The cloister's original purpose was to provide the church with a place to retrain and succor their priests and paladins that had suffered from a crisis of faith or injuries deemed too severe to allow them to continue the good works of the church.  With the increasing influence of the church in matters of state, however, it also became an excellent place to send wayward nobility who were not likely to inherit to “contemplate and learn from their betters how to conduct themselves” at the relatively small cost of regular donations to the church.  

There were occasions where one or another of the church's adherents found in a given youth a cause to be championed or a possible recruit to the ways of the gods.  In the girl called Silver, one of the more dedicated priests discovered a talent for the arts of personal combat and inner strength.  While she was forbidden from joining the church, her “distasteful proclivities” had made it convenient for her to be away from the duchy for the purposes of learning some “discipline.”  

While Friar Johannes suspected the kind of “distasteful proclivities” that Silver preferred extended somewhat further than wearing trousers and carrying a rapier, the girl had arrived in terrible need of discipline.  It was not that she was extremely rude though she was a bit more than rough around the edges for a princess, or that she put on airs; both were situations most noble children seemed incapable of avoiding at some point or another in their lives (which Friar Johannes found somewhat startling given she was a princess).  She simply lacked the self discipline to comport herself properly in public – slouching, wearing clothing more appropriate to peasants or the men of nobility rather than dresses, and a ribald sense of humor more appropriate to the taverns than the castle halls of her home duchy.  

For a fifteen year old princess, her vocabulary was both impressive and quite filthy.

When the older priest had arrived, six months after the girl was given her monastic name and her true name forbidden from being spoken until she left the cloister, he had been quite convinced she was some bastard by-blow of the local nobility who had been removed from the duchy for the protection of some over-sexed and corrupt noble's pride and standing.  The abbot had been quite amused by Friar Johannes reaction to discovering the girl was nothing less than the princess of Duke Fairing and Duchess Fairing's marriage, and the second child at that.  She could easily be marriageable and could have been beautiful with some little effort, but it was quite clear she was both far too willful and far too disdainful of a lady's place for that.

With his duties as a mendicant at an end with a slowly fatal wound, he had intended to spend his last years studying scripture and illuminating texts, both in ink and philosophically.  Instead he found the idea of making the headstrong lass into someone respectable a fine and far more rewarding end to his service of the Bound God.  

Despite her rambunctious and boyish nature, she was still a young woman – a girl really – when they first met, and meeting Friar Johannes for the first time was a memorable event for anyone.  She was a delicate, slender figure, hardly filling out, and despite her rough vocabulary and preference for breeches she had likely never seen a beggar, much less one who served the Bound God.  Friar Johannes was more than six feet tall, but his twisted spine and tilted hips and shoulders prevented him from standing more than the upper side of five feet.  His gnarled hands and slow, almost bouncing club-footed gait and twisted visage was quite the sight outside of a beggar's lane or a hospitallar's asylum.  

His decision was vindicated, as far as he was concerned and despite the doubts of his fellow priests, when after her initial shock she said quite loudly, “Whomever put you to the rack should have replaced you, crook-shanks, so they could see how to do it properly for themselves!”  

Friar Johannes laughed, and then cuffed her so hard she skidded along the walkway.  

The look of angry defiance in her grey eyes was just what he'd expected, and she stood up, brushing herself off.  “I've been told to do no violence, but then I'd be bloody hard pressed to do more violence to you than's been done already, old tree-limbs....”  When he took two spinning steps and backhanded her so hard she slammed into the wall and slid down it in shock, even his brethren were dismayed and protested. The fury in her eyes was raw, untamed, hot blood rushing to her cheeks. 

“Hussh you,” he growled at the cloistered priests.  He turned to her.  “Thhink yoush can teash me a lesshon, lil' shtrumpet?”  He found it interesting that calling her names did not increase her ire, but the challenge did.

“I'd need a weapon to teach you a lesson, you bestial freak, even if I was the kind of person to torment the less fortunate!”  She started to scramble away as he stalked towards her, but he caught her easily, and she even let out a small shriek of surprise when he lifted her bodily without much effort from the paving of the walkway.  Kicking and striking, though without words or insult which Friar Johannes took as another good sign, she fought him every staggering step of the way as he walked out into the courtyard of the cloister.

