What We Do to Survive

“Hi Orion!” I forcibly shaped my face into a smile as Brenda half-tackled me, nearly knocking me out of my chair in her enthusiasm as she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. Setting my pen down on the table, I shifted in my seat and did my best to look happy. Brenda bought it, or at least I think she did. Without a care in the world, she plopped down in my lap, one arm still wrapped around me and head resting against my shoulder.

Glancing around, I could see several students looking with interest at what was happening. It was rare to see such public ‘displays of affection’ at Avalon. Few people were willing to advertise what people they were closest with. I had expected, hoped, that Brenda would be the same, but clearly I’d been mistaken. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even just in class, she did her best to hang off of me at all times. Now, the first time I’d actively invited her to study with me? Was it any surprise to see her acting like this?

Seeing that Brenda wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, I tried to return the gesture. I half heartedly wrapped my left arm around her waist, pulling her slightly more tightly against my chest. From the way she reacted, blushing brightly and grinding into my lap, I imagined she liked what I was doing.

Despite my concerns, things honestly went better than I had expected. Sitting on my lap seemed to calm some of the girl’s more obnoxious tendencies and we spent a relatively productive hour working through our homework. It was somewhat awkward, our positions making it somewhat difficult to write at the same time, but it was manageable.

Brenda…well, she was actually kind of better at this stuff than I had expected. She asked insightful questions, remembered what our professor had taught us in class, and didn’t make any of the trivial mistakes that seemed to plague her the last few times we’d ended up ‘working together’ in the library.

We got through everything in just under two hours, only a little longer than it would have taken me to do it without her presence. During the entire session, Brenda only got distracted two times, and in both cases went back to focusing on her work within just a few minutes. By the end of it, the fake smile I’d been holding had been replaced by something much more genuine

The only issue was, it seemed that Brenda was ‘enjoying’ the situation slightly more than was warranted in such a public space. She spent most of her time slowly grinding herself against me, her ass rhythmically pressing against my lap as we worked through the questions. Several times I tried to shift her over slightly, slide her body to sit on one leg instead of right in the center of my lap, but each time she quickly moved back to her former spot. It was… distracting, and I had a feeling I would be playing with Mistletoe when I came back to my room.

“That was nice,” I said as we both began to gather our things, “I wouldn’t be opposed to doing it again sometime.”

Brenda, who still had one of her arms wrapped tightly around my chest, nodded and pressed the side of her head against me. “Yeah. Thanks for inviting me, Orion.”

“Happy too. We’ve been friends for so long, it seemed only right that we should spend more time together. Well, I have some things left I need to get done before classes tomorrow. I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah, definitely! Friends. Thanks Orion.” She suddenly let go of me, grabbed her papers, and rushed out of the room. I stared after in confusion, slightly lost. What had that been about? Maybe once I had her properly soul-bound I would finally be able to understand that girl.

Raising the potion vial to the light, I carefully compared the amber liquid to the color diagram that had been included in Professor Igor’s notes. This was my fifth attempt at the potion, the previous four not having been potent enough without some of the ingredients I hadn’t managed to obtain.

I’d made some modifications to the recipe, increasing certain quantities and adding a few more recently discovered ingredients to compensate for the missing components. From what I could tell, I’d finally done it. The magical signature of the potion seemed right, nothing had exploded, and the color was well within the range Igor’s notes had indicated.

Setting the potion back into its case, I wandered over towards Rea, who was hard at work taking care of one of my other temporary guests. Briella was stretched out across a low table, arms and legs fastened tightly to the corners of the newly transmuted work surface. A wide strap of soft leather ran across the center of her back, ensuring she had no room to move and potentially disrupt Rea’s delicate work.

Rea knelt on a small rug by the center of the table, a look of utter focus on her face. The flexible knife in her hand slid smoothly through pale flesh, the enchanted blade cutting through skin as easily as a hot knife through butter. Already, a large patch of the unfortunate second-year’s thigh and buttock were stripped bare, exposed muscles twitching and shuddering in the cool air. Without the potion I’d brewed for just this purpose I was sure the poor girl would have bled out by now, but that would have been a waste. Instead, the potion’s magic ensured that she remained fully aware and conscious as Rea literally peeled her skin like an apple.

Beside her, Cayla hung from the ceiling by her arms, toes just barely able to brush the floor if she strained herself. Her eyes were forced open by another enchantment, head fixed in place by a posture collar that ensured she couldn’t look away from what was happening to her friend. She would be next, she knew. The next time Rea accidentally cut away too much and ruined the single piece of skin she was trying to remove from Briella’s back, the two would switch places and it would be her turn under the knife.

