Day Two
As the lid closed on her and trapped Raven in the darkness, she felt a new panic rising in her host. She was terrified, almost beyond reason… for no cause that Raven could sense. The blonde was terrified to be here, swallowed by the enclosing darkness… she began to violently thrash around, bringing new pain to their many shared injuries with every bump and grind, with ever splash of the filth they were forced to wallow in.
Raven felt like she had no pride left… like she couldn’t be brought any lower. She supposed the perk of that was that, when compared to the fiery flames of hell that Shane had put her through, this wasn’t so horrible. She still couldn’t breathe properly, a desperate flame burning within her lungs as her air was stolen by the damned collar, but at least no one was actively finding a new way to make her miserable with each passing second.
She should have known better than to think that way.
The soulstone inside the coffin with her began to smoke, filling the enclosed space with the dark graveyard mist that made their prison seem even more cramped, make her vessel try even harder to escape it. Try as she might, however, there was just nowhere to go. She sucked in the mist through the straw that her throat had become, and even if her vessel couldn’t feel it, Raven could sense the imprint of that soul attaching to her, seeping into her body and mind and soul.
Soulstones didn’t contain a mortal soul, of course – that would be monstrous. They were… more like a cast of one. A copy of plaster in the shape of a part of the soul so that one could study it, see its experiences and thoughts. Allolyre made them so that certain important knowledge or skills wouldn’t be lost once people past beyond the 9th Gate. Shane, or someone, had had these made to preserve a very different kind of knowledge.
Raven began to feel warm as the sensations of the soulstone began to creep into her, like warm water lapping at her skin. Bits of that woman’s life began to filter into her awareness, the cast parts of her life beginning to merge into her host… and therefore Raven… as if she had experienced them herself.
The woman had been a pretty blonde, much like Al- her vessel was. She had been raped… something Raven had new appreciation and sympathy for. The throbbing pain in the imagined girl’s cunt didn’t match the sullen coals burning inside the ruins of her vessel’s asshole, but it was more than enough for Raven to appreciate. The odd part was the warmth that was surrounded her. It was actually pleasant after what she had been through all day, while covered in the cold filth in her tomb – but there was still something vaguely threatening about it.
Raven didn’t even notice the agony in the memory’s lungs at first after the pain in her own… she just thought that was her own pain until the girl in the soulstone couldn’t hold her breath anymore and took a deep, gasping breath…
Of piss.
Her vessel’s body abruptly jerked hard to the side as she began to drown, and the flood of sensations came with it. Raven could feel the sting in her eyes as the illusionary girl opened her eyes wide, and it was hard to tell in the darkness of the coffin, but she thought that her vision might have actually tinted yellow. Warm, acrid urine rushed into her mouth as the memory girl gasped in, trying to breathe and sucking in only piss. The heat of the liquid now felt like damnation itself inside of her, filling her lungs as they spasmed, trying to expel the foul liquid but having nowhere to do it… every much she opened her mouth, more of the foulness rushed into her. It filled her stomach. It filled her lungs. It filled her ears and her eyes and her nose and her cunt and her ass. All she could see, smell, taste, and feel was the piss she was drowning in.
Raven felt the memory girl thrash in the way that her own bound form could not, grabbing at her throat, battering at the sides of the barrel she had been sealed inside. She the pain in her lungs grow far beyond even her own, her head growing lighter and lighter as her thoughts swam. She felt it as the girl gave one last feeble attempt to push the piss out of her… and life left her battered, abused body.
Her name had been Rachel. Raven had met her on the other side six years ago, on this very planet. She had been so sad and broken down when Raven had met her she didn’t even seem upset to be dead. She had walked the girl down the river in silence to the 9th Gate. Raven remembered her. She remembered all of them.
The memory faded. Raven and her vessel were themselves again. No more memories. Only Shane’s urine around them. Only the collar stopping her from filling her lungs as much as she would want. A coffin, not a barrel.
Then warmth lapped against her raw skin as the memory started over again, from the beginning.
Alice didn’t know how many hours had passed, drowning over and over. Thousands, she was sure. He had left her down her for days and day. Her throat was parched, she was starving, and she hadn’t managed to get a wink of sleep, tortured over and over for eternity. She thrashed through the final moments of that poor girl’s life, feeling her entire body hollowed out and replace with piss. She felt her die again, for what felt like the millionth time and wept as she waited for it to start again.
It didn’t.
