The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Something was wrong. She distinctly remembered the way the clasp on the collar had worked: the way the thick, padded leather had met itself perfectly around her neck, just constricting her flesh ever so slightly, how the narrower strip of the belt-and-buckle had fed through loops in the heavy inner band, lending strength to the four ‘D’—rings around its circumference and securing with a simple steel prong through a hole. Now, though, as she explored with her fingers and twisted to view the whole thing in the mirror, there was no sign of a buckle, or even of a join, in either part of the device. Frowning, she used her fingers to methodically trace the whole circle of the band as it hugged her neck. The leather was perfect and continuous, impossible to remove.

What the Hell?

She also remembered, just after he had buckled it in place, that she had stretched her neck a little and been able to spin the thing around: it had been snug but moveable. Now, though, no matter how she tugged, it stayed just where it was, as if it had glued itself to her flesh and become a part of her.

Feeling a thrill of fear, she marched to his kitchen and scrabbled through the drawers for the sharp scissors she knew must be there somewhere.

Back before the mirror, she carefully maneuvered the blades around the belt before pressing firmly. The leather compressed under the assault of the sharp steel, but unbelievably – impossibly – it wouldn’t cut. In fact she couldn’t even make a mark on the edge, no matter how hard she pressed.

This couldn’t be happening. Her logical mind railed against the evidence of her senses. Leather didn’t change like this overnight. Solid steel buckles didn’t just blend into the leather they were attached to. And leather, no matter how rich its quality, could not resist a steel blade!

Magic! The word sat uneasily in her mind, alongside such idiotic concepts as witchcraft and demons. Was it possible that he was a magician, and that she was the victim of some kind of magic trick? But magicians just fooled the senses, didn’t they, making the mundane seem impossible, and this looked and felt frighteningly real.

Then it stuck her. He must be a hypnotist! He had put her into a trance, and all this was the result of his programming. Yes, that must be the explanation. Her fear turned to anger at the cruel game he must be playing on her. She imagined herself lying there, at his mercy, helplessly repeating all his commands: “Yes, I will obey. No, I will not be able to remove the collar…” Bastard!

But where was he now? He had woken her after an all-too-short sleep, himself already dressed and ready to leave. As she had knelt before him, he had listed her instructions for the day, exactly how he wished her to clean herself and the flat. Then he had simply left, and she had proceeded to carry out his orders, stripping the bed and setting to wash the stained sheets, replacing them with clean; tidying away the disarray and the remnants of their lovemaking – no: of his fucking of her, she corrected herself—and then finally she had cleaned her own sore and battered body, allowing herself the indulgence of a long, scaldingly hot shower and a thorough clean-out of her sex and anus, using the equipment he had left in the bathroom for her.

Now at last she was finished, able to think after all of her tasks were completed, able to consider how strange everything had suddenly become.

Strange that she had woken not in his bed with him, but curled on a rug beside it. Strange that she had not thought to look for her clothes. Strange that she could not bring herself to cover her nakedness, even with a robe or one of his shirts. Strange that she had unquestioningly done as he told her and spent – what? – two to three hours cleaning the place like some skivvy.

And since when was a thorough colonic irrigation part of her daily routine? That part of her ablutions had been uncomfortable and disgusting, and yet she had gone ahead and done the deed without a second thought. Just how thorough had the bastard’s hypnotism been?

And what was his name, anyway? She remembered seeing his full name on the dating site where they had found each other – a nice name, old-fashioned and dashing – remembered rolling it around her tongue all through their meal, and over the drinks they had shared afterwards at the bar. She recalled shouting it over the pumping beat of the music at the nightclub. Now all she could remember was an ‘M’. M… Mas… Master?

What the fuck?

And most of all, now that her jobs and her immediate panic over the collar were over, why had she naturally adopted a kneeling posture facing the door through which he would eventually return? Kneeling with her legs spread wide to expose her sex, hands behind her head and chest thrust out to present her breasts to her master.

She needed time to think. She took a deep breath, relaxed and closed her eyes.

It was as if she looked down on the whole of the earth, so high above it she seemed. The land she surveyed was a scorched one, though, ravaged by merciless sun and wind, a land no sane man would try to call home. And yet her godly vantage point was in the heart of a city, the ziggurat she perched atop flanked by lesser pyramids, then by temple buildings and the palace of her new lord, his citadel walls forming a jagged ring around which the rude hovels and the bustle and squalor of his subjects lapped like a swarm of invading ants.