It was a surprisingly effective form of conditioning, and Rea seemed to enjoy it. When I’d come back to find her cutting pieces of Cayla’s leg with a cruel smile on her face, I’d thought something bad must have happened. Instead, it seemed Rea had found her inner sadist. In the days since, it seemed she spent all her free time between other duties working on this one thing. She wanted a fully intact skin, without any nicks or tears to mark the surface.

I… wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Sure, I’d known I was going to be torturing the girls, but Rea appeoached it with a level of enthusiasm and efficient brutality that was honestly somewhat intimidating. It didn’t help that I had no idea where that attitude had come from. Had she always had a hidden penchant for sadism that had been unearthed by my binding, or had my binding somehow changed the timid girl into the person who now was slowly skinning a young woman her own age with a smile on her face.

In the end, I decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. It was convenient after all, immensely so. It had definitely increased the amount of time I spent healing my prisoners, but that wasn’t really a problem. If Rea wanted to do my work in breaking the duo for me, who was I to say no? Judging from how the two flinched whenever they saw her and begged me to keep her away from them, they would be ready for a binding ritual in just a few more days.

I stood behind Rea for a long minute, watching as she carefully cut the skin away from the muscle. She was meticulous about it, Verdan’s enchanted knife making the task much simpler than it would have been with an ordinary blade. It was rather disgusting, but I’d seen worse. Professor Igor sometimes liked to show off his classes’ work around the school; there was only so many times you could see a still-living dissected body dangling in a hallway before you became desensitized to it.

Well… at this point I was just wasting time. I grabbed both vials of potion and walked over to where I’d already prepared the delivery method days ago. The two vials were carefully inserted into the small ports I’d made in their feeding tubes. Then, it was simply a matter of turning the valve and it was done.

The faintly glowing potion flowed slowly down the feeding tube, but the pumping runes I’d carved into each end had no issues forcing the viscous liquid down the tubes and into the two elves’ stomachs. There it was done. Two more days for the potion to do its work, and then the terrifying investment I’d started with Mistletoe those few short weeks ago would finally start to pay off.

Emerald-Moss-That-Creeps-Over-Frozen-Roots, Verdan when she was around the short lived races, screamed into her gag. Muscles that could bend steel beams and crush a man’s skull as easily as a grape flexed and pushed. Her mana flowed in vast torrents, weaving through flesh and bone in dizzying patterns.

It was futile. No sound emerged from her throat, suppressed utterly by runes powered by her own mana. Muscles strained against unyielding bonds, runes glowing faintly as they tore away more power to suppress her strength. The collar around her neck grew warm as it slowely ground away at the faint connection that still linked her mind to her body’s mana. No matter how hard she strained, no matter what she tried, she was simply too weak. Too young. Too stupid.

She knew an older elf would never have been trapped like this. An older elf would have shrugged off the poisoned cloud, cut through the shielding spell like butter, and skewered the shrouded spellcaster like a squealing pig. An older elf would not have been so thoroughly suppressed by a collar like this, easily shattering its magic with a careless flex of their indomitable will. An older elf would have escaped from bindings like this in a heartbeat, no mortal metal enough to restrain a millenia old warrior.

She… she was none of those things. Compared to the children at this school, she was ancient. Only a scant handful of the teachers were her seniors, though she knew that all of them were much more experienced spellcasters than her. This boy who captured her, he could not have been more than twenty years of age. When she’d been his age, her parents hadn’t let her leave the house on her own nor trusted her with magic and sharp objects.

And yet… Here she was. Trapped at the mercy of a baby, about to live out the next centuries of her life as a farm animal. She’d felt the potion’s magic as it trickled down her throat, felt the changes slowly rippling through her body as dormant sections of her anatomy and magical circulation slowly triggered outside of her control. Her breasts felt strange, the skin too tight, sensitive nerves twinging with every tiny movement. She wanted to rage against the injustice of it, to scream and cry and beg. She wanted her parents, her friends, her aunts and uncles who had loved and cared for her. She wanted to go home.

It was so… dark. And quite. And cold. Her blood rushed in her ears, her racing heartbeat painfully loud inside the endless quiet. The mage’s bonds were thorough, if nothing else. Aunty had taught her to escape all sorts of restraints, it had been a requirement from her family before they would allow her to leave the city, but none of those lessons would help her here. He had gone so far as to bind her individual fingers together, ensuring she could not manage the half dozen spell-signs she had been taught, though those wouldn’t have helped her now anyway.

She froze as she felt the touch of slender fingers on her ear. It was not the mage’s hand, his fingers were thicker, the remnants of tough calluses barely noticeable on his skin. This touch was gentler than his, a woman then, or perhaps an even younger child?

She expected pain. The mage had not been overly rough with her, mostly just uncaring of her comfort, but she knew many of the short-lived races enjoyed causing pain just for the sake of it. Elven ears were delicate, sensitive organs. They contained a multitude of nerve receptors that could cause great pain if damaged, though she’d heard talented lovers could make use of them to great effect as well.

