The day our heroines’ collective fate began its drift towards the unthinkable was born much like any other. When the company awoke and broke camp it was under clear skies with the mighty sun just cresting over the Eastern horizon. As they set out the same gentle breeze that had whispered them to sleep the eve before still held sway, but that was to change within the hour. The first sign of trouble came when the distant horizon grew dark and hazy, an onrushing tempest casting a shadow over the land. From then it wasn’t long before the winds began to build, slowly at first but rising ever faster. By midday the very air had been whipped into a frenzy and a seemingly boundless armada of ominous thunderheads grew closer by the minute.
Silke, the party’s lightfingered thief, walked at the head of the company alongside their elf-blooded huntress Keire, the two girls typically entrusted at the vanguard as between them they could boast the sharpest eyes and ears in the party. Sharpest in this case referring to the sensitivity of their ears, of course, not the unusually pointy shape of the the huntress’s. Silke, whose ears appeared perfectly normal for a human though they were quite sensitive as well, was having a particularly unpleasant time. Her choppy black hair was even wilder than normal, each and every gust rearranging it into a newer, madder pattern as the shivering young woman clutched her bare arms tight around her exposed midriff, a vain effort to stave off the wind’s harsh bite.
After glancing once more towards the encroaching thunderheads, a move she had been repeating at an ever-increasing rate over the past hour, Silke finally turned towards her companion to voice those concerns they both surely shared. “How much farther is it to the next village, Keire?” Even with the scout just a few measly feet away, Silke had to raise her voice to be heard over the roaring gusts.
“I’m not sure,” the archer returned her companion’s grim look as she too strained to be heard. “Two miles, maybe more.”
“We’ll never make that in time,” the thief shouted back, an undeniable hint of dread creeping into her voice at the prospect of being caught out in the kind of torrent that was due to arrive any minute. From the expression on her face it was clear the archer wasn’t keen on the prospect either. Silke hadn’t gotten to know Keire quite as well as she had some of the other members of their party, her fellow scout wasn’t exactly the most talkative of women, but spending a good chunk of each day walking out front together had given her enough experience to read her comrade’s expressions at the least. Right then the huntress’s face showed more than a little worry, and if the woman who had spent more time in the wilderness than all her comrades put together was concerned, well, Silke wasn’t about to question her.
“No, we won’t,” Keire agreed. “And it won’t take a storm like that long to turn this track into a mudpit. Once that happens we might as well be crawling.” Silke groaned at the prospect of being bogged down further, the sound swallowed up by the winds before it could reach even her own ears.
“Then what’s the plan? Will the forest give us cover?” No sooner had the words fled Silke’s mouth than her wide-eyed companion began to vigorously shake her head, the motion setting her long brown ponytail aflutter.
“No way! The forest would be suicide,” the huntress shouted. “We’d still be soaked to the bone within the hour and it’ll get so dark in there you can’t see your nose. Even if I managed to keep us from getting lost we’d be helpless against whatever beast we stumbled across first.” Silke felt herself shuddering at the thought, it certainly sounded like a nightmare. Specifically a recurring nightmare from her childhood which had always begun with her wandering lost through the woods, evolved into a terrifying chase by a monster she could never remember by the time she woke up, and then culminated in a whimsical dinner party under a dead oak tree at which her own left leg was the main course. Naturally, that was an experience she had little desire to reenact in her waking hours. Especially the dinner party. Frogs shouldn’t sing, that just wasn’t natural. More than a little shaken by the sudden reminder of a trauma far in her past, Silke was about to repeat her first question only for Keire to cut her off before she could, nodding emphatically towards a cluster of craggy hills they had been approaching for some time. “Our best bet is in there. Find a leeward outcropping to hide behind or, goddesses willing, some kind of cave.”
“I would kill for a cave right now,” Silke shouted, her fellow scout nodding in agreement. Next to the prospect of being caught out in a thunderstorm even the dingiest of caves would have seemed practically a palace. Not that she had ever minded being underground half so much as most humans seemed to. The cramped spaces and damp air were nothing compared to some of the spots she had been forced to squat growing up on the streets. And as to the dark, well, a thief does her best work at night. Burglary, pickpocketing, mugging, it all came easier when one could fade away into the darkness the moment the deed was done.
“You might have to,” Keire warned. “Any cave large and dry enough for us is liable to have something gnarly living in it.” There was a flash of something painful in the huntress’s eyes at that warning, but Silke didn’t catch it. She knew nothing about the first time her friend had been forced to take a life, that of a ragged outlaw whose den she had unwittingly sought refuge in and whose intentions towards her quickly proved anything but honourable.
“Ugh, one bridge at a time, Keire. I’m going to fall back and tell the rest of the girls to pick up the pace. Those hills look pretty far away.” Silke’s companion just nodded in agreement as the thief turned to walk back the way they had come. The rest of their company was clustered together some thirty paces back of the scouts, far enough that it took a few moments before they could be heard over the wind.
Estelle, the tall lady-knight who had been responsible for gathering their party, strode at the front of the pack, her face set firmly in an emotionless grimace. Silke wouldn’t have said she was fond of their supposed leader, per se, but the redhead was at least more tolerable than most highborns. She didn’t actively talk down to those around her and had paid half of the coin she promised up front, so she was alright in Silke’s books. Not that she wouldn’t still pick the woman’s pocket when they parted ways.
“What’s the news?” the tall redhead asked as soon as Silke was within shouting range. She never had been a particularly patient sort.
“Keire thinks we can find shelter in those hills, but we need to pick up the pace if we want to make it before the storm hits.” That wasn’t exactly what the huntress had said, perhaps, but a street orphan like Silke had once been learns fast that hope is a far better motivator than despair.
Estelle just nodded in acknowledgment, turning over her shoulder to glance back at the rest of the party. “You heard the lady, double time girls.” That was another thing Silke had come to respect about the young noble. Most of her kind always thought they knew best. Estelle, though, trusted her comrades’ judgment. She didn’t seem to feel the same need as so many of her peers to instinctively question every decision made by another.
If any of the remaining trio grumbled at being told to hurry, the sound never reached Silke. Before she fell in next to Estelle, the boyish thief shared a look with her company’s other redhead. Vissi’s hair had fallen prey to the hectic wind same as Silke’s had, but the curvy young woman didn’t look half so cold as her best friend felt. Out of all our novice adventuresses it was that pair who knew one another the best, having been close since they were, well, very young. Neither girl had ever known exactly how old she was, after all. Growing up they had run with the same gang of street kids, and once they aged out of that life they had moved on together. In the years since they had remained partners in crime, literally so more often than not. Silke provided the finesse for their frequently ill-advised schemes while Vissi backed her up by way of the unpredictable arcane talents which had manifested in her from a young age. So it was only natural that when Estelle had come recruiting the two girls had signed up together, drawn in by the promise of a little fame and a lot of money.
Even with the company accelerating to a near jog, it took Silke and her comrades almost ten minutes to reach the hills Keire was leading them towards. By the time they arrived the first wave of rain had already hit, falling in sheets to soak through their clothes and packs alike. A frantic search ensued, the girls’ need for shelter growing more desperate with every minute that passed.
Then they found it.
In those first few moments after rounding a bend in one of the bigger hills and laying eyes on the entrance to a large cave, Silke thought that portal beneath the earth was the most wondrous thing she had ever seen, a true answer to her prayers. If only the thief had known then what lay within the girls may well have chosen to weather the tempest out in the open. In their ignorance, though, one by one she and her comrades broke into a sprint, not coming to a stop until they were through the cave’s mouth. While the others were still doubled over catching their breath and shrugging off the heavy packs they had carried all day, it was Keire who first raised an alarm.
“Um, girls? Come look at these,” she called back from where she knelt some twenty paces into the cave.
Gradually, each of the huntress’s traveling companions straightened up and trudged over to see what was concerning their scout. It was hardly unusual for Keire to serve as the party’s voice of caution, but never before had the other five been so reluctant to heed her counsel. A mistake they, and one among them in particular, would soon live to sorely regret. Still, they weren’t about to ignore her entirely so before long they were standing in a small cluster peering down at a patch of dirt that had collected in a dip in the cave floor. Perhaps three hands wide and twice as many long, the tight packed soil was covered in tracks.
