Demon attacks are rare.
Of course, a single traveler or a small group of them is so fantastically unsafe from such that no one in their right mind would do that in the first place, but large caravans are usually perfectly safe.
The demon notices the blood on its hand when it withdraws it. He pries the wood off Nerine's hiding place and looks at her.
He is tall, close to seven feet, and fangy, with blue-grey pebbled skin and blue-green hair. Black horns jut from the back of his head at odd angles, and his wings blot out a great deal of sunlight. Nonetheless, he has no trouble spotting her. Despite the oddness of his dental arrangement, he can still produce a recognizable leer.
Well, there aren't any demons currently murdering boys, so maybe it's just that all the men fought. Or maybe all the demons here happen to be straight, it's not like these are all the demons ever.
They take off, great wings snapping wide and catching air from a standing start.
Some of the other women scream.
The demons make their way down a dark stone passage, to a better-lit round room with a bunch of doors. The hallway continues, opposite. The few demons with corpse-bags go down that hallway. Those with live captives open the doors and enter the rooms, including the one holding Nerine.
The room is bare, with only a stone slab in the center. The demon slings her onto it and leers again.
...the healing implies they mean to keep her long-term, especially because he fixed her leg and not just the mess he personally made.
That's good news for her chance of survival. But in the moment, what she mostly thinks about is a future of weeks or months or years of being violently raped by demons. She shudders, half from fear and half from lust.
- maybe there are advantages to the group thing after all.
No that should not have been her first thought.
Okay, fuck it. She is going to spend the foreseeable future being raped by demons. If she gets off on it then fine, she gets off on it, good for her, her life is going to be much more pleasant that way. She shouldn't let herself be so distracted that she misses an opportunity to escape, but realistically there aren't going to be opportunities to escape, so she might as well let herself like it.
It tastes so awful that she bursts into tears. And yet somehow that makes it better. Pain and suffering and helplessness, it's all part of the same thing, and she wants it. She wants them to keep fucking her like this forever. She wants to be hurt, raped, used, nothing but a toy to them, a warm body for them to fuck.
She shudders.
If they keep hurting her and she keeps reacting like this, she is going to have to hope that they're either very unobservant or not inclined to complain about her getting off on it. She hasn't literally gotten off yet, but it's starting to look like it's just a matter of time.
She whimpers around the cock in her mouth. The pain is incredible, like nothing she's ever felt, and she loves it, she wants them to fuck her to shreds -
- yeah there she goes. Tears streaming down her face, gasping and choking, stuffed full of demon cock from every direction, she has what is unquestionably the most intense orgasm she has ever experienced.
It hurts so much - if they don't heal her after this she'll probably bleed to death - she almost doesn't care, it's not like there's anything she can do, and being afraid of it feels so good - she comes again, and blacks out in the process, half from need of air and half from sheer intensity.
The one in her cunt has spikes, she can feel it, ripping her apart and then shredding what's left - she starts crying again, and gives up completely on trying to hide her pleasure. They haven't minded so far; in fact they seemed to find it entertaining, and if she's especially entertaining maybe they'll keep her alive longer.
The demon fucking her ass comes and is replaced. The demon fucking her mouth comes and is replaced. The demon who solicited a handjob comes, streaking her forearm with seed. The new demon fucking her mouth comes too, and instead of being replaced immediately one of them gives her a piece of bread with some kind of oil smeared on it to eat (they do not give her the opportunity to clean her seed-streaked hand first).
- fuck.
She can't scream, she can't breathe - she is utterly helpless, surviving second by second only at their whim, and they can fuck her any way they want, break her any way they want, and then put her back together and do it all over again, there is nothing she can do to stop it -
She comes. This one goes on for a while.
As complaints go, this one is fairly petty, but wow, eating while being fucked just makes both things so much less appealing.
On the other hand it's kind of hot to be raped literally every waking moment.
This is a fucked-up way to be but it's not like giving herself a hard time over it will help anything.
They fuck her like that for a while. Sometimes one of the cocks in her lower holes will have spikes, sometimes both, sometimes neither. Size varies wildly. Almost all of the demons who fuck her throat pull the lung trick.
At one point both of the demons fucking her are way too big and covered in spikes, which proves a mistake when they accidentally abrade entirely through the wall between orifices and start getting each other with the spikes. This results in shrieking and cursing in the incomprehensible demon tongue, immediate removal of spikes, a healing for her, and the two so afflicted leaving immediately to go curl up in pain. There are no more spikes for several rapes after this.