And invaders they were, this race of nomads-turned-conquerors. No crops grew in the arid lands surrounding the city, no livestock grazed. Instead the city fed off the bounty of the fertile, prosperous, conquered kingdoms that bordered this desert nation, systematically robbing them of their crops, their meat and the enslaved lives of their subjects.

Her education had been thorough, as befitted a royal princess, and she knew much of the kingdoms that surrounded this land, though she had never visited them. Now she never would. The names of those nations were meaningless history now, soon to be forgotten, swept away by sand and death.

Her lost homeland was nothing but the latest to fall to the whim of this nation’s warlord, the one they called The Render.

She squinted in the burning light of the sun. Perhaps those shadows on the horizon far to the North were the mountains of her birth? She wondered whether the cities there still burned.

Now, as her lips cracked and her naked skin scorched, she longed for the cool mountain air of home, for the dancing rivers and the swaying branches of the trees, but she doubted she would ever see those lands again, even scorched and conquered as they were now.

Truly, she had little hope of seeing another dawn.

Beneath her, almost close enough for her to touch, had not her arms and legs been tied, the macabre pantomime she had witnessed hundreds of times played once more. Again the high priest uttered the words, again his knife slashed, and another slave’s pleas and screams died in a bubbling gurgle of lifeblood.

Her screams went on, though, voicing her fear and the horror she was witnessing. The slave now watching his own life pouring from his severed throat was her brother Alexander, until recently the Crowned Prince of Syria.

She blinked in confusion as the familiar surroundings of Master’s flat reasserted themselves. She had never had a dream so vivid. She could still feel the burning sun on her flesh, and her un-cracked lips, un-parched throat actually felt strange for a moment. The terrible sorrow slowly left her, as she realised that she hadn’t actually just witnessed the slaughter of her brother.

A dream. It had been nothing but a vivid dream. She didn’t even have a brother.

Did she?

Now that she thought about it, she seemed to be missing quite a lot of basic facts. She couldn’t remember any of her family, couldn’t recall a home, or a job.

She realised that it was a full bladder that had roused her from the dream. She rose, stretching, and padded into the bathroom.

Soon, after a short drink of water (the glass thoroughly dried and put away, the kitchen again spotless), she knelt, brazenly exposing herself to anyone who happened to walk into the flat.

The spots on the mat where her knees rested were noticeably worn, not just from her hours there, but as if somebody had knelt there over and over again, for weeks, months, or even years. For a moment, she worried that it might in fact have been her own knees that had created the abrasions, but if that were the case, her skin should show matching calluses, and upon investigation she found she was thankfully free of hard patches. Perhaps she could trust her own memory that this was her first day here.

How strange, she thought, that she had been able to visit the toilet with no difficulty, and her investigation of her own knees had posed no problem. She could move her arms if she wished, to scratch an itch for instance, but she found that moving away from her open presented posture caused a growing dread and discomfort – a wrongness – that she could only assuage by returning to her pose.

The door was only feet away. It might even be unlocked – she hadn’t tried to open it. She imagined herself running naked out of the building and into the street, shouting ‘Rape! Kidnap! Slavery!’ It would be so simple, but even as she pictured the action, her body filled with the same horror and dread. No. She would stay here instead.

So she knelt, and waited.

She was incredibly turned on – she had been all day. Her nipples felt like hot little stones protruding from her breasts, and she was actually dripping on the mat! And yet she could not find any relief. If she felt her tits or rubbed her throbbing clit, the sensation was no more pleasurable than touching her nose. Even the wash of the fierce jet of the shower had done nothing for her down there. For a while she had feared that she had developed some strange medical condition, but then it had struck her – it was his hypnotism again!

Bored, and unable to address her desperate need for sexual release, she entertained herself by reliving the events of last night, maybe to find that moment when he had hypnotized her.

They had met at the restaurant at eight – the neutral ground a simple safety mechanism for that first date. From the dating service, you knew their name and the neighborhood they lived in, and you knew their face and what they had chosen to tell you, and that was it. The first date was usually in a public place – restaurant, pub, cinema – and was the proving ground of the relationship. From that date both parties could decide whether to ditch, arrange a second date, or even take the first date further.

As an opening gambit, his choice of restaurant had been huge point in his favour—expensive and popular—and the table he had booked had been the best. He had been dark and fascinating, outfitted to perfection, charming and funny and very sexy. The meal was perfect, and she hadn’t even dared look at the price of the divine wine he’d chosen!