He tossed her on the ground next to a tree, and then reached up, breaking off a slender branch as she righted herself and started to stand.  The branch was a little longer than a sword for her height, but it would do.  “Ish yoush can shtrike me onshe, I'll sherve yoush for a year 'nd a day, lil' bashtish.”  He took a step back as she crouched, slowly picking the stick up.

With her cheek already coloring from the first blow, and rubbing her breastbone from the second, she glared at him with those stormy grey eyes.  “If I hit you, you stillborn giant, it'll be for my momma's honor,” she said flatly.  Friar Johannes' heart soared; there was the gem in the rough little pebble.  For all her peasant's ways and boyish manners, there was honor in her, and familial piety.  

It was a one sided fight and he roughed her up quite badly, leaving her with a split lip, bruises, and covered in dark dirt from the garden loam.  She was crying, though not sobbing or wailing, by the end of it.  He looked down at her and growled in her grotesque's slur, “Yoush come hhere erry morn, I teasch yoush.  Yoush come hhere erry bhell noon, I teasch yoush.  Yoush come hhere erry shunshet, I teasch yoush.”  He turned around, stumping off.  

“Why me?” she called after him, rubbing her face with a sleeve, smearing the blood and dirt across her face.  He turned and glared at her.  “Why'd you want me?”  

Friar Johannes looked at her hard for a moment.  “'Caush yoush treahted me like any'un elshe, Shilver.  Yoush eahrned it yershelf, me teaschin.”  Turning, he walked off, leaving her staring after him.  

Three years later, she had grown, though more up than out.  Still, when she wasn't wearing the simple monk's breeches and robes, she had a softer shape than she once did which was now tempered by sleek muscle.  She still kept her hair short, though with somewhat more care than she had when she'd first arrived, but her language had vastly improved and her robes and breeches were kept clean.  Silver no longer slouched; she walked and sat with grace, and demonstrated patience and attention to those around her.  What ten years of tutors and handmaidens and parental guidance had not done, an old, twisted monk had managed in three years.  

True to what Friar Johannes had seen in her, Silver did not abuse her skills (though she had demonstrated them a few times upon the more rude and mean-spirited of those youth condemned to the cloister by nobles, albeit never on behalf of Johannes and often in the defense of weaker lasses and lads), and she learned humility as well as strength.  He had taught her more than was proper for a priest – how to channel her inner strength, how to utilize her will to achieve the impossible, how to heal herself of injury.  Not truly power of the faithful, but far more than any noble should have been taught.  

The problem was that she was not just a good student – she was a great student.  All her energies, all her focus was bent upon learning everything she could from him, regardless of how unladylike it was.  What had started out as an anger fueled act of spite, to prove that she would not back away from his challenge or his fearsome prowess, became an actual desire to learn.  Friar Johannes taught more than just brutal strength and uncanny speed; he taught her letters, to write, the ideas and forms of dance, about the stars, the names of beasts and flowers and creatures of the strange.  

And now he lay dying.  

The wound had been inflicted by a weapon of great potency, an infernally damned spear that had spitted him in a battle against a dark lord or men and monsters.  He and his allies had been successful in defeating the Lord of the Broken Keep, but at great cost.  Three of their number slain, one cursed, and him with a poisoned wound that killed him slowly from the inside out.  Ironically, the twisted body his birth had given him slowed the progress of the wasting as a healthy body would not have.  Still, as he wheezed quietly on the low bed of the hospice, even his uncanny strength and skills had come to an end.  

Dressed in nice breeches and a wide necked, long sleeved tunic, Silver sat vigil.  She was nineteen, her birthing day passed mere weeks ago, and though she had been reinstated to her father's house she had pleaded permission to remain these last few months and care for her teacher as his health finally failed him.  Never a man to renege on his debts, and for turning his willful little hellion of a daughter into a respectable (if still terribly mannish in manner at times) young woman the Duke felt he owed much to the Friar, he allowed her this pilgrimage.

