The Duty of a Noble Lady

Alice flinched again as the volley of siege engine fire raked the curtain walls, a tremendously concussive cacophony. Smaller tower mounted engines, where still in place, returned fire with a gusto. But it was an aural afterthought, the garnish to the hellish assault that was the sound of masonry cracking, giving way, falling. She was holed up high in the keep, staring down at the nightmare pastiche of light and sound from explosive bombardment.

Rogier paced tirelessly. His bulk swayed under his shift as he stalked forward and back. He would stop to run his hands through his salt and pepper hair or rub his bristly goatee. Every part of him was soft, even his jowls trembled slightly as he walked. As a minister to the king, he was hardly required to be down at the walls, even in this dire time. But because he didn't have anything to do, he burned off the energy with ceaseless pacing and fretting. This in turn made Alice more nervous, unable to avoid her thoughts from dwelling on the assault going on below.

Less than an hour before, Alice had been sleeping peacefully. She was still abed, her strawberry blonde locks unbound and flowing. Her sleep shift, indecent at the best of times, had soaked through in places with nervous perspiration. She was practically flaunting her nude body to her husband, and all he had eyes for was a battle he had no say in. She wanted him desperately to see her, to discard his anxieties. She wanted his eyes to shift from the firelight, to linger on her wide hips, her full breasts, her still youthfully lithe frame, not yet marred by time and worry. But instead they glinted with an anxiety born of a man concerned with a world he no longer had any influence over. He didn't speak to her- that wasn't unusual. He rarely addressed her.

Hers was a marriage of convenience, meant to secure ties between the northern outmarches and the king. Being married to one of the most powerful ministers in the court was more than Alice could have hoped for, but she sometimes dreamt of a man who did more than plot how to coax more money from the populace. The only time he deigned to notice her was for a perfunctory lay. "You still owe me an heir," he would say stiffly, as if somehow ashamed to be with her. It was almost always an unceremonious affair- laying his bulk, born of soft living and rich food, atop her. He would dutifully spear her, thrusting rhythmically while his breathing grew more irregular and strained. Just before Alice feared he would suffer some manner of apoplexy, Rogier would let out a shuddering gasp, spilling his seed into her. All she needed was to conceive. But she wished he saw her for more.

An hour of pacing finally drove the frantic Alice to plead: "My Lord, please come to bed. There is nothing out there that we can change. We must trust in the stoutness of the defenders, in the rightness of their cause against the unjust enemy." She smiled as prettily as she knew how- a testament to the lessons she had endured since youth, how to disguise her true emotions behind a radiant mask. Even now, it dimpled her pale cheeks prettily and sparkled her deep blue eyes.

Rogier turned to Alice, and she realized she had misstepped. His eyes were alight, not with the glint of a man bridling at weakness, but rather the fevered fervor of a desperate man. His lips curled in a sneer. "My lady wife seeks to tell her lord husband how to live? As if the fires out there won't as surely consume you as they will me and all I've striven to build here. 'Come lay with me,' she says with all the subtlety of a painted whore. As surely as their engines of war shall breach our walls, so too will they pierce your sex. This is not some foe born of the rules of humanity. This is a darkness, an enemy sent against Man. There is no taking of hostages. You had best pray that we find death swiftly, for that is the only mercy that our foe may grant us."

Alice almost immediately began to weep. It wasn't that she didn't understand that it was an army of Hell, daemons from beyond the mortal veil. She knew they had inexorably drawn nearer, winning victories first on the field and then at stronghold after stronghold. She merely wanted to distract the minister and tear him away from the anxieties he had no control over. "My lord, I was only trying to-"

Alice hadn't even seen the backhand coming, and it left her splayed on the bed, right cheek throbbing with flames of pain. "You vapid cunt, I wasn't asking for an explanation. I was explaining to you that this is the end. We are dead. Make your peace now. I am grateful now that your barren womb never bore me an heir so that he never had to endure this day." Rogier's eyes glittered in an unkind way. "But if you are offering me a balm on this night of my demise, who am I to turn aside your sinful whorish pleading?"

