A Jar of Hearts

All characters in the following work are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons – either living or deceased – is coincidental on the part of the Author. Furthermore, as the body of the following fiction involves graphic depictions of sexual activity AND violence all characters, unless otherwise noted, are written as being of the majority age of eighteen years.

Thank You

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Elissa placed the second jar – that of lust – into the proper receptacle within the Infernal Wheel and marveled as the blood-rune beneath it fired with the pleasure of The Master. She found herself wetted from the experience and wanting a man. Unusual, since she had only ever allowed the pleasure of her Master to fill her desire.

Still, this yearning was building within her and she could not quiet it. Perhaps it might go unnoticed if she were quick about it. All the better still if she were to find yet another sacrifice suited to the needs of The Master. Verily the daemon could not take umbrage at her own lusts if they were satiated in His name.

She had discarded the stinking rags which rescuing from the trash heap in that alley had allowed her to renter the Olde Quarter of the capitol with barely more than a ribald comment from one of the wretched members of the City Watch. Making her way into the warren in which she lived had been little trouble after that. The sacrificial skin had already been tainted upon His alter and then burned in the name of The Master. Now, even though sleep was threatening to drag her down, Elissa must force herself back into the twisted lanes and narrow alleys of the poor tenement hovels in search of quenching these desires.

A stick of Goblyn Root served to revive her, though the bitter taste of the plant did nothing for her appetite. Elissa was no addict and avoided the vices of The Quarter as much as possible. The Master insisted upon his vessel being free from the taint of the sins upon which he otherwise feasted. A stale roll stuffed with meat tamed the rumblings of hunger within her. The purse from last night's sacrifice still held ample coin for her meager needs and still allow her to seek the pleasure which her body was demanding.

It was almost an entire candle's length before she chanced upon one of the stews that serviced women. For a district of the capitol wherein a man might get every imaginable vice and desire fulfilled – if their purse was not wanting for coin – a woman seeking the same distractions would have a difficult time of it.

The aged pimp at the door gave her a smile consisting of bare gums and the rotting stumps of a few teeth.

"My needs call for a clean one." Elissa said even as she showed the man three silver coins. The going rate for a male whore within The Quarter.

"Not so easy to find today milady." Assured the pimp. "But Longpole has a few within that will suit."

Elissa passed through the thin door with the peeling paint in search of what she needed. Already the tension inside of her was building again and a discomforting wetness had begun between her legs. Her breasts were also sensitive to the tough and her hardening nipples spoke to her growing arousal. One of the handful of doors that the pimp had indicated did not have its lantern lit – indicating that there was already someone paying their custom within – and she tapped upon the frame to announce herself before pushing through the portal.

The room she entered was much as her own quarters. A few aged and stained pieces of furniture, an old fireplace and rusted grate, and a pallet sitting in the middle of the room. A set of heavily mended curtains dressed the only window and the occupant was turning back into the room after emptying the contents of his chamber pot into the alley below. A string of muffled curses said that he had hit his mark – dousing some wretch below in night soils – and he returned the pan to the floor and kicked it beneath the bed.

The young man was not unpleasing to look upon and he carried no obvious taint that Elissa could see. She chanced whispering an incantation under her breath which confirmed what her eyes had already told her. The man-child was, indeed, clean. He was wearing only a pair of loose fitting leggings and a breech clout that covered his manhood.

His was a medium built and his height was only a hand's length taller than Elissa herself. Reaching back into the hallway she lit a taper from a candle and fired the colored lantern hanging outside of the door then shut it as she stepped back inside.

Elissa's tensions were lightened from the moment that Anton's tongue was pressed against her sex! She arched her back as he took her with his mouth and proved that he was well schooled in his craft of pleasuring a woman. He had little trouble in finding the swollen bulb of pleasure that would grant her release and as his tongue touched it she jumped and almost tumbled off of the bed.