“What made those?” Vissi was first to inquire, the sorceress scowling as she turned towards Keire.
“Not sure,” the elf-blooded huntress murmured, her friendly face crinkled with concern. “I’ve… never seen their like. Three toes, moderately webbed so there’s a good chance they’re reptilian… Looks like some pretty wicked claws or talons… I’d say a little bigger than a dog or a wolf, judging by the size and depth of the prints.”
“That doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard of,” Estelle’s tone was cautious, her eyes rising to peer deeper into the cave.
“But it does sound scary…” the faint voice of Avaya Silverlight added. Silke couldn’t help but roll her eyes at that admission. The priestess was pleasant enough company and potentially a literal lifesaver thanks to her powerful healing abilities, but she was also a coward through and through. If the thief was in a gambling mood she might well have wagered good money that Estelle’s little adventure was the very first time Avaya had ever set foot outside the safety of a temple. It was a wager she would have lost, though only by the barest of margins.
“I’m sure we can handle whatever made those, if they’re even still around,” Silke crossed her arms stubbornly in front of her nearly flat chest. “There are six of us and we are not going back out into the storm over a few old footprints.”
“I agree,” Estelle nodded after a long moment. “We can handle ourselves. And look around, this clearly isn’t a natural cave.” That declaration was enough to set the other girls to scrutinizing their surroundings, most of them for the first time. The noblewoman was right, Silke quickly realized, the cave walls were too smooth and regular to be natural, the angles where they met the floor and ceiling too sharp.
“Huh, what do you think this place is?” Keire asked. “It doesn’t look natural, no, but I don’t think our map had anything marked in these hills.” As a matter of fact, the map in question had left the hilly patch of countryside which the girls were crossing the corner of nearly blank for a very good reason none amongst them knew anything about.
“Maybe an old mine,” the last member of their party suggested in her lyrical voice, “abandoned so long ago everyone forgot about it?” Silke wasn’t particularly into other girls, despite a little youthful experimentation in her past, but even she had to admit Faye’s voice was enough to make anyone fantasize. Even the simplest of words were like music coming from the gorgeous minstrel’s lips, and when she sang… That said, the thief wasn’t exactly certain why the blonde was tagging along. Sure she was a friend of Estelle’s, and supposedly of the kidnapped princess’s as well, but it wasn’t like she could fight. Or do much else of use other than… sing. Well, so long as she kept putting on her shows before bed every night Silke certainly wasn’t about to complain.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Estelle agreed. “And if it is, this place is probably huge. Big enough to have more than one entrance. So even if whatever beasts moved in after the miners left are still here, there’s a good chance we won’t even run into them.” A few hopeful nods rippled around the company at that prospect, with only Keire still looking hesitant about the prospect of venturing any deeper into the caves.
“Alright, well, can we move a bit further in before we set up camp? That storm is too loud to sleep out here,” Silke suggested. At a nod from Estelle, the travelers picked up their packs once more and made their way further into the cave, Vissi using her magic to light up a trio of torches as they went. A little more than a hundred paces in, the cave curved sharply to the left and then widened before forking into two slightly smaller tunnels.
“This will do nicely,” Estelle announced, surveying the modest cavern before setting her pack down with a sigh. The chamber’s walls weren’t quite as smooth as those near entrance, but the stone had clearly been worked at some point in the past and dark stains on the ceiling suggested that they would not be the first wayfarers to light a campfire inside it’s cozy confines. Of course, evidence of past occupation does not necessarily equate to evidence of safety, but I fear our young heroines were yet naive enough to be blissfully unaware of that particular nugget of wisdom.
Over the next few minutes the company busied themselves with the familiar routine of setting camp. They each laid out their bedroll in a tight ring around the fire Vissi had promptly lit upon their arrival, then Faye and Avaya broke out a day’s worth of trail rations and divvied them up among their companions. Silke had just finished wolfing down her share of dried jerky and old berries when she suddenly noticed Keire freeze on the edge of her vision, the scout’s head turning towards one of the tunnels deeper into the hillside.
“Keire?” the weary thief immediately turned her own attention on the same passage, all the day’s anxiety which had only just started to dissipate suddenly roaring back with a vengeance.
“I thought I heard something…” the huntress’s voice was tense, her arms instinctively reaching for her bow.
“Are you sure?” Estelle had appeared at Silke’s shoulder, the knight’s own hand resting firmly on the hilt of her blade.
“No,” Keire admitted, her deep brown eyes peering warily into the murky darkness of the cave’s depths. Even they weren’t sharp enough, though, to spot what lingered just beyond the edge of the campfire’s light. Would that they were, friends, for then this would be a much cheerier tale. For our heroines, at the least.
“Do you think it’s whatever left those tracks?” Avaya’s voice sounded nervous. Of course.
“How is she supposed to know what made a sound she isn’t even sure she heard you dolt?” Vissi snarked. Despite the tension Silke couldn’t help but smirk. She didn’t have to look to know her best friend’s eyes were rolling dramatically.
“Shut up and listen,” Estelle barked, striding slow and silent until she stood beside her uncertain scout. The rest of the group begrudgingly obeyed, each woman peering down one or another of the tunnels. The atmosphere in the cave, already cold and clammy, felt suddenly heavy as the girls waited. Against the muffled roar of the storm outside, though, all Silke’s ears could detect was the crackling of their nearby fire. “Anything?” The lady-knight finally asked after a long minute.
“I think I hear something, but it’s too hard to tell. Could be movement… or it could just be the storm echoing back at us. Maybe even from another entrance somewhere ahead.” At long last Keire shook her head gently and pulled her gaze away from the murky blackness to look up at Estelle. “Sorry, I can’t be sure.”
“Ach, it’s probably nothing. We’ll be fine,” Vissi muttered from where she stood next to the fire. The short redhead had pulled off both her clingy dark tunic and the thin shift beneath to dangle each as near the flames as she dared, baring her plentiful breasts to her comrades for not the first time.
“No, it’s better to be safe,” Estelle decided after a few moments, glancing down at her scout. “Keire, go ahead and check out the rest of the caves, make sure there’s nothing hungry down there. Take Silke and Vissi with you, just in case.”
“What?!?” The topless sorceress nearly spat, whirling to glare daggers at her supposed leader. The metaphorical kind, not the jagged, ephemeral ones she could briefly will into existence to hurl at her enemies. She wasn’t that angry. Not yet. “I am not crawling through some fucking cave for half the night just because you lot are scared of the dark!”
“Yes, you are,” Estelle insisted, the tall warrior meeting her rival’s glare with one of her own. “We all saw those tracks, and if there’s something down there Keire will need backup.”
“Then you go!” Vissi retorted, eyes narrowing.
“No, I need to stay here in case whatever made those tracks didn’t get home before the storm hit. Or some more travelers show up who don’t feel like sharing.” The lady-knight looked as stern as Silke had ever seen her, one hand resolute on the hilt of her blade. Vissi could be petty, not to mention stubborn, but the thief was pretty sure her friend would see reason. The sorceress was smart enough to know she wouldn’t last long alone in a close quarters fight, and that her arcane talents would be far more useful than a sword in detecting anything lurking in the depths of the cave. As ever, it was simply a question of how much grandstanding her pride would demand before she gave in.
The two redheads glared at one another for what felt like several minutes before Vissi finally turned and spat into the fire. “And the songbird and scardey cat won’t be any use doing either…” she growled. Out the corner of one eye Silke could see Faye shooting the sorceress a dirty glare at those words, though in all likelihood it was for Avaya’s sake rather than her own. For her part the priestess just blushed and looked at her feet. “Fine, fine, I’ll fucking go. But not in these.”