Kneeling next to the man who had taught her so much, given her so much, she held a scented taper over a the vigil prayer scrawled upon a piece of parchment.  While she could have used her real name, here she was merely Silver; to him, she was always Silver.  The proof dangled about her throat on a silver chain; a silver coin which she had driven her finger through when he had said there was no more that he could teach her.  She hadn't believed him, and he had challenged her to take the coin itself from a thread hung from a tree without grasping it in any way.  Silver grasped that coin now, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

The quaver in her voice as she recited the prayer from memory was soft, would have been barely noticeable to others if she had not been alone with him in his small mendicant's cell.  Her sorrow at his passing was more than for a man whom had treated her as a daughter:  Friar Johannes had reared her and taught her respect and fidelity, shown her that what lay behind the flesh was far more valuable and important than the flesh itself, and given her the skills and means to make her way in the world regardless of what path others would set before her.  Even forbidden by law as she was to take oaths with the church, if she wished she could abandon her royalty, ignore the marriage arranged for her, and become a wanderer, or even one of those strange and dangerous people who sought out adventure, knowledge, or treasure.  Be whatever and whomever she chose to be. 

It was a gift that she could never repay. 

The taper was nearly burned away and the script of the prayer destroyed by molten wax, and she had no more tears to shed as Friar Johannes of the Broken God rattled his last breath, emptied his lungs for the final time.  Raising the candle to her lips, she blew it out, and lowered her head, the tears threatening again.  She held them back by force of will, unwilling to show weakness in the face of adversity.  A laugh bubbled up rather than a sob.  “You always did tell me I cried as a man would, rather than a woman, you weather-beaten old tree.”

There was a soft creak from the bed.  

Blinking back tears, Silver stared at the twisted corpse of the warrior priest; it shifted but not as a body would move.  It moved sideways along the bed, not at the joints.  He did not breathe, and did not stir otherwise.  Drawing her sleeve along her eyes Silver cleared them of the remnants of shed tears, laying the smoldering taper along the tile floor of the mendicant's cell.  “Be still, old man, for you've left this life and moved on,” she warned the corpse, more to hear the sound of her own voice, steady and unafraid, than to truly still Friar Johannes' body.

The body creaked, the limbs spasming; the skin split along his arms, and black ichor welled up from within, spilling onto the simple wool blankets.  The long shift he wore stained along the chest as well, more ichor spilling from inside his body.  Laying upon the blankets as he was, she was given a gut-wrenching view of his legs splitting open and more ichor pouring from his body.  

Appalled, she rose from kneeling into a crouch, her heart pounding.  The smell of fresh slaughter wafted over her, the scent of opened guts spoiling the meat of a badly butchered carcass.  She did not cover her mouth or nose, only breathed through parted lips, unwilling to flee in the face of evil as she had been unwilling to run in the face of punishment.  It was only when a three fingered hand with talons as long as her own fingers slipped from the gaping black wound in her master's arm to press against the bed that she realized there was more to this than some horribly envenomed and putrefying wound.

Fear closed her throat, the Friar's tales of adventure and battles where he quaked in his sandals lost in the bitter taste of terror.  A high pitched whine of horror was all the noise she could muster as the slime coated, black skinned abomination birthed itself from the corpse of her teacher.  With the advent of one arm free, the demon pushed itself up, its head splitting the shift as it lashed a tongue as long as her forearm and barbed like a bramble-berry vine back and forth from an elongated mouth held open in silent rictus scream.  

Just like that the spell was broken.  Silver drove her knuckles into the horror's temple, shattering bone and spattering ichor on the wall and bed.  The thing turned to look at her, burning coals of marvelous rainbow fixing on her, which gave her the perfect target for a palm strike to the creature's nonexistent nose.  More cracking bone and the monstrosity's neck snapped, the head half spinning as it fell over....and screeched in anger, the head jerking like a puppet on a string.  

Another arm rose from the gushing body, and the first one backhanded her, the wiry, rubbery flesh as soft and gentle as wrought iron.  It was horrifically fast, and even with the training she had she was able to do little more than roll with the blow and put some distance between her and it.  Rubbing the muck off her face, her outrage turned to fury at the desecration of her master's corpse as the thing tore itself half way free of his flesh and bones.  The thing's broken neck twisted and rolled, and the head jerked and quivered upright heedless of those broken bones.  

Channeling her inner strength she stepped into it and launched a barrage of strikes at its sallow chest, bones cracking and rubbery flesh giving way.  It screeched again and lurched at her, its head swinging up and over to right itself as its tongue swept to caress her cheek.  Tilting her head just enough to avoid that hellish kiss she flung her leg straight up, smashing the thing's jaw and making it slump before her.  She dropped her heel onto its back, breaking what might have been a shoulder blade in a more natural creature, but was merely some other bone in a body a hundred times more grotesque than her master's.  

