… basic pieces of knowledge. She had to learn magic one gesture, one rune, one spell at a time. Maybe in an entire year, Syllia would stitch together just enough to piece together the principles of a basic cantrip that a mage studying without interruption might get the hang of in the course of a weekend. Syllia really had no one to compare herself to – she had no idea then that she’d been born with strong character and exceptional intelligence and curiosity… traits that were nothing but an inconvenience as a sex slave but made her plan even possible. Little by little, painstakingly slowly even by the measure of an elven patience, Syllia had taught herself the fundamentals of magic, then the deeper secrets, then finally the most difficult and potent of arts.

With a brilliance and a fortitude she barely realized she had, Syllia’s progress began to accelerate… her knowledge and understanding of one art feeding into another. Most mages of comparable talent to her, endowed with identical intellect and self-discipline, would attain competence in a year, expertise in five, and mastery in a decade. Syllia, forced to study so slowly and from such scattered fragments, having also no mentors to whom she could go to explain some unclear point in a text or identify potential errors in her practice of a spell… it took her a century and a half. But she was thorough, and she was careful, and she was patient. She did not settle for anything less than total mastery, refusing to get ahead of herself and lash out after learning just enough to be dangerous. No, she had studied for all that time, learning every spell she could and delving the intricacies of the human high magic. Partly, it had been wariness of sabotaging her own schemes with overconfidence and imprudent haste. If she tried and failed, she would not ever get a second chance. But also she had hoped to discover a way to remove from her brow the ever-present Oathmark, her greatest fear and weakness.

Slowly, Syllia grew to understand the very most fundamental underlying principles of that magic… and she realized something incredible. There was not a human alive who could match her. There was no great need for battlemages in this decadent, peaceful age, and even the masters who now taught in the human academies and served in the human empire’s military would have been considered mediocre at the most generous during the time of the Human-Elf war. After a hundred and fifty years of careful, secret study and practice – prostrating herself ever before her hated masters and satisfying their every desire so as not to be suspected – Syllia was a master of the arts, surpassing any who had lived since before even her mother was born… and in so doing, she realized something equally horrible. The Oathmark could not be removed. It was indelibly woven into her soul and could not be pulled out… she could not even feel it with her own magic, so similar was its nature of her own spirit. Perhaps the Oathmark of another elf she could affect… but her own would forever remain out of her reach.

That knowledge paralyzed her… the knowledge that she would never be strong enough, never be good enough. Centuries of conditioning washed over her, and before she knew it she was seeking reasons to delay using her abilities. Not today… tomorrow she would be stronger. No, not today either, she would only get one change. One more day. One more day. One more day. Still, Syllia counted. She had to count. If she didn’t count, Syllia would lose the one thing that made the dark elf herself… the big number, the one she kept near the front of her mind. How many times she would make her masters scream before she finally killed them. How many of her spells she would unleash into their hateful, wicked flesh before imploding her into her component atoms and reforming them into statues of meat and bile and blood before all the city to see. By then, she was a possession of the great-great-great-great… – great? She wasn’t sure anymore – grandson of the man who had taken her virtue. She did not care to remember his name, and he had not permitted her to call him anything but Master, anyway. But that would have to wait. One more day… one more…

When it began, it was by accident.

Syllia focused on the tube of meat being shoved repeatedly between her lips, and the grunts and groans of her master as he tore at Syllia’s silver hair, pulled the dark elf’s pointed ears, mauled her petite breasts, and viciously raped her mouth. Syllia licked with each thrust. If she didn’t use her tongue the way he liked, the Master would have it cut out before having it healed magically by the house mages at the end of the day, so Syllia licked and suckled the head of the cock each time it passed her tongue, trying not to gag every time it shoved against the back of her throat. That was important. Master didn’t like it when she gagged; last time she had, he’d run a knife through Syllia’s neck to stop her gag reflex and used her mouth until she was nearly dead before he’d healed it… badly.