With a grunt of undisguised displeasure, Silke’s oldest friend dropped her wet clothes beside the fire and proceeded to slip out of her cloth pants as well, flashing her bare rump and snatch at her companions without a second thought. The smirking thief shook her head as she watched the sorceress tug new, drier clothes out of her pack and hastily pull them over her curves. In a traveling party devoid of men, most of their comrades had quickly become quite casual about baring themselves to change clothes or take a dip in the occasional stream, but Vissi was especially shameless. In all likelihood she would behave no different even if there were a few cocks around. The girl had never been shy, after all, and modesty was a luxury their rough and tumble adolescence had seldom indulged.
For her own part Silke decided she would swap tops as well, but her own leather leggings had held up well enough to the few minutes of rain they had been subjected to not to need replacing. After changing and double checking they had everything they might need handy, the pair joined Keire where she was crouched peering nervously down the passage they were meant to explore.
“You ready?” Vissi asked, not bothering to hide her irritation as she handed each of the other women a freshly lit torch.
“Yeah,” Silke replied with a grin.
“I think so,” Keire answered, her voice notably less certain.
“Alright. Let’s get this over with. I’m tired enough already.”
The trio of adventuresses had only taken perhaps two dozen steps each before a voice called out after them. “Hold up!” Frowning, Silke turned back to see Faye standing at the edge of the party’s camp, a worried look on her face. “Here.”
Without saying anything more, the minstrel swung her arm forward. It was easy enough for Silke to catch the small object Faye had hurled her way, even despite the dark. Well honed reflexes, after all, were something of a job requirement in her line of work. When the curious thief opened her hand she saw a small white stick resting on her palm, its powder already dusting her skin.
“Use that to mark your path so you can get back,” the pretty blonde suggested. “Who knows how many tunnels there are down there.”
“Thanks.” Silke kicked herself mentally for not having the same idea first. Getting lost underground would be the perfect way to make an already crappy day a hundred times worse. So frustrated was she by her own sloppiness that the thief nearly missed the warm smile and cute little wave Faye sent her way, just barely managing to raise her hand in thanks before the bard had turned away. Of all the girls in their company save Vissi, the blonde had certainly proven herself the friendliest towards Silke. And she always seemed to know how to cheer anyone up. Perhaps, the thief momentarily mused as she watched Faye stride back towards the fire, shapely backside swaying slightly as she went, it might be time to reconsider her stance on the merits or lack thereof involved in the prospect of taking a lover.
Realizing all of a sudden how long she had been staring after the retreating bard, Silke spun back around a little too abruptly, nearly stumbling over a loose rock beneath her feet in the process. By that point Keire had moved a little farther into the tunnel, an arrow already knocked on her bowstring. Vissi, on the other hand, was staring right at Silke. The thief cringed as she saw the playful smirk which decorated her friend’s face and the way one eyebrow was raised curiously. “What?”
“You want that little songbird, don’t you?” the sorceress chuckled quietly, her grin only growing wider as Silke felt her face start to flush. The two former street urchins, it must be said, knew one another far too well for either to miss such an obvious display on the other’s part.
“Don’t be stupid, V.” The thief quickly looked away, her hand clenching tight around Faye’s chalk. Knowing her friend, it would be a long time before she was to hear the end of the matter. Not that there was even anything there in the first place. It wasn’t like… would the blonde even be interested? She was probably just being nice…
“Awww,” Vissi cooed, reaching over to ruffle Silke’s hair. “You’re adorable. But since when do you like ’em all sugary-sweet?”
“Oh, shut up already,” the thief managed to spit out, her cheeks fully blazing as she hurried off to join Keire.
The sorceress’s smirk showed no signs of abating as the two friends reached their scout. Armed with torches and chalk, the trio finally set off to explore the dark of the cave beyond. Blissfully for Silke, they walked in silence for the most part, making as little noise as possible in an effort to better hear anything that might be lurking ahead of them. The longer they walked, the more clear it became that Faye had been right to worry. The cave grew gradually narrower, frequently branching and spitting off smaller offshoots most of which seemed to angle sharply downwards, perhaps in pursuit of veins of ore that had long since dried up, or so they supposed.
It was hard for the three young women to be sure how long they spent exploring the maze of tunnels their company had stumbled into. Suffice to say their travels were long enough to dispel any notion that their environs could ever have been considered comfortably secure. There were simply too many nooks and crannies for danger to lurk in. Regardless, they pressed on in their search for evidence of life within. What progress they made was slow, hindered by sharp curves, thin passages they could barely squeeze through, and an increasingly uneven floor. Some passageways seemed to be worked stone like the entrance while others seemed entirely natural with little apparent rhyme or reason to the transitions between. That is not to say the signs of such were entirely absent, more experienced explorers would have had little difficulty recognizing the sort of craftsmanship at play, but alas our heroines passed each one as oblivious as the last.
As the trio advanced through the caverns, Silke took great care in marking every junction they came across with a sign of their passage and an arrow indicating the direction they had come from. While she did so, Keire kept her attention focused forward and Vissi periodically closed her eyes and mumbled an incantation or two. As far as they could tell, though, they remained alone, and with a safe return assured their confidence grew the longer they went without encountering any hint of occupation.
The first sign of the predicament our lovely trio were soon to find themselves ensnared in came when they reached a junction at which Keire silently held up one hand to signal for a stop. Silke yawned widely, letting her eyes stay closed for a long moment before trying to discern why the archer had called a halt. Vissi just shrugged when they exchanged a look, though, prompting both girls to turn towards Keire. She was too busy glancing around the cavern like she was searching for something to pay any attention to her comrades, though, only falling still and letting out a quiet grunt right as Silke finally opened her mouth to inquire as to what she was looking for.
“What?” The thief tried to follow her comrade’s eyes. “Do you see something?”
“I thought this spot looked familiar,” Keire answered in a murmur, “and now I’m sure. Isn’t that the thing Vissi thought looked like a face?” her voice trailed off.
“Rocky?” the sorceress asked, turning to look where the huntress had just pointed. “Huh. Yeah, that looks like him…” she mused as she stared at a small outcropping near the ceiling.
“It can’t be the same. There wasn’t any chalk when we got here.” Silke frowned, her eyes sweeping across the stone all around them in case she had somehow missed a marking on her first check. If only she had.
“Are you sure you didn’t forget before?” Keire asked, her voice tense.
“Of course I’m sure,” the thief retorted, scowling and folding her arms in front of her chest as best she could while holding a torch. Which is to say not very well.
“Alright…” the archer sounded skeptical, but she didn’t push the matter. “I guess its just a coincidence. We should keep moving.”
There was no further discussion, but Silke made sure both of the others saw her marking the junction before they set off. The trio continued on for awhile longer, weaving through tunnel after tunnel but still they found nothing to indicate any danger in the caves save that of boredom. Nothing that they recognized as such, at least. Finally they decided they had gone far enough. If there was anything lurking in the dark, it hardly seemed keen on showing its face.
Only once they made the decision to return did the three adventuresses finally discover how much trouble they were in. Retracing their steps to the previous junction was an easy enough task, as was reaching the one from before that. When they arrived at the third, though, that was when they at last knew something had gone terribly wrong. The spot was certainly marked, there was no mistaking that, but the chalk arrow which should have led them back to camp was instead pointing down the tunnel they had just emerged from. Thinking, or perhaps hoping, they had somehow misread the previous directions, the trio turned around and begrudgingly trekked back the way they had come. But they had made no error. When they emerged from the other end of the passage things were exactly as they remembered. Somehow, the markings they had counted on to see them back to safety were instead aimed directly at one another in a perpetual loop.
“Uh… Silke?” Vissi was the first to find her voice as the three women stood nervously looking down at the chalk arrow in question. To any observers lurking just out of sight, their befuddled expressions must surely have been quite the amusing sight, though one not fated to last. For very slowly, the redhead soon lifted her head to stare at her friend, one eyebrow cocked inquisitively.
“Don’t give me that look, V,” the thief countered sharply. “You’ve both been watching me, and don’t pretend you haven’t. I didn’t fuck up.”
“She’s right,” Keire confirmed in a quiet voice. “I watched both times.”
