Chapter 3: From Paladin to Pleasure Slave

Alwynn did not have time to process the guards and Warden’s words as she struggled to keep up with her escort taking her to an ornate exotic temple of sorts, spider sigils, statues, altars everywhere, even various webbings with pet spiders on display. It was unsettling.

The smallest handmaiden was a handsome soft drow, he could be only 40 or fifty years old looking like a 20-year-old human, his skin pale as salt produced a brush and a pot of black ink. He knelt at her feet and, with infinite care, began to paint a design up her left calf. It took shape slowly: a chain of runes interlinked with stylized thorns, climbing toward the knee. She recognized the motif from the collars and shackles of the palace dungeons, but these were finer, more delicate. It was not a brand, but a badge. The boy finished and dusted the ink with a fine powder, then blew softly to set it. The runes tingled as the powder settled, a faint electric fizz beneath the skin.

The guards stood back, admiring their work, then fitted her arms behind her with soft, padded manacles. These were nothing like the brute iron of the pit; they were lined in velvet and stitched with tiny gemstones, designed for display rather than restraint, though the effect was the same. She could not move her arms and, when prompted to rise, stumbled and was caught by the handmaidens on either side.

They marched her through a series of winding corridors, deeper into the heart of the city. The halls here were carpeted in dark velvet, the walls inlaid with tapestries depicting the feasts and wars of the Valsharesses’ line. The handmaidens led the way, and the guards flanked her, sometimes exchanging muttered bets about how long she would last, whether she would break or beg or even survive the ritual.

She tried to focus on the details, to fix her mind on any small thing that would keep her from panicking. The air was cool and dry, but thick with the scent of oil and incense. The floor vibrated faintly with the thrum of distant machinery, or perhaps the movements of the crowds overhead. Every third step, her collar chafed against the flesh of her neck. Her hair pulled at the scalp, heavy with the beads and decorative cords. She was aware, weirdly, of her own toes, separated and shining, every movement a reminder of how thoroughly she had been changed.

They reached the temple precinct. Here, the light was even dimmer, but refracted through crystals set high in the ceiling. The effect was an eerie half-daylight, as if she were underwater, bathed alternately in green and blue. The handmaidens brought her to a halt at the foot of an altar, its top shaped like a massive, upturned hand. The guards forced her to her knees once more, elbows yanked cruelly behind her, braid-crowned head lowered until her forehead touched the base of the altar.

A crowd was gathering. It was smaller than the one in the pit, but far more elite; most were in the silver-and-black livery of the priesthood, with additional rings and badges denoting their various ranks. Some were masked, some bare faced, some openly leering at the spectacle of the newly tamed paladin in her ceremonial shaming. Alwynn recognized none of them, but she felt their gaze on her like a hundred cockroaches scuttling across her bare back.

The handmaidens arrayed themselves behind her, arms folded, faces impassive. The guards flanked the altar, drawn weapons and at the ready for reasons she could not guess. Then, from a side door, the Priestess entered.

She was nothing like Lisszt, nothing like the icy, predatory women who had tormented Alwynn in the pit. This one was old, ancient even, her hair white but glimmering with streaks of violet, her eyes a milky lavender with no visible pupil. She wore layered robes of somber gray, embroidered with runes and sigils that shimmered even in the half-light. If Lisszt was a huntress or a warden, this woman was something else: a judge, or perhaps an executioner.

The Priestess approached, gliding over the carpet as if unbound by friction or care. She examined Alwynn, head to toe, then touched her cheek with one finger and nodded satisfaction. She spoke, and her voice was low, almost kind, yet the words carried the iron certainty of someone who had never been refused.

The guards clustered around her, narrowing the circle, their faces drawn with almost academic interest. One, the tallest and perhaps the least cruel, crouched at her side and explained in the bluntest terms: “Soon you will be taken to the High Priestess. There will be a ritual. When it is done, you will be marked, as the Princess was. But your bond will differ from your Princess, slave, because you are a trophy of combat your bond will be much more powerful. The mark for you, will be for the Valsharess alone. A celebration for her to enjoy alone as is her right won by combat.” The words settled into Alwynn like handfuls of sand in a wound, grating and raw, and she stared at the altar’s upturned palm as if it might upend and crush her.

Another guard, impatient, added, “It’s not just a tattoo or a collar, surface girl. The spell goes into your blood. You will want her. You will crave her above all else.” A cruel smile. “Even her sweat, even her filth, will taste like nectar to you.” The woman leaned forward and slowly kissed Alwynn on her lips as if she was getting turned on by the thought.

Alwynn struggled to process this, her heart a cold lump in her chest. She tried to remember her catechisms, the meditations that carried her through pain and grief, but the words scattered and would not assemble. She was aware of the handmaidens behind her of their expectant hush, and of the way they kept glancing at one another, as if each was eager to see what she would become. One of them whispered, “She doesn’t know. Not really.” The smallest, the one who had painted the runes on her leg, shivered and hugged his arms around himself, eyes wide with a complex blend of awe and terror.

A third guard voiced the part Alwynn could not bring herself to ask: “Will it hurt?”

The reply was matter of fact. “During, yes. Especially for one as soft as her. Afterward, never again. She will be content. That is the point.”

