Chapter 5

“ ... so let me get this straight: she eats steak, I chew on a gag, and this is what the Council calls an education?” — excerpt from one of fifteen complaint letters received from Phase Two apprentices, MDAP class of 1967

April 16, 2025 – Kael Family Manor (Irish countryside) – 7:00 p.m.

Sybille was furious. And not the kind of furious she had been as a teenager when her mother refused to let her go out, or when some witch at school got too smug. No—this time she was truly furious.

Her face burned crimson, and she would have unleashed a torrent of insults at that nobody, Lucina—if only the big gag strapped between her lips hadn’t reduced every word to incomprehensible, ridiculous noises.

She was no longer in her crate, but her situation was no better, nor any more acceptable.

She was on her bed. But of course, her self-proclaimed “Mistress” (Sybille stubbornly refused, even to herself, to admit that the appointment had come from the Magic Council) hadn’t simply set her there.

No—Lucina, calm and effortless, had levitated her straight from the crate to the mattress, placing her face not toward the wall but toward the room. Then she had conjured a new pair of shackles. That sadist—as Sybille called her—had “invited” (forced) her to draw her already cuffed ankles closer to her already cuffed wrists, linking them together with a third pair and locking her into a particularly strict hogtie.

The bondage was humiliating, the gag was maddening ... in fact, the whole situation was both frustrating and degrading. But the fact that Lucina had set up a little whiteboard on a stand in her bedroom and was now giving her something that passed for a “lesson” while she lay there chained and gagged—that was beyond insulting.

“My name is Lucina Velatrix. And for you, it is Mistress—or Mistress Lucina,” declared the latex-clad witch in a firm tone, a riding crop in her hand which she wielded like a teacher’s pointer toward the items on the whiteboard.

“MMMMPPPHHH!” Sybille protested, writhing in her bonds.

But Lucina paid her protests no mind.

“I will be uncompromising about my title. You would do well to remember it.” She paused briefly, then allowed a smile to curve her lips. “Of course, any insult or ... inappropriate vocabulary on your part—and I have no doubt you can be very imaginative—will result in immediate punishment.”

She punctuated the warning with a sharp, controlled strike of the crop against the whiteboard, the crack echoing through the room like a gunshot.

The “little message” on the board, of course, did nothing to quiet Sybille. She kept right on protesting—gagged, furious, and utterly incomprehensible.

Lucina brushed it off as easily as the last outburst. She lowered her crop to the next line on the whiteboard, where she had scrawled Phase 2—complete with doodled hearts around it.

“Phase Two,” Lucina began, her tone firm and authoritative yet carrying the patience of a teacher wrangling rowdy students, “is in fact the first true step on the long, very long road that may—if you prove worthy—lead you to the grail: the title of Magical Dominatrix.”

Beneath the heading, a list of keywords sprawled across the board. Sybille hated every single one of them.

“Phase Two is built on the bond between an all-powerful Mistress—currently in Phase Four of the program, which would be me”—Lucina’s smile turned proud and mischievous—”and a young witch still untested in the ancient art of BDSM: the submissive. That would be you.”

“MMMMPPPHHHFFF!” Sybille screamed, yanking at her chains in the vain hope they’d give way.

But her magic betrayed her. Every attempt to strike at Lucina—or to unravel the spells she’d cast—fizzled out before it even began, as if the power itself refused to answer.