Being gang-raped by demons feels good. It's easy to just let herself get lost in it. She's past the point of caring how fucked up that is; so what if she's fucked up? She has bigger problems. And it's not like she's ever going to get the chance to escape -
- but she can't assume that. She shouldn't give up completely.
Still, if she gets that kind of chance, it won't be while she's being raped by three demons at once. She can afford to enjoy herself.
Are they going to spend all day making her come like they did yesterday? Because she would be ever so happy to cooperate with that.
They continue raping and torturing her. About a week after she was first captured, someone decides to add fire to the torture palette. One demon has just clawed her breasts open and ejaculated on the wounds when the burning sensation of demon seed is augmented by the demon raping her cunt laying a flame-wreathed hand on the whole bloody mess.
The demon who drew pretty designs on her stomach in burns when fire was first added to the equation steps up to start raping her. He takes her hands and does little curlicues of napalm or something similar across her palms, then lets them fall, still burning, and then cups her breasts, slowly burning them and crushing her ribcage at the same time.
"Standard operating procedure for kidnapped human women is to get them pregnant, wait until the fetus is five or six months old, forcibly abort, magic it so the demonic essence seeps into the womb instead of dissipating on death, repeat as desired, then cut the womb out and eat it for the power."
"You're the first person who's been nice to me in a month. What am I gonna say? 'Fuck off'? Anyway, it's... you don't have to make 'demons should stop being such assholes to humans' your thing. There's lots of people who know it's a problem and don't make it their thing. If you want to and think you can get somewhere, then sure, but if you can't..." Shrug. "Personally, I find my ambitions limited by circumstances. I want to get out of here alive someday. Doesn't even have to be soon. Everything else is details."
Meanwhile Khythen has work to do.
Leaving the hell-pocket by himself is a little risky, but he's careful to avoid humans. The gate point back to the demon dimension is several hours' flight away, but it's pleasant to stretch his wings.
He makes the transition to his home plane with a minute sigh of relief. It's good to be home, even for a brief visit.
It's a few more hours before he makes it to the dwelling in question. He knocks on the door.
They've rearranged the furniture again since his last visit; now the centerpiece of the main room is a painted wooden sculpture of a jaguar standing on her hind legs and stretching up toward the ceiling. There are different paintings hanging on the walls, and they've dug out an extra few feet of cliffside to expand the room and carved a new window in the northeast corner.
Izaneth disappears off down the hall to fetch Talyr.
"I think the question is... do you want to save these particular captives, or try to make a bigger difference than that? Because from your description, I'm pretty sure I could walk into that pocket and walk out again a few months later with every single captive alive and free, but I don't think I could come home afterward. And if everyone who notices that humans are people does something like that, it's hard to see how we'll ever get anywhere on convincing everyone else."
"Yeah. And - well, they're both good to have around just in case things get... troublesome. And Izaneth being Izaneth, he'll remodel all the rooms to be more comfortable - he'd do it even if he didn't care about the captives, he just finds that sort of thing aesthetically offensive."
He nods. "You're welcome to. No one else cared enough to bother but I seriously doubt they'll object." He leads them down the corridor on the other side until they hit a cross-corridor dotted with more doors on either side. "And this is where our rooms are. I can show you which ones are unoccupied."
Izaneth shoves at the edges of the hole. Stone moves like clay under his hands. Soon the whole wall is lying on the floor in pieces; he picks up a particularly big slab and forms it into the approximate shape of a bed, then runs his hands over it a few times, softening the stone into something more comfortable. Another chunk of rock becomes a backless couch the same way.
Khythen gestures for them to come in anyway.
"Oh, hey, who's this?" the demon currently raping Nerine asks.
"Friends of mine who came in late," Khythen says. "Izaneth's going to completely remodel the place, it's going to be great."
"Cool," the rapist says approvingly. "My name's Nykrheeth."
Khythen gives her one last hairpet and then leaves the room and opens the door to the one next door. The woman inside is in fact in the process of being raped, but once Khythen explains Izaneth the rapist is happy to remove himself and his victim from the stone slab so Izaneth can work.
"I've suspected something wasn't right for a while now, but I'd barely ever seen a human, I had no way of knowing for sure, and - I didn't have anywhere to start. I'm a painter, not a politician. But then my friend Khythen went on one of these expeditions - I tried to warn him off, he didn't understand what I meant - and he came back and said I was right and he needed me to help him fix it. So now here I am."
"I get the sense there's more to her than what's visible on the surface, but what's visible on the surface is someone who's enjoyed everything that's happened to her so far and is mildly annoyed about having her life disrupted but perfectly friendly and very understanding about the 'most demons don't think of humans as people' thing."