Alice gasped as Rogier firmly grasped her breast, squeezing tightly. He leaned over her, staring into her fearful eyes with his dull, black, porcine ones. His thumb and forefinger cruelly wrenched her nipple. "Is this what you wanted, lady wife?" His voice took a sadistic tone, glee clashing with Alice's wracking sobs. She pleaded with herself to still them, but they instead took on a hysterical bent as his hand tore the shift open, expensive fabric parting at the violence of his rending. Her right breast was now fully visible, pink nipple catching the firelight as it flickered through the window.

His hand returned again, taking a firm handful and grasping hard. "Is this what you need? A strong man to make you forget about the enemy on our doorstep? Are you too feebleminded to even truly contemplate your plight? Are you just a cunt that seeks masculine satiation the way a babe seeks to suckle? Are you sopping wet at me doing my husbandly duty, my lady wife?" The gleam did not leave his eye. As he spoke, his other hand forced its way under her chemise, worming its way in between Alice's desperately twisting thighs. "Indecisive doxy!" Rogier roared. With the next words, he punctuated each word with a buffett to the face: "Make. Up. Your. Damned. Mind." With the last, he grabbed her face between thumb and forefinger. Though his hands were not calloused with labor, they were cruel and incisive things, and Alice felt fear claw over her heart and will.

In a voice that was not hers she dully acquiesced "Apologies my lord. It is my place to serve you." She let his hand in between her thighs, although his other did not relinquish her face. He pressed his lips onto hers, his goatee aggravating the already rising bruises on her face. Deliriously, Alice worried what she would do to hide the marks come her next time in court with the other ladies-in-waiting.

But the thought was brought stock still as Rogier forced two fingers inside her, jolting Alice with the pain. "If you want it so badly, lady wife, you could at least show your lord husband the courtesy of getting wet for him." His fingers cruelly rummaged, not in a quest to arouse or titillate but only to humiliate. This wasn't about one last night with her husband. This was about one last night with her lord. And he wanted her to understand the difference.

Alice's head felt too heavy, as if her neck were incapable of supporting it. But she couldn't loll it to the side, avert her eyes from the piercing black gaze of her husband. His hand, clenching her face, slowly migrated downward, to the soft sides of her neck, still grasping like a vice. He didn't let up, holding her head so she had to continue to take him in as he pressed harder and harder on the sides of her throat. His fingers were now plunging, incessantly, into her, not in a measured affectionate way, but rather driving, raking her deepness.

Mercifully he finally halted, pulling his rapacious digits out, still sneering. "Is this what you wanted, you strumpet?" He pulled her face up to his, leering at her as she whimpered. Tears ran down her cheeks, wetting his fingers as they burrowed into her likely bruised neck. He again pressed his mouth down on hers, hungrily forcing her mouth open as he momentarily lost himself in the passion of the kiss. Just as quickly as it began, he withdrew, staring into her slack features. "Your cunt is just as dry as your womb is barren," He snarled. He took the fingers from his earlier venture and plunged him into her mouth, hooking her by the jaw. "Does it taste of dust? Like my dreams and plans?"

Alice made some kind of noise. She wasn't sure if it was conciliatory or protestation, her thoughts were adrift in a sea far from the shoreline of her conscious mind. Blearily she came aware of her husband hiking up his sleep shift, his member erect and looming. Still hooking her jaw painfully, he lay on top of her. Momentarily, she thought that he might be gentler now. With his free hand, he lined up his manhood, gently teasing her lips with his head. Up and down it furrowed, gently parting the labia. Alice was suddenly gripped by an icy fear as she felt it. Somehow, his cock seemed larger, more imposing, than it ever had before.

Even on her wedding night, when she had been deflowered, he had been a less intimidating figure. He had seemed almost bookish and shy. She was not his first, but he treated her with the respect and near bashfulness afforded a new husband with his wife. Her thoughts tried to drift back to that evening, when she was overwhelmed by the splendor of the wedding, in the royal capital. She remembered the ladies in waiting, bawdy with wine and song, hoisting her to carry her to her marriage bed. She had felt a nervous excitement, thrilled to be married to such a powerful member of court, but also petrified at the notion of her losing her maidenhead. Her head had been swimming with the heavy spiced wines she had continually been offered, and the trip upstairs had breezed by, despite the pauses for jokes and ribaldry. Her wedding bed had been a soft indulgence, all warm down and silken sheets, a decadent affair. Her brain tried to feel the linen cloth in her back as those same silks. She tried to feel the man above her as the same man from that night.

