The Priestess Ordeal Ch 01

WARNING: The following story contains graphic descriptions of reluctant impact play, verbal degradation, primitive tattooing, and rough public sex in a high-fantasy setting. It picks up immediately after the prologue of this series.

* * * * * *

Diarma winced as she stepped through the heavy curtain into the well-lit room behind Grimald. As her vision quickly shifted back to the visible spectrum in the lamplight, she could make out the grey dwarf scribe speaking to another of his kind in their own tongue. Although she could not understand a word of it, the scribe's irritation was obvious from his tone. Diarma could see that the other duergar in the room was a female by her slightly finer features and her lack of a beard. Her hair was thin and pale grey, tied back in a braid to keep it out of her work. Whether she was considered attractive by the standards of her kind was a mystery to the drow. To Diarma, this creature was as repugnant as the rest of her kin, female or otherwise, and uglier than even the most homely dark elves.

A set of what Diarma recognized as alchemist's tools were arrayed on the stone slab table that dominated the claustrophobic chamber. The female duergar looked more irritated to be interrupted than surprised by the appearance of the naked, bald, and bound drow that had just entered her workshop. The conversation continued in the hard consonants and guttural flow of the grey dwarf dialect for about a minute. It seemed to Diarma that it was more of an argument than anything else, but the female grumbled an apparent concession and began clearing her broad stone table.

"Shandrung is our clan's tattooist," Grimald said to the priestess in undercommon, the only language all in the room understood. "She'll mark ye as King Gorran has declared. Ye'll lay on the table and be still while she works."

"Tattooed!? Like some common slave?" the priestess answered with a haughty tone that she knew was completely at odds with her humiliating position.

"What if I refuse?" she asked, turning up her nose at the scribe.

"Then I'll beat ye unconscious and do it anyway and make sure that Shandrung 'ere uses the itchin' ink we normally use on outcasts."

A part of Diarma had to admire that creative form of torture. Tattoos were rare among her people, and were unheard of among females. Drow men sometimes tattooed their faces in shows of devotion to their evil goddess, Lolth, but tattooing was otherwise reserved for marks of shame among outcasts and marks of ownership among slaves. They could be removed with sufficiently strong magic, however, and it was far preferable to branding, she reasoned.

"Very well," Diarma replied coolly as though she had some choice in the matter, "release me from this crude contraption and let us get this over with."

Both duergar laughed mirthlessly. Shandrung shook her head as she finished clearing the table, and Grimald yanked the cord attached to the drow's collar, pulling her face close enough to his that she could feel his hot breath as he spoke.

"I'm removin' nothin' ye sneaky drow whore. The next time ye give me an order, I'm gonna find out what color yer face bruises. Understand?"

Diarma hesitated, jaw clenched tightly. The duergar slapped her face, not nearly as hard as the demon had slapped her in the king's audience hall, but enough to sting and remind her of the gravity of the situation.

"Yes," she growled through gritted teeth.

"Face down on the table, slave," said Shandrung over her broad shoulder in thickly accented undercommon. She was mixing something in a glass container from the sound of it.

With both hands locked in the universal 'I surrender' pose by the iron bar clamped around her wrists and neck, Diarma struggled to obey. The table was a four-inch-thick stone slab laid flat on a thick central pillar. The table top was high enough to make it comfortable for a dwarf to work standing upright, a little under three feet from the floor. She didn't think she could roll over from her back to her front with her restraints, and the table wasn't quite wide enough for her to do so anyway. The priestess awkwardly put her left leg up onto the slab, bending at the waist to try and use her elbows to maneuver her upper body onto the slab.

Her bare breasts pressed against the cold stone, and she felt her nipples stiffen. She made an undignified shuffle on her belly onto the table, coming to rest in a prone position with her feet hanging off one end of the table at the ankles. Her breasts squashed out to her sides slightly under the weight of her torso, erect nipples pressed into the stone and aching slightly from being dragged across the cold and not perfectly smooth surface.

"Where'd this knife-eared whore come from, anyway?" Shandrung asked in undercommon as she leaned over Diarma and began tracing something soft and wet across her back, just below her shoulder blades.

