The days had passed quickly as the preparations for the Great Festival of Discipline gathered pace. It was now the evening before the Opening Ceremony, and after my weeks of preparation, the allotted time for my discipline trial had at last arrived.
"Can't you just tie me up and spank me for a while?" I asked.
Tr'skel laughed as he secured my wrists behind my back in the familiar metal cuffs.
"This is a trial of discipline, girl, not a lovers' game!" he replied. "The penalty for failure is severe. But it will serve as a true test for you, and the rewards could be incalculable for you, for Gyn and for Demonkind if you succeed!"
"No pressure, then!" I replied, wishing I was as confident as I was trying to sound!
I was standing at the edge of a circular pit, almost as wide as a football field is long, the narrow balance beam that I was about to use to cross it traversing its widest point. A huge web stretched across the pit itself, about three metres below the beam, slender filaments stretching from it to an opening in the pit wall a metre or so below the web itself.
"In that burrow," Tr'skel said, pointing to the opening in the pit wall, lives a drel, one of the most potent of all Pain-demons. She has stretched her web beneath the beam as she knows that the Pleasure imp is about to attempt to cross her pit."
"Why do you keep a Pain-demon locked up down here?" I asked, not comfortable with the notion that she was a prisoner, even if she did have nasty designs on me!
"She is NOT a prisoner," he replied, "she works with my artisans to produce pleasure stone devices. She lives apart from the rest of my staff because she prefers to." He then lowered his voice and whispered to me. "Most of my staff are glad that she chooses to do so, much as it embarrasses me to admit!"
"I HATE spiders!" I said, honestly. I always had. Even as a fully grown man, before my transformation by my estranged beloved, the sight and skittering sound of a large arachnid running across a polished floor was enough to make me feel physically sick!
"Then don't fall in!" he said, smiling grimly! "The upper walls of the pit are too smooth for her to climb up to you, she can only ensnare you if you fall from the beam." He pointed to a gate on the far side of the pit. "However, if you do not reach the gate and pass through it before your allotted time to complete the trial expires, the first gate will close automatically and a second gate at the back of Sp'drel's burrow will open. The tunnel behind it will allow her access to the platform and to you!"
"And then what happens?" I asked.
"She ensnares you in her web and you spend some time as the plaything of a Pain-demon." he answered. "How long I cannot say for certain. She has many burrows in the pit and I do not know where all of them are! You may be in there until she tires of you, and she is unlikely to quickly tire of tormenting the Pleasure imp!"
"Now that the moment has finally arrived, I am afraid, my lord!" I said. "What if I fail? What will it mean for our future, Gyn's and mine?"
"You will never be certain that you can control your nature unless you test yourself in some way, Lindsay." he replied. "I have designed a trial for you that only self-discipline will see you safely through, but the decision to attempt it is yours and yours alone!"
"I do need to know if I can truly control my lust, my lord." I conceded. "Best start the clock, so!" I said, smiling a little. "It's just the same as before only higher, really, so long as I don't think about Spiderella down there!"
"One moment," he said, "You're not fully prepared yet!"
He then cinched a thick leather belt around my belly and my heart sank as I realised what was coming next! He then placed a lozenge shaped glowing crystal stone against my lovelips, expertly rubbing my labia with it and twisting it gently until they separated around it. I was already moaning softly from the pulses of pleasure as he strapped it in place, the final strap passing between my bum cheeks and buckling to the back of the belly strap. The High Lord waited until my hips were trembling, my bottom tensing and relaxing in time with the pulsing of the stone pressed against my vaginal opening, before slapping me lightly on the bottom to start me forwards.
I stepped onto the balance beam, focused on the gate on the far side and maintaining my centre of balance above my feet. The patient coaching I had received from my beautiful Leopard-demon girlfriend, an expert in the field of keeping her balance, had prepared me for this moment of truth and I had no trouble maintaining myself upright and making slow but steady progress across the beam. The pulsing, vibrating stone strapped against my now throbbing pussy was another matter altogether, however. Several times I had to stop moving altogether, biting my tongue and relaxing my belly muscles, resisting the waves of pleasure that threatened to engulf my wanton body, my whimpers echoing off the walls that enclosed Sp'drel's pit. But my time in the boar forest as a hogglig had helped condition me to resist such animal urges, so the waves of delight eventually passed, each time more agonisingly slowly than the last, allowing me to resume my slow movement towards the gate and safety.