She lay there in the darkness, half expecting any second for her to begin drowning again, but it didn’t come. She almost wished it did. The anticipation and suffering of the drowning had at least distracted her from something even worse.
From the moment the lid of her coffin closed, Alice had been about a sliver from going mad with the panic. It overwhelmed her to the part that she couldn’t process much more of the pain and humiliation… even the burning nettles still wrapped around her clit seemed to recede into a single mass of pain that barely distracted her from her misery and terror as the walls pressed in on her. Trapped in the darkness, Alice longed to scream, but she couldn’t breathe except in a pathetic whisper, and her scream came out as a thin, reedy wail instead. She longed to claw at the lid of her imprisoning coffin, even if she was sure that Shane had locked it… she would have scratched at it until her fingertips were bloody and raw, but he hadn’t released her from her bondage. Drowning over and over again had occupied her body with a purely physical reaction to the lack of air, had kept her from thinking about how the coffin was crushing her to death.
Logically, she knew that the coffin was sturdy, that it wasn’t going anywhere… and that Shane had been very, very clear that she wasn’t going to be allowed to die. She wasn’t running out of air, even though her body was screaming every second that she was. She was as safe as she could hope to be in the dungeon of a sadistic madman… but her fear wasn’t rational.
The coffin was not closing in on her. It was not it was not it was not oh my god it was going to crush her! Alice squinted her eyes shut and screamed into the darkness as loudly as she could, which came out more like a whistle than a yell. She paid for it… it kept her desperately short of breath for more than a minute afterward, her holy body arching as it struggled to breathe in quickly enough through her constricted throat to catch her breath and largely failed. She tightened her eyes further, trying to resist the urge to keep screaming as her terror overwhelmed her. Breathe. Breathe. Just… breathe…
In her desperation, she found herself thinking of her mother. Begging her to save her. To take her into her arms and shield her from the world. It was a stupid thought – her mother hadn’t been like that in a decade. Not since her brother. Even if her mother knew that she was here, even if she could save her… the woman would probably be too deep in her wine and misery to do anything. She was alone… she had been alone for ten years.
No. Not alone.
‘Raven,’ she whispered in the darkness of her mind. ‘Can you hear me?’
Nothing but silence greeted her thought. No emotion, no words, not even an impression. ‘Raven?’ Alice struggled to remember what Shane had said. It all felt like madness to her. ‘Passage? Are you there?’
Once again, silence. Alice felt exceptionally silly, but at least the thoughts kept her attention momentarily off the fact that the coffin was slowly crushing her to death. ‘Raven? He… he called you a goddess. Are you there? Can you hear my thoughts or do… do I need to pray or something?’ She spoke again and again, begging, pleading, and feeling horribly alone.
Anger began to grow inside of her. Her mom had always said she was crazy. So had half her teachers, and almost everyone she went to school with. A few of her doctors had even said it when they thought she wasn’t listening. She was not crazy. She was not imagining it… there was someone else in her head, she had heard her! ‘Why don’t you answer me, damn you!’ Alice snarled in her head, and she was grateful for the anger… it drove away the fear. ‘I know you’re there! Answer me, Raven! What good is a God that won’t answer you! Why won’t you answer?!’
She didn’t so much hear the sigh as she felt it. ‘Because nothing good ever comes of it,’ Raven answered. “Having conversations with mortals has only ever brought us both pain. It would be better if my vessel never knew I was here.’
Alice couldn’t really argue with that, but here she was – trapped in the prison of a monster. She wouldn’t be here if Raven weren’t here with her. Of course, if Raven weren’t here, then she would already be dead. ‘Well, I know,’ she whispered back. ‘So how are we going to get out of here?’
Only silence answered her. ‘We’re stuck here together!’ she all but yelled. ‘You can’t just ignore me!’
‘What is there to say?’ Raven answered back. ‘He means to keep us here until he gets something from me that I am duty-bound not to give. He will continue to torture us until his anger and stupidity lead him to kill us. Then I will be free, and I will avenge us.’
Alice shuddered. She was so… matter of fact about it. About a plan that would get her killed. ‘I would… really prefer a plan where I live, Raven.’
Silence. Again. ‘Listen, Raven…’
‘Lady Passage,’ she interrupted.
