Though not as much as you might think.
Warren, Hell love ‘im, decided to post this in response the current tempest-in-a-teapot:
At a certain point in every social group, the number of assholes becomes self-selecting and spontaneously-organizing in a self-supporting way. It appears the number of folks on the Net with factional agendas has reached such a point with various subcultures. Oh, joy. Moreover, the number of idiots in positions of decision-making power has always been unnaturally large, as a result of the rest of us promoting them just to keep them away from the things that really matter to keeping an organization running. Thus, SA‘s decision-making in this environment.
Me? I don’t care enough to do anything about it beyond a token. But I have a great token!
Even after, she wasn’t sure what was the worst of it.
At first, she thought it was the caress of his cold, dead hands, with nails chipped and slightly ragged. She could feel the trickle of blood where it stroked along her inner thigh, dragging a gash behind it like the wake of a dying fish.
Then, she considered whether it was the smell of his breath, that carrion odor like an open grave. There were many open graves on the outskirts of Vandread, some of the only open soil allowed to see the sky there, and she’d always connected the scent of freshly turned dirt and rotting flesh with a sort of freedom, with a release from concerns. But his breath just smelled like death, even if the clay of his body yet moved.
Finally, she decided it was the look of him. Pale, like a raw bone, and thin like one, too. His naked body stood in the center of the circle and writhed in a way that recalled serpents, or worms. His arms shifted with fluid grace along patterns of force only the blasphemous and the damned could see.
It occurred to her that she was starting to see them, undulating as if waves in the sea caught in lightning. This only slightly discomfited her.
Once, before the Lord’s minions had descended on her clave and pointed her out, marked her for taking, dragged her away from family, friends, and servants, she was named Anise. Like the flower. Her hair had been black and rich, falling to her ankles in mahogany-black. Her eyes, too, were dark and deep, like her mind.
That mind, like her father before her, had led her to her researches, of course. She served the City of Thorns, the City of Iron, in a needed role: Public Necromancer. Theurgia Publicus. By the time she was thirteen, she had raised the dead, consulted the spirits, and sent demons screaming back to Hell wrapped in nothing but her ire. Demons from Hell didn’t frighten her. The dead, walking or not, didn’t frighten her.
The man who’d just turned toward her, one hand raised to the metal ceiling, encrusted with empty-eyed skulls, the other curled lightly about his phallus, stroking in time with the rhythm of the chant, he scared her. Terrified her, in fact. The knowledge that when she was thirteen and already conjuring fiends, he was a thousand years old, maybe more, and had not sent the fiends to Hell but bound them in cold iron, fused them with his body, made them serve him like dirty whores, that made her bones jelly and her knees sag and her wrists protest against the iron manacles that kept her nearly on tip-toe.
Anise was thirty now. Thirteen was long past. To him, the intervening time wasn’t a lifetime, it was an eye blink.
As she watched him stroke his shaft, watched it grow hard and thick in his hand, she was both terrified and wonderfully excited.
This was Th’esus Hummel, Third Lord of Vandread.
He leaned in closer to her, his long dark hair nearly as long as hers, pulled back in a simple half-braid. The pinkness of his lips was stark on his pale face, and it added an extra fillip to his liquid expressions. It was lust there, now, but she wasn’t sure if it was for her or the thing he was calling.
“Soon, little Anise, soon. I think we’ll have what I’m looking for soon enough. I’ve already found part of it, no?” He paused, looked at her with a little moue of dissatisfaction. Some part of her shivered at the look, and that earned a bit of a quirk of the lip from him.
Something in Anise turned loose with a gush. “Haven’t you had enough, Hummel? Haven’t you –” and it stopped again as she felt him move around behind her, felt the coolness of his chest to her back.
The knife in his fist that came around from behind her drew her eyes more than the roiling in the circle. It was black and silver, obsidian-bladed.
It was a sacrificial knife. And it hovered over her breast, a hungry wasp.
The tip teased along under the nipple. “I never have enough, my pet,” whispered into her ear, and she imagined she could see it curling around in whorls of smoke. “I take what I want, and I want much.” Or – hadn’t you noticed?”
The hard, sharp thrust upwards which sent his shaft into her came as less surprise than she wanted, much less surprise than the fact that her body had betrayed her and was ready for him, ready and wanton for him. Her fists rattled the chains as she tried, agonizingly, to drag herself away from him, but the demon he had bound into the iron made her sluggish, made the body like one at the bottom of the sea. Her intended hard pull away ended up like nothing so much as a sensuous writhe.