Having spent time as prey, both in innocent childrens' games and in deadly earnest, my senses had by now developed a routine for examining my environment for clues that danger might be near, my eyes scanning from right to left, my ears attuned to the noises around me, alert for anything different or out of place. I therefore took notice of the several filaments leading from one of the many holes around the pit that opened into Sp'drel's burrows, filaments that led up to the platform in front of me! I kept moving, until forced to stop to fight off the next expansion of the pool of pleasure in my belly, the wantoness burning through my body as my resistance to the building fountain of release began to fail, the need to let climax overcome me becoming almost irresistible. My encounter with Slith'oph a few weeks earlier had introduced me to the joys of sharing pain and pleasure with a Pain-demon, but her warning to me rang in my ears as the pulses and vibrations of the pleasure stone strapped between my love lips intensified, the urge to let myself fall from the beam and into Sp'drel's trap becoming stronger and stronger as the lust burned hotter and hotter in my belly. Only my will to succeed was keeping me moving forwards now. But I stood in place a moment longer than I needed, watching the burrow entrance and spotting eight red eyes observing me, eyes that disappeared the moment their owner suspected that I was ready to begin moving again! Sp'drel had set a trap for me; somehow she had attached sufficient strands of her web to the platform to allow her to climb up to it before I could reach it myself!
I had no choice but to try to run the last twenty metres to the platform, to get there before she could react and cut me off. If I slipped and fell, she had me for certain, but if she managed to trap me on the beam my fate would be exactly the same! I focused on the gate, pulled my arms in behind me as tightly as I could and ran as fast I dared along the narrow surface. I could hear hissing and the horrifying scrabbling clicking of some kind of claws below me, the horrible sensation the sound produced in my stomach quenching the burning arousal that I had been constantly on the very edge of yielding to until that moment, helping me ignore the noises and keep running, throwing myself onto the platform the moment I felt it was near enough, then scrambling to my feet and running for the release mechanism for my cuffs. I turned and squatted, feeling for the slot in the device into which the lock set between the cuffs needed to be fitted to open them. I looked towards the gate, which hadn't yet began to close automatically; I had made far better time than expected.
The opening that the gate was supposed to block was then suddenly filled with one of the most horrifying demons I had ever seen! A recognisably humanoid body, but with an unusually slender waist, supported eight spider-like limbs, the drel walking on two that were longer and more developed than the others, the rest functioning as arms. A cluster of glands on her lower belly, that I deduced to be her web-producing spinnarets, pulsed and throbbed. Her head bore little or no resemblance to a human at all, two large glowing red eyes were flanked by three smaller ones on each side and her jaw consisted of terrifying snapping mandibles with what looked like long taloned fingers above and below the mouth that the mandibles concealed. Sp'drel then spoke to me, a ghastly, screeching parody of human or demon speech.
"Come to me, sweet little pleasure imp!" she said, hissing and drooling disgustingly! "You have no understanding of the pleasure I can produce in your body. All I ask is that you please me in return!"
"No thanks, Spiderella, I'm spoken for!" I replied, as the cuffs finally opened and fell from my wrists. I got to my feet and sprinted for the wheel that would lower the gate manually.
"Your resistance is hopeless!" she shouted as a long thick net of filaments launched from her spinnarets and snared my ankles in sticky strings! I fell heavily, winded, as she began to draw the web back towards herself, hand over hand, like a fisherman reeling in a catch! I tried to kick, grab a handhold, but it was no use. My mind reeled frantically, trying to think of anything I could use as a weapon; then I suddenly realised that I had one! I opened the belt around my waist and pulled the pleasure stone from between my sex lips, my terror having driven all thoughts of pleasure from both my mind and body. I waited until the moment that Sp'drel's arms reached for me and pulled me to her, her claws reaching for my wrists. Then I pressed the stone against her face as hard as I could, counting on her inverse relationship with pleasure to cause her immense pain from contact with it. It worked even better than I expected; she screamed in agony and released me, staggering backwards towards the gate, which now finally began to close! Unfortunately, sending a burst of extreme pleasure into Sp'drel's brain in an effort to harm her instantly did the exact same to me; I collapsed to the floor in a sensory overload, my mind adrift.
A huge bat-like shape suddenly flew at the Pain-demon, its huge wings beating to force her steadily backwards through the gate and then off the platform altogether. The last thing I saw before I passed out was the gate slamming shut. I could only have been unconscious for a moment before Sp'drel's shrieks and hisses brought me around. Tr'skel was standing on the edge of the pit, looking down into it. I went to the back of the chamber and used the wheel to reopen the gate, then joined him. He turned and grinned at me.
"She is trapped in her own web!" he said, laughing! "No less than she deserves for trying to ruin your discipline trial! Well done for succeeding, by the way, I never doubted you for a moment."