"She just marched in the front gate practically naked with five zombies. Wanted to evict the clan from the mine and claim it for the drow. USED to be a priestess of the Spider Queen," Grimald answered, emphasizing the past tense.

The flowing brush strokes on her back stopped for a moment, then resumed as Shandrung let out a long whistle.

"Never had a drow priestess tits out and ass up on my table before. Musta done somethin' to piss off her goddess, eh?"

Grimald chuckled.

"Sure'n that's true. She managed to conjure a demon in the great hall, but it showed up as a big naked drow woman, marched right up to this'n, and slapped the smile right off her face."

"She conjured a DEMON? Here?" asked the tattooist with obvious concern in her voice. Good, thought Diarma. She SHOULD be afraid.

"Hardly," scoffed Grimald, "the accursed thing torched her clothes and hair off and bade the King to abuse and torment her 'til all her hair is grown back. King Gorran said to bring her here, get her marked up, and have her in the central hab by shift change."

"Well," said Shandrung before leaning to look Diarma in her scarlett eyes, "looks like your goddess has abandoned you," she said with a cruel grin.

She finished the final line of script just above the dimples at the small of the drow's lithe back.

"There!" she said, laying a loud slap against the left cheek of her canvas' toned ass. Diarma gasped reflexively at the stinging indignity.

"Clearly legible," nodded Grimald with his arms folded across his broad chest as he inspected the flowing elvish characters that comprised the written form of the undercommon tongue.

"Of course it is," Shandrung nearly spat. "All of my work is excellent," she declared as she fetched more tools and resumed her place over the prone, naked Drow.

"Now hold still, bitch," she said with a worrying degree of enthusiasm, "this is going to hurt."

Diarma winced and sucked in air through her teeth as she felt a sharp pain cut into her skin. It only took two letters for her to realize that, unlike drow tattooists who painstakingly tapped ink into the skin with fine needle rakes and tiny mallets, the duergar tattoos were carved into the skin. The result would likely be a raised scar, colored by the inks. Through the cloud of pain she could see the logic of it. These marks could be more easily seen in the heat-based vision of most denizens of the underdark, and could be felt with sensitive fingers as well.

The pain went on and on as the duergar's tools did their work. The two grey dwarves were silent but for the occasional comment in their own tongue or a chuckle at their prisoner's occasional grunts or gasps. After somewhere between one and three hours, Diarma couldn't tell, the marking stopped. She gasped again as she felt Shandrung's cool, rough hands rub some kind of slave onto her throbbing back, and within a minute, the throbbing burn had become a dull ache.

"Now the front. Roll over, slave," the tattooist said tersely.

Her pride gave her just enough strength to barely choke down a groan as the priestess pulled her knees in toward her chest, raising her bare ass into the air for a moment then sitting back on her heels and lifting her torso from the table. She sat upright on her heels for a moment, rolling her head to stretch her neck before scooting into a sitting position and carefully laying on her back.

The drow grimaced at the pain as she lay on her rapidly healing tattoos but was grateful for the cold stone to sooth the marks. She glanced down at her naked body and felt more self-conscious and more vulnerable than she had since her capture.

Her areolas, a lighter lavender color against her midnight purple skin, were puckered from the cold. Her nipples stood at attention, pointing obscenely at the low stone ceiling. Between the low mounds of her breasts she could see the faint outline of her abdominal muscles, toned by rigorous physical training across more than a century. With her toes pointed to the ceiling, the muscles of her thighs formed the slopes of a valley behind the smooth mound of her naturally hairless vulva. She stared at the space between her breasts and navel, knowing it would be a long, long time before she would see it again unmarked by a visual and tactile reminder of her enslavement.

Enslavement, NOT abandonment, she reminded herself. This was a test of strength, of endurance and devotion to her goddess. An atonement for her failures, and an opportunity to rise above them. Shandrung began the text just below her breasts. As the duergar woman carefully made the calligraphic marks upon her skin with a fine brush, Diarma remembered the early teachings of her noble house's Weapons Master, when he took her to the small lake at the edge of the city to "drown-proof" her as a child.

"If your hands are bound," the male had said, "you will drown if you try to swim. You must release the air in your lungs and sink to the bottom, then kick off and bob to the surface for air."