All three girls exchanged long, uncomfortable glances before it was again Vissi who finally broke the silence. “Then, who…” The sorceress didn’t finish her thought, instead gulping visibly. At her side, the fingers of her free hand curled into a fist and Silke could see it start to subtly glow.
“We’re not alone…” Keire finally muttered, a tone of dread certainty in her voice. Though she could see them not, in the darkness a solitary set of lips curled into a wicked grin at that pronouncement. Ignorant she may have been as to where exactly her unseen observer lurked, the huntress turned all the same to stare down the tunnel opposite of where the altered mark was pointing, half-drawing her bow as if she expected something to charge out of the shadows at them.
“Fuck me…” Vissi mumbled, herself and Silke each turning to look down one of the other two tunnels.
For what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, the trio of adventuresses kept a silent watch, their eyes peering into the darkness all around while their ears strained for the slightest hint of movement. But there was nothing there. They were all alone with naught to hear but the beating of their own hearts. Or so it seemed.
“So… how do we get back?” Silke eventually asked, more alert than she had felt for hours as fear and adrenaline held her exhaustion at bay. The girls had already explored enough of the underground complex to know it was massive, even with the newfound possibility they had been left to wander in circles. Thanks to the chalk, retracing their steps had once seemed a simple prospect. Now that they knew the markings not to be trustworthy, however, the return journey had become a far more daunting endeavor. It might well take days to reunite with their comrades if they had to resort to blindly fumbling through the twisting passageways without any means of guidance.
“Give me a second,” Keire murmured. The huntress closed her eyes to think while her companions exchanged a worried look. Silke could feel herself beginning to sweat despite the damp chill all around.
“Okay,” Keire finally opened her eyes after a few long moments and took a deep breath. “What we need are landmarks. Vissi, can your magic make anything that won’t be erased or altered as easily as the chalk?” Her eyes were hopeful as they fixed on the sorceress, but Silke could tell she was just as nervous as they were. None of the three young adventuresses had been blessed with the luxury of a carefree youth, yet neither had any of them ever felt so imperiled as they did in their current predicament.
“Uh…” Vissi glanced up and to the side, chewing on her lip as she racked her brain for possibilities.
It wasn’t the sorceress who came up with the solution, though. No, that particular flash of inspiration struck Silke instead, the gasp when it hit catching both of her comrades by surprise. “How about fire?” she asked, a wild grin spreading on her face.
“Fire?” Keire asked, her voice skeptical. “They could just snuff it out. And we don’t have any kindling…”
“No, no, she’s right!” Vissi grinned. She always had liked solving problems the fun way. “Like the time I tried to sign my name on old man Daleth’s warehouse.”
“Exactly! It took him ages to wash the scorch marks off those bricks.” Understanding slowly dawned on Keire’s face at the thief’s explanation and she started to nod her head in agreement.
“Yeah, alright, that… might just work.” The elf-blooded archer smiled, tension visibly draining from her body as she worked through the possibilities. “Alright, here’s what we’ll do. Vissi, leave one scorch mark right here. It doesn’t have to be huge, just enough to recognize it later. Every five junctions from here we’ll leave more marks. First two, then three, and so on. Got it?”
The childhood friends looked first at one another then back at their scout, both of them nodding. For the first time since learning their trail markers had been tampered with Silke felt a little hope, not to mention a newfound appreciation for their party’s resident pathfinder. “Got it.”
“Alright. We’ll try to keep our route as straight as possible and if we hit dead ends or passages that are too tight then we just go back to the last marker and try a new direction.” As Keire outlined her plan her voice seemed to grow in confidence until she sounded as if nothing at all had gone wrong. “This way we’ll gradually eliminate paths and keep from repeating any. And we don’t need to find the entire route back. We could hear the storm for a long time, remember? We just need to get far enough back that we can hear it again, then follow the noise out. Worst case we find a different entrance and once we’re back on the surface I can get us to camp from there.”
“I like it,” Vissi agreed, a newfound edge to her voice. “And if we find whoever or whatever’s been fucking with us, we burn them to a crisp.”
Silke nodded along, as always unable to resist her friend’s enthusiasm. That particular failing of hers had, on many an occasion, led both street kids into far more trouble than they were prepared to deal with. It was perhaps the memory of one or another such misadventure that prompted a kernel of doubt to surface in her mind. “Um, Keire?” she asked, anxiety coiling around her heart like a snake once more. “What if the route we start with takes us… further in?” At that suggestion, Vissi’s rampant grin faded a little, the sorceress also turning towards their guide.
Keire put on as brave a face as she could manage, one convincing enough that Silke couldn’t be sure whether or not the huntress had already considered the same possibility. “I don’t think that’ll happen,” she declared after just a second too long. “I think we’ve been going in circles for awhile. If this place really is big enough for us not to have been…” Keire trailed off and Silke caught herself gulping. That wasn’t a scenario that bore thinking on for too long. If they were truly that far from safety then they were also well and truly fucked, more likely than not to wander aimlessly until exhaustion finally overwhelmed them and they collapsed, becoming easy prey for whatever foe was stalking them. Not that they had been particularly challenging prey to date, of course.
A moment later both thief and archer were shaken out of their mutual dread by the unexpected roar of flames. Blinking away the sudden rush of light that had assaulted her eyes, Silke turned to stare at Vissi. The redhead was a foot away admiring a freshly formed scorch mark which now decorated the center of the small chamber they stood in and dusting her faintly glowing hands. She let her comrades stare for a few moments before looking up and fixing them with a determined look. “You two ready to get going then? I for one still intend to get some fucking sleep tonight.”
Silke couldn’t help but crack a grin as she nodded, seeing Keire answer much the same way out of the corner of her eye.
“Alright. Then get going before I decide to use you as tinder.” The thief chuckled but didn’t hesitate to start walking. She had, after all, witnessed her friend make good on too many threats to ever assume anything the curvy redhead said was mere jest.
And like that the trio had set off once more, stopping periodically to allow their ill-tempered sorceress to mark her territory. Only a few times were they forced to stop, retrace their steps, and *********** an alternate route. At first they kept encountering chalk marks which sought to divert them this way or that, but those quickly dried up as their unseen shepherds seemed to realize the ruse was up. Eventually, to their great relief, the distant sound of the storm above began to tickle at the edge of their hearing. From then on the adventuresses grew increasingly confident they would make their way out of the labyrinthine tunnels unscathed. Should one find themselves pondering that age-old proverb about unhatched chickens at this point in our story, well, I fear that such a concern would be all too fitting.
It would hardly surprise such a cunning reader to learn that the trio’s confidence had grown so high and their pace so fast that they entirely failed to notice what had to be one of the most blatant traps Silke had ever laid eyes upon until it was too late. Proceeding with all haste down a section of tunnel which had clearly been carved out of the rock, or at least expanded from whatever natural passage had once existed, Vissi, who had rather unwisely forced herself to the front of the pack, abruptly froze midstride and let out a loud gasp of surprise. Silke was barely able to prevent herself barreling into the sorceress, a narrow miss which proved quite fortunate as the redhead promptly drew her attention to the cause of her sudden halt.
A ragged, slightly discoloured patch of the cavern floor centered almost perfectly on Vissi’s foot had sunk perhaps an inch below the neighbouring stone. Had keen-eyed Keire or the experienced and wary Silke been in the lead, either would most likely have detected the poorly disguised pressure plate with ease allowing them to guide their companions around it. In her haste to be reunited with her bedroll, however, the impatient sorceress had nearly sprung whatever nasty surprise the girls’ unseen hosts had prepared in their honour, an error which it would fall to her best friend to correct.
With all the caution of an illicit lover tiptoeing past the slumbering husband they had just cuckolded, Silke dropped to her knees and began withdrawing a handful of delicate tools from her pack. A quick inspection was all she needed to confirm the obvious supposition that the discoloured patch was indeed a pressure plate, but, in what had become a rare stroke of luck, it at least seemed not to be a particularly sophisticated one. Had she a sufficiently heavy object at hand with which to replace Vissi’s weight Silke could and would have simply pinned the plate down and moved on. With no such object available and no way to be certain just how sensitive the plate in question was, however, she was going to be forced to disarm it. Such an operation would naturally have been tricky at the best of times, even with how simplistic the trap seemed, but after a day that began many miles away and an evening spent in tense subterranean exploration Silke was far from at her best. There was no other choice to be made, though, so she got to work.