He had passed the first test with distinction, so she had allowed him to proceed to the next. The bar was a short taxi ride, and a long-time favourite of hers. All neon and drum-and-bass, it was a retro cliché, but well executed. Another excellent bottle of wine appeared, and the alcohol and her infatuation with him had loosened her tongue. Perhaps she gabbled a little, but he listened attentively as she had spilled her secrets to him.

Returning to his flat had seemed completely natural – his address had been closer, though right now she couldn’t remember it, and his hints at toys and games had been all too enticing in the state she had been in. His flat had been a pleasant surprise—as perfect as was he, classically beautiful, yet fitted out with all the accouterments of a top-flight 21st-century residence. Drunkenly, sitting beside him on his couch, she had teased him about the ‘toys’ he had promised. With a mysterious look in his eye, he had slid open a drawer in the side of the coffee table and drawn out the collar.

She remembered turning the band over and over in her hands, impressed by the weight of it, by the quality of the leather and the perfection of the stitching and metalwork, and by her own intrigue at what it represented. Apart from a few experiments with scarves and stockings, her sexual adventures – and they were many – had never once ventured down the leather-lined path to kinky. Though she understood the concepts of submission and dominance, and had no revulsion for such games, she had simply never played them. Last night it seemed that she was being offered the chance. Naturally, she had shrugged and said, ‘sure, why not?’

The collar’s cool kiss around her neck, and the moment that he fastened that buckle in place, had coincided with a frisson that spread from her neck in a wave that set every hair on end and lit a fire in her breasts and her sex akin to nothing she had known.

Her memories from that moment on were hazy. It was as though she had dove into the role of submissive with the dedication of a method actor. Like an automaton she had responded to his every muttered command, and even now the memory of his cock sent a shiver of awe and lust through her, her nipples hardening still more and pointing proudly from her chest and her dripping loins crying for his touch. His cock had filled her utterly – her body, her senses and her soul – its scent, its motions as he moved around the room before her, the taste of it as she drew it deep down her throat, and most of all the feel of it penetrating her cunt and her arse. Kneeling there now, she found herself silently weeping for him to return, for his fingers to give her the throbbing clit the release she needed, and for his glorious cock to thrust into her dripping, gaping cunt.

Thinking back, their coupling had the glorious, dreamlike glow of a religious experience, yet she struggled to remember the details. Yes, she had begun with giving him the deepest, most thorough blowjob she had ever given, and she had a hazy recollection of sexual position after sexual position, of the incredible feel of him thrusting into her, and of coming and coming and coming. She could not remember how it ended. Her next recollection had been of waking this morning, curled up on the fur rug at the foot of his bed.

In horror, she realized that her tears must have smeared her makeup. She rushed to the bathroom and repaired the damage, then returned to her pose before the door. Her longing and her arousal did not subside, though. Frozen in place, she silently dripped onto the mat, full of lust and the need for release, unable to give herself the slightest relief.

He must have hypnotized her just before he put the collar on! That was the only explanation. He had hypnotized her and then made her forget it. Her wanton subservience, her actions today, her arousal and her inability to do anything about it, and her kneeling here like this, were all commands that he had planted! The certainty in her mind did nothing for her predicament, though.

The king, her father, had died during the sack of Amasya, along with most of his court. She, and the remnants of the royal family, had cowered in her chambers as the flames and the screams, and the sounds of battle had grown louder and louder, until the piled furniture that had served as a barricade across the doorway had finally burst open. For the first time, then, she had met the followers of the conquering warlord: bold, triumphant, angry men brandishing bloody steel and shouting in harsh barks as they bound the hands of their newfound prisoners and herded them into the burning streets, to join one of the lines of newly chained slaves that streamed from the city.

Not she, though. Whether it was her fame or just her beauty that singled her out, the last sight of her family was their shocked faces as she was dragged away from them, a gag forced into her mouth and a black, stinking hood pulled over her head. That was the moment her screams had begun, at the unseen hands that had bound and gagged her through the hood, at the sensation of being carried, blind and helpless, until she was unceremoniously thrown onto some kind of cart.

And there they had left her, her muffled cries ignored, as the cart rattled along towards this evil place.

