Chapter 24: Red Revelry

Twenty years, twenty years have passed since Dominion took over the world, and nothing is as it once was. Humanity has been enslaved, and all that matters is to what degree. Those who live without ID numbers are slaves to their fear. Hiding in the most isolated and untouched areas in nature, they live in terror of the beasts flying overhead, eternally scanning the landscape in search of prey. Their lives are spent underground, always searching for ways to minimize their exposure to the surface, as well as the traces they leave behind that might be spotted. They either live in total isolation, planning to die alone, or in small communities, trying to raise families and keep some semblance of freedom, to raise children in a world where they must be afraid every minute of every day.

There are the collaborators, most working sixty or eighty-hour weeks, watching over the pathetic whelps bound in chains. They must remember to be grateful for what they are given in return for their service: breeding rights, slave ownership, and even the freedom to have families and their own homes. There is no concept of money and very few materialistic outlets. Families are given what they need to live comfortably.

Their children will become future collaborators, and while the parents work, the children are in school. However, unlike the schools of the old world, these schools teach only proficiency in future jobs and loyalty to Dominion. There is no art on the walls, no crayons and colorful books, no recess or gym class. They are there to learn how to be of service, and that is all. Children who misbehave are cruelly punished while the others watch, and if they are especially disruptive, their parents can face punishment as well. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are only a part of the curriculum because illiterate workers aren’t as useful.

They teach history, but only from the rise of the undead to the current era, so that the children may be aware of how the world fell apart, how it tried to pull itself back together, and how Dominion conquered it. Any books or records of the old world from before the war are either destroyed or in Dominion’s collection. Once they enter the workforce or become heads of their own households, they may be rewarded with access to forms of media that are deemed unlikely to trigger rebellion.

Then, in the lowest social caste are the slaves. The vast majority of the human race is now born in servitude, receiving no formal education of any kind. There is no concept of family, children living without parents or siblings. Their quality of life and daily routine are no different than those of the first prisoners held in Augusta all those years ago. They are used as free labor, both to keep them busy and to increase efficiency in the prison system. Most of the work they do is construction, either improving infrastructure, expanding prisons, or building monuments, or farming, growing and harvesting crops to feed the skyrocketing population.

The most lucrative produce of these farms isn’t food or animals. They’re humans. Almost every single fertile woman of fitting age is now a breeder, destined to spend the rest of their lives either pregnant or recovering from giving birth. With how fast they are producing children, a great amount of food is needed.

Culture has all but gone extinct, religions dwindling day by day. After all, who can believe in God when they’re surrounded by demons? Even the collaborators have abandoned their faiths. They don’t bother asking for forgiveness or protection, not after all the things they’ve done. No matter what profession they have in service to Dominion, every male collaborator has the same job of assisting in the creation of new slaves. Raping women is now routine for them.

However, there is an upside. While the human race has been enslaved, the natural world is recovering from centuries of abuse. All technology, from cars, to lighting, to heat, is now done with S2 Engines, meaning that mankind’s carbon footprint is next to zero. The human race is now sequestered in and around concentration camps, so all of the lands that had been conquered by suburbia and pavement has been reclaimed by nature. Since all slaves now lived on a vegan diet (not counting the human meat mixed into their stew and protein bars), fishing and ranching are only done to feed the collaborators, meaning the seas are no longer being overfished and the greenhouse gasses produced by livestock are minimal.

Industrial production of single-use items and unregulated corporate dumping has ceased to exist and everything is recycled, so there is no longer any pollution or garbage poisoning the environment. Because of the efficiency of the plantations using spirit energy to speed up the growth of crops, the wilderness is no longer in danger of deforestation for the creation of farmland. Even when wood is needed, the forests expand faster than they’re harvested. Last but not least, the black market has been eradicated, so endangered animals are no longer being hunted for trophies.

Because of—or some might say thanks to—Dominion, the world is on a new path, darker in some ways but much brighter in others.

It was a sweltering day in New Delhi when Dominion’s floating fortress arrived. He was constantly on the move, traveling from prison to prison to check in on their progress, as well as to collect the souls that his minions had harvested. There were around 500 concentrations camps on Earth, each one requiring a day or more of scrutiny, so adding that to the travel time, it meant each camp saw him once every year and a half or so.

For the midlevel spawn tasked with administering each camp, this was both a joyous and incredibly stressful day. Their creator, their god, would be visiting them in the flesh, but it meant that everything had to be absolutely perfect. He had arrived to make sure they weren’t screwing up.

For executive human collaborators, it was especially soul-crushing. Their efforts would be seen by Dominion himself, and unlike the spawn, who seemed to receive sustenance by appeasing their master, the humans would receive no bonuses or rewards for exemplary work. These visits were just opportunities for their lives to be ruined. That was another difference between them and the spawn. When Dominion was displeased, he trusted his minions to punish themselves, to suffer in despair and guilt for failing to meet his expectations, but he had no expectations of the human collaborators. He knew they’d never be as loyal and fanatical as the spawn, so when they screwed up, their punishment was nightmarish.