It was unpleasant, but the physical sensations Syllia could handle. She had been a rape toy for centuries, and she knew how to pleasure all manner of humans. it was the words emitting from her Master’s mouth which made the hate in Syllia’s heart growl and twist.

“Filthy knife-eared little whore,” moaned the nobleman as he pumped the elf’s mouth, grunting in time to the whip that landed harshly on the dark elf’s. The chambermaid who was whipping her was new to this task – the master liked to rotate which members of the staff he used to break and humiliate Syllia and make sure the entire household used like a toy – so her strokes often went off center and sometimes missed entirely. The girl was also tiring – something that Syllia was grateful for – so the whip sometimes landed softly enough that it merely caused incredible pain rather than tongue-chewing agony. “Immortal little bitch,” he growled as he thrust. “I’ll show you how immortal you are when I choke you to death on my human cock. I wish I had twenty of you elves to torture and snuff at my pleasure. Fuck. you’re all worse than cockroaches – at least those filthy creatures have the decency to die properly when you smash them underfoot. You whores, with your slim bodies and your long legs and your big eyes… tempting good, upstanding people to sin…”

Fire burned in Syllia, but she kept silent. Not just because her mouth was too plugged to retort, but because the last time she had failed to hold her tongue perfectly she had spent two days being continuously drowned in a cauldron, gulping for air and screaming for mercy as she was lowered over and over into the boiling water. Not a single scar remained from that incident – even the weak magics of the house mages were sufficient to heal her without a mark, but sometimes Syllia still woke up screaming, the sound of bubbles in her ears.

Instead Syllia offered a quiet prayer to any god of her people that was left, for her sisters and whichever brothers still remained. They surely had to endure as bad of treatment as she did, or worse. She prayed for anyone listening to lift her sisters from their slavery and torture. One day. one day she would find them and free them…

But that one day was not today, and as the nobleman howled in pleasure as he fucked Syllia’s mouth, gripping her hair passionately and slamming his cock into her narrow elven throat, Syllia felt the foul organ twitching. She forced herself not to retch… but her master withdrew the fleshy cylinder and began to stroke it with his perfect, pale white hand. As her master unloaded his fourth round of seed onto Syllia’s face, splattering her pretty elven features with disgusting white globs of wretched human cum, Syllia counted them too. Six. Seven. Eight. She had to count. She always had to count.

“Gods,” moaned her master as he fell back into her chair, the chambermaid continuing to whip. “Gods I needed that. The council is being so godsdamn stubborn, and my useless shit of a wife…”

Syllia fought to catch her breath and counted gasps. She knew she should be absorbing every iota of information about the humans in order to better plot her revenge, but there was almost nothing left in her mind but centuries of rage brought on by hate, and the numbers. She knew, vaguely, that her master was some important human noble, that the family was only a few steps removed from the human throne, and that he hated his wife and had only married her to move him a few steps closer to that throne. She knew he had a mistress, the woman he actually cared for, and that somewhere in the house there was a girl, their daughter. She knew that the wife was pregnant from the last time she had seen her. She knew a lot of things… but otherwise each day was an endless gallery of pain, and rape, and hatred.

“h, stop already you wretched whelp,’ moaned her master to the chambermaid. Panting with exhaustion, she dropped the whip, and Syllia was silently grateful that the whipping stopped. “Go change out of those filthy rags before your stink makes me vomit… and fetch me Elira!”

The chambermaid, wearing clothes that Syllia could only have described as being impossibly fine, fled the room.

Her master wore dark black silks, strewn all over his body in some human fashion that Syllia didn’t understand but had seen often enough that she understood it must be fashionable. The silks crisscrossed his body, covering it in what had to be an exhausting amount of effort. Using his foot, he tipped Syllia’s chin upwards.