While Keire watched from a distance, Silke carefully approached, delicately replaced Vissi’s foot with her own knee, then waved the sorceress off to wait with their companion. Not knowing just what particular brand of nastiness the pressure plate beneath her was set to unleash, a large part of Vissi wanted to send both of her comrades on ahead just in case she proved unequal to the task before her. Where there was one trap, however, there were often a great many, so instead she decided to play things safe. After waving Keire and Vissi off to a comfortable position several dozen paces to her rear, a task made tedious by how reluctant the trio had become to put distance between one another in the wake of discovering they were not alone, she got to work.
Once she did so it was relatively easy for Silke to get at the guts of the pressure plate beneath her. In her moderately expert opinion, the thing didn’t seem like much of a trap at all. She had disarmed more sophisticated devices at least a dozen times before, probably twice that many. The one before her would be child’s play in comparison, or so she thought until the very last second. The young thief thought that by severing the plate’s connection to the mechanism beneath she had succeeded only to realize instead that the tension on that thin line of wiring was all that was keeping the trap from engaging. But the deed was already done. Had the rest of the device not seemed so primitive, had she not been so drained by the longest of days, had camp not seemed practically around the corner… had conditions been anything but what they were she might have expected such tamper-proofing, would almost certainly have checked for it just to be safe. But she hadn’t. And she would suffer for that lapse in judgment, oh would she suffer.
No sooner had the trigger wire snapped than the trap sprung into action. There were no spikes hurling from the walls or deadly curses raining down from hidden spell crystals as Silke had always assumed would be the case on the day she finally made her last mistake, though. Indeed, the vicinity of the pressure plate seemed to be entirely devoid of danger. The action actually occurred much farther away where massive hunks of rock were suddenly released from hidden alcoves in the tunnel’s ceiling to descend and cut her off in each direction.
Silke’s cry of alarm echoed around the improvised chamber, the sound of her voice competing against the tremendous clamour produced by the stone seals slamming down in each direction. The barrier which cut her off from Vissi and Keire was perhaps twenty paces away, its counterpart in the other direction only a little closer. The distance to either was such that the thief couldn’t have hoped to reach one in time even had she already been sprinting the moment they began to fall.
The dark-haired girl was left reeling, her ears ringing as if she had spent hours working an anvil. As if it wasn’t enough that she had been separated from her comrades, the heavy seals had also hit the ground with such force that they kicked up great clouds of dust which were rapidly drifting towards where she stood at the center of the suddenly isolated stretch of tunnel. Within moments the dirt and dust hanging in the air was thick enough to distort what feeble illumination the lone torch she carried could provide. It was like a scene out of the worst of nightmares, for who among us doesn’t dread the prospect of being buried alive?
For several seconds, Silke stood still as a statue, heart pounding thunderously in her chest as her well-practiced eyes scanned the floor and walls before her for further traps. She had been fooled once, it was true, lulled into complacency by a clever veneer of simplicity, but that failure only left her all the more alert. Of course, no amount of awareness could possibly save her should the initial trap truly prove as thorough as it seemed.
The wary thief had yet to so much as turn in place when a new noise from behind seized her attention. Skin crawling at the grating sound of stone grinding on stone, she whirled to face the new threat. The source of the noise wasn’t another trap as expected, though. A quick and clean death would have required far more luck than Silke had ever been blessed with, I fear. Instead, where before the wall behind her had seemed a plane of unremarkable, unbroken stone, suddenly there were two, no, three openings into unknown chambers or passages beyond. The third she witnessed unseal with her own eyes, a portal appearing where before there had been nothing. What she had thought to be seamless stone parted as if by magic, pulling back before sliding to the side. It was stonework the likes of which she had never seen before, what could only be the product of generations of craftsmen honing their trade. There was precious little time for her to marvel at the skill of the doors’ construction, however, as no sooner had they been revealed than a far greater concern made itself known.
Mere seconds after she turned around a flurry of small creatures began to emerge from the darkness beyond and surge forward. The things ranged from three to four feet tall standing upright and appeared humanoid, if only vaguely so. Their limbs were unnaturally long and slender, sprouting off compact torsos at angles that seemed somehow wrong. Leathery, gray-green skin clung tight to their gangly frames and their faces were oddly crowded by eyes and mouths that seemed too large to be natural. They wore clothes, if the eclectic mix of leather scraps concealing seemingly random swathes of their bodies could be called as such, and chittered like madmen in a language the bewildered thief couldn’t hope to comprehend. At first glance the creatures may have appeared savage, even feral, but there was an undeniable intelligence in their wicked, leering gazes as they closed on her.
Goblins. That was all they could be. Silke’s heart skipped a beat and her eyes went wide with fear as she faced down one of her world’s great horrors for the first time. Having spent nearly her entire life behind the walls of a civilized city, the thief had never once laid eyes upon the bastard race of creation, but there were few indeed who hadn’t heard the tales of their depravity. Alone a single goblin was little threat. Even a peasant with a stick might fancy their chances against a solitary greenskin. In enough numbers, though, the little devils could overwhelm any foe. And our trapped heroine was face to face with more than a few.
Of the many races which might imagine themselves challengers to humanity’s mantle as masters of the world few indeed could lodge so fierce a claim as the goblins. Rejected by most civilizations for their loathsome nature and supposed barbarism, goblins tended to dwell in hidden, isolated communities all their own. One should never let that segregation fool themselves into believing the greenskins to be savages, though. They were fiendishly clever, master tinkerers, and extraordinarily cooperative amongst their own tribes. Only a tendency to ignore the long-term consequences of their actions and the fierce competitiveness which arose between tribes who came into contact had held back the goblins from emerging as a plague which threatened to overwhelm their so called ‘civilized’ neighbours. Even with those shortcomings, however, it was an inevitability that every few years new reports would arise of a successful tribe swelling to the thousands or tens of thousands, large enough to spark dreams of taking their place in the sun until some army or another was raised to beat them back down.
As daunting as all that made goblinkind to the masses, though, it was hardly what caused our young thief to recoil so at the sight of her assailants. No, Silke’s mind immediately leapt to that single trait which most repulsed members of the other races, that which made the greenskins’ threat so insidious. Their breeding. If there had ever been such a thing as a female goblin, no living soul was known to have encountered one and escaped to tell the tale. That was not to say, however, that it was a mystery how goblins reproduced. Rather, it was all too well known that male goblins could and would interbreed with the females of other species, such unions invariably producing their own spawn rather than children of the mother’s race. Not a single intelligent species was known to be immune to whatever vile magic allowed the little devils to reproduce in such a manner, nor was it known what twisted divinity or abhorrent sorcery had crafted such cruel monstrosities when the world was yet young.
Perhaps most concerning of all for Silke and all those souls unfortunate enough to find themselves in her predicament was the rate at which goblins could breed. The entire process, from the moment their seed took root in a woman’s womb to the moment their vile spawn was born, transpired in a matter of weeks. Five to six most often, though the process was less predictable than its equivalent among most other races. That meant given just a few captives and a few undisturbed years even the smallest of goblin packs could rapidly swell into a colony large enough to seriously threaten anything living in their vicinity. It also meant the prospect of being captured by goblins was a fate that fueled the most terrible nightmares of many a woman, as well as the secret fantasies of a few twisted deviants. Silke, though, was no such deviant. Thus, the sight of a small horde of goblins descending on her was nearly enough to make the thief piss herself in terror. She counted ten, twenty, perhaps even thirty of the vile creatures as she scrambled backwards.
Unfortunately for our young adventuress, she was trapped and she knew it. Her instinctive retreat could only last so long before her back smacked hard into the cave wall opposite that from which the greenskins were still emerging, the collision followed a split second later by another which saw her head strike the same hard stone. That self-inflicted blow left her vision swimming and by the time it cleared her assailants were already upon her.