Alice choked off an angry retort. ‘Lady Passage,’ she thought back at her. ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t feel anything but agony below the hips after what that bastard did to me. I am about ten seconds from a full-blown panic attack. I need anything to take my mind off of it. Please please please, don’t ignore me…’
There was a pause, long enough that Alice began to think that she wasn’t going to answer. Then her voice came. ‘There isn’t a way for you to live, my vessel.’ Her tone was sorrowful. ‘I am Passage. I am only here because you were destined to die, and I won’t be free until you do. And until you do… no one, anywhere in the universe, can move onto their afterlife.’
The words of the goddess were horrifying, but at least she was speaking. ‘Then…’ she whispered. ‘Then, I do have to die.’
‘Yes.’
The single word answer left no room for doubt. It… scared Alice, but it didn’t scare her the way it would have most others. She had already made her peace with her coming death, accepted it. It didn’t mean she wanted to die… it just meant that she wanted to live more than she needed to survive. ‘I… I was supposed to die in that basement, in Kosovo. Wasn’t I?’ The words formed a question, but she wasn’t really asking one. She had felt it when it happened… felt the wrongness of that second as the bullet slipped past her head. ‘Alright,’ she thought softly. ‘Then… I need to die.’
She was quiet for a second before she continued. ‘So. Passage. You’re a goddess. Which of the religions are right?’
‘My vessel, I…’
‘Alice,’ she thought forcefully. ‘I have a name, Lady Passage. Alice.’
A pause. ‘Alice,’ Raven said at last. ‘I… shouldn’t really tell you that.’
‘Why not?’ Alice asked. ‘I’m going to die anyway. It’s not like I can answer the big questions. What happens to us when we die? Is there a heaven?’
Another pause. ‘Yes,’ the goddess answered at last. ‘There is… something like that. The Beyond. Beyond the 9 gates in Stygia, there is an afterlife waiting for you, guarded by my sister. When you die, I will be the one to take you there, like I have your ancestors and those before them.’
‘Is my br…’ Alice stopped that thought, shaking her head. ‘What’s it like?’ she asked at last. ‘The Beyond?’
‘I don’t know,’ Raven answered. Her answer shocked Alice, and Raven must have felt it. ‘It’s for the dead, and the dead alone. One day, I will go there… when everyone else had gone before me. When all the stars had died, and nothing else lives in the universe, I will follow you into the Beyond. Until then, I do not belong there… and no one comes back to speak to of it.’
Despite everything, despite the pain and humiliation and terror and disgust, Alice found it in herself to chuckle. It hurt, badly, to do so… short of breath and with her entire body one single knot of pain, it felt like being stabbed, but it also felt so, so good. ‘I guess there are some things, not even a goddess knows,’ she thought to the Incarnation in her head.
She could feel something that might, possibly, have been a smile, if someone had strangled it to death in its crib. ‘Yes,’ Raven agreed. ‘There are.’
Alice was trying to think of something else to say when the lid of her coffin suddenly cracked up. The dim light of the underground dungeon seemed like knives stabbing into her eyes as light flooded into her dark prison. As her vision slowly swam into focus, Alice braced herself for the sight of Shane… but it wasn’t him.
It was a woman.
Hands reached into the coffin and took hold of her, working to lift her up out of the piss and cum she had been marinating in all night. There were three of them… naked girls in metal collars welded shut. All of them were younger than she was, unless she missed her guess, and… their eyes were all the same color. The same dead gray as Shane’s.
Working slowly, almost gently, the three women began to unbind Alice… undoing the chain that held her right leg to her left wrist. Her leg ached horribly as it straightened for the first time in what felt like a month. Now that she was out of the coffin, it seems impossible that she had been in there longer than a night, but the logic of it didn’t match up with what the experience had felt like… it had seemed like weeks or years in the darkness.
With her left arm suddenly free, the first thing Alice did was reach for the crank on the collar, eager to unscrew it. One of the girls grabbed her wrist. “Don’t,” she said, her voice quiet… terrified. “He’s watching.” She began pulling her arm behind her to where the right one met her collar and closed the clip locking it in place there. “Don’t fight,” the black-haired girl in a hushed voice. “It only ever makes it worse.”
Alice walked on stumbling feet as one girl took each of her found arms and guided her into one of the corners of the room, where she noticed a water grate beneath her bare feet as she walked over it. The chained her ankles in place, and while they were gentle when they did it compared to Shane, it still reminded her of the painful metal on her ankles and wrists, how tight they were and how they chaffed with every twitch of her body. She had scraped them bloody last night, thrashing while she drowned and struggled to escape her tight tomb.
“Sorry about this,” one of the girls… a different one, with the same black hair and grey eyes as the others. Then she walked over to a hose, picked it up, and sprayed it at Alice.