Syllia didn’t like to look at her master; it was too hard to keep her face from contorting into a mask of pure hatred. He was fairly young, even for a human… somewhere in his twenties perhaps, with a face that even an elf would consider graceful; pale white skin, and long, black silken hair which tumbled down his back like a waterfall. Her face, however, was twisted with cruel intent as she reached over with one arm. “And you,” she said, pulling Syllia’s ear, making her scream. “What do you say?”

“Thank you Master,” Syllia said automatically. “Thank you for teaching me my place as a worthless cum dump for your almighty cock. I am naught but rape meat for you, Master, a receptacle for your noble seed, a fuck doll for your pleasure. I am not fit to lick the shit from your arse, Master…” A bit over the top, but that was how he liked it.

He snorted. “Well spoken, for a knife-ear,” said her Master, twisting Syllia’s ear. “Perhaps one day you’ll actually make me believe it.” He turned to the door. “I can hear you breathing, Elira. Come in instead of panting all over the fucking door.”

The door opened and a girl walked in. A human child… it had been several years since she had seen the Master’s daughter by his mistress. She was tiny, no higher than perhaps Syllia’s hip if she were standing. She looked like a smaller version of her father… the same sharp features, the same dark hair, but with her mother’s green eyes rather than the hated, dead grey of her Master. Syllia saw the scion of the man who had tortured her for years and imagined wringing the tiny thing’s neck in its sleep.

“Elira, you know our elf,” said the Master to his daughter. “Even you could not possibly be so stupid as not to. We’ve had her since before you were born. Say yes, father.”

“Yes, father,” said Elira, keeping her eyes off of Syllia’s naked, bleeding body, her father’s cum still spattered on her face.

“She is our family’s elf, which makes her a plaything. See this mark on her forehead?” said the nobleman, using a toe to point out the nearly invisible magical brand. “Our Oathmark. One word, and you will remind her who she belongs to.”

Elira said nothing, staring at her bare feet.

“I’m assured by your tutors,” her father growled, “That you have shown magic potential. That should should be able to read it. What does it say, Elira?”

Almost reluctantly the young girl looked up. “Itharien,” Elira read automatically. Syllia winced, expecting to feel the fire surge through her… but nothing came.

The Master scowled, and Syllia, her adrenaline having surged and finding no release, understood only slowly. Elira wasn’t a legitimate daughter… the Oathword only worked when it was spoken by her owner. From her lips, it was just sound.

She barely had time to feel relieved before her Master turned back to her, his lips moving to form the dreaded word… and every nerve, every muscle, every cell in her body was subjected to an avalanche of pain as the magical bind sent agony coursing through all of her. She saw her Master’s cock harden as she watched Syllia scream and writhe in pure agony. It felt like ice and fire simultaneously eating at every part of her… it felt like being ripped apart. She couldn’t breathe. She could only scream until she ran out of breath and then continue to scream anyway, tring to reclaim muscles that were tensing fit to snap, fighting her body to get even a single gasp.

“Itharien,” her Master said after what felt like a year, but judging by the step backwards the child had just taken, must have been just a moment or two. “Useless,” he growled. He produced a small dagger and placed it in the child’s hand, closing her tiny fingers around it and patting gently. “Make a mark on her.”

“m…mark her?” the child whispered.

“Anywhere,” her Master confirmed. “Just cut her. Show her she is yours.” Syllia lay on the ground catching her breath slowly, whimpering softly. That would be enough for the Oathmark… one more brand to prove ownership. One more mark.

“Father, I don’t want to,” Elira trembled, tears falling from her bright eyes.

“It is not a matter of want, Elira, you must. This will be your elf someday. You must cut her.”

The girl stood, unmoving, and the nobleman shoved the child forward. “DO IT ELIRA!”

Her Master dragged his daughter close but the girl’s face was screwed up in tears. “Father, no! I don’t want to hurt her!”

Silence.

Syllia breathed, deep ragged breaths, and she did not see the look on her Master’s face as she dragged Elira from the room by her arm, the dagger clattering to the floor. There were a trio of smacking sounds and a child’s scream, followed shortly after by a loud thud, and then sobbing.