“No!” Silke squealed as the bravest among them leapt at her. “NOOOO!!” The greenskins’ spindly fingers already seemed to be grasping at every inch of her body all at once as she reached for the nearest of her many sheathed knives. If not to use that precious blade on them, then at least for her own slender throat. The thief almost managed to draw it, too, her fingers wrapping tight around the hilt before one of the goblins latched its own grip around her wrist. Even fighting the creature’s surprising strength she managed to slide the weapon most of the way out of its sheathe before all hope was lost. Just as she thought she might manage the feat, another of the little devils’ hands joined the struggle and from there it was a lost cause.
Silke wailed out her terror as together the two goblins pried her fingers from the knife, another wresting away the torch she still held in her other hand. From there she couldn’t resist as several of the little monstrosities committed to keeping each of her wrists pinned back against the wall while yet more clung to her legs, their weight bringing to an end the frenzy of kicks she hadn’t even realized she was delivering. Thus subdued, the captive thief was helpless to resist as the rest of her assailants began to run their hands across her supple body.
Perhaps a larger woman might have been able to hurl the vile things off of herself and fight back, but not lithe young Silke. She could do nothing but sob and writhe in place as a legion of tiny hands conducted their thorough search, the goblins familiarizing themselves with her modest curves and relieving her of every object which might possibly be of use in resisting them. By the time they were satisfied, her every knife and tool were gone. Even the few odds and ends she had collected during her brief travels were handed off to a waiting stream of couriers who swiftly whisked them away into the dark of their hidden tunnels before returning for more. She would see most again, sooner or later, though their presence would bring her little comfort in her new life.
The incessant cackling of her many captors was almost too much for Silke to bear. Never in her life had she felt so helpless, so worthless. Not even when a bitter turf war had led a rival street gang to beat down her own and celebrate by making sport of her and Vissi had the thief felt so pathetic. There was just something about the goblins who now held dominion over her that made her predicament incomparable. Whether it was how repulsive she found them, how feeble they were as individuals, or the dread fate which she knew awaited her in their lair, there was simply nothing she could imagine that would match the humiliation of becoming their prisoner.
It was impossible to know how much time had passed before the goblins’ search came to an end. In its wake, those not preoccupied restraining her nubile form clustered together into something like a pack, the individual greenskins glancing back and forth between one another and chittering eagerly in their bizarre tongue. Silke herself was left panting, her breathing ragged as she watched and waited with wide eyes. While all her many knives and tools were gone from sight, spirited away into the goblin tunnels, her torch remained. One of the little freaks stood apart from the rest, holding it aloft like the staff of a wizard, and a truly preposterous sight that was. They had come with no light of their own and the tunnels from which they emerged were dark as pitch so the fact her light was still present could only mean the fiends wanted her able to see for what was to come.
After a long exchange between himself and another, one of the goblins, one which wore an odd set of markings painted upon its face, held up a long-clawed hand. Quickly the rest of its comrades fell into a hush, deference to what must have been some sort of leader. After letting the silence linger for a moment the thing chittered alone briefly, its proclamation immediately answered with what could only be a cheer of approval.
Silke let out a girlish yelp when she was suddenly pulled away from the cave’s wall and dragged down onto her knees. From there, two goblins jumped onto her back, their weight sending her toppling to the ground. Her face smacked agonizingly against the hard stone of the cave floor and she heard a wicked crack as pain suddenly flared up in her nose. If the goblins even noticed, though, they didn’t let her petty distraction impede their plans. A second later three of them were tugging at her side, the team easily managing to flip her onto her back.
Once they had their captive positioned as they wanted, the greenskins restraining Silke’s wrists began to tug, twisting and pulling her arms until they were held together as far above her head as she could reach. At the same time, a small pack of the fiends descended on her ankles and got to work, tugging them apart until there was enough open space between her thighs for three of their kind. The desperate thief tried to lash out at them, tried to prevent what she knew was coming next, but her efforts were too feeble. By that point she and her assailants alike knew her to be entirely at their mercy. And mercy, well, I’m afraid mercy was something goblinkind had never understood.
What came next was inevitable. The goblin with the painted face strode assuredly between Silke’s parted thighs, a wicked grin on his distorted face. The dark-haired girl just clenched her eyes shut as his delicate fingers fought with the laces that held her tight leather pants in place. She didn’t need to see him work. She didn’t want to see. But her captors had other ideas. Barely a moment had passed before she felt her head being yanked up, a goblin gripping her harshly by the hair with one hand while his other scrabbled at her eyelids and slapped at her cheeks until she gave in and opened her eyes once more. The sight she saw as she gazed down her body was no more or less than she expected, though its predictability did little to dull its horror.
Once he had her pants suitably loosened the goblin leader began to tug. Silke let out a whimper as the tight leather gradually crept down her thighs, cool underground air raising goosebumps as it kissed the pale, delicate flesh revealed beneath. The young thief’s traveling boots and footwraps were already long gone by the time her pants reached her ankles, leaving her nubile form bare from the navel down save for the simple wool knickers which covered her womanhood.
All around her the rest of the little devils began to chant as one when their leader moved back into position between her thighs. It was a slow, quiet murmur at first, rising in volume and speed as the wicked creature retrieved a small curved knife from a sheathe on one leg and held it aloft. Leering up at his prisoner’s face while the minion holding her head ensured she wasn’t able to look away, he slowly lowered his blade and made two precise cuts on her delicate undergarment, one above the top of each thigh. Silke couldn’t help but blush at the way her captor held her gaze and the ceremony with which he was baring her body for what felt like all goblinkind to see.
Returning his knife to its place, the lead goblin reached down to pluck up the freshly severed portion of her knickers which covered her snatch and slowly peeled it away to reveal the charms beneath. A thin patch of scraggly dark hairs carpeted the upper portion of that hallowed chalice between her thighs, but they were far too sparse to conceal the small slit hidden between her legs. The greenskins’ chanting had nearly reached a fever pitch by the time Silke’s soon to be rapist started shedding his leathers, but her attention was elsewhere. The pretty thief’s eyes were locked on the fiend’s cock, the sight of it rendering her momentarily stunned. By human standards its six inches were nothing of note, he was certainly smaller than some of the men she had lain with in the past, but on the goblin’s tiny frame it looked almost comical.
Noticing where her eyes had fallen, the goblin leader’s thin lips twisted into a deranged grin as it lined itself up with Silke’s entrance. She tried to close her eyes and look away, but the greenskin clutching her head wouldn’t let her, slapping and scratching until she obediently turned her attention back to her own imminent conquest. The bested adventuress let out a primal cry as the first goblin cock surged into her body, but it was drowned out by the chorus of cheers which erupted from her audience of captors that same moment. Tears began to flow like rivers down the girl’s cheeks as her body was roughly claimed, but their emergence only seemed to encourage her abusers. She hurt, oh how she hurt. Nothing about the situation she had found herself in prompted even the slightest arousal in Silke’s loins and like so many before her she was dismayed to discover that a goblin’s skin was far rougher than a man’s, the leathery material chafing and scraping at her dry, delicate interior.
The first of the goblins to enjoy their new captive’s charms lasted but a few minutes. It felt like he had barely gotten under way before his body seized up like he was having a fit, a bizarre warbling cry escaped his lips, and his load was splashing against her sensitive depths. The fiend’s seed was hot and plentiful, but no more so than a man’s. Silke whimpered pitifully as she watched her conqueror pull out of her and stagger back, lusts momentarily sated. Instead of tracking him, though, her eyes lingered on her own gash, watching as a few dollops of viscous gray slime trickled out. She couldn’t help but wonder whether that single load was already enough, whether the goblin leader had already sealed its victory in her womb and her fate along with it. Not that it would really make a difference. There was, after all, no shortage of greenskins waiting to take their turn with her. Unless Silke’s friends somehow managed to rescue her, a prospect that seemed unlikely given all her captors had proven themselves capable of, they would continue to use her again and again until eventually their seed took. Whether that moment came in an hour, a day, a week, a month… it would matter little in the end.