She probably would have screamed if she had breath. It was like the hose was attached directly to a glacier… it was unbelievably cold, and her body began to shiver violently. With her legs bound, her flinch actually sent her to the ground, where she landed heavily on the painful grate on her side. The girl directed the water back at her on the ground, soaking her thoroughly for long seconds until it felt like she was going to freeze to death.
When the water stopped, she continued to shiver… as the three women headed back over to her, and she felt their bodies against her, she was almost grateful. At least, for a second, she didn’t smell the rotting cum and piss slurry that had soaked into her very soul. Even after one day of Shane’s attention, she knew that it wasn’t for her benefit… that he just wanted a pretty doll to rape and hurt instead of a cum-soaked fleshlight, but if today was going to be the day she died, she would take dying clean.
And today was going to be the day she died. She was determined of that. There had to be an opening, somewhere… there had to be a way to make him kill her. She would find it. She could be at peace with that.
Her resolve lasted up until she saw Shane step in through the door, already glaring at her.
Raven watched through her vessel’s eyes as Shane approached. “Get out of here, whores,” he spat, and Raven saw the three girls scurry towards the door. It took the Incarnation seeing them together to realize what Alice had put together the first moment she saw them – those women were related to him. From the age, probably daughters! And he would do this to them? As they ran out the door, Raven caught a glimpse of what looked like soldiers on the other side of it, on the outside. Guards, to prevent anyone from getting in here.
“So whore,” Shane said as he approached her. He drew back one finger and flicked her forehead, right where he had cut her sigil onto… Alice’s… head. It hurt, but everything hurt. “Your eyes are normal, boring blue. I take it Raven still doesn’t want to come out and play?”
‘Should you?’ She heard Alice ask her with a thought. Raven would have never expected how… comforting… it was to be able to talk with her, now that she had begun. In truth, she had rarely been alone in centuries. Not since she had created Jackal to keep her company. But he was gone now, and she would be alone… if it weren’t for Alice.
‘It would only encourage him,’ she whispered back.
Alice took as a deep of a breath as the collar would let her, and whispered out words as best she could. “She’s gone,” she said.
Raven was confused. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What I have to,’ she said softly.
She was… she was trying to provoke him into killing her. Killing her and setting Raven free. It was… it was brave. And selfless. And possibly… no, definitely… the most heroic thing anyone had ever done for her.
And she could see in Shane’s eyes that it wasn’t going to work. It had just pissed him off.
Shane narrowed his eyes. Then he moved and drove a knee into her stomach, making it heave and twist. If she had eaten anything, she would have thrown it up even through the pinhole that her throat had become. “What did you say?” he growled, reaching over and… and loosening her collar a little. Alice, and by proxy Raven, got a few glorious moments to catch their breath.
Alice drew it out as long as she dared, hoping his impatience wouldn’t get the best of him. “She’s gone,” she repeated. “She escaped last night. Said she’d see us both on the other side… you piece of shit.”
Shane’s scowl darkened. “Oh, girl… you just don’t know when to stop.”
And he slammed his fist into the side of her face.
Raven felt the tooth come loose, tasted blood as Alice cried out and spat it from her mouth… hear the tink of it as it hit the grate and vanished. “Problem is, for a whore, you really are quite the good girl. And good girls make shitty liars,” Shane said with a snarl. Then he tightened her collar again, and Raven felt a flash of despair as her air was cut off again all but completely. “If you aren’t going to say anything useful,” he said, pulling out a metal ring with small spikes on the outside and putting it into the mouth. The ring gag scraped painfully at her lips before wedging behind her teeth, the spikes digging into the roof and floor of her mouth, and into her cheeks as he tightened the strap around the back of the blonde’s head. “Then you don’t get to say anything at all. When Raven wants to come out, she’s more than welcome. You… you’re already dead to me, whatever your name is.”
He pulled down his pants and revealed that horrible weapon of a cock, already hard as a sword in his hand as just as dangerous to her. He grabbed Alice by the hair, and violently pulled her up to her knees. The position made the metal grate dig into her with all her weight on her calves. “Time for your breakfast,” Shane spat.
