A Daemon-Horn Blade Ch. 19

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There was little discussion back at the Inn. The Foole started his evening with a performance so mournful that the innkeeper nearly drove the morose gléaman and his guests out onto the street. For the rest of the evening, he forced himself to laugh and make merry as was his duty and calling, but inside his heart was dark and sad with depression, and not even a dozen flagons of good Aldarian wine could mellow his spirit. When his last audience member had gone to their own rooms or to their homes, thejoculatorwho had so wittily made the room merry, now cried the first tears that he could recall every releasing, as he huddled in abject misery before the dying embers of the great stone fireplace of the taproom. NoCisalohad cried in an age, if ever, but flow the tears did as for a time the burden of his duty was far too great for him to bear, but as he saw Rowan and Gwenda descend down the stairs the next morning, he once again donned his mask of good humor, but his heart remained black with despair.

The lad was going to face a far more potent swordsman than he had ever fought with before and his skill couldn't possible be enough to hope to win. Still, he had the Daemon-Horn Blade and the blessing, for whatever that was still worth of The Seven. Sadly, Oddtus realized that the old priest had been quite right, that the Foole had indeed beenfartoo foolish! He had sought to tamper with prophecy, and with the very weaving itself, and surely he was going to be punished! The Lady Ayleth had already fallen into depraved darkness, perhaps beyond rescue or hope of saving, and now the seemingly fearless and noble young lad Rowan, already tormented with cares and fears of a man far beyond his years and experience, would yet once more shoulder another impossible burden against odds that he couldn't hope to understand, and for the birth of a new age in the world that he could never comprehend.

Likely he would die for nothing, a pawn in a Foole's hands who had been forced to move too quickly and dangerously for any mere mortal hero to hope to survive. Oh, the sword would continue in this world and be wielded in turn by others, and perhaps the distant future might again become someday brighter, but now, at this very moment Oddtus only saw darkness and destruction, and he and his apprentice Ashburn escorted Rowan and his beloved Gwenda to their appointment with destiny.

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The wicked Viscount spoke quite truthfully when he had stated that the Lady Ayleth was not at all to his personal tastes and inclinations. For starters, she was much too old for him, even at just eighteen. He preferred his fruit quite a bit greener from the tree. She also wasn't nearly terrified enough of him enough, and even after her third brutally harsh whipping her eyes just glazed into beads of hate and despair... not fear and terror, as he preferred. While he had taken his pleasure with her once, in her tight ass that had been just newly branded with his mark with a red hot iron, this was only a token act to mark her as his. Tonight for his own amusement, he as usual dallied with a young pair of youths, both brother and sister and without yet their first growth of maturing intimate hair, while he watched his many friends and lackeys amuse themselves with their new toy.

Aroused, watching his new slave of a plaything being forced to debase herself in every possible way, he allowed the young siblings to suckle him and restore him to full engorged stimulation. It was with a thrill of pleasure that he watched the whip fall, splattering blood from her tattered back while three of his gallant friends filled each of her anguished holes, all already well filled with cum from over a dozen previous men, with yet another dozen or more ready to await their turn, anxious to further defile and use the young noblewoman.

It was not often that a high aristocratic woman, especially the daughter of a Duke, fell into his depraved hands, and after they had enjoyed a great deal more of further sport with her, with every possible indignity that could be imagined, she could given or sold off for marriage to some Aldarian nobleman, who could make better use of her title. With the Southern Duchies in obvious disarray, facing certain destruction from theEorfleodeinvasion, the time would soon be ripe for the Empire to swoop in and gather up the waiting harvest. Even the idea of a new kingdom, created from the ruins of the duchies, as the stupid and helpless girl had original suggested, wasn't entirely an unthinkable solution. Especially if the new king in turn bowed its knee to the Emperor, and owed a debt of perpetual gratitude to him as well. Advantageous trade monopolies, at a very minimum, would add immeasurably to his already great wealth and power, and the clergy of the south could be completely purged and reformed, with zeal only for the words of his divine lord,Yfelde Soð, who after these long years could truly command the sole worship of every subject, bringing in time this chaotic and senseless world into order.