Silver was unprepared for the bulbous stinger that slammed into her gut.  

The pain was intense and, and she felt the venom spill inside her stomach, but driven by her hate and fear, she grasped the slick, rubbery tail, and twisted, feeling bones and other, stranger things within the appendage snap and crush.  The part leading from her hands to the stinger went limp before the demon yanked the tail back, the end flopping uselessly as the head had at first.  

That head still bobbed and weaved like some drunken lantern-bearer or insane puppeteer held it on strings; the creature pulled itself out of her master entirely and slid onto the floor.  Heat was blooming in her belly as the poisons made themselves known, and she half collapsed, falling backwards, away from the attenuated monstrosity that slowly rose before her.  The ichor was sliding from the demon's skin, leaving the smooth black surface gleaming and strange.  The malevolent rainbows of its eyes gazed at her fiercely, the barbed tongue sliding along thin black lips in a gaping wound of a mouth.  Its head was horned, but strangely so – a single horn that rose from the back of the things head like a hook.  The spindly creature rose, the rictus scream shifting subtly, a horrifying smile that promised nothing but pain.  

Forcing herself up to her feet, one hand over the ichor-and-blood coated hole in her tunic, she started to move at the creature....and then backpedaled in fear and no little amount of shock.  She stumbled and fell as she caught sight of the pulsing rod between the creature's legs twitched and dripped thick reddish slime from the tip.   Hands and feet tingling, she pushed herself further back, her throat closed and her mind screaming at her to run, to fight, to do SOMETHING other than scramble backwards and corner herself.  While virginal, she was no naïve or innocent child, and she knew exactly what would happen if she could not get her body to obey.  

Her body would not obey.

Princess Jenine Fairing, second child and daughter of Arthur and Elyse Fairing of Olfenrech Duchy, was going to lose her virginity to a demon because her body was weak and helpless.  Her hands and feet were on fire, as though they'd fallen asleep, and her head was pounding, the glowing eyes of the demon fixed on her as she struggled to push herself away.  Talons reached for her and her throat would not open enough for a scream, or even a cry of outrage.  Tears bloomed in her eyes, crying with no more noise than she had made while sitting vigil.

Her heart pounded fit to burst as the talons slowly – purposefully slow, her screaming heart was beating far too fast for it to be a trick of the mind or the poisons – ripped long strips of her tunic away.  The creatures not-quite-a-smile gaped further and she twitched, struggled, her hands flopping uselessly as she tried to ward the threatening tongue away.  The other talons reached out and the hideous creature crouched before her slowly tore the soft silk bindings over her breasts away, leaving shallow cuts along the swell of her right breast.  Despite her terror she felt her nipples become obscenely hard as the cool air of the mendicant's cell caressed them.

The pulsing thing between the monstrous creature's legs quivered and spurted several jets of thick red slime onto her twitching and useless legs, writhing in an impossible, snakelike manner.  A high pitched, almost inaudible whistle escaped her lips, as close as she could come to a scream as the red slime stained her breeches.  It was hot, that noisome spatter, and it moved along her clothed leg like something alive.  Jenine's fear, her terror was too huge, too monstrously large to let her escape into a faint as the talons reached out and divested her of the breeches, slicing through the leather belt with as much ease as it did her soft and pale skin.  Yet more red lines which oozed a healthier, less horrifying crimson decorated her belly and thighs now.  

The demon's face was thrust up to hers, and she smelled the fetid breath, the spoilage of meat and rot, saw the dark, unwholesome flesh of its throat.  That tongue slipped out, as the thing's head wobbled before her, and slowly licked her throat, her cheek, her lips.  She whimpered and closed her eyes, and they opened of their own accord as she gagged on the barbed tongue being forced into her mouth, sliding along hers, twisting around it, the loose, slippery lips covering half her face as it kissed her.  

The pain in her belly was nothing compared to the humiliating shame she felt as her legs were dragged apart, the appendage – she would not call it what it was, there was nothing natural about what it represented – sliding along her thighs, spitting slime across her bared breasts.  As the horror kissed her she was forced to endure the sensation of the thing rooting blindly between her legs, nuzzling her thighs, seeking ingress.  She jerked as it found one, spilled slime along it, slime which shifted and moved and prodded of its own accord; but she was spared that particular brand of painful brutality, for the moment.

