A Ritual to Corrupt Purity

AN: Tropey as hell, unabashed hentai cliche everywhere. First time writing the pr0ns, feedback welcomed.

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1 -- Prepare the Chamber

Consciousness returned slowly to Talana, sense by reluctant sense.

On the edge of hearing, the trickle of water, with an echo to it that said 'underground'. Much closer - a room away? - low chanting sounds. Neither was comforting to the young paladin.

Her nose twitched at the smell of moist earth and hot wax around her. A cave. Candles. Some sort of underground lair, then. A foul musky odour underlaid it all, warning both her physical senses and her growing mystical perception of demons and demonspawn nearby.

She swallowed in a dry throat, tasted her own blood - she'd been hit hard on the head, likely bitten her mouth - and something acrid and chemical coating her tongue. Had they fed her something? Its bitterness reminded her of swiftheal potion, but it had a savoury tang she could perceive even through the metal-salt-bright of blood.

She reached out with her aura as best she could, and recoiled in pain at the static of demonic anger and lust and greed and hate and desire and want and fury. Only a single spark of light she sensed before the pressure of it forced her to subside, but that was hope enough. Her mentor still lived, was still near.

As her perception returned to her body she became increasingly aware that she was cold and sore. Her discipline alone was enough to keep her from shivering at the chill of cavern air on bare skin. Of course they would have stripped her of her armour, her weapons; would have taken her arming doublet and chausses. It was an odd kindness that she had been permitted to keep breastband and loincloth, and one she mistrusted.

Her knees complained, and her shins. She was kneeling on cold stone. She shifted her weight experimentally, and was utterly unsurprised at the clinking of chain and the sudden gentle pressure of cold metal at ankle and wrist and neck. Of course she had been bound. Not tightly - she had some range of motion - but clearly to the stone below her and to something higher up that shifted as she moved.

She steeled herself for horrors, opened her eyes...

...to find herself meeting the calm grey gaze of her mentor, Rela.

Rela's mouth was set in a grim line that ill fit her full lips and round cheeks, but there was deep and genuine warmth in that look and in her voice when she spoke.

"Strong self control, good use of aura, and no wasted effort. Nicely done."

Talana could have laughed at the tone, so much like years in the training yard and so much like the last eight months of mentoring in the field. It was pure comfort - diminished not at all for knowing that's exactly what Rela intended speaking so - and it helped her school her own feelings to an approximation of the same calm.

Rela's face was all of a foot away from hers, and the collar around her neck told Talana how exactly they were both shackled: knelt, facing each other, on a block of stone a couple of feet high. She looked down at it.

The stone beneath her was no lump of bare rock. As she had feared, it was squared off and polished, carved with runnels and engraved with runes only some of which her education had yet reached. It was clearly well scrubbed, but no amount of scouring could entirely remove the old brown of blood, the crusted yellow-black of ichor and the other various stains of a dark altar in frequent use.

The older paladin saw her glance. "Bad business, isn't it. I fear we may have found what became of the missing men and women from the town."

The observation was compassionate but unfazed, and Talana was reminded of just what a legend Rela was. At almost thirty years old the human woman had fifteen years of legend following her - the youngest ever Called to the service, a prodigy of arms and aura alike, saviour of entire cities and slayer of literal dragons. Talana, at nineteen years of age, could only hope she would achieve a fraction as much.

If she survived this.

Surely Rela had seen worse, survived worse, in her years of adventure.

"Don't worry, Alleycat," she said on cue. "I've come out of worse than this in the past."

Talana could have giggled at the timing as much as at the old training-ground nickname. She swallowed it, flicked a tufted ear instead. She trusted Rela implicitly, just as Rela had once shown trust to a rare felen recruit to the Order where so many considered the cat-elves a liability.

Too connected to the material, many of the commanders believed. Too close to the wild and vulnerable to the base temptations of the demon realms, as if fur on pointed ears or silt-pupilled, amber eyes were a mark of association with the lusty satyrs or the greedy harpies.

Talana wasn't usually given to bitterness, and paladin training had made it more distant still, but she wondered why the forest elves her kind otherwise so closely resembled were upheld as having a laudable connection to nature rather than looked on with suspicion.