--relaxes a little.
"My mother was a--dropout priest," she says. "She got captured, and...she knew enough about how to hurt demons to escape with it. And then moved to an entirely different country so no one would think it was weird that she decided to be a solitary forest herbalist so no one would find out what I was before I was old enough to hide it."
"...I'm not sure what I mean either, at least not well enough to put it into words. Um. If you have any plans that hinge on pretending our interaction was other than it was I would appreciate if you would tell me what and why so I don't fuck it up? Are we pretending you didn't know but still--did what I asked how I asked--so there's something I feel comfortable--telling them, later, that's not a catastrophe if they're indiscreet..."
"...I could pretend that, but it would complicate things. If I control exactly when and how I 'find out', then I control how the message lands, and I can make sure the reaction that people have is 'horrified and apologetic and deeply disturbed', which I can hopefully leverage into rethinking the entire concept of abducting humans to rape and torture. If there's any hint that I knew ahead of time and planned that, then I look like a manipulative sneak and it gets much harder to, ah, be a manipulative sneak. And it would be very unlikely for me to have done what I just did without finding out. It's probably best if we pretend we didn't have this conversation at all, to everyone except Khythen and my boyfriends. Everyone else is sleeping in today to give Izaneth time to remodel the rest of the rooms. ...but if you strongly value being able to be open about where your child came from right from the start, I can probably come up with a version of events that works, if not necessarily as well as my original plan."
...he nods. "All right. So. New plan: when we came into this room to do the remodeling, I noticed something didn't seem right but I couldn't tell what, so I stayed after Izaneth moved on, and as soon as I touched you I knew you were a half-demon, and I was horrified and apologetic and deeply disturbed, and I said everyone else would certainly feel the same way, but you had every reason not to believe me, so when I admitted what you were here for you asked me to do what I did so that whatever else happened you at least wouldn't be carrying a rapist's child. Does that hold together?"
"Yeah. And I stay with you until everyone else wakes up, because I didn't want to leave you alone for a moment in case someone else came in and - thought you still looked human enough..."
He hugs her, very gently, and murmurs, "I apologize in advance for - pretending I wouldn't otherwise have cared."
Nod.
He retrieves his pants and puts them back on and then sits beside her on the bed and hugs her some more.
"I'm going to be - protective and considerate and distraught," he says. "It's not exactly an act, it's more - refraining from hiding my feelings when I otherwise might."
"A few things, actually. One is that Mezeidai knows that my ultimate goal here is to change the way demons feel about humans. The other is - when we were talking, I wasn't aware of her heritage at first, and even once I knew we weren't sure that it would be the right strategic choice to reveal it immediately - so when I told her what she was here for, she asked me to get her pregnant, and I did."
"I wasn't planning to stick around for that part," he says. "And I don't honestly care that much about the stages of brain development, like, whatever, I'm fine not thinking of babies as people until they're born, seems like the most convenient place to draw the line, but this is a girl I've seen and talked to and hugged and comforted after what you guys put her through, and I cannot begin to tell you how fucked it is that you're standing there arguing that I'd better not think of her as a person if I want to be okay with the premise of this operation? Like, okay, maybe the premise of this operation is a little fucked too, because sometimes you end up fucking raping somebody? I get that this is awful, I'd be wrecked about it in your place, but you don't get to define away somebody's personhood to make yourself feel better!"
"Well that's delightfully inspecific," someone says cynically.
"Do you have anything more helpful to say?" the demon next to him asks.
"...Not as such, no."
"Then maybe shut up."
"I have a cousin who's a lawyer and won't ask inconvenient questions if I ask him about weird edge cases in immigration and refuge law," someone offers.
"Thank you, that's actually helpful," the one who told the cynic to shut up says.
And:
You wake with a start and a splash, in a ditch by the side of a road, neither of which you've ever seen before in your life. The air is mild, without the bite of early spring. The malevolent force of nature locked inside your heart and mind sleeps soundly, never stirring. You shouldn't touch it until you know what's going on. A mara is not a tool to use lightly.
Figures in the distance, unfamiliar, soaring unlike birds in the too-blue sky. This isn't the nightmare realm: the world is solid and real. And when you reach out, you feel no roiling nightmare darkness, no bitter flicker of possession, not even the faint whispering spark of another locked mara like yours. Whatever these people are, with their strange forms and their broad beautiful wings, they're no kind of dream-creature.