It was infrequent. This yearning for taking a living man into her. Normally, Elissa much preferred the attentions of The Master and doing his bidding as means of relieving herself. She was relatively inexperienced with men and knew only to take her pleasure as it came. At least with this one she had chosen well!

"Mmm!" She pressed herself against his eager lips and skilled tongue. "Ohhh!" This one was proving himself an expert as the tip of his tongue and lips teased her folds.

Despite his best efforts though her pleasure refused to come by such means and after some minutes of merely basking in the waves of ecstasy rising from between her legs to assail her mind Elissa bade him rise to strip. Gone with the tug of a rope belt was the breech clout so that now his sex was shown to her and it had risen magnificently from the tangled web of hair covering his upper legs, stomach, and crotch.

His balls hung heavy and full between his legs and his manhood was, oddly enough, curved upward in its hardness. Elissa eyes were fired with lust and she tightened in anticipation of accepting such a marvelous instrument inside of her. Knowing full well that she was breaking any number of acceptable behaviors for a person of her sex, Elissa guided Anton to his back upon the bed and gently grasped his stiffened member!

It was the man's place to be atop a woman – or so insisted the holy men of this benighted realm – and since she was already in league with a daemon prince and murdering the scum of the capitol, there was no real harm in breaking just one more social convention. Anton gasped at her touch and Elissa called upon a small portion of her power and marveled as the man-whore shrank in upon himself now that he was under her spell. Truly, the gifts of The Master were many fold for those as were loyal.

Her ability to control those consumed by their vices was just one such gift, and one of the more useful ones. She dared not use too much though. The Master was always aware whence she used his gifts. He would prove most unhappy with her if he knew she were wasting them upon a man in order to appease her own lusts!

The penis was hard and felt welcome in her hand. Anton, his eyes reduced to bottomless reflecting pools of shadow by the power of The Master was helpless in her grip. She could have gutted the man-whore with the dagger in her boot and he would have thanked her for the privilege if she had so willed it. Instead, she would take the pleasures her body needed and be done with him.

Not like the wanton women in the adjoining rooms of the brothel as they rutted with these men. Allowing their bodies to be used as the men took them and yet daring to think that they were in any way maintaining some form of control! They were merely paying for the convenience of remaining nameless and thus avoiding the persecutions of the clergymen and their accursed churches. It was all fine for a man to walk the streets and to take from a whore, but allowing a woman the same freedom as a man was unheard of and unwelcome thinking in most corners of the realm.

Elissa swung one leg over Anton's prone body, straddling the thing she desired most at that moment. Already her own sex was wetted and ready to take him inside of her. She knew to expect some discomfort from the deed – before the pleasure came – because she had only allowed two other men the privilege of having her body like this. Both those other times had been more from curiosity than from any physical yearning of her own. Both times The Master had punished her deliciously for daring to give his vessel to another. Elissa closed her eyes as she guided the head of Anton's engorged cock to her opening and then in a single fluid motion impaled herself upon it!

"Ahhh!" She cried out. Thankfully, within the walls of the brothel, it was a common sound and one which would pass unnoticed.

The angle she had taken him at and his odd shape made this one hurt just a little more and Elissa could feel the blood-tears as they leaked down her cheeks. Still, such was not going to stop her release and thus she began to move her body. Short strokes at first – raising her body just enough to feel the friction within her – before burying Anton deep inside of herself again. Her nails lengthened and hardened into blackened talons and she raked them down Anton's chest as, indeed, her own pleasure began to build.

The blackened down covering her sex was soon dampened from her exertions, her sex was hungrily devouring Anton as she rode him! Reaching behind and beneath her own bucking ass, Elissa's hand encountered Anton's testicles. They were heavy and drawn close to his body. His time was near indeed! Such surprised her. Most creatures in the grip of The Master were unconcerned with their own pleasures and were, verily, unable to come to their own release. Still, she kept her motions even and consistent until her womb and sex tightened around his manhood and her mind was awash with pleasure!

