The Citadel
© 2021 by Pitchblack
Chapter Eleven -- The master
Water smacked Annie's face like a cold icy hand. Enchanted and ridden by her insatiable desires she had watched impassively as it crawled towards her, feeling nothing as it edged forward and swashed against her heated body. Its arrival heralded that the advent of the master was near, that he would come to satisfy all of her wanton needs. Dim lights, like flickering motes played over the rippling surface as the foaming liquid surged up until it started to immerse her neck. Once it splashed against the tender skin of her face and soaked her auburn hair, her ecstasy diminished. Suddenly she felt the coldness of its touch as her excitement was washed away by a sudden bout of fear to become drowned by the ever rising water.
Her trance broken, she heard a gurgling noise coming from the passage leading down into the oppressive darkness below. Churning waves emerged from there as if a monstrous being broke the water surface coming towards her immovable body. Floating from all sides against her skin, they splashed over her head, letting her hair fall in pieces over her face. She wanted to swipe the clinging tresses away, to see what was causing the turmoil. Immersed in the frigid water, her sexual agitation melted into thin air. Annie froze both in temperature and out of fear what would happen to her next.
When the frigid water submerged her flaring nostrils it cut away her last source of air. Panic-stricken, she started to struggle frantically against the chains holding her in place. They trapped her body mercilessly down under the churning waves, leaving her no way to get out of the water. She thought her lungs would burst open, while she gasped desperately for breath. Her struggling suddenly came to an end, when she felt the hold of her shackles let go. Bereft of their restrictions and weight her body floated upwards towards the surface. Her limbs ceased to trash around, once she was able to breathe again. She wondered what had caused her freedom, how it was possible to pry the tightly secured iron bands open without effort.
The turbulent water washed her body up towards the ceiling of the flooded cavern. Its coldness soaked into her bones, making her shiver and increased her fear of becoming drowned once it would fill the whole chamber. Turning her body vertical from its floating position and flailing about she looked frantically around searching for an exit. There was none visible but her thumbing heart pushed her forward to swim desperately towards a direction as good as any.
Her moves felt sluggish and clumsy at first, but gained momentum when the rising panic drove her forward. They were interrupted when something soft and writhing brushed against the skin of her ankles. Somewhere deep in her mind she knew that had happened before and the sickening memory drove her to duplicate her efforts. A suppressed cry escaped her lips when the touch became more rigid and something flexible like a stout rope grabbed her ankles, yanking her whole body to a halt. She began to scream, trashing with her arms, while she felt a powerful tug on her feet. The constricting lock around her ankles defeated all hopes of escape as she was dragged backwards into the turmoil. Her eyes went wide noticing out of the corner of her eyes the massive and sturdy tentacles writhing in the turbulent water which had coiled around her feet. They had wrapped them self tightly around her ankles, where she felt their scaly and rough surface squeezing her tender skin.
Annie's body firmly under their control, the writhing tentacles turned the desperately struggling woman around to face whatever was holding her in place. She continued to scream as two more of them shot out of the roiling water reaching for her arms. They slashed against her wrists and seized them in a vice-like grip, as they ensnared them right under her hands. Looping several times around her tensed muscles the tentacles increased their hold by coiling further down her elbows. She struggled vainly against their hold, but their grip was too strong for her frail attempts to gain freedom.
Once the creature had got his hold on her wrists, it pulled her arms high up above her head. The strain on the muscles which had to suspend the whole weight of her body brought burning tears to her eyes. It increased even more as her naked body was lifted out of the water until only her toes were straddling the churning surface. She hung in the cold air under the stony ceiling of the cistern only suspended by the thick tentacles coiling around her wrists. Helplessly trapped, her struggle against her ensnarement was in vain as her body swayed back and forth in the cruel grip of her capturer.
Looking down from her heightened position above the water her horror and fear increased when she stared down towards the seething vortex where the thick tentacles emerged, holding her in place. Out of the whirling maelstrom, a monstrous head emerged, rising above the surface. Rivulets of water streamed down from its thick scaly skin, which stretched over an enormous bulbous shape that elongated back from its bony face. Several circular openings were lined up along its temples, looking like oversized vents, spilling forth an oozing greenish liquid alternating with violent bursts of air sounding like a whizzing pipe. Thick bulges surrounded his eyes which were big as lanterns and glowed with an eerie bluish light. There was no nose between his eyes, only a row of small nostrils which blew up and inflated to the rhythm of his breathings. The most shocking sight was below these gaping apertures, for there was no visible mouth, but a chaotic mass of tentacles, writhing in every direction. If the creature possessed ever something like a maw, it was concealed deep within the wriggling appendices.
The monstrous head rested on a sturdy, muscular neck, which seemed to blend into the massive torso attached below. Partially obscured by the maelstrom of churning water around it Annie could scarcely guess its shape and appearance. What she could discern was more than enough to increase her horror and revulsion about her captor, for it was in no way build like anything human. Bulging muscular extremities stretched out to both sides from where it shoulders should be, vaguely resembling arms only that the ended in sinewy tentacles which had taken hold of her arms. Between his shoulder blades and along its back ran a row of nasty, crooked spikes, looking like bony protruding sticking out through its greyish skin.