The talons gripped her arms, held her fast as its barbed tongue squeezed and tasted hers, pierced it with needles, but that isn't what made her choke and arch as best she could; that was the sensation of the slick, pulsing thing between the demon's legs tearing her open, pushing into her as the monstrosity's hips jerked.  The young woman writhed as it impaled her, the pain of her virginity being taken compounded by the jab of agony as the spitting, squirming appendage hammered into unyielding flesh inside her.  The relief of the retreating thing was almost enough to make her relax, before the agony of being forced wide again and having her woman's flesh bruised deep inside and a spill of thick red sludge pour from between her legs.  

Red sludge that was now tainted with brighter crimson streaks.  

It pulled its mouth from hers and the wickedly barbed tongue as well, though it did not release her tongue while doing so.  Red streamers of drool spilled along her bare chest, mingling with the slime already spread there as Jenine choked and gasped for breath.  Tears spilled from her eyes and her chest heaved as she struggled for breath between the battering of her sex and the claws that crushed and squeezed her breasts now.  Her head was full of darkness and she was in agony, her arms and legs on fire.  She clenched her hands, felt the demon forcing her, fucking her.  Janine trembled, as her greyed out vision became darker and darker....

~Is there nothing you fear?~

~Many thhingsh.~

~I can't even imagine that.~

~Shearsh keep ush livin'.  Ish you can't shear, yer broke.~

~What if you can't stop something from happening?~

~You can alwaysh do shomethin'.  E'en ish itsh dyin'.~

Balled fists rose slowly, twitching, trembling.  Opened.  Grasped.

Silver didn't want to die. 

The demon's talons cut into her breasts, her chest, but it was too late.  She grabbed the thing between her legs, as it pounded, hot and slippery and blood- and slime-slick.  With a head full of fog and barely able to see, Silver held the writhing, animate, snakelike appendage buried in her cunt and twisted.  Her heart exulted in the scream, and she felt an unexpected clench of pleasure from her center.

The very angry woman didn't let go, either.  She looked up slowly, fury and hate burning in her own eyes as she looked at the monster that had raped her.  Again her hands twisted and it all but threw her back, slamming her head against the wall.  Her fingers slipped in the blood and slime, but she didn't let go.  The voice that crept from her lips was a croaked whisper, her tongue swollen and her throat clogged with blood and slime 

“....my turn....”  

She SQUEEZED.

The demon shrieked and flailed as the monstrous thing in Silver's hands was torn apart, black ichor and red slime spewing from the stump.  Fixing her gaze on the creature, Silver forced herself to her feet, one hand still gripping the writhing thing.  Unthinking, her fury eating her mind alive, she grabbed the thick horn on the horror's head and yanked its boneless neck forward as she drove her hand into its face.  Into its mouth.  

Choked it with its own meat.  

It reached for her and Silver yanked her open hand out and slammed her head into it's face, pulverizing bone and splattering black ichor everywhere.  Then there was light, and flame, and she staggered back.  The demon was howling as a figure bathed in light so bright Silver couldn't even see what it was chopped into it with a white hot bar of flame, set fire to the horror, burned it.  She started to fall, but hands – soft, gentle, human arms and hands – caught her and pulled her away.  Only then did Silver allow herself to faint. 

A few days later, Silver stood in a simple white tunic and breeches, sandals on her feet, her only jewelry the silver chain and her namesake coin.  Bandaged and cleansed – physically and spiritually, the young woman watched the priests of the temple burn the body of her mentor, her master.  Her heart ached a great deal less than her body did; she had forsaken her ties to royalty, given up all the wealth she had.  It wasn't freedom she felt, only the sadness of having lost a man whom she could have called father, and never had.

Despite the horrors perpetrated by the demon she was unsullied by demon-child.  Only time would tell if any taint remained within her womb, for even if there was no evil there the horrific life from beyond the pale changed a person, inside and out.  Silver – the only name she would keep now – smiled as she looked at the unbent, handsome figure of her teacher as the pyre consumed him.  

The same could be said of good people. 

~XS