Hold out

The truth is that you don’t feel there is a choice to be made. You are a piece in the game and all of the players have made their moves. What little agency you have felt since your capture evaporates. Nonetheless your resolve remains. You will remain unbowed and watch for your chance.

You remain true to your word and the silent promise to yourself. When your interrogators arrive to question you and offer your chance of buying your way out with information, you throw it in their faces scornfully. You cling to the dismissive facade and refuse any interaction, all the while offering prayers to the goddess for rescue.

Time ceases to have much meaning over the following days. You eat when told, sleep when allowed, and for the rest of the time you experience sights and sensations beyond anything you could have imagined. You learn new definitions of pleasure and the blurred line between that and pain. Unknown sides of your psyche are revealed, and new desires that make you feel like a stranger to yourself. Sensation so intense it leaves you unable to form coherent thought. Your body is explored, manipulated, exposed and shared by many. There are times you beg for just a moment’s rest. There are more times you beg to be allowed to continue. Neither plea is heeded.

Gradually the experiments become more and more tuned to your responses. Your wardens playing your body like some sort of instrument, now hard now soft, fast then slow, teasing out exactly the orchestration they desire. You feel like fingers have been wiggled into the cracks of your mind, and now are slowly twisting them open wide to see what is deep within. You are weaker now. There is never an opportunity for escape. Your sleep is plagued by dream and nightmare, and you begin to lose track of which is which, and what is reality. It isn’t long before in desperation you answer some of their questions. Those first answers are false, an attempt to delay and dodge. That is soon proved to be the case by your captors following careful study of your runes and several painful magical probes. You are quickly back into the machinery and the dance resumes. You obfuscate and resist, play out your hand to the best of your battered ability. But it is harder and harder to think.. to muster the cunning and the will to offer plausible alternatives.

At last, strapped into what seems like some sort of plate armour with strategic openings, which keeps you immobile and seems to buzz from within somehow, pushed to the brink you offer a weak answer. Instead of stopping the experience intensifies. You begin to lose track of the not quite orgasms you are pushed through. Exhausted and semi-delirious, you hormone soaked brain breaks. You gabble out the truth as best you can between sobs and spasms of pleasure. This time something rings true and everything stops.

Following careful study of the keystone rune at the base of your spine, the device at your chest is adjusted. You are finally allowed the sweet release of climax at your choosing. The experience is relatively short but deeply powerful, your third consecutive orgasm causing you to black out for several hours as your exhausted and finally sated body rests. The next day you are stripped of your runes.

It is something impossible to prepare for. The agonising pain is relatively brief. The pain of the loss never really leaves you. In the following days you are considering taking your own life, despite repeated visits from Alina who continues to try to recruit you to her cause. Your choices are cut short by an elven rescue team, the third such raid over several locations, though you have no way to know this. They successfully use a magical artefact to “jump” through the tunnels of the complex until they find you, and kill your guards. However when half of the regiment and the artefact are lost in a hail of crossbow bolts, you are **** to escape into the disused mine tunnels to escape. The pitched cavern battle which follows, between your handful of survivors and the mixed forces pursuing you, comes to an abrupt end when it sets off a tunnel collapse.

You never learn of the new weapons which quickly nullify the Queen’s guard, and begin to shatter both elven magic and the queen’s hold on the lands of the other races. The war is truly just begun and the sides are once again finely balanced, but the momentum is against the elves. Generations of chaos and bloodshed reign. But for you at least, there is finally peace.