She couldn’t tell then if the chains forced her to that – or simply let her. A hundred nights nor a hundred years later, she still didn’t know.
All she remembered was his laugh.
“Good, good!” he murmured after the chuckle had flown by, as sharp as the knife cutting its way across her breasts. “That’s a good little girl, yes. Just what you needed, hmm? And what I needed.” Another thrust speared up into her, as he murmured, not to her but the chains and they fell a foot or so, enough to leave her hanging forward just a bit.
All the better for his pleasure.
“I hate you,” Anise spit at the floor. “I hate you, hate all of you. The rotting stench of you sickens me. You’re dead inside.” She tried to turn her mind toward the circle, tried to ignore the violation she was experiencing but had no control over. She even thought of the knife, and how the lazy gestures it was making on her chest reminded her of certain rune-marks she’d seen in the Deep City. Her body, though, betrayed her at the end, slipping out a groan to punctuate her hate.
Part of her loved him.
The wicked smile he wore radiated against her back. The thickness of him made her thighs quiver, and her sex ache. It wasn’t the first time she’d been taken (not even the first time by something arguably utterly inhuman), but it was the first time she’d been used without her consent. She could feel the degradation dripping down her inner thighs.
“Oh, but you’re so alive inside.” A thrust. Another. There was no real rhythm, no real time, except – there was. It matched the beating of the Black Heart of Hell, the screams of the dying.
He dropped the knife. In a sense, she felt relieved and in another she was more sickened than ever. Now both his hands were free.
Both of his hands went to her breasts, jerking her upright, pulling her back so his manhood pushed against the underside of her clit with the force of another blade. She screamed, wordless and high.
His scream joined hers, curled around it, mocked and echoed it. His nails dug hard, hard into her breasts, teasing the nipples, bruised and bloodied already, to a higher heat. Her sex answered, clenching tight around the white-hot iron inside, buckling and suckling.
Hair thrashing, she was wordless. Nothing sufficed to verbalize how much she hated him, and hated being so helpless. Words paled. Only the Hell Speech answered, and it came like a whipcord.
The language of demons and the dead is a potent thing, and he answered it in kind. Marks appeared on her skin, branded by the force of it, his name repeated in the script of the Book of Black Law, in her secret places, on her flesh like burns, everywhere. Her hatred and filth made manifest insects which burned in the air and bit them both.
It only seemed to spur him on. His hands dropped to her hips, his hard length from her hungry slit to her untainted ass. When he pushed within, she wasn’t sure if the scream was from the pain or from the suddenly empty gaping void which drooled juice and blood from between her thighs.
A word whispered upwards and the chains dropped her to the floor, just within the circle, thrown roughly forward so the cold granite bloodied her nose, turned it into a gruesome flower to mock her name. Anise was caught beneath the weight of the dark man, the empty man, and enjoyed it.
Looking up and forward, her hair caught in hands like claws, dragged back until her neck ached, she gazed directly into the heart of the maelstrom that circled the ceiling above, felt her body reaching the point of absence, mingling unconsciousness and a lesser death, and could not close her eyes against the onrushing horror.
When she came, it was without a sound. Only the storm answered her, and that only by reaching out and down.
Th’esus Hummel withdrew from her violated ass, turned her to face him, and looked into her eyes. The coldness inside made him smile. The cold, hard hands that guided her to take his blooded shaft in her mouth and suckle her own ruin from it, hungrily, greedily, even, made her shudder because she remembered those hands.
When he came, she swallowed every drop. In no way would she let even the slightest fraction of him escape.
The slap across her face that drove her on her back into the center of the circle dropped like lightning. Anise’s black eyes met those of Th’esus Hummel.
“I hate you, father.”
“Good, my pet. This will serve you well.”
And then the demon was on her, it was in her, and she was made into the thing of her father, his pet, his soldier, and if desired, his sacrifice. She died as her blood crept out on the floor, while Th’esus violated his daughter, took her, ass and cunt and soul, ravaged and raped her, and the body he tossed casually into the circle was made to receive the beast that descended.
A hundred years later, in her father’s bed, having watched him fall asleep, she still hated him. A hundred years later, watching the sleeping man who was nothing less than her father, she loved him. A hundred years later, she was still his toy, his thing.
Anise Hummel would have it no other way.
Ferg:
