AN: Tropey as hell, unabashed hentai cliche everywhere. First time writing the pr0ns, feedback welcomed.
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1 -- Prepare the Chamber
Consciousness returned slowly to Talana, sense by reluctant sense.
On the edge of hearing, the trickle of water, with an echo to it that said 'underground'. Much closer - a room away? - low chanting sounds. Neither was comforting to the young paladin.
Her nose twitched at the smell of moist earth and hot wax around her. A cave. Candles. Some sort of underground lair, then. A foul musky odour underlaid it all, warning both her physical senses and her growing mystical perception of demons and demonspawn nearby.
She swallowed in a dry throat, tasted her own blood - she'd been hit hard on the head, likely bitten her mouth - and something acrid and chemical coating her tongue. Had they fed her something? Its bitterness reminded her of swiftheal potion, but it had a savoury tang she could perceive even through the metal-salt-bright of blood.
She reached out with her aura as best she could, and recoiled in pain at the static of demonic anger and lust and greed and hate and desire and want and fury. Only a single spark of light she sensed before the pressure of it forced her to subside, but that was hope enough. Her mentor still lived, was still near.
As her perception returned to her body she became increasingly aware that she was cold and sore. Her discipline alone was enough to keep her from shivering at the chill of cavern air on bare skin. Of course they would have stripped her of her armour, her weapons; would have taken her arming doublet and chausses. It was an odd kindness that she had been permitted to keep breastband and loincloth, and one she mistrusted.
Her knees complained, and her shins. She was kneeling on cold stone. She shifted her weight experimentally, and was utterly unsurprised at the clinking of chain and the sudden gentle pressure of cold metal at ankle and wrist and neck. Of course she had been bound. Not tightly - she had some range of motion - but clearly to the stone below her and to something higher up that shifted as she moved.
She steeled herself for horrors, opened her eyes...
...to find herself meeting the calm grey gaze of her mentor, Rela.
Rela's mouth was set in a grim line that ill fit her full lips and round cheeks, but there was deep and genuine warmth in that look and in her voice when she spoke.
"Strong self control, good use of aura, and no wasted effort. Nicely done."
Talana could have laughed at the tone, so much like years in the training yard and so much like the last eight months of mentoring in the field. It was pure comfort - diminished not at all for knowing that's exactly what Rela intended speaking so - and it helped her school her own feelings to an approximation of the same calm.
Rela's face was all of a foot away from hers, and the collar around her neck told Talana how exactly they were both shackled: knelt, facing each other, on a block of stone a couple of feet high. She looked down at it.
The stone beneath her was no lump of bare rock. As she had feared, it was squared off and polished, carved with runnels and engraved with runes only some of which her education had yet reached. It was clearly well scrubbed, but no amount of scouring could entirely remove the old brown of blood, the crusted yellow-black of ichor and the other various stains of a dark altar in frequent use.
The older paladin saw her glance. "Bad business, isn't it. I fear we may have found what became of the missing men and women from the town."
The observation was compassionate but unfazed, and Talana was reminded of just what a legend Rela was. At almost thirty years old the human woman had fifteen years of legend following her - the youngest ever Called to the service, a prodigy of arms and aura alike, saviour of entire cities and slayer of literal dragons. Talana, at nineteen years of age, could only hope she would achieve a fraction as much.
If she survived this.
Surely Rela had seen worse, survived worse, in her years of adventure.
"Don't worry, Alleycat," she said on cue. "I've come out of worse than this in the past."
Talana could have giggled at the timing as much as at the old training-ground nickname. She swallowed it, flicked a tufted ear instead. She trusted Rela implicitly, just as Rela had once shown trust to a rare felen recruit to the Order where so many considered the cat-elves a liability.
Too connected to the material, many of the commanders believed. Too close to the wild and vulnerable to the base temptations of the demon realms, as if fur on pointed ears or silt-pupilled, amber eyes were a mark of association with the lusty satyrs or the greedy harpies.
Talana wasn't usually given to bitterness, and paladin training had made it more distant still, but she wondered why the forest elves her kind otherwise so closely resembled were upheld as having a laudable connection to nature rather than looked on with suspicion.
Unimportant! Here it was only herself and Rela, and they were as close as any journeyman and mentor could be, and they were in a predicament shared all the more closely for the short chain that kept them in almost constant eye-contact. She gave herself to stillness, ignoring the discomfort of the stone beneath.
"What do we do, Rela?"
Some mentors insisted on being called Mentor, or Lady or Sir. Rela had laughed in her face the first time she'd tried that. You're at my side now, not under me on the training ground, she'd said. Rela, call me Rela for pity's sake.
Her mentor's reply was gently sardonic. "Unless you've found a way to conceal a rasp or a phial of ironbane, we do nothing for now. Save your strength for the moment; I feel we'll need it."
She looked into Talana's eyes as she continued. "This is likely to be very unpleasant for both of us for a while, sadly. Remember this: we left word of our destination with the chapterhouse in town, and they are expecting our return within a day. If we are late, they will attempt a sending to check in with us."
"They took our farstones."
"Aye, so the sending will fail, fail for both of us, where a farstone might break once in a dozen years. They'll know it's trouble. They'll muster, they'll come in force, and Commander Poran will be at their head."
"He sweeps the cave system..."
"...and this nest of demon-summoners, surprisingly large though it is, will be cleansed by blade and aura. Poran's a traditionalist like that, very much of the retribution-and-justice school."
Talana grimaced. "For all that I generally agree with you that redemption is the foundation of the Golden Path, I think I am comforted by the thought of retribution coming to our captors. Am I weak?"
"No." There was no judgement in Rela's grey eyes, only understanding. "It is one of the hardest lessons to learn, and one I confess I've not fully learned mys-"
She broke off sharply, eyes flicking to the archway leading into the cavern room. Half a moment later, Talana's pointed ears picked up what Rela's insight had already told her: footsteps approaching. Most were human, others smaller or heavier, a group two dozen strong or more.
Torchlight reflected off the walls, grew from a spark to a glow as the bearers filed through the dank tunnel. At their head strode a figure cowled and robed in a nondescript, sturdy brown, hands thrust each into the other sleeve, smiling mouth just visible in the shadows of the hood.
Behind this one came a horrorshow of blasphemies.
Half-a-dozen little imp-like creatures skittered back and forth along the procession with a nervous energy, using their hands as much as their feet on the cold stone floor as they leaped about.
The main body of creatures kept steady pace behind the leader -- three satyrs, a pair of wulfen, and a hulking minotaur, each one accompanied by a black-haired and black-eyed woman. The women held their heads high and proud, ivory-pale skin showing through outfits made of mere straps and bands intended to show off far more than they covered, eyes gleaming with more than the guttering torches. The creatures were blatantly naked, manhoods swinging heavily between their legs with each powerful stride.
The imps scattered to the furthest corner of the room in a pack, hopping and muttering quietly to themselves in the rasping demonic tongue. The other six creatures took a position on the six irregular points of a star centred on the altar to which the two Order paladins were bound, quivering with something anticipatory and fell. A raven-haired companion moulded her body to each one from behind, stroking bare skin with pale fingertips, scratching with black-painted nails, whispering in animalistic ears.
The hooded figure approached the altar, standing on the side furthest from the chained pair.
"Do you like them? They're quite new."
His voice was refined under the affected rasp. Familiar? Talana was still muzzy enough to be unsure, but Rela spoke up.
"This was a trap, then, for us?"