The handmaidens drew closer, forming a tight phalanx at her back. They applied more of the numbing syrup to her lips and gums, then began to daub her brow and chest with a thin, sweet-smelling resin. It cooled instantly but left behind a tingling that crawled across her skin like a thousand spiders. One handmaiden, gentle and deliberate, worked the resin deep into her collarbone, then began to draw a new web of glyphs up the side of her neck and onto her cheek. The ink pulsed with the rhythm of her own heart.

The Priestess watched all this in silence. Alwynn tried to meet the old woman’s gaze, but the milky eyes gave no sign of acknowledgment, so she focused instead on the details of the room: the enameled skulls lining the walls, the incense swirling in slow vortices above each torch, the blood-wax candles burning at either end of the altar. And through it all, the unbroken chant of the attendants, a language older than anything she had ever learned.

Her thoughts turned to Princess Lyra. There was no sign of her here no hint of her presence, no whisper of her fate. Had the Princess undergone this same ritual? If so, what had it made of her? A memory surfaced, unbidden: Lyra at the gate of the monastery, trembling and proud, offering her hand in the ancient gesture of peace. That hand could now belong to anyone. To the Valsharess. To the pit. The notion stoked an ember of rage inside Alwynn, enough to make her flex against the manacles until the velvet lining bruised her wrists.

The handmaidens finished their work and stepped aside. One produced a glass vial filled with liquid the color of bruised plums, and offered it to Alwynn with a bow. “You must drink,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “It will make the transition easier.”

She clenched her jaw, refusing. The tallest guard pinched her nose and covered her mouth, forcing her to gulp air until, in desperation, she opened wide, and the vial was tipped past her lips. The fluid was thick and cloying, with a taste like honey mixed with rot. It burned all the way down, and within seconds her body felt as though each nerve had been outlined in cold flame.

“Good girl,” murmured the guard, stroking her hair, then wrenching her head forward to face the altar.

The Priestess began to speak, not to Alwynn but to the assembly, uttering a sequence of words that flickered in the air like heat-haze. The air thickened, compressing the crowd closer, and the upturned hand of the altar shimmered with an oily gleam. Alwynn’s vision blurred at the edges; her mind spun with the disorienting certainty that she was both present and absent, her body a vessel for something else entirely.

She had a moment’s warning a single heartbeat in which her whole life unspooled before her, a tapestry of failures and fleeting triumphs and then the ritual began in earnest.

The altar’s hand clamped around her head like a vise. The pain was immediate, liquid and searing, radiating from the base of her skull to every nerve ending in her body. She screamed, or tried to. Her mouth was filled with the taste of rosewater and salt, and her tongue would not obey her. She felt the glyphs on her skin ignite, every rune a tiny inferno, and the chain of thorns up her leg writhed as if alive.

She thought, for a moment, that she was being skinned that something was peeling back the layers of herself, searching for the softest part. She tried to lock her mind behind the fortress of her discipline, but the pain found every weakness, every hidden fear, and turned them inside out. At the edge of her vision, the handmaidens swayed in unison, their eyes half-lidded in ecstasy, and the guards looked on with the cold interest of scientists observing a specimen.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the fire subsided. The altar released her, and she sagged forward, chest heaving. The glyphs on her skin shimmered wetly, then dried to a faint silver. She could taste honey on her lips, and beneath that, the faintest undertone of something richer, nearly intoxicating.

A hush fell over the chamber. The guards helped her to her knees, then forced her bow her head once more to the Priestess.

She was trembling, but not with pain. Not with fear, either. The agony had passed through her, transformed and left her something changed, something brittle and glassy. She could not tell if she had come through the ordeal as herself, or if the self that remained was only a hollow shell etched with the Valsharess’s sigils. Her thoughts skittered wildly, every attempt at discipline short-circuiting on a thousand raw nerves. She knelt, trembling, head bowed, dimly aware of the guards who now regarded her with something like professional pride.

One of the handmaiden’s no, not a handmaiden, a slender boy in the same livery leaned in to wipe the sweat from her brow and the glistening resin from her cheeks. Their touch was gentle, almost reverent. The air bit at her skin where the runes had been drawn, and the sticky aftermath of the potion clung to her tongue, honey-sweet and cloyingly thick. She retched once, but the boy steadied her, murmuring lullabies in a tongue that reminded her of home and not-home, both at once.

“Stand,” he said, and the word was not a suggestion. The guards hooked their hands beneath her arms and lifted her upright. Her legs buckled, but she did not fall. The resin had set hard across her collarbone and breast, turning her flesh into something more like porcelain, or a trophy. She stood, not of her own accord, not exactly, but by that strange new gravity that pulled her toward the dais at the far end of the temple.

She was aware, suddenly, of the hush in the room. The congregation had parted, forming a corridor of pale faces and dark eyes, all turned toward her. Some were smiling behind their hands, some leering openly, others regarding her with the impassive disinterest of taxidermists inspecting a new display. The air was thick with incense and anticipation. The boy led her forward, and the guards fell in behind, their boots thumping a slow, martial rhythm against the velvet runner.

The altar receded into gloom behind her. Ahead, the chamber opened like a jaw. The throne of the Valsharess was not a seat but a sculpture, a monstrous thing of black glass and bone, shaped to mimic the carapace of some immense insect. The Valsharess herself waited there, sprawled in feline indolence, as though the temple and its rituals were a tedious formality she endured for the benefit of her lesser kin.