She had not been alone on the cart. She heard and felt other bound forms around her, although she could not guess how many, or if she knew any of them. Gags and hoods prevented meaningful communication, although the crowded bodies did lend a little comfort as the journey stretched into days. Their captors ignored them utterly, which was perhaps another comfort, But her hunger and thirst became agonies, and she was soon forced to add her own urine and excrement to the stench they all lay in.

She had ample time to weep for her lost family, to dread the short and bloody future she might expect. Her greatest dread was meeting her new lord, her thoughts never far from the stories she had heard.

Typically, his campaigns followed similar courses – a frantic but doomed attempt at diplomacy on the part of the threatened nation, desperate cries to their allies for aid and reinforcements—cries that abruptly stopped, and then the pitifully tiny bands of refugees with their tales of brutality and massacre.

Descriptions of the man himself were few, and hard to believe. Some told of a giant, twice as tall as any man, with shoulders as wide as an elephant. She had heard talk of a mane of hair that whipped like black fire even on the calmest day, a face rent in two by a terrible scar and eyes that burned into your soul. None knew of his birthplace, or his true name, but the honorific he had been given was whispered with racing heart for fear that he could sense the very words. The Render! The warlord and warlock of The Rended Empire. Her rational, educated mind rejected the more excessive descriptions, but the mortal man at their heart was still surely one to be dreaded!

She sensed the change as the dirt road they travelled became cobbled stone, then as the rattle of the wheels echoed back from the walls of buildings and a chorus of alien jeers joined the voices of their captors. Amid a crescendo of cries and laughter, she and the other captives were lifted from the cart. Her feet had been unbound and she had been dragged away from the others, though her feet were at first all but useless after days of bondage, over cobbled streets and up, up a thousand steps. She had been close to unconscious by the time the top was reached and her limp body was lifted and lashed to this pole, her filthy clothes, and finally the mask, had been torn away.

She had expected a violent death, or a violent life of slavery, but even her darkest imaginings couldn’t have painted a picture as horrific as this reality.

She benefitted from an excellent view of the ghastly spectacle. Only the priest and his acolytes were closer, and they had the advantage of not being securely bound to a wooden post set at the very top of the ziggurat. To her right, a seemingly endless stream of her former subjects, hooded and bound, their clothes in rags or gone completely, shuffled and struggled and cried out as they were herded up the long staircase that ran from bottom to top of the pyramid. Each slave’s hands were bound behind them, a single rope leading to the neck of their follower in the procession.

‘No! Alex!’ she wailed, ‘Alex, my brother!’ Even as his life ebbed away, the two attending acolytes cut the rope linking him to the next screaming victim and pitched his twitching body down the steep, fluid-blackened northern slope of the monolith.

She closed tear-filled eyes. At that moment she vowed that she would avenge the deaths of these hundreds of innocents, her family, friends and subjects. This macabre game would eventually end, and there would come a time when her captors own throats were hers to cut.

They had become so efficient after their long hours of practice, clearing away waste rope and clothing, and the crude woven sacks that served as hoods for the victims, readying the altar.

The third acolyte performed his tasks with a sadistic glee. With brutal force, he kicked and manhandled the next sacrifice’s body until he knelt across the altar-stone, head hanging over the side, and secured a rope across his back to hold him there. Finally, with a flourish, he pulled the sack away, and she witnessed the slave’s growing horror as he surveyed for the first time the scene around him, the still-flowing blood that pooled below his bowed head, the priest to one side, pausing to sharpen his knife, the bound woman to the other. His eyes widened in recognition, then shied away from her nakedness. His eyes would not touch her body, but he knew her, spoke her name in disbelief, ‘Princess Eurydice?’

The priest snorted. ‘Princess no more,’ he sneered. ‘She, like you, is discovering the price of conquest. Her price will be greater than yours, and longer in the payment.’ His accent was strange, but he spoke the royal language well. The next words he uttered, though, the same as he had repeated over every sacrifice, were of an altogether different flavor, words that seemed almost to struggle against their own formation, his throat straining to fit around strange guttural syllables as he slit the man’s throat.

Philinas. This one had been called Philinas, a servant employed in her father’s riverside palace. His eyes bulged in horror as, voiceless now, he watched his own blood gush over the intricately carved stone before him, spilling along blood-clotted channels to eventually run down the vast wall of the pyramid.

Once more Eurydice wailed in horror. Once more the priest’s acolytes threw her countryman’s body over the edge, to fall and fall, eventually joining the fly-ridden pile at its base.