So absorbed our luckless thief was in her own thoughts that she scarcely even noticed a second goblin striding to her entrance and lining himself up. A little yelp of surprise escaped the girl’s lips as his battering ram breached her gates, the sudden pain causing her eyes to refocus on the new threat. The new goblin was a little taller than the first, a little leaner, but no less ruthless. Still, his predecessor’s leavings rendered her passage just lubricated enough to make her second fuck of the evening less agonizing than the first, if only by a little. Before she knew it the second goblin was shooting off his own load, adding it to the small sea of monstrous seed already pooling within her body.
The moment in which she witnessed a third rough, gray-green cock lining up against her snatch was that in which Silke abandoned what few shreds remained of her dignity. The dark-haired adventuress wailed like a starving babe, her supple form thrashing wildly against the grip of so many captors as keening cries ricocheted off the hard stone walls all around. The display did her little good, though, pitted as it was against the combined might of more than a dozen goblins. Those clutching her ankles kept them pinned tight against the ground, leaving her legs unable to do anything more than shake helplessly from side to side. Those restraining her wrists proved just as stalwart, their shared strength more than sufficient to maintain such firm control that her struggles served only to make her modest tits dance delightfully atop her chest. In the end her protests only encouraged the cackling little fiends. While most looked on and laughed, one of the more adventurous among their number, one whose attention had zeroed in on the thief’s bouncing breasts, hopped astride her stomach and made to ride her like a ranchhand would a wild mare yet to be saddlebroken.
While her latest assailant rutted away inside Silke’s cunt, the brave goblin which had leaped atop her thrashing body hastily began stripping off the few leather scraps it wore to reveal a cock only marginally smaller than the first she had witnessed some minutes before. Cackling maniacally, the green devil slapped its length down between his victim’s modest breasts and began to hump. Even once he had taken hold of those mounds of flesh and pulled them as tight together as he could manage, though, they barely wrapped even halfway around his member. It was the crying thief’s very first titjob, her lackluster chest having ensured no human lover had ever attempted such an endeavor. She was far more accustomed to being bent over and having her near-boyish rump enjoyed from behind, or dropping to her knees and performing with her mouth.
It was the latter of those skillsets which the greenskins decided to test next. The rider straddling Silke’s chest was still hooting and howling like mad when another of the fiends appeared at the corner of her vision, though his counterpart between her legs had already finished satisfying himself and deposited his contribution to her pool of potential offspring only to be replaced by a fourth she couldn’t so much as see. She could, however, see the goblin approaching her head, his vile cock already dangling openly between his legs. When the monster arrived and began to smack that fleshy rod against her face, all the captive thief could do was yelp girlishly, close her eyes, and wait for him to stop.
So blinded, Silke didn’t realize what was about to happen until it was already too late. Suddenly there was something being shoved into her protesting mouth. It wasn’t thick and fleshy as expected, though, but thin and stiff with a sharp curve to it. By the time she realized what it was for, the wooden ring was already lodged behind her upper teeth. Even as she tried to clamp her jaw shut and push at the offending object with her tongue, spindly fingers were already at the corners of her mouth prying it open. From there it was little challenge for the goblins to finish positioning the cruel instrument and mere moments later she could feel a pair of cloth straps being tied together behind her head to secure it in place.
With the cruel ring stretching her jaws achingly wide, Silke was rendered mute and helpless as she gazed up at the goblin looming over her face with wide, vulnerable eyes. In a way she was hurt that they hadn’t even offered her a chance to cooperate, just jamming the tool in her mouth to render her harmless instead. It was as if she wasn’t even a thinking creature in their eyes, just a shapely sack of flesh with some particularly entertaining bits rather than a person to be reasoned with. It wasn’t like she would have bitten the goblin. What would have been the point? Against just one or two attackers doing so might have been tempting. But with dozens? All she could have hoped to accomplish was to anger them and earn herself the beating to end all beatings. She knew that. Her assailants, though, didn’t seem to care. Somehow, despite all they had already done, that indifference stung the young thief.
Barely a moment passed between the ring being affixed and Silke’s newest master starting to slip his cock through it into her mouth. Just as quickly, though, he withdrew, stepping back and to the side. As if that retreat wasn’t bizarre enough, the pretty captive quickly realized that his comrade straddling her chest had called him off, chittering loudly and jerking with his head. At first she was astounded to see one of her rapists discouraging another, after what she had already endured she couldn’t imagine they possessed even the slightest shred of mercy, at least not for one who wasn’t of their own kind. And she was right, mercy had nothing to do with her reprieve. The real reason, which quickly became apparent, was far more self-interested.
Silke’s eyes went wide as the little bastard’s voice peaked and his own bulging orbs clenched shut, the cock between her breasts spasming as it began to erupt. That instinctive reaction had been a terrible mistake, though, the very first strand of grayish seed arcing high and a little wide of her nose, its tail end splattering against the corner of one eye which immediately began to burn. She tried to jerk her head away, but the goblin clutching at her hair denied the attempt. Unable to escape, the hapless thief could only close her eyes and whimper as blast after blast splashed across her face. By the time the seventh and final burst of goblin cum was decorating her fair features, she felt as if her head had just been held beneath a waterfall. Not all of the vile slime had landed on her face, though. Two well-aimed strands of the stuff had managed to pass through the wooden ring spreading her lips to hit home on her tongue instead.
The taste of a goblin’s seed filling her mouth was nearly enough to make Silke wretch. Despite her proficiency at giving head, the former street urchin had always found the taste of a man’s essence utterly revolting. On the many occasions she had found herself sucking a cock, whether to satisfy a lover, to pay for a meal or bed, to sway a guardsman against turning her in, or for any of the dozen other reasons that had driven her to her knees, she had always tried to either take the resulting load so far down her throat she didn’t have to taste it or encourage her partner to finish across her face as the goblin had. On the rare occasions neither approach had succeeded and she had been forced to taste the bulk of the man’s seed she had always been left gagging, having to fight down the urge to spew the slime out all over its owner. It was thus to her immense displeasure that she learned goblin semen was even more foul than that of her own kind. The same revolting taste was there, of course, but the greenskins’ slime had en extra, acrid edge, almost like it had been mixed with the creature’s piss.
With the jubilant greenskin straddling Silke’s chest satisfied, his comrade once more moved forward to enjoy her mouth. No interruption came to impede his second attempt leaving the thief to groan quietly as a first goblin cock thrust through the wooden ring spreading her lips and into her mouth. When the throbbing shaft brushed against her tongue she was surprised to find it tasted little different than a man’s. A particularly sweaty man who hadn’t bathed in several weeks, perhaps, but a man’s nonetheless.
At first the goblin riding Silke’s face seemed content thrusting away wildly into her mouth, but before long it grew agitated. The little fiend fixed her eyes with its own and chattered loudly, its bizarre language making no more sense to its captive than that of a songbird. When his outburst prompted no change in the whimpering thief’s performance, the goblin only became increasingly cross. Incensed, he started to slap at his captive’s face, rough, clawed hands clapping against her flushed cheeks in rapid succession. The helpless girl squealed at the assault, her inarticulate cries muffled by the monster’s stiff rod and an inability to move her jaw. Only when her assailant opened his mouth and pantomimed a large lick did she finally realize what he wanted of her. With the last shreds of futile resistance already beaten out of her the obedient thief began to lick, her hesitant tongue probing at the invading shaft like it was coated in poison. While hardly an inspiring performance, her attempts were at least enough to end the rain of blows against her face and trigger a groan of pleasure from her abuser.
Scarcely more than a minute passed of Silke actively servicing the foul monster in her mouth before he shuddered and blew his load all over the thief’s tongue. If a few drops of goblin seed had been enough to make her want to heave, tasting an entire load of the stuff was plenty sufficient to bring a fresh wave of anguished tears to the girl’s puffy eyes. When the creature withdrew his cock a moment later she began to sputter in a desperate attempt to eject its seed with what little control she had of her mouth, but before she could make any real progress another of the greenskins had taken up the same position and was pushing past her lips. Knowing defiance would bring only more pain, Silke began to suck.