The twisting, pinching, or crushing never came. Instead, the waxy stopper that had been painfully pressed into her ear was carefully removed, the fingers taking care to remove every trace of the material from nooks and crannies. For the first time in what must have been several days, she could hear, and it was wonderful.

Her ear filled with the sounds of breathing, the rustle of clothing, the quiet scraping of metal on stone as someone moved around beside her head. “Good evening, miss elf,” a quiet voice said from just beside her. The speaker had a strange accent, making it hard to interpret the tonnage of her voice, but she did not think the speaker had any negative intentions towards her. Interesting.

“This one hopes you are settling in well to your new accommodations. This one knows they are likely not very comfortable, but Master says it is important to keep you fully contained at all times.”

Ah, another victim then, though a broken-in one, it seemed. So that was the mage’s plan. Had she even been the target at all, or simply a victim of opportunity? Well, there would be time enough to consider that question. She had a terrible feeling that she would be having a lot of time to think in the near future.

“Master wants me to tell you that this was nothing personal. Master does not like your kind, but Master has no particular enmity with you. As long as you behave, Master says Master will ensure your stay is as painless as possible.”

Nothing personal… In all honesty, that just made things worse. To be reduced down to nothing but her heritage, ‘her kind’? It burned. He didn’t care who she was, only what she was.

“Master says that as long as you do not try to escape, Master will not have to take any more severe measures. Master says that elf bone is a valuable material, but that Master can source it elsewhere if you behave.”

She swallowed heavily around her gag, eyes widening behind the thick blindfold as memories of childhood lessons rose to the forefront of her mind. Stories of desecrated corpses, torn appart while still alive to preserve the freshness of the material. Aunty Oldroot, limping around with one artificial leg, the real one lost to orcish hunters centuries before. The rituals they had used prevented her from regrowing the lost leg, condensing all the potential strength of the severed leg to craft a more powerful artifact from the bone.

After another moment of panic, she realized the voice had continued speaking and frantically tried to fill in what she’d missed.

“...as painful or painless as you make it. If you behave yourself, Master will limit to harvesting your valuable fluids. If you are a bother, Master says elf meat is a valuable delicacy in many parts of the world. If you continue to struggle and plot, Master will remove your limbs, scoop out your eyes and tongue, and leave you a dismembered torso useful only for its milk for the rest of your immortal life. Master hopes you understand.”

She understood alright. Behind her blindfold, fresh tears brimmed at the corners of her eyes and her heart pounded in her chest. Still, she did not try to move, did not try to escape. She was paralized with fear. This… this dark, cold, quite hell was torture. The situation this other slave described? It was worse. It was the sort of horrors mother had tried to use to scare her off from traveling to the human lands. She should have listened. Oh, why hadn’t she listened?

“Soon, Master plans to use a potion to trigger your body to lactate. Master has also told this slave that it is its responsiblity to harvest certain other materials from your body. Master… Master is not cruel. Master hopes you will find some pleasure in this one’s efforts.”

And then, before she had a chance to process the slave’s final words, enchanted wax was pushed back into her ears and smoothed out. In an instant, that tiny connection to the outside world was severed once more. Verdan closed her eyes, tears of fear leaving wet trails as they leaked out from her blindfold and trailed down her painfully stretched jaw.

She should have never left home, she finally realized. A century and a half of kindness had felt stifling. She’d wanted to go out, see the world, learn magic and become someone important. Spending centuries slowly honing her talents had felt like such a waste. Avalon had seemed like a perfect choice, the promise of incredible power in under a decade overwhelming whatever reluctance had tried to hold her back. Even among elves, the archmages of Avalon were respected, mortals with the power to face even millenia old elders.

She should have listened. Should have been more careful. Should have… she didn’t even know. She swallowed again as fingers trailed across her dangling breasts, checking on whatever device she could feel tugging at the skin around her nipples. Tears fell freely as she tried to come to terms with her new life. Just days ago, the future had seemed so bright. Now? Her best hope was slavery. She knew powerful mages enjoyed the service of powerful servants. Perhaps someday, she would advance from dairy cow to pleasure slave. She prayed she would never face the… other fate of cattle.

Small fingers squeezed down around her bottom, pushing her sculpted ass apart. A warm, delicate tongue trailed across sensitive flesh, sending a shudder through her entire body. Oh. Her ‘valuable fluids’. She’d thought they just meant her milk. Knowledge of how valuable elven milk could be had spread far and wide, despite the best efforts of the elven nations. It was just too useful to mages and too easily accessible. This though… She prayed this wasn’t what she thought it might be. What she had been warned to avoid at all costs. This could be a problem. Humans weren’t supposed to know about that. Oh Elders, humans were not supposed to know.