Was a cloud passing before the midday sun? The day seemed to be growing dim. She squinted above her. The sky was as cloudless as ever, and yet…

‘Mercy! Mercy!” The cries of the next slave drowned out the voices of all her fellows, their ragged line snaking down the long range of steps to the desert floor. Her wails rose and rose as she groveled pitifully on the top two steps.

‘Silence her!’ commanded the priest, and the third acolyte, the cruelest of them, viciously pulled on the noose around the young woman’s neck, catapulting her forward into the front of the altar stone. She fell to the floor, her screams reduced to pitiful sobs.

Ignoring her now, the acolyte stepped forward and calmly spoke. ‘This is the final one, the seven-times-seven-times-seventh.’ Though his grey, hooded cloak rendered him anonymous it did little to disguise the muscular bulk of his body, the vast spread of his shoulders, and he spoke and moved with assurance that belied his lowly status.

She felt as though she might burst with horror and disgust at these ‘priests’, performing their bloody, pointless rites before her. Seven times seven times seven of her countrymen and family! Her fury rose in her chest and the words poured from her mouth, thick with hate and scorn. ‘Is this to be my part in this? The final sacrifice of your day? The climax of all your fun?’

They all turned toward her, their shadowed faces pitiless. ‘No, princess,’ whispered the high priest, his twisted, blood-spattered face inches from hers, ‘but you will begin your role soon enough. Acolytes! Prepare the next!’

Did no one see the way the light was dying? The day had turned the colour of copper. She squinted into the sky searching for the sun, and stared in confusion. The disc of the sun danced and twisted in the sky as though she watched it from under water, as if some unseen hand sought to snuff it out like a candle flame. A terrified moan escaped from her lips.

The fallen girl’s screams rose once more as rough hands gripped her and tied her onto the stone. With a flourish, the priest pulled away the sack that covered her head, and the girl lay there blinking in the light. Her jet-black hair was matted against her skull, and blood flowed freely from a swelling cut on her forehead.

Eurydice’s heart froze in horror. ‘Laodicea? Is that you?’

The girl’s head slowly turned to look at her. ‘Sister?’ Her eyes were dull, confused, perhaps from the blow on her head. ‘What is to become of us? Why are they doing this?’

Eurydice had thought she had no more tears to give, but she had been wrong. ‘I don’t know, Lodi. Maybe because they hate us.’

‘Ah ha ha ha! This couldn’t be better!’ The priest laughed. ‘Oh Great and Beautiful Princess Eurydice, this is surely a great portent! Your own sister’s blood will be the closing of the spell!’ With a flourish, he cut away the ragged dress Laodicea still wore, leaving her bruised body as naked as her sister’s. ‘Little sister, you think we hate you, do you? Why should we hate you? Did you hate your chair, when you owned such things, or the floors of your palaces? No! Why should we hate our property? We merely use you as we see fit. Anyway, I’ve chatted long enough. It’s time to finish this!’

He prepared to continue his butchery. But as he turned, he finally noticed the change, the pale blue sky suddenly darkened to twilight, the sun dimmed to a dull, shivering ember, and Eurydice was surprised to see fear in his eyes. The knife seemed to have taken on a will of its own, writhing in his hands as if invisible assailants fought against him, and even the black obsidian blade seemed to twist and bend as he forced it, inch by inch, toward the princess’s neck. His face twisted in a rictus as he uttered the invocation, his very lips fighting the syllables they formed. Finally the sharp tip touched her sister’s throat, and bit. The blade moved no more, but a thick cascade of blood fountained from the woman’s flesh. Like dark honey it ran, flowing into the deeply sculpted stone and following the channels to left and right that formed the circle carved there.

As the twin streams met and the ring was made whole, the scarlet blood seemed to set alight, spitting and burning back around the carved channel, the reaction jumping through the air and into bleeding princess’s flesh.

Laodicea screamed, a cry of fear and pain and dread, and her body shuddered, legs and bound arms twisting and shaking grotesquely. Her pale flesh glowed as if lit from within, a light that grew and grew, soon rivaling the shadowy ember that was the sun. Her incoherent cries rose and rose, as the ropes binding her burst into flame, then split. She rose, still screaming, her arms spreading to the sky, her flesh burning a blinding hot white.

And with a flash she was gone, only the echoes of her screams testament that she had ever been there at all. The priest, his knife still poised where her throat had lain, blinked in shock. The knife clattered onto the stone floor.