Elissa was barely aware of her mouth hanging open in silent exclamation of her pleasure as she ground herself against Anton and convulsed atop of him. Before the blackness consumed her though she was vaguely aware of an added wetness between her legs and knew without doubt that her slave had, miraculously, achieved his own release!

Upon unsteady legs, Elissa exited the brothel into the weak, late morning, sunlight over the capitol. The old pimp smiled at her as she tried to walk and laughed aloud at her comical success. He would not be so pleased once he found what was left of young Anton. Still, her desires satiated, and her sex and thighs sticky from the effort, she could return to her Caew pleased and ready to resume the work of The Master.

Anton's seed was running out of her and soaking her small clothes. Elissa was only too pleased that home was not so far off that calling for one of the hacks that plied the streets of the Olde Quarter was going to be required. She had good reason to believe that The Master would have need of her again tonight . . .

The Third Task

Her trepidation at again allowing The Master to wear her was off putting and Elissa found that she was having difficulty arousing herself enough to pass the philter into her sex that He might come upon her wholly! She blamed her foolish behaviors from this morning.

Had she been possessed of sufficient strength to refuse her own lusts and take pleasure from only her own fingers – as The Master seemed to prefer – then performing the ritual needed by Him would not now be such a challenge! Also, her sex still ached from the unaccustomed and vigorous use to which she had put it. Even the idea of placing something foreign within herself was enough to cause her to wince with pain.

Still, he had called, and she had no real choice. Her path had been set before her long ago. The egg shaped device set with the darkest of runes was wetted by her sex – though Elissa had been forced to rub at herself until she was certain that she was going to climax without first placing the arcane device – and passed between her folds only with the utmost difficulties!

She groaned with pain, not pleasure, as it seated within her and she resumed her attempts to bring on her own orgasm. Her fingers teasing and rubbing through the folds of flesh between her legs as her heart beat increased and she sweat through the thin cotton shift that she was wearing. Finally! Her body convulsed and as she lost herself in pleasure The Master came into her and her form began to change.

***

Gostig hummed a jaunty tune that he was certain he had heard somewhere before as he worked on his latest creation. In so far as he knew he was the only one of his kind to dare work beneath the nose of both the Justicar, and the Templar Hunters. Were he ever discovered he would most certainly burn. Yet where else were the materials for both his works and his pleasures to be found?

Verily not amongst the pious village peasants or wandering communities of gypsies and circus folk. This latest one was a beauty. He had taken in the last of the needed materials himself – slaughtering three whores in the process – but the capitol was rife with not save the talk of two rather grisly murders which he had not committed.

Some deviants amongst the gentry and the lower nobility. Both of them mutilated in the dying, skinned, and with their hearts torn from their bodies and spirited away. One had been a sadist. The other just the pampered brat of some minor lord-ling. One, if accounts and gossip were to be believed, had bedded an entire brothel worth of whores before he was killed.

Gostig had read accounts of daemons and their servants that performed such works but had never thought to be in the same place as one of them! It was all very exciting. Well, unless you were counted amongst the dead, or were a practitioner the likes of himself. The skin and organs were needed in his work. The corpse had to be whole if reanimation were to be a success after all.

Tonight, Gostig had assembled his greatest accomplishment thus far. A golem comprising the reassembled corpses of no fewer than half a dozen different wretches! One of them he had acquired by giving his custom to some lowly resurrection men. Little higher on the order of beings than your average ghoul they took the bodies of the recently departed and sold them to the universitat for their studies in medicine and anatomy.

Strange then that he felt so little in the way of remorse for having then informed the Justicar of the men's activities. He had recouped his coin, been rewarded by the local Magistrate, and then been able to recover the corpses of those same wretches once they had been cut down from the gallows. Parts of them were easily identified within the quilt work of his creature by the myriad wounds and burns they had endured whence being put to the Question. The others, those whores, he had bought from their pimp after they were no longer able to turn a coin to his satisfaction.