Unimportant! Here it was only herself and Rela, and they were as close as any journeyman and mentor could be, and they were in a predicament shared all the more closely for the short chain that kept them in almost constant eye-contact. She gave herself to stillness, ignoring the discomfort of the stone beneath.

"What do we do, Rela?"

Some mentors insisted on being called Mentor, or Lady or Sir. Rela had laughed in her face the first time she'd tried that. You're at my side now, not under me on the training ground, she'd said. Rela, call me Rela for pity's sake.

Her mentor's reply was gently sardonic. "Unless you've found a way to conceal a rasp or a phial of ironbane, we do nothing for now. Save your strength for the moment; I feel we'll need it."

She looked into Talana's eyes as she continued. "This is likely to be very unpleasant for both of us for a while, sadly. Remember this: we left word of our destination with the chapterhouse in town, and they are expecting our return within a day. If we are late, they will attempt a sending to check in with us."

"They took our farstones."

"Aye, so the sending will fail, fail for both of us, where a farstone might break once in a dozen years. They'll know it's trouble. They'll muster, they'll come in force, and Commander Poran will be at their head."

"He sweeps the cave system..."

"...and this nest of demon-summoners, surprisingly large though it is, will be cleansed by blade and aura. Poran's a traditionalist like that, very much of the retribution-and-justice school."

Talana grimaced. "For all that I generally agree with you that redemption is the foundation of the Golden Path, I think I am comforted by the thought of retribution coming to our captors. Am I weak?"

"No." There was no judgement in Rela's grey eyes, only understanding. "It is one of the hardest lessons to learn, and one I confess I've not fully learned mys-"

She broke off sharply, eyes flicking to the archway leading into the cavern room. Half a moment later, Talana's pointed ears picked up what Rela's insight had already told her: footsteps approaching. Most were human, others smaller or heavier, a group two dozen strong or more.

Torchlight reflected off the walls, grew from a spark to a glow as the bearers filed through the dank tunnel. At their head strode a figure cowled and robed in a nondescript, sturdy brown, hands thrust each into the other sleeve, smiling mouth just visible in the shadows of the hood.

Behind this one came a horrorshow of blasphemies.

Half-a-dozen little imp-like creatures skittered back and forth along the procession with a nervous energy, using their hands as much as their feet on the cold stone floor as they leaped about.

The main body of creatures kept steady pace behind the leader -- three satyrs, a pair of wulfen, and a hulking minotaur, each one accompanied by a black-haired and black-eyed woman. The women held their heads high and proud, ivory-pale skin showing through outfits made of mere straps and bands intended to show off far more than they covered, eyes gleaming with more than the guttering torches. The creatures were blatantly naked, manhoods swinging heavily between their legs with each powerful stride.

The imps scattered to the furthest corner of the room in a pack, hopping and muttering quietly to themselves in the rasping demonic tongue. The other six creatures took a position on the six irregular points of a star centred on the altar to which the two Order paladins were bound, quivering with something anticipatory and fell. A raven-haired companion moulded her body to each one from behind, stroking bare skin with pale fingertips, scratching with black-painted nails, whispering in animalistic ears.

The hooded figure approached the altar, standing on the side furthest from the chained pair.

"Do you like them? They're quite new."

His voice was refined under the affected rasp. Familiar? Talana was still muzzy enough to be unsure, but Rela spoke up.

"This was a trap, then, for us?"

"You flatter yourself," the cultist snapped. "You were an opportunity, nothing more."

Rela let that slide, her expression calculating as she side-eyed the man. "Seven missing townsmen and seven missing townswomen. Twelve new-minted monsters. Two escaped? Or dead?"

"Two... held in reserve." The hooded figure snapped his fingers in the air once, twice, and a final group appeared from the dark of the tunnel.

The ogre stood a little over eight feet tall. In each meaty hand he clasped the shoulder of a stumbling, naked figure, one man and one woman. They were unchained, since there was a threat from neither to fight or to flee into the pitch-black of the underground.

Both were clearly disoriented, both were clearly drugged, both were clearly in a state of extreme... physical excitement.