Laying on her back in the middle of a goddesses forsaken cave with a goblin she hadn’t even seen ploughing her cunt and another humping her mouth while their predecessors’ vile loads befouled her face and womb alike, Silke felt completely and utterly worthless. She wasn’t, though. Far from it. To her captors, the defeated adventuress was a prized possession. Their colony had fallen on hard times of late and wasn’t nearly numerous enough to comfortably take down an entire party of combatants like the one that had stumbled into their domain. That weakness, however, only served to make the lone captive they could safely procure all the more precious. She would be a priceless treasure to keep them entertained through the boredom of long, subterranean days and start the restoration of their clan. It was only natural that the capture of such a prize would leave the goblins in a mood to celebrate. And celebrate they would.
Indeed, our woe-bestruck heroine’s ordeal was far from over, and if she felt she had already suffered as much degradation as any woman possibly could… well, that was a misconception her captors would be glad to relieve her of. At first she wasn’t sure what was happening when several of the little bastards grabbed her around the hips and began to lift, but that mystery was swiftly dispelled when, after she had been raised high enough, one among them dropped down and wiggled its way under her lithe body. In comparison to what the boyish thief had already suffered and what she knew was yet to come, having her ass filled in seemed a trifling matter. More than a few times in her life she had let a man take her up the butt and while it wasn’t a particularly pleasant sensation, the goblins’ respectable girth had nothing on some of the shafts she had endured. All told, it was a rather mundane torment, though the new demand on her already-strained attention only seemed to make it even more difficult for her to process what all was happening around her.
With her body buffeted from so many directions all at once and a constant buzz of incoherent babbling filling her ears it didn’t take long for Silke to lose track of how long her relentless gangbang had lasted. It is, after all, quite the challenge to measure the passage of time when one’s only means to do so is counting the number of goblins to unload their seed into one hole or another. Around a dozen loads had been deposited into the luckless thief’s womanhood (or, had it been more than that?) before her captors grew tired of enjoying her as she lay there and decided to change things up. Even had she understood their strange tongue, however, exhaustion and abuse had sapped all but the last of her strength meaning the goblins were forced to manhandle her into each new position themselves. Not that that proved much of a hindrance.
The first shift came when they flipped Silke onto her belly, leaving the unblemished flesh of her svelte back and taut rump exposed to their long, spindly fingers even as her sensitive breasts and rosy nipples were crushed against the cold, hard stone of the cave floor. Only a few of her captors enjoyed her like that before they were at work again lifting her hips high into the air. So arranged, the dazed captive’s well-filled cunt was left to steadily drip thick grayish seed down into a growing pool beneath her while goblin after goblin stood nearly upright and battered her increasingly loose asshole. That position didn’t last either, though, as eventually the mob of greenskins grew too impatient to use her only two at a time. Instead the little devils shoved her down onto her side where they could plunder her from the front and the rear at the same time, one leg held awkwardly in the air as they did. All the while the line of goblins awaiting their turn to use her mouth never faltered, adjusting seamlessly to each new position she found herself in.
Between the fatigue of a long day followed by an increasingly longer evening taking its toll and the way her captors held her firmly in place no matter how she was positioned, there was little Silke could do but endure her ordeal. She ached all over from where the little fiends had slapped and pinched at her supple flesh, but that pain paled in comparison to the ever-building ache in her obscenely stretched jaw and the burning of her swollen, overworked lower entrances. The longer her abuse stretched on, the more the young thief hurt and the more her mind began to shut down.
As her body grew numb and her exhaustion mounted ever higher, Silke’s mind drifted further and further away until it was as if she were a witness to some other hapless victim’s abuse. In her more lucid moments she found herself wondering whether the rest of her captivity would pass in the same manner, her body subjected to a constant barrage of carnal violence until eventually it gave out completely. Surely that couldn’t be her captors’ intention, could it? If they truly meant to breed her, and there was no reason to suspect they had any other plans in mind, then she couldn’t possibly be expected to endure such a physical toll day in and day out. There was simply no way her body would last long enough to birth even a single child at the current rate. Surely, then, some respite must lay ahead of her if only she could last long enough to reach it intact.
When at last the sweet embrace of the void approached, Silke put up no more resistance against it than she had against the last dozen of her fiendish tormentors. As she let a dreamless haze envelope her, she wasn’t sure whether or not she hoped to ever awaken again…
***
When Silke finally emerged from her long, dreamless sleep, the very first thing that struck her was how much her body ached. She felt like she had been dragged several miles by a galloping horse then had every last drop of blood coursing through her veins replaced by liquid fire. She had been blessed with no such luck, though, for as agonizing as such a fate might have been it would at least have been a fleeting thing, not the lingering torment she was destined for. No, she was cursed with the misfortune to carry on living, though there seemed not to be a single inch of her flesh that didn’t ache, nor a muscle that wasn’t sore, nor a joint that wasn’t stiff. Naturally there were a few particular parts of her body which, delicate as they were, hurt even more than the rest, and a pathetic whimper escaped the fallen heroine’s cracked lips as the memories of just why that was the case came flooding back to her.
The second thing Silke realized as she tried to stave off the tidal wave of shame which threatened to drag her under to a mindless abyss of despair was the fact she couldn’t move. Rather than lying in a bed, or even on hard stone, she was on her feet, albeit hunched oddly forward. When she tried to straighten up, though, she found her head was somehow stuck. Instinctively, she made to reach for whatever had trapped her neck only to realize that her hands, too, were unable to move. Now, some might have found it bewildering to awaken in such a position, but our young thief had spent enough time in a pillory thanks to a few of her less successful escapades to recognize the symptoms even in such a groggy state. This did not, of course, make the discovery of her entrapment any more pleasant, but it did spare her whatever energy another might have wasted on futile attempts to break free.
The third thing Silke realized was that she was in the middle of a scene which she might well have opted against even were her only alternative the depths of hell. It had taken a few moments for her sleepy eyes to uncloud and adjust to the the darkness in which she found herself, but her surroundings were at last becoming clear. She could see before her a dozen or so small heaps of rotting wood, patched cloth, and crumbling stone that could only be (exceptionally poor) dwellings, and flitting between them she could just barely make out numerous squat, unshapely figures. With no light to see by save for that of a distant cooking fire and a few faintly glowing cave plants scattered here and there the runty figures were little more than silhouettes. But then, she hardly needed eyes to know her captors. What else could they be but the same fiendish greenskins which had isolated, captured, and brutalized her so enthusiastically? And now she was in their village.
The fourth and final thing of consequence that Silke realized as she stumbled towards full consciousness was that she was moving. Or, more accurately, she was being moved. As the erstwhile adventuress struggled to gather her bearings she could feel her shoulders knocking against the firm frame of her prison, her legs trembling beneath her, something rough and leathery slapping against her ass…
Hot tears began to well up in the corners of the new slave’s eyes, tracing salty rivers down her cheeks before plummeting to splash against the stone ground beneath as she realized she was again being used by one of her captors. Had they even stopped? The goblins must have done so eventually after she passed out from the initial abuse in order to bring her back to their lair, but once they placed her in her new prison had they left her to rest at all or simply picked up where they left off taking it in turns to rape her limp, dangling body while the rest simply went about their business? Were they ever going to stop?
The goblin having his way with Silke must have already been nearing his peak before her return to the land of the living, or else her sudden squirming was a most delightful surprise, because she had scarcely even realized what was happening before his member started twitching and spraying its terrible load up into her thoroughly sodden cunt. He didn’t linger, withdrawing almost immediately after the last of his seed had been deposited. As he walked away Silke’s unseen master gave her a little slap to the rump. The light blow made her jump, to the extent she could move at all while trapped in her pillory. In the wake of his departure a single heavy sob wracked her body and she let herself fall limp, propped up by naught but the sturdy frame holding her fast.
Just a few moments later came the all-too-familiar thrust of another stiff cock probing at her entrance and a fresh wave of tears began to fall from Silke’s eyes…
To be continued
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