Gostig took no shame in that he had enjoyed their favors in turn. Once apiece whilst they still breathed. Several times more after that particular function had ceased. He much preferred a wench that was still and pliable to his whims than one that was not. A deviant behavior, to be sure, but it was one he could little resist anymore.

Slipping the cassock of peeled skin over his wasted form the necromancer began to chant within the runic circle from which he could channel the powers needed to raise this creature and enslave it to his will! Already he had made the appropriate sacrifices of flesh and blood. New scars would form and in time tell a tale of his greatness! The power built within him and the runes – drawn in blood upon the floor – began to smoke and burn.

The first twitches of the massive form told him that his will was sufficient to bring the creature back. His eyes watered and the sweat beaded upon his brow as Gostig fingered the fetish of severed fingers and dried eyeballs hanging about his neck . . . As he prepared to seal the enchantment and pour a profane life back into his creation he became aware of shadows shifting and moving across the wall.

Shadows where there was no light thrown by the dozens of candles which served to illuminate his Gostig's lair!

"Dark One take me." He breathed as the golem continued to move now – of its own accord – and still the shadow deepened and crept towards him.

"Assss it wishessss!" Hissed the darkness and in the last moments of his wretched life Gostig saw his creation rise from the table over which he had labored to sew it together. He had a moment of the deepest pride. Mere seconds only, and then he began screaming as the shadow swept forward and claimed him!

Elissa's return to consciousness was startling! At first she knew not where she was and the flashes of memory of what she had done whilst possessed and transformed by The Master were seldom of any help. Before her sat the third vessel. The black runes spelling out the sin of Pride, rested between her parted legs.

What remained of the sacrifice was still twitching and smoking in a discarded heap. The Master had been most displeased and had seen fit to give the Daemon's Share of her punishment to this wretched thing. His skin, already burned with the necessary runes, was folded next to the urn. In the room with her however was a monstrosity! She choked down the urge to scream though. She was sitting, naked, in a circle of protection as the thing stumbled around the exterior. No doubt testing its strength and wanting very much to get at the soft thing inside of it! A golem. Of that she had no doubt, even though what little reading she had done in regard to fel necromancy was fleeting and difficult to recall.

It was comprised of several bodies. Men and women both from the tangled mess of varied genitalia between its misshapen legs. The trunk of the thing also had both the hair of a man as well as a plethora of breasts of differing sizes stitched to it. With shaking hands Elissa pulled the tattered and blood stained clothes of the fallen necromancer over her. Her flesh crawled at the touch of what she knew to be leather cured from the skins of the dead, but there was nothing else for it, not if she were to regain the safety of her lair with The Master's prize intact.

As usual, her sacrificial knife was strung around her neck upon a length of scorched intestine. Everything else was before her. Elissa passed a whispered thanks to the Dark One as she noted that the door leading out of this wretched cellar was both behind her, and securely within the circle which the necromancer had forged.

The cellar door, blessed was the shadow, opened into a little used alley fronting the river. It was little problem then to walk a hundred paces and pay a pole boatman a silver coin to take her to a part of the river which ran through the Olde Quarter and near enough to her lair that Elissa might pass unseen!

Within the Watch crying the hour she was slipping the key into the door and canceling the charms and other magickal defenses which were proof in case the locks were forced! Immediately she burned the skin and then locked the third vessel into its place within the Infernal Wheel! With the deed done she purified herself and knelt before the alter and gave thanks to The Master.

"The flessssh wassss weak . . . yessss?" The question oozed from every shadow in the dingy room and the cold bit at Elissa and tears came to her eyes.

"Yes Master." Elissa said through her tears. A note of fear and panic rising to her voice.

"Another will sssserve assss well, hmm?" His tone was mocking, and the sound smacked at Elissa, driving her onto her stomach in supplication!

"No! There is no other as devoted as I." As much as Elissa wished to scream this to the shadows there was little to be gained by further angering the daemon.