The illusion shattered. He plunged her depths with a sudden lightning bolt of pain, a white hot flare that shot up her spine and bloomed in her brain. She cried out, somewhere between a squeak and a groan, biting down on the intrusive fingers out of reflex. Rogier yanked his fingers back, but did not withdraw them, instead, pulling her forward with a sudden jerk. The ache in her jaw was merely a seasoning on the hurt he was visiting upon her. "Try that again, my wife, and I will remove the teeth for you," he growled.

He fucked her rhythmically, pushing deeply with each thrust. He felt more expansive, longer than he ever had previously, battering her insides. Each thrust seemed to culminate in another crack of siege weaponry outside. Even up here now, she could hear cries and screams from the men below, fighting and dying to the invaders. As her sobs mingled with the sound of men dying, Rogier's assault battered her in synchronicity with the enemy outside. Each lance of pain flared in her head, pulling a new flavor of hurt forth, and she shuddered with each mewling groan she made.

Rogier took her bare breast in his mouth, teeth worrying at her nipple as his breath got more belabored. Soon it would be done. But for some reason Alice didn't quite want it to end. A small part of her, the trained noblelady, saw herself as performing her wifely duties. The tiniest part of her exulted in the raw way he was handling her, the animalistic rage with which he despoiled her. Some of the fireworks of pain in her head didn't feel quite as painful before. She felt a susurration of warmth, some measure of pleasure, amidst all the horror she was seeing. With a final shuddering breath, he came, his cock spurting with an ire almost as hot as the rage in his eyes. She stared into his dead black eyes as he came, his seed more voluminous than any she had experienced prior. Her thoughts latched onto the irrational thought of him filling her up entirely, so that it spilled from everywhere, her used and discarded by her lord husband, as a noble lady was intended to be. But he finally ceased with one last wheeze, lying on top of her, his goatee scratching her sore neck.

Alice barely had time to recover. She was a listless puddle of abused flesh, lying beneath the familiarly ponderous and soft bulk of her husband. "I love you, my lord," Alice whispered, her trembling voice hoarse and uncouth to her ears. Rogier looked up into her eyes as if to say something, when the window gave out.

It broke in a sound that was both discordant and jarring, while simultaneously melodious and beautiful. Each shard caught the crimson light from below, a fractional universe of the horrific carnage beyond the keep. Each universe a microcosm of chaos, fire, and misery that sailed into the room. For a brief moment Alice heard the rending bass of the window giving beneath the kinetics of a siege projectile. Sprinkled over this oppressive noise was the gentle song of glass shards, each universe singing one last pure clarion note before succumbing to its destruction.

Alice screamed in surprise, but she never heard it. Her hearing had lapsed into a tinny buzzing, blotting out the entirety of the sense. Dust and slivers of glass littered the entire bedroom with the finer particles drifting on the chaotic air of the wall's rending. Rogier stumbled away from her, his face a bloody horror from numerous shards raking his face. His back, arms, legs, all were cut by multiple lacerations, his body having taken most of the shrapnel from the window. A ruined crimson streaming face shrieked in what must have definitely been absolute agony, but Alice couldn't hear it. She likely was screaming too, her vocal cords straining. She flailed, falling out of the bed with little grace and even less dignity, backing away from the gaping rend where the window used to be. The macabre dance of firelight flickered across the walls, casting Rogier's shadow as an even more ruined, writhing being, a blackened soul drawing back from the torment of damnation.

Alice's gaze was consumed in watching that shadow dance, reaching for the heavens in pleading, flickering in and out of existence. It suddenly was blotted out, something large and imposing filling the gash in the wall. There was something batlike to it, large leathery wings spanning outside, as its taloned feet grasped the cracked masonry. The large wings folded across its back, and Alice realized she was gazing upon a tall, human-looking frame but also disturbingly inhuman at the same time. Its silhouette was perfectly masculine, broad musculature across its shoulders and chest. A smooth androgynous countenance was cast in lurid shadow by the flames behind it, but two ebon horns curled from its brow, deep and inky in the light. Large arms rippled as it flexed, and the wings vanished. It strode into the room with a casual arrogance that made Rogier seem feeble and subdued. It turned to gaze upon Alice, and her heart froze as its full lips curved into a smile. One of the daemons was here. In Rogier's room.