Diarma had thought this stupid. There were no circumstances where this would be a usable skill. What if the water was too deep? Would she just die then? It was not until her younger sister received the same training decades later that she realized the lesson was truly about breaking the habit of panic. She used the lesson now as the tiny scalpel of volcanic black glass carved the terms of her enslavement into her flawless ebon skin.

She would not gasp for some escape at the surface of this ordeal, trying to outrun Lolth's test and thus incur her wrath. Fifty years of training in the church taught Diarma that the Spider Queen's judgment was more inescapable than gravity. She would release her breath, her dignified nobility, and sink to the bottom of this cesspool, into her temporary role as a slave until the time was right to kick off the bottom and rise to the surface once again. These filthy duergar would not break her.

Diarma had almost blocked out the pain, and it came rushing in as the application of the salve broke her meditation. She looked down between her heaving breasts, slicked in sweat despite the cool subterranean air. She felt shame and despair at the message written across her flesh warring with determination and pride that she had endured the process without crying out. Flowing silver letters across the dark skin of her flat belly marked her as the property of a clan of grey dwarves. Studying the marks as best she could from her awkward vantage point, Diarma could see even under the glistening layer of translucent healing salve that the work was masterfully executed. Her matron mother would kill her on the spot out of shame if she could see her daughter now. Diarma knew she would have to find a way to remove the scar tattoos before she returned to the city.

"She's tough, I'll give her that," mumbled Shandrung in dwarvish to Grimald.

"We'll see," he said with a malicious smile. "How long does she need the salve?"

"She ought to be fully recovered by shift change," Shandrung answered in undercommon so the drow could also understand.

"Good," growled Grimald, stroking his beard, still singed from the explosion of his desk oil lamp when Diarma summoned the demon hours before. "Then she's mine for the next four hours."

"Make sure you get her to the hab in one piece," Shandrung answered with a grin, "I want a turn with her too."

The scribe jerked the rope tied to Diarma's collar as she sat up, nearly pulling her off the table. The bound drow lept to the floor and followed her captor quickly, glancing back over her shoulder at Shandrung and wondering what exactly she wanted a turn at. Diarma knew that whatever the duergar had in mind, it was going to be far from pleasant for the disgraced priestess.

Her bare feet padded along the cool stone of a series of low ceiling tunnels, turning through a sprawling underground complex. This was no mere mine as she had supposed, it was a proper dwarven settlement. The decorative carvings of unimaginative though admittedly well-executed geometric patterns that adorned many of the tunnel walls and arches confirmed to Diarma that this place was originally built not by the dour and dull duergar who now occupied it, but by their more frivolous and fair skinned cousins who lived closer to the surface. Both races of dwarves had an affinity for subterranean living, but the duergar were exclusively denizens of the underdark. They eschewed the pomp and artistry of their kin. Had this mine been a duergar construction, not a single chisel stroke would have been wasted on aesthetic concerns. The deep dwarves did not place form below function, they discarded considerations of form entirely. Simple and brutal was their architecture, and Diarma could see it realized in the new tunnels that the duergar had dug to expand the captured complex.

After minutes of walking, the scribe led his prisoner to another small chamber carved from the stone. A heavy curtain provided all the privacy its occupants received from the main tunnel, and Diarma realized as she passed through it that she had not seen any doors in this place but the main entrance and the door to the main audience hall. It seemed personal privacy was not valued amongst this clan. The drow's eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness in the space, slipping back to infravision in a couple of seconds. The room in which she stood, more of a cell given its tiny floor plan, was sparsely furnished, with a stone writing desk carved into an alcove in the back wall and a wider alcove for a sleeping occupant carved into the wall to her right. A small table and a single chair made of unpainted mushroom stalkwood occupied the center of the room. Grimald stood beside the chair staring at her. She could see that his face was somewhat flushed, and he seemed to be nursing his anger for the damage she had inadvertently done to his beard when her summoning exploded the oil lamp on his desk in the main audience hall.

"Yer lucky King Gorran has decreed yer bodily safety, ye haughty drow cunt," he spat in undercommon. "Why if I had my way, ye'd be on yer way to the slave pens to feed the orcs."