On the roof of the main administrative building, the commanding spawn and his human subordinates gathered. Each was the head of their own department in the concentration camp. There was the Head of Breeding, Child Care, Slave Training, Collaborator Vocation, Human Resources, Agriculture, Construction, and Maintenance. Everything else fell to the spawn in charge.

They were cast in the shadow of Dominion’s fortress, each of them able to feel the oppressive weight of their Master. The fortress was built on a huge stone island, with the bottom tapering down into a massive cone, like a mountain-sized stalactite. It touched down on the roof of the building, as daintily as a falling leaf. Facing the group was a great set of metal doors, adorned with reliefs of demons and various monsters. The doors opened and a staircase extended, and upon seeing who stood at the top, everyone immediately bowed down, trembling in fear.

Dominion, he moved down each step with his footfalls causing hearts to skip beats. In the twenty years since devouring the third Guardian, he had aged, as all men do. However, as he was immune to the ravages of time and could never die of old age, rather than his body getting weaker and inching towards death, it was more accurate to say that it was continuously acclimating to the indescribably vast torrent of power it contained.

Now in his mid-forties, he was stronger than ever before, and time had polished his devilish good looks to give his face a rugged radiance. His long black hair was now like a wild mane and he sported a thin beard, with eyes that now pierced whoever looked into them. His physique was also masterfully sculpted, the definition of might. Any woman, regardless of fear, would feel the heat of attraction upon looking at him, and should their eyes meet, their faces would redden from arousal.

His clothes were made of the finest fabrics on Earth and had an almost regal bearing, but weren’t gaudy or showy. Rather, they looked suited for combat. And of course, he had a long black overcoat that hung off his shoulders.

Always at his side was Ishtar, the manager of his harem, as well as his secretary. She hadn’t aged a day, and her beauty and sinfully sexy aura still invoked lust in men and women alike.

The spawn in charge moved ahead of the group without breaking his posture. Like other prison administrators, his body, power, and intellect were different from the typical foot soldiers. His appearance was a man fused with a horned beetle. His body was encased in an exoskeleton with great tusks growing from the top of his head, and all of his fingers looked like insect legs.

“My Lord and Master, almighty Dominion, I, Claim, humbly welcome you to New Delhi!”

Dominion didn’t answer and instead surveyed the city. Like all cities, it had been converted into a massive concentration camp, holding millions of people. Outside of the prison was a ring of the homes of collaborators, and beyond those were the farms and monuments built by the slaves. It was New Delhi in name only. Early on, he had considered just dividing up the planets into zones and assigning each concentration camp a number, but the numbers didn’t make it easy to remember their location on a map or what the environment was, so he decided to just stick with names.

“Any issues to report?”

“None, sir. Everything is running smoothly. We would have let Blight know immediately if something went wrong.”

Blight was still in charge of the worldwide prison system. While Dominion would simply wander around from camp to camp, Blight was moving across the globe at all hours of the day, maintaining constant contact with all prison leaders. If any errors or incidents occurred, he was alerted and would teleport there to make sure everything was put back on the right track. His arrival was not dreaded by the prison leaders, nor was it embarrassing to call on him. Every leader had to acknowledge that things went wrong and that the prison system needed constant maintenance. The true sin would be trying to cover it up.

“Very well, show us the progress you’ve made.”

The first area they went to was the most important part of the prison: the maternity ward, though, of course, the meaning of those words was nothing like what it was before Dominion appeared. It barely even resembled the early maternity wards in his first concentration camps. The hospital beds were all gone. In a warehouse larger than a football stadium existed a colossal mass of vines and roots, growing around a multilevel scaffold structure.

Held in the embrace of these vines were hundreds of thousands of pregnant women, like flies caught in spider webs. Their limbs had all been removed, a potential source of blood clots for infection, plus it’s not like they’d ever use them again. They were leaning forward, their stomachs were allowed to hang freely, thus to ease the compression of their organs and give the fetuses more room to develop, but they were also cradled, so that they wouldn’t stretch down so far as to risk injury.

To account for the back strain that this position would create, the roots had even burrowed into their spines and helped evenly distribute the weight. Hollow roots were inserted down the throat and into the urethra and anus to act as feeding tubes and collect waste. There were even vines hooked up to their nipples, acting as breast pumps that continuously drew nourishment to feed the babies already born.

This mass of roots and veins was a unique spawn, named the Kabballah, otherwise known as the tree of life. It was a life-support system, working in tandem with doctors to monitor and maintain the health of the breeders and the development of their unborn children, as well as drugging them to keep them in a comatose state. The new breeders were lucky. For the first ten years after Dominion took over, before he implemented the Kabballah system to assist the doctors, all of the breeders would have been in hospital beds, kept awake so that they could tell doctors about any sudden pains that might mean a risk to their lives or pregnancies. They were aware of every passing second.