The daemon's mouth moved in some statement but it was similarly muted beneath the buzzing. Alice shook her head desperately, pointing to her ears helplessly. "I can't hear," she said frantically, hoping it sounded understandable. Perhaps if she made it apparent she couldn't comply with its demands, it wouldn't hurt her. Unbidden, the same frozen smile she had always been taught to bear, took over her visage.

The daemon's smile didn't waver. It took a step toward her. Alice scuttled backward, but she was already against the far wall, unable to retreat any farther. She curled up against the cold stone, covering her bare indecency as much as she could. The daemon continued its advance, until it knelt in front of her.

She could see it now, in its full terrible glory. Its angular features jutted at its chin and cheekbones, while the softness of perfect beauty filled in its lips and brows. Its eyes were foreign and unknowable, orange dying coals in a pool of midnight dark. Two long slender black horns framed its alluring features. The daemon's body was red and shone in the fire light, only dimmed across the shoulders, the flanks, and the throat with a darker blackened carapace. Its body was starkly hairless, at odds with the coarse hair her husband was coated with. The being had a taut midriff, abdominal muscles guiding her eyes inexorably downward to a ramrod straight phallus, large, red, and glistening.

Alice recoiled, blushing, but the daemon reached out, faster than she could withdraw. Its hand caressed her cheek, where she had been backhanded. The hand was warm, uncomfortably so, the way metal felt after being left in the sun. But hearing returned in an instant of disparate sounds. Rogier's hoarse screaming competed with the ring of steel at arms, the cries of the dead and dying, the thunderous roars of siege engines and collapsing stonework, and the haunting chimes of windows breaking across the top of the keep. But more and more, Rogier's bellowing dominated.

The daemon spoke and this time Alice could hear it. Its voice was a rumbling bass, the same rumble of mountains collapsing, ice sheets grinding, forests falling. It was a voice not only of power, but of destruction. "Ah, now how is that, lady Alice?" His voice drew her heart in while also making her palms sweat and breath come in irregular shortness.

"I... I can hear, my lord," Alice replied, gratefully. "If it is not too much of an imposition upon your august personage my lord, could you visit the same boon upon my lord husband?" Her smile remained immutable, bolted onto the face of a scared little girl leaving her highland homeland to a far off court and kingdom.

"That's not what you really want, my duck. You want him gone. You want him silent, yes?" His voice was the sonorous purr of a predator. He rose from his crouch, turning to face Rogier's writhing form, amidst the smeared puddle of his own blood.

"No my lord, please save my lord husband as you have granted your mercy unto me." Alice's smile felt giddy, unnatural in a way she had never felt before.

"No. This is mercy." The daemon brought one taloned leg down on Rogier's chest, entirely caving the abdomen and ending his shrieks in a gurgling sob. "What I intend for you, my duck, is far far less preferable."

Alice tried to back away, slide more into the corner. In one instant, she had been made a widow. But there was still one chance. Rogier's seed was still within her. She could still bear him an heir. "I beg for ransom my lord," she proposed, weakly. Her smile hung askew, a deranged facade actively giving way to force it was not prepared to face.

The daemon approached and crouched again. Its full lips curved into the same knowing smile. "You laid with him recently didn't you?" He leaned forward, his horns hemming her in, forcing her to look into those same indecipherable eyes. "You reek of his pathetic dribble. I shall take it upon myself to bless you."

"My lord, I don't understand-"

"Oh you understand well enough, my duck. Since you were old enough to have breasts, you pined for a rich southern lord to take you away. You offered anything. Anything at all. Do you not wonder why Marie took that wasting sickness? Or why your sister Elene took the vows at a convent? It was all for you, my duck. Ever was it for you. Yet in all things, you wanted more. "

Alice shook her head, denials blubbering out of her in an incoherent babble. Her mask hung crazily now, the smile clinging to her by only a few threads of discipline and hope. Tears flowed again, somehow her reserves not yet dry. They tracked muddy paths through the dust caked on her cheeks. She didn't know what he was saying- refused to acknowledge what he was saying. This had been her dream, this was how she found happiness, as the dutiful wife to one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. The dead man behind the daemon.