“Useless whelp,” her Master’s cruel voice came through the thick door of the dungeon. “Be grateful my son is not yet born… If I knew he would be sufficient, I would slit your stupid cow throat!” Another smack. “How dare you embarrass me in front of a slave? How dare you bring dishonor onto your family name?”

“Father I’m sorry I’m sorry,” babbled the child as the master of the house hit his daughter again. “I’m sorry…”

“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for, you pig-headed idiot!” the nobleman hit her, and hit her, and hit her. “Get out of my fucking sight!”

Syllia heard footsteps as the child fled, and a moment later the door opened again and the Master strode in. He picked up the dagger from the floor and, without hesitation, slammed it into Syllia’s chest. The dark elf’s scream was ragged at the metal pierced a lung, a wet, gurgling noise in the cry of pain. “Right,” he said, reaching between Syllia’s legs and spreading her cheeks. “It looks like I am going to have to be the one to reinforce this lesson myself. Whose are you, little worm?”

“I am yours, Master,” whispered Syllia, grunting, unable to get air through her rapidly collapsing lung.

“Say it like you fucking mean it, you horrible fucking wretch!”

“I, aah!” Syllia screamed as her mistress penetrated her bowels, pushing hard against the dry walls. “I serve only you, Master… my pitiful life… my filthy body… are yours – aaah! – to command, to use, to rape and torture and break as you de – AAAH! – desire…”

“Good,” moaned her Master as he raped Syllia for what must have been the thousandth time. Syllia tried to count her own breaths – six, seven, eight – but when his hands went around her neck she could barely do even that. “Choke for me, little elven bitch. Suffocate like the rape slut you are…”

“Master!” Syllia choked, ropes of cum dangling from her face as she was rocked in her frame by the nobleman’s savage thrusts. She could feel her voice going. “Master, I beg you… please…”

But her Master was lost in pleasure and rage, his fingers squeezing tighter and tighter around Syllia’s neck as he fucked her in a frenzy. Syllia could feel panic rising within her. Her master had brought her close to death many times, but always slowly, controlled, long sessions of planned pain and endless torture as she was baked alive, or burnt at a stake by magical fire, or flayed to make a leather rug for her mistress’ bedroom. It wasn’t like that now. Her Master was in a fury, and when he was he tended to lose control… Whipping Syllia until the bones showed, Tearing her limb from limb before reattaching them, Raping her eye socket with each thrust coming dangerously close to destroying her brain. It felt like that now. As Syllia felt the blackness creeping into her vision with every thrust, felt the fingers squeezing harder and harder, unable to speak, she could feel it…

No. No, not like this. She hadn’t… She hadn’t… finished… counting…

A burst of light appeared at Syllia’s neck, forcing her Master’s hands back as Syllia gulped beautiful, sweet air, gasping and coughing as her dark face sucked in as much as she could. It was a blessed relief… until she realized what she had instinctively done.

Turning her head, she saw the shock on her Master’s face quickly turning into rage…

Syllia was very, very fast. She was an elf, eternal, nearly ageless, and she had spent centuries practicing her magic… but she was afraid. Hesitant. She had never used it before. As fast as Syllia was, her Master was fasted. she was faster. “ITHARIEN!” screamed her Master, still hip-deep inside Syllia’s arse. Syllia could feel the throb of the princess’s cock as her entire body began to shake so hard she broke tore muscles. “You fucking traitorous little worm! Where the fuck did you learn magic? Who taught you?” he growled. “WHO!?’

Syllia could not answer. Her body was wracked by magical pain… but her soul hurt even worse. Now she knew the truth. She would never leave this place. She had given up her one secret, her one ace, her one weapon. All her counting, all her numbers, her centuries of holding out hope, all came down to one, final, inescapable fact…

She been defeated, completely and utterly. She was going to die in this room.

Chapter 2 –>

With Evil Fuzzy and Alyssarhea. Thank you both 🙂