Rela shook her head, as much as the chain would let her. "Let them go," she said with gentle force.

The cultist laughed briefly. "Waste two perfectly good doses of my serum, all the setup of the ritual chamber and two more devoted footsoldiers? No, thank you."

"By the Light I tell you that you will regret your actions in the fullness of time."

The words got nothing but a tilt of the cowled head. The cultist motioned to the ogre, who with surprising gentleness ushered the trembling townsfolk into the centre of the star then stomped from the room to vanish into the shadows of the tunnel.

"Begin."

2 -- Prime the Aura Flows

As one, the pale women stepped round their companions and dropped to their knees, reaching with a hunger their languid grace couldn't belie. Delicate fingers wrapped round their partners' members -- the satyrs already partly tumescent from the stroking of their fuzzy skin -- and the women began to worship with hands and occasional kisses.

In moments the room had taken on a darker edge than the low torchlight could explain. The heavy scent of musk filled the air and an oppressive sense of anticipation grew, as if something beyond the edge of sight was watching in patient approval.

The cultist stepped round the altar to stand closer to the two unwilling watchers as the sound of low grunts and shallow breaths filled the heavy air.

"Amazing stuff, swiftheal. Something about it gets right into every bit of the body. Makes it wonderful for mending wounds, of course."

The drugged woman took a couple of unsteady steps forward, hands grasping at the air for purchase; finding none, she subsided to her knees on the stone.

"No, no please, no I don't want, I don't want to, I need, I mustn't, please Light I need I need..." Her voice was a low mumbling litany, her breath coming in gasps.

"But what a way," the cultist continued, his voice low but cheerful as if making a joke to a fellow audience-member at a theatre, "what a way to get other effects right to the core of someone, eh?"

The townswoman had sunk forward, propping herself up on one hand. Her other hand moved as if to find purchase on the floor and push up... but instead drifted treacherously across her own body, low on the belly, and she shuddered hard enough to put her head briefly to the ground.

"Ah no I feel I feel so much it's too much I don't want it again, it feels, I need, oh please..."

With great effort, she rose back to her knees, but her hands had begun to roam across her body as if not her own to command and rose to occasionally cup a breast or graze a nipple.

"Hence my new serum," the cultist continued, his murmur still conversational. "A shot of raw lust, and sensitivity, and suggestibility delivered straight to the mind, body and soul... and still works as a healing. If you'll excuse me waving my own banner."

In Talana's line of sight, one of the pale women leaned herself forward and took her satyr partner's cock entirely into her mouth in a single motion. The satyr groaned, and a mirroring groan arose from the throats of both the townswoman and her male companion, as black lips began to bob back and forth with an obscene slurping sound.

The townsman's attention was fixated on the desperate woman's body as she tweaked both nipples at once, pulling with vigour to an accompaniment of shallow gasps amid the ongoing litany of pleas, "Oh touch me please, I want, I want..."

With an effort, member still rock-hard and twitching, he pulled his gaze away as she fell back on the stone floor, thighs spreading wide, glistening with arousal -- but there was nowhere to look that offered no lewd display, and he met the yellow eyes of the taller wulfen.

The muscled wolfman dropped its jaw in a canine grin before putting one paw on the head of the pale woman currently cupping his furred balls and turning it to follow his glance -- she fixed the townsman with a heavy-lidded stare, and without breaking eye contact moved in to lick the length of the wolf's shaft from sheath to tip with a lolling tongue.

That was enough to tip the balance. The townsman grabbed at his hardness, stroking it with irresistible lust as his eyes swivelled about to take in every lewd act in the room from the pale woman fellating her satyr, to one using both hands at once on the massive manhood of the minotaur, and finally back to the writhing townswoman who had by now buried both hands between her legs.

"And then all it takes," gloated the cultist, "is enough lust, enough priming of the pump, and..."

The naked man wanking himself in the middle of the ritual cave seized all of a sudden, shoulders hunched and knees bent as if shocked by a cramp-eel, locked immobile but for his frantically-pumping fist.

His lips drew back to bare clenched teeth and his eyes opened wide enough to show the whites all around, turning his very plain face into a mask of dark desire even as his body began to swell and bulge unnaturally.