You almost can't believe it, when they land and one makes a crude remark in an indecipherable tongue. It just seems so... stupid. You try to explain about the mara, but you half know it's not going to work, and indeed it doesn't. He sees nothing in your eyes, because your mara is safely contained, and you're not about to call it up just to show him what it looks like. Odds are he wouldn't understand, and this is definitely not a safe situation in which to hold a mara in the grip of your bare will. It would not be worth it to call on your mara just to stop them from raping you.
They carry you off to a strange portal, which leads to a place that isn't the nightmare realm either, heaping another layer of incomprehensible foreignness onto the pile. And when the man who flew you here throws you onto a stone slab and rips your clothes off, then you finally bother to be afraid.
There is - a long blur of pain, its details mercifully obscured. The choice, made again and again and again and again and again, not to open the lock and draw on the mara's power, not to risk possession for a chance at safety and freedom. The degree to which you want these people dead varies, but outside of brief moments of hazy temptation you never want them trapped in an eternal nightmare, even though what they've trapped you in is arguably worse. Adding more suffering won't balance the scale of the world; it just drags everything farther down. And if they kill you then your mara will get loose anyway, but it's abundantly clear that they have no immediate plans to kill you.
You wish, variously, for death or rescue or a good night's sleep or two free hours to cry in; but more than anything else, you just wish you could ask them what the fuck they think they're doing—
The world untwists, and everyone is back in their own skin. (A subtle flavour in the air, a hint of unreality, suggests that they might not be all the way back.)
She steps into the room, wearing a simple white dress that blurs slightly at the edges.
The roar quiets; yelling just doesn't produce the kind of volume it should.
"I'm not going to murder you all," she says over their softened voices. "And I'm not going to lose control of my mara. I wouldn't have tried this if I thought it might fail that badly. I'm just here to talk."
"Maybe they have noticed and just find it to be the lesser of two evils," someone says. He does not sound thrilled by this prospect. Someone else punches him. He snarls and swipes back with his claws. One nearby demon tries to separate them, but others end up piling into the fight. It starts escalating quickly.
"I suppose an apology would be nice. And I still don't really have an explanation for what you were doing, although 'you didn't think humans were people' at least explains why you weren't not doing it. Besides that—" She shrugs. "I've been a little too busy to come up with an itemized list of demands."
She turns to go, and then looks back. "...By the way, in case any of you were confused, this is a constructed dream. In the material world you are all asleep. You can tell the difference if you pay attention. It's... considered very impolite to try to fool anyone about that, at home."
And then someone else walks into the room.
It's the girl who liked it, wrapped in a robe of thin black silk that is clearly less about preserving modesty and more about achieving the state of not-literally-naked.
"Hi," she says. "So apparently I'm being rescued or something?"
"Maybe this is a real dream," someone muses out loud, "and I'll wake up and none of the crazy will have happened."
"I think you really shouldn't try to rely on that," someone tells him.
"Yeah. But still."
"...How long 'here' is going to continue being a thing is a very real question," Jiorthkir says slowly.
"Reasonable."
Mmmm what a cozy huggable demon Khythen is.
"And, like, it makes some amount of sense to leave now as opposed to later because if I leave later I maybe end up wandering around the middle of nowhere by myself and I hear that's bad for your health. But honestly I'd kind of miss you guys."
The dream-girl (without her dream-dress) is standing in the doorway, sparks dancing in the depths of her eyes. (She looks like she's been crying.)
"Hello," she says; her accent is a little odd, but she speaks the demons' language now. "There are some girls who'd like to stop being pregnant."
"...in a sense, yes," he says.
"One of the other captives turned out to have mysterious otherworldly powers relating to dreams, and when she was left alone for long enough this morning she put everyone to sleep in the middle of the meeting and then came into a dream version of the meeting to politely ask us what we thought we were doing. She - showed everyone what it was like for her, coming here - not the traumatic parts but most of the rest - it was, ah, very convincing. Then she told us that humans are people and said she plans to take all the prisoners and leave. I offered to - help anyone who was pregnant and didn't want to be - she woke me up to let me do that, and then asked if I knew the two of you. She'd like me to ask you if you want to go with her or not."
"All right. I'll let her know. The girl with few complaints is staying, too; she came into the dream-meeting to ask if that was feasible, and she seemed very charmed by how concerned for her happiness and well-being everyone suddenly is."
He comes over to the couch to distribute hugs.
"Oh, sure."
He pulls layer after layer of stone-silk off the nearest wall and hands them to Talyr to be made into usable garments. And shoes, too, they're probably going to want shoes, he can do shoes. And maybe some bags for carrying stuff in? Not that there is really any stuff for them to carry?