As he slammed his cock in through the ring gag, he took hold of her head and drove her forward at him. “Take it, you bitch,” he growled. As he pulled back, he noticed the blood staining his cock and smiled at that. “Can make you bleed from every hole all over my cock,” he spat as he jerking his hips downward and pulling her head viciously toward his groin. Alice gagged, unable to breath already as she retched, her nerves rattling painfully as his cock humped into the warm, wet cavern of her mouth, bumping up against the back of her skull and making her choke and gasp and shake beneath him. She wished her hands were free so that she could grab at him, shove him, push against him in at least a vain hope it would stop her from being raped yet again.
“That’s right, bitch,” he growled through gritted teeth, jabbing his cock into her mouth, “Take your breakfast. Take my cock in that worthless cunt mouth of yours.” He thrust forward again, even more viciously, wanting to impale her. He held her head with both hands, tangling them in her hair and practically ripping her blonde mane off as he began to pull her face even harder towards him.
It was harder for him today than it had been even with her virgin throat yesterday. She could feel the head of his cock pushing against the soft, warm flesh at the back of her mouth, could feel it make her gag. She shook her head as best she could, making small jerking motions as she tried to pull away. It was the collar… her throat was too tight, it wasn’t going to fit… but Shane wanted to see her squirming as his cock stabbed all the way down her neck, and he wasn’t going to stop until he got what he wanted. She tried to let out a breathlessly scream of pain as she felt his cockhead slide into her throat, pinching her neck against the collar, shoving aside bits of her anatomy she needed to live in order to make room to fuck her.
The way her body heaved as she gagged and shook seemed to turn him on because he began fucking her harder. The sounds that came out of her throat were beyond description… unwilling slurping and sucking noises as her too-tight throat tried to hold onto his cock combined into a symphony with the gagging, retching sounds of a woman choking to death on a cock as Shane cock slid completely into her esophagus, her nose pressing hard against his pubic hair as he held her there.
She cast her blue eyes up at him, looking for any shred of mercy in his face… mercy that she was sure wasn’t there. He reveled in her agony, the way the pain made her throat hum on his cock, the tears filling her eyes. Then he slid his cock almost all the way out of her throat, letting her catch an insect-sized breath before slamming his murderous rod back in. The thrust was hard enough that his pelvis slammed into her sharp, pretty nose, earning another noise of pain from Alice as she was forced to wonder if he’d just broken her damn nose by fucking her face.
It was hell. With the collar around her neck, every single bit of it hurt even worse than yesterday. He had transformed her neck into a spasming tunnel of flesh crafted for the express purpose of massaging my cock, milking maximum pleasure from it, and she could do nothing but feel his cock slide in and out of her mouth, cutting off even the precious trickle of oxygen she was capable of fighting for as her spit drooled around her lips and his cock to coat his balls. He fucked her face, ramming his cock in short strokes in her throat that made sure to never completely leave it, slamming her nose against his hips again and again as Alice was forced to jerk and thrash and suffer beneath him. He used her not like a whore, not like a fleshlight, not even like an old sock. He used her body like it was kleenex he had picked up off the ground, just a thing to dump a single load in and then it had served the only use it was ever meant for – he fucked her his cock all the way down her throat and took his pleasure from her incredible tight neck.
‘Is…’ she whispered in her mind as her eyes glazed over. ‘Is he almost done?’ Raven didn’t answer her, but she caught the impression of tortured gagging from her as well. For the first time, Alice truly understood that the Goddess suffered the sensations the precise way she did, reacted the same way. She had been about to pass out… now she held onto consciousness with an iron grip instead. She wasn’t suffering this alone… if she couldn’t stop herself from suffering, if she couldn’t keep him from hurting Lady Passage either, she would at least make sure the Goddess didn’t have to go through it alone. Maybe, if she didn’t pass out, Shane wouldn’t realize just how desperately short of breath she was, and he would choke her to death on his cock… it wasn’t the death she had imagined, but if that were what would set her free of this torment, she would take it.
He didn’t. He let her take a single breath, and as much as Alice tried to stop herself from breathing, her body had its own ideas. Then he was slamming back into her.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
Alice was more than halfway dead without ever being allowed to go the rest of the way by the time he came, grinding his crotch into her face as Alice felt the first pulse of his meat, the twitch in his thick cock as it began to spurt cum deep into her throat. Holding her head still, he pulled back until his cock rested right on her tongue, cumming against the back of her mouth as Alice involuntarily tried to breathe, choking on his cum and coughing violently as she breathed his seed, coughed it up, and breathed it again. While she gagged and coughed, he pulled back far enough to rest his dick against her nose, spitting the final few spurts against her face.
“There you go,” he said without the slightest smile. “Breakfast.”
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