It was a long moment before Eurydice realised that the day had returned to normal. The sun beat down once again as though the strange, frightening dimming had never happened. Far off, a bird called in the silence, and it was as if the nightmare she had witnessed, the deaths piled upon deaths, the hundreds of her subjects she had seen brutalized and murdered, had never happened. Where the deep, clotted runnels of blood had ran moments earlier, there was nothing but clean, white stone, except for a glowing remnant nestling deep in the carved ring. Of the foetid tide of bodies that had lapped at the base of the pyramid, there was not a single sign. The priest’s eyes met hers. His robes, too, were clean and white.

‘I didn’t believe it would work,’ he whispered in the silence. ‘I said the charm and performed the ritual all those times, but I didn’t believe.’

‘Believe what?’ She knew true dread now. They had given her the best vantage point from which to view this macabre, impossible ritual, and she suspected that she was about to pay the price for that seat. ‘And why am I here? What are you going to do to me?’

‘He? Nothing.’ The priest and his two principal acolytes turned in surprise at the voice, to where the third acolyte stood at the head of the line of slaves. With a flourish, he threw back his hood.

‘My Lord!’ the priest gasped, and fell to his knees, and Eurydice drew in a shocked breath as she realised who this must be. An unkempt mane of hair the colour of pitch framed a face that seemed hewn from the same rock as the pyramid on which they stood. His lips were full and red, accustomed to sneering, she thought, and a deep, puckered scar ran down one side of his face from temple to chin.

It was he! The Render! For a long breath she was speechless with surprise as she watched him step around the altar and bend to pick up the fruit of his labour. At last she was able to compare the reality with the stories. Yes he was a powerfully built man, with the wide shoulders and scars of a warrior, but his thick hair did not writhe, and his eyes were just eyes. The scar was real, and disfiguring, but it not cut his face in two. It did pull on his flesh, though, turning his victorious smile into something grotesque.

And she realised what she must do. The steps were simple: escape; grab the knife from where it lay on the stone; bury it hilt-deep in his evil heart.

The first step was the simplest of all. If only she could break the ropes. If only her arms weren’t as weak as a baby’s after days of immobility, if only her hands weren’t numb.

The Render knelt, studying the carved channel in the stone. When he rose, he held in his hands what looked like a loop of blood-covered thread, though the glistening crimson refused to stain his fingers as he turned and studied the loose circlet. In length, it was perhaps just long enough to fit around his head like a crown.

She blinked, and the thing seemed to change, its substance turning shiny, like silver, and as she watched, the loop became a fine silver chain, and then solidified into a single wire loop.

He spun the circlet around his finger, and his eyes met hers. ‘Do you wonder what this is?’ His voice taunted her, cruel amusement dancing in his dark eyes as they searched her face.

She could not speak, the hatred and fury were so overwhelming. Kill You! Three little steps!

This is yours,’ he said as he spun the loop of wire, although now it seemed to have thickened into a ribbon, and taken on the lustre of beaten gold. ‘All of this…’ his sweeping arm took in the ziggurat, the line of roped sacrifices-in-waiting, perhaps even the temple and the city ‘…was made for this moment.’

Sound escaped from her lips, the words escaping in a hoarse whisper. ‘A thing made of evil, like all your works.’ Somehow she found the strength in her arms to pull against her bonds. Kill You!

‘Defiant little sparrow,’ he smiled crookedly as he stepped forward, pressing himself against her. The band he held felt just like cold metal as he stroked it down her cheek and neck, scraped it across her breast.

Her skin crawled. ‘Kill You!’ she whispered in his ear.

His eyebrows raised in delight and surprise. ‘You really are defiant, aren’t you? Shall I give you your chance? Why not?’ He treated her to another lascivious grope, then stepped back. ‘Priest! Cut her down!’

And she watched as the hooded cleric picked up the shard. She stared at the object of her desire as he brought it to her, as its edge cut effortlessly through the ropes that bound her…

She fell, to lay on the floor, her heart racing with fear. Slowly, slowly, her arms began to recover from their days of immobility. Weeping with the pain, she placed her palms on the stone and pushed herself up until she could balance her weight on shaking knees.

‘Do you want the knife yet, little sparrow?’

He held out the glittering blade for her, handle first, his expression serious – encouraging, even.

‘I’ve played this game before, you know. I’ve nearly lost once or twice, and I have the scars to prove it, such as this beauty on my face. Go on. Take the knife!’