She smiles thoughtfully at both of them and puts on shoes and clothes and takes custody of the rest for when she wakes the prisoners.
"...There should be someone in the world with the ability to capture a mara, in case mine gets loose," she says. "I'm going to be careful but accidents happen."
"Acquiring the ability is a very unpleasant process. Technically it's possible anytime someone is attacked by a mara, at home, but I'm not sure if anyone in this world could do it by themselves, and I don't especially want to rely on that, since people who can capture an attacking mara with no preparation are rare even in a world where everyone knows what a mara is; and locking them is much harder to guess, it needs to be taught. If you want to capture a mara you need a strong will and the ability to focus well under stress. And if you want me to give you the ability to capture mara you have to confirm that you understand how important it is not to unlock them casually. A locked mara is a source of considerable power that is almost never worthwhile to use."
The sparks in her eyes flare slightly, and Izaneth falls neatly asleep.
She looks at Talyr.
"I meant it about the process being unpleasant. Being a captive here was only usually worse, minute-for-minute. But it doesn't take very long. If you haven't picked it up after five minutes I'll stop trying."
—creeping clinging darkness sliding under his skin, pulling all his pieces out of place, licking at his bones with long cold tongues—
—and an inarticulable sense of how to make it stop doing that—
It feels like closing a door that someone else is trying very hard to shove open: a long struggle, and then click, and his mind is his own again. He blinks down at her; neither of them has moved while he was fighting the mara. He can't even tell how much time passed. It didn't feel like more than a few minutes, but it's hard to be sure.
"...you're right," he says. "That was unpleasant. Thank you, though."
She nods. There's - something about her, now, an intangible feeling of something huge and powerful and horrible wrapped up tight and compressed down to fit in a space as small as a person. Up close, it's kind of disconcerting.
"You'll know how to lock a mara if it ever comes up. I'm going to leave now. I'll let everyone wake up once we're far enough away."
He waits until he can't hear anyone moving in the hall, and a couple of minutes afterward, before he goes to check on Kemar and Mezeidai. The last thing he wants to do is startle anyone on their way out.
When he looks into all the rooms along the way, the only one still occupied is Nerine's.
He studies it for a minute, and then puts it down and pulls a bit of stone out of the floor (smoothing it out afterward so there's only barely a visible dip) and picks up Nerine's hand, the better to examine it for sizing purposes. The lump of stone shapes itself into a brush, and he kisses Nerine's hand and gives it an affectionate squeeze that makes the bones creak audibly and then gives her the new pen and lets go.
The whining gets higher-pitched and more intense. Her back arches and she screams, and apparently this is enough to finally wake her because her eyes fly open. She collapses, whimpering, for a moment, before she levers herself up and crawls to the edge of the bed and vomits over it, dry-heaving long after there isn't anything left in her stomach to disgorge.
"Yeah. But..."
She trails off, searching for words.
"...You fucked up real bad, I'm not gonna deny that. But you didn't - there's - there's not some kind of cosmic threshold where if you make this big a mistake you're not allowed to be okay anymore. Everybody gets to be okay. Everybody." Hug. "Okay?"
Mmmmkiss.
"So," she says, "first time we met, my impression was 'could definitely break me in half with his dick, is definitely thinking about it, too preoccupied with interior decoration to follow through'. And then you participated in the politest gangbang I've ever had. Which was, you know, nice! But was I wrong?"
He kisses her again, and takes her clothes off without putting her down. When her pants come off to reveal blood and semen still damp between her thighs, he makes an appreciative noise and gropes her, then throws her down on her bed, takes his pants off, and pounces. He's well over eight feet tall and built like a blacksmith; when his weight comes down on her wrist, the bones snap like twigs.
He hauls her knees farther apart, casually crushing them in the process. When he shoves his cock into her cunt, it's already big enough to hurt. It gets bigger. Her bones crack with the force of his thrusts. He doesn't use spikes; he tears her open with sheer size and violence.
He grins down at her; pins her wrists above her head, breaks them both with a casual squeeze of his hand; and starts fucking her again, in slow shallow grinding thrusts that really bring some emphasis to how huge he is right now, how thoroughly his cock fills her cunt. As he hardens again, her skin splits just from the increased pressure. Fresh blood trickles out of her.
Shortly afterward, he comes too, and lets himself slip out of her this time. A gush of mingled blood and seed follows, pooling between her thighs. He kisses her forehead and flops next to her on the bed and gathers her into his arms, draping a wing over her back.
"That was fun. You okay?" he asks, petting her hair and healing her again to fix the voice and any lingering splits or fractures from that last half-minute.