Embolden and aroused by his plans for ever great power, he took delight in roughly sodomizing in turn the young siblings, bring out their tears of pain and fear for his eager eyes to feast upon, while long into the night, he watched the beatings and the rotation of fresh aroused male flesh into every orifice of the helpless former young noblewoman. Branded now as a slave, she was nothing now but fresh meat for their carnal lusts, to be used and abused as would best amuse their master, the Viscount, even to her consuming their other bodily fluids, and they forced her to drink their urine until she vomited, and then she was made to consume yet more.

Long before the Viscount and his toadies arose from their slumber later the next morning to take yet some more brief but degrading humiliations upon her, Ayleth had shut her eyes tight in her misery and already she willed herself to die, err she ever again wake to more such ill-use and treatment. Chained to a secure metal post in the center of the floor, where hundreds or perhaps thousands of other slave girls had amused their unspeakably corrupt master, even to the torture and final destruction of their bodies, she lay quiet in her pool of piss and semen, and prayed silently that Rowan might somehow defeat this unspeakable enemy and somehow later rescue her, before her body exhausted its will to live and she escaped to the mercies of the Shadowlands.

Her rest was brief and all too interrupted. Desiring that his new captive be suitably amused during his absence at court, the Viscount allowed his guard-officers the temporary enjoyment of her debased body, and they in turn, as they wearied, summoned forth their sergeants and favored corporals as well, so that the slave captive, in her ever increasing despair, had much to do to please her tormentors enough to keep the whips from further flaying her already bloody back, tits and stomach, and as yet more semen entered into her. With every gulp or trickle, she prayed every harder for the Viscount's own horrific destruction at the hands of her champion, whom she had abandoned and so long spoke of with anger, overly willful pride and even jealousy. Later, as the long woven and knotted leather whips yet again beat upon her without mercy, she surrendered to the unendurable pain and fell into happy darkness, a merciful state of deep unconsciousness where she no longer heard the cries of her ravaged flesh or her wiser, but hopeless feeling soul.

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Even in her tormented dreams of darkness, she found no peace. In her delirium, her old slain attendants, with Cedany at their forefront, whipped and tormented their mistress yet further, even from the vale of the Shadowlands. With their decapitated heads, and showing every tear of their eviscerated groins and bowels, they held her weak spirit down, and laughed at her. Daring her to regain her will to fight them, or even to gather her will to continue with life, and the unendurable ordeal that it had already become.

Facing her primary accuser, her old friend, lover and companion Cedany, who had once been Rowan's love, she grasped her hands into the shadowy spirit grass, and willed herself to fight, or to at least arise to face her tormentors. Climbing on upon her knees, she whispered before the dream shade of her former lover and begged her for forgiveness and mercy. Sincerely and contritely, she even kissed the slain girl's ghostly feet, weeping ghostly dream tears of own, that washed away clean Cedany's bloody feet, and she felt the chill of her shade touch her head in forgiveness and benediction.

"Be well my sister in love and oath-duty, for we shall be sisters of the heart as well, but it will be long again before our next and final reunion. Know truly that you shall never share Rowan's heart, for he has been tied by the Weavers to Gwenda. Forever shall they remain united in life and in the Shadowlands, before they are yet called up again to do the will of the Weaving. They and their descendants shall not always know peace or happiness, or long lives with many children at their feet, but their will shall ever do the Weaver's will and do what must be done, now and until the end of the Ymbwyrcan, the Great Tapestry of Life. Endure the unendurable, my sister, for your return to the light is now near upon you. Give my beloved my prayer of hope that his days are long and happy, for he also has endured misery, fear and pain beyond the dreams and terrors of all but a few men of this world, and his duties yet remain incomplete. You must be his strong hand in the hard days to come, and give forth your love for the land that it might flow to their rescue, for he walks in the shadow of theléaslic, one of the seven hands of his god; an ever dangerous path, but it is the one that you both must follow. Be at peace, my sister, my lover and my friend, for your ill-deeds of childhood are absolved and forgotten. You are now a grown women, born again anew in blood and suffering. You have but our love and our faith, so that you can stand strong, render good leadership and bear your own desperate fear when all seems hopeless, and there is naught but death and destruction that surrounds you, that your final selfless act of redemption might indeed save all that you have belated, but sincerely come to love.

"Be well, my sister and dearest lover, Ayleth cried as the shadows of dream departed, like a pebble over a great cliff, she fell back into wakefulness, and a world of searing pain that not even her freshly revived spirit felt it could long endure. As yet another group of men knelt down to take their sport with her, she once again returned to her real world of uncountable sorrows.