And, incredibly, he let her take it. She turned it in her hand, watching the sun glint from the facets of the obsidian, waiting, letting time return the feeling and agility to her muscles. Could this be really happening?

‘You have the only weapon. You have all the advantages. Try me!’

Her schooling in the royal court had included a little combat training, and she was not fooled. She most certainly did not have all the advantages, but she did have two. He was a trained warrior, hugely taller and more powerful than she. He was standing over her in a relaxed but ready stance. All she had on her side were the knife and…

Surprise! Her lunge aimed squarely for the point just below his sternum, the easiest and shortest path to his heart. Perhaps if she had been rested, or if her last drink of water had not been days ago, her thrust may have struck home. As it was, the blade drew blood and a sharp cry from him, but she found her wrist caught in his great fist, and with ease he prized the knife from her.

‘You almost had me, and now I bear another scar. Perhaps this war wound is my price for the conquest of your nation, and you.’

She wept, her defeat bitter in her mouth. ‘I’ll do it yet! I’ll kill you some day!’

‘I doubt it.’ His playfulness was gone as swiftly as it had first appeared. ‘Hold her,’ he commanded, and the priests took her wrists and handfuls of her hair. She stared defiance into his eyes, and watched as he took the golden band in both his hands, and it opened.

‘For this device I have slaughtered seven times seven times seven slaves,’ he intoned, ‘in this collar I have ensnared the blood and souls of your subjects, and with this collar I will enslave you!’

‘Nev—‘, she said, as the thing snapped closed around her throat. The cold metal pressed against her skin, and something took hold of her soul.

Images, thoughts and feelings assaulted her. She knew experiences she could never have known, whole lives that weren’t hers. She knew what it was to lead the life of a peasant in her lost homeland, and that of a tradesman, and a merchant, a royal minister, a prince. She saw herself as her subjects had seen her, sometimes the beautiful, graceful idol, sometimes the hated symbol of oppression. She saw hundreds of lives, humdrum or exciting, grindingly hard or easy and privileged. In every life she saw the coming war, felt the rising fear of conquest, the horror of capture and the agony of their forced march. She felt the sting of obsidian slicing into flesh and watched life draining away, over and over.

And for every death, she felt a growing force, a syrupy, scarlet awareness that grew with every sacrifice, a construct of the souls, the words spoken and the will behind the words.

The will of the Render.

Her eyes blinked open, and she beheld her God.

His face was a snarl of arrogant victory, rent in two by the terrible scar he wore and surrounded by a halo of black hair that writhed and danced like snakes in motion. His eyes bored into her, staring into her soul.

Her God spoke, and He said, ‘Hold Her, or she’ll fall off the edge.’

She wept at the sound of his words, at the truth in them. Terror of falling filled her, and gratitude that He should protect her with his priests.

And then to her joy, He spoke to her. ‘Little sparrow,’ He said, and she knew her new name, ‘do not be afraid. How can you serve me if you are so afraid?’

She sobbed in gratitude, and the hands that held her let her descend to her knees. ‘M… My L- Lord,’ she managed.

‘Good sparrow,’ He said. He was pleased with her! Her sobs redoubled, even as her heart filled with joy. ‘Now, pick up the knife and hand it to my high priest.’

Still racked with tears, she wiped a hand across her eyes and found the knife where she had dropped it. Reverently, for it was holy, because He had mentioned it, she took hold of the blade and held it out for the hooded priest to take.

‘Good sparrow,’ her Lord told her again, and again she felt as though she would burst with joy. To her horror, though, He turned from her and began to descend the stairs of the pyramid, leaving her. As he walked away, He commanded. ‘Follow me, little sparrow,’ and her heart burst with joy as she rushed to obey.

‘My Lord,’ came the high priest’s voice, ‘what shall we do with all of these slaves?’

‘Turn them into more collars, of course!’ shouted the Render without pausing his descent. The slave who had once, briefly, been Queen Eurydice scuttled behind, past the last of her doomed, forgotten subjects.

Footsteps! There was somebody outside the flat! A keychain rattled and there was the sound of a key entering the lock. He was back! Thrills coursed through her body, adding yet more to the arousal she felt, and in a moment of panic she desperately ticked off all of the tasks she had been required to perform for him. Yes, all was ready for him. She arched her back, forced her elbows back and her knees far apart to display herself to him all the more.