Within moments he had gained a foot in height and a stone in wiry muscled mass. His chest barrelled out, arms and legs stretched and became sinewy tough, all colour leeching from his skin. His grin became sharply pointed as his mouth turned to a gape of sharklike triangle teeth, and with a soughing slither the hair of his head, his body and his crotch fell at a rush to leave his grey-skinned body hairless and smoothly unwrinkled from tip to toe.

Throughout it all he never ceased his manic masturbation, even as his very average penis swelled in girth and length and began a slick dripping that quickly covered his clawed hand and then, by his motions, his entire member.

Another surge of clear desire rolled his eyes in his head until only the whites showed, and when they rolled back some seconds later they were limpid black pools with no iris, no humanity, and no intelligence in them at all.

"...and a monster is born. Just a lowly akheil, this one, but every army needs rank and file."

"I know where the real monster in this room is," Rela told him, matter-of-factly.

Talana said nothing. The chain binding her neck-to-neck with Rela prevented her from seeing the transformed man full-on, but something about the dramatic nature of his sudden corruption held her attention with a sickened fascination as she side-eyed the sharklike creature who now crouched on the stone.

For his part, the new akheil had eyes only for the woman a few feet away from him. Her gaze was glassy, unfocused in the general direction of the ceiling, her mouth open. Her hips bucked up to meet her plunging fingers as she finger-fucked herself with mounting desperation, too far gone in burning desire to care for fear or shame of the watchers all around her.

Her babbling words had fallen away to an unending series of moans and cries. No sensible sound came from her as she sought relief from the still-growing want she was lost to. Her free hand moved back and forth from mauling her own heaving tits to scrabbling at the stone floor in search of additional purchase until it by chance laid against the column of one of the altar candles.

She plucked at it greedily, dashing it out and spilling its wax across the stone floor as she brought the wax shaft round in spasmodic haste to drive it between her folds; but even as her body bucked at the new sensation it was clear to the onlookers that it wasn't enough for her.

The motion broke through the immobility of the akheil, who let go of his own shaft for the first time and dropped to all fours. His dead eyes were locked on the sight of her movement, her flushed face, the slick sounds of the candle in the needy gash between her legs, and he took a step forward. His tongue lolled out, less like a shark's than a snake's, tasting the air and the scent of her.

The townswoman groaned again, one hand driving her improvised toy and the other strumming at her nub, and that was all it took; the akheil lunged forward across the short distance between them and covered her with his body. One long arm descended to pluck the candle from her grip and fling it aside, then positioned his wet cock at her equally wet entrance.

Talana didn't see the moment of their union, at the angle she was bound, but she could see the woman's face when the shark-man buried his entire length into her with a single irresistible thrust, watch it twist with sensation and a relief that only stoked her desire. He wasted no time beginning to move, and she met each thrust with a buck of her hips, biting her lip hard. Lucidity returned to her eyes, but where before she had been lost and confused, now there was nothing but heat.

It was long minutes of writhing coupling, in a room silent but for the sounds of pale women stroking and sucking, before the akheil reached down to cradle the woman with a surprisingly gentle arm. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing, turned her and leaned her across the far side of the altar on which the two paladins knelt bound.

She squealed briefly in protest at the treatment and at his sudden withdrawal, but quickly regained her bearings and braced herself on the stone. Oblivious to the altar's other occupants, she looked over her shoulder at her partner with an animal snarl and arched her back to angle her hips for him.

He obliged with another thrust so deep she wobbled, dipping her head to brush her long hair against the carved rock as he fucked her with long, even strokes. For long moments she clung to the rock as best she could, adjusting to the new sensation, and then slammed herself back against him forcefully to drive him even further inside.

She flipped her head back, sending her hair out of her face, and Talana grimaced at the fell light in her eyes. Her skin was turning pale, all colour draining from it into the auburn of her hair and staining it a glossy black, and every wrinkle and sag was smoothed away into unnatural porcelain perfection.

"Honestly it's disappointing when they go so easily," the cultist murmured, looking into the rutting woman's eyes. "The ones that can resist a while come out so much more... potent." He straightened and gave an airy wave.