"How lucky I am for -," the priestess sneered before the scribe slapped her across the face with a crack that filled the small space. She reeled for an instant, then whirled back toward him, a killing rage curling back her lips in a snarl. The scribe yanked hard on the rope attached to her iron collar, forcing her to bend down to his eye level, an inch from his face, which now glowed with hot anger to her heat-sensitive eyes.

"Slaves do not speak unless bidden to speak, do ye understand?!" he shouted, spit flecking her face. Diarma scowled, nostrils flaring, and was slapped again.

"I asked ye a question, SLAVE!" he bellowed again.

"Yes," the furious drow puffed through clenched teeth, trying to look intimidating but failing miserably without hair, eyebrows, a stitch of clothing or an ounce of dignity.

"Ye belong to clan Grimhammer now," he growled, not looking away as she stared hatefully back into his eyes. He held the rope leashed to her collar in an iron grip, forcing her to bend at the waist to meet his eye level, which would normally be at her collar bone.

Without warning, the dwarf's free hand shot out and took hold of her right breast, dangling freely as she bent forward, and pinched her nipple hard. Diarma clamped her jaw shut and growled loudly behind her pursed purple lips, cocking her head to the side as pain blossomed from her nipple. They had always been especially sensitive, and she often had her consorts suck them for many minutes at a time before and during sex.

"Say it, whore!" commanded Grimald. He twisted and pulled slowly for emphasis, forcing the priestess to bend lower to try and relieve the sting. She still refused to break eye contact, but relented.

"I belong to clan Grimhammer now," she quickly panted.

The scribe laughed, released her nipple and took her throat in his vice-like grip instead.

"Good. That means ye'll obey any command given ye by any member of this clan without hesitation or complaint. Understand?"

This time she did not hesitate.

"Yes," she said softly, "I understand."

"We'll see," he said ominously. "Lie on yer back on the table and don't move."

The drow kept her eyes on the duergar as she moved to the table, backing her ass up to it and laying back gingerly, the pain from her fresh tattoos on her back now gone. The square table was small enough that her head was barely able to rest at one end with only the top half of her ass on the table at the opposite end, both her legs dangling off the edge and her feet on the floor. Grimald took the rope still tied to her collar and looped it around the table leg over her right shoulder, then around to the table leg over her left, then back up to her collar so that she was tied firmly and unable to move her upper body from the table, the iron bar still manacled to her wrists either side of her head.

She couldn't clearly see what he used to tie her legs, but she guessed it was a pair of trousers that bound each of her knees to the corners below her, spreading her legs to a wide sixty degree angle and baring her defenseless vulva at the edge of the table. She tested the improvised restraints but found she could not close her thighs, the knots around her knees too firm to pull loose. Diarma lifted her head from the table and looked down between her breasts, over the silver tattoo scars raised on her flat belly, and past her defenseless vulva at the wicked grin of the duergar as he appraised his victim. Her heat-sensitive eyes saw her nipples glowing warm in the cool room, her right nipple a little brighter than the left from the twisting and tugging, and the lettering on her belly standing out sharply. The ink seemed to conduct and concentrate her body heat to the surface of the slightly raised scars of each letter and make them glow like faerie fire.

"I went to a drow city once," said Grimald, tracing a finger from the inside of her left thigh up toward her crotch. "Was carryin' an armful of parchment when I bumped into a drow woman leadin' a patrol through the market square."

His stubby finger reached her outer lip on the left side then arched over her slit to the right side.

"Know what she did?"

Diarma's mind swirled with a dozen cutting and sarcastic remarks she wanted to make in reply, but this creature had no sense of humor and a hand on her most delicate parts.

"No," she answered.

"She stabbed me," Grimald said calmly, as slapped Diarma's exposed pussy with a loud *SMACK*. She yelped, arching her back and trying in vain to shut her thighs to protect her sex.

"That-" *SMACK* "-bitch-" *SMACK* "-fuckin'-" *SMACK* "-stabbed-" *SMACK* -me!" *SMACK* he said, emphasizing each word with an open hand slap on her bare vulva. The drow priestess grunted with each strike and panted through the sting when he finished. Glancing down at her crotch, she could see it warming as blood rushed to the spanked spot.