A man stepped forward, one of the executives, Dr. Reddy. He was the Head of Breeding. He used to be a fertility doctor before Dominion took over. Technically he still was. He held a clipboard of information and red it off with all his strength being put into keeping his voice from trembling.

“Since your last visit, 2,681,119 children have been born, with all those deemed weak or deformed immediately culled, about 4%. All the harvested souls are awaiting your collection, My Lord.”

“Any changes in the fertility levels?”

“It’s only improved, sir.”

Claim stepped in. “Thanks to our constant small alterations, their bodies have adapted to their task. Despite their minds being dark, their flesh understands what must be done. They have become perfect breeders.”

“And no deterioration in health?”

“Nothing we can’t correct.”

Dominion looked at the Claim’s human entourage, the middle-managers of the prison. Reddy was skittish because of Dominion’s presence, but he was used to the scene around him. The rest were terrified. It was no surprise. Any sane man would look at it and see an abomination, a crime against humanity. What was being done to these women, so many women, was the truest definition of evil. The female executives were the most nervous, as they were aware of how close they were to this same fate. They had only been spared because they were related to collaborators or were skilled enough to become collaborators. They were all old enough to remember life before Dominion, life before this hell.

But when Dominion looked around, what he saw was inefficiency, and it strained his patience. Even after twenty years, the fourth Guardian had yet to reveal itself, no matter how many souls he collected. Either it was so powerful that he hadn’t reached a level high enough to warrant its awakening, even after eating its brethren, or more likely, it was already dead, perhaps crushed to death between two tectonic plates, or it delved too deep into the mantle and was incinerated. If it was dead, that meant he had to continue taking the long way to the Old Gods, and after all this time, he had grown bored with the long way. He had enough of the scenery, he just wanted to reach his destination.

“Show me the offspring.”

Claim showed him to a similar room with the same setup, but instead of women, the Kabballah roots were cradling millions of infants. The roots had the same softness and feel as human flesh and thus mimicked the contact that newborns needed for healthy brain development. The milk that was being siphoned from the breeders was supplied to the infants in what could be considered either organic bottle-feeding or artificial breastfeeding. Along with feeding them, holding them, and removing their waste, the roots also routinely injected them with muscle growth serum and a mild hallucinogen. It stimulated their brains to nurture healthy neurodevelopment, without causing any damage, and the growth serum sped up their development.

Once they become strong enough to walk, they be removed and placed amongst the child slaves too young to be used for labor. When they weren’t held by Kabballah, they were looked after by human caregivers. Their job was to cultivate their social awareness and help them learn to speak.

Early on, Dominion had tried to use the Kabballah system to fade out the breeding program altogether, to implant the reproductive organs of both men and women into the tree and use it to grow children like grapes on a vine. Unfortunately, this next step of in-vitro fertilization failed for a reason he could never identify. The children were either never conceived or born without souls. It made no sense, likely another defense mechanism the Old Gods put in to make sure that no one could farm souls that easily.

This time it was a woman who stepped forward. Late thirties with a slim waist hidden under her lab coat, beautiful face, and a perfect complexion, she was the definition of Indian beauty. “We have seen a 24% increase in the speed of the children’s development. Most are now ambulatory and talking by eight months.”

She looked up from her clipboard and was shocked to find Dominion’s gaze fixed on her, and a wicked smirk on his face. All of the executives’ hearts dropped when they noticed, and felt shivers crawl up their spines as he approached her.

“And you are... ?”

“D-Dr. A-Alisha Patel, Head of Childcare,” she stammered as he towered over her. She became stiff as a board as the top buttons of her lab coat came undone without him touching her, revealing the gold locket around her neck. Inside was a picture of a beautiful young girl. From the aging of the picture, she’d be in her late teens.

“Your daughter?”

“Chanda,” she said, trying to hold back tears of dread.

Dominion turned to Ishtar. “After our inspection, escort Dr. Patel to my chambers. She’ll be entertaining me tonight. Oh, and find her daughter. I want her as well.”

“It will be my pleasure, L—”

“Lord Dominion!” Alisha blurted out.

He looked down on her with merciless eyes, watching her desperation and terror form two glistening streams running down her cinnamon-shade cheeks. “Yes? Is there something you wish to say?”

Her mouth hung open, her heart trying to find something she could say, some magical combination of words that would save her and her daughter. In her peripheral vision, she saw her fellow executives. She looked to them for help, but from the expressions on their faces, they were already mourning her. They didn’t expect to ever see her again after that night.

Due to the sheer vastness of the concentration camp and the farms around it, guards and human executives often traveled on small S2 Engine trollies, similar to golf carts. Claim, Ishtar, and other spawn simply ran wherever they needed to go, having no use for such modes of transportation. Dominion refused them outright and simply traveled via levitation. He followed Claim around the prison and surveyed the farms. These prisons were made to be entirely self-sufficient, growing every crop they could ever need. A large portion of this food was fed to Kabballah, where it would be broken down into a nutrient-rich slurry and fed to the breeders.

Giant arachnid-like spawn would move through the fields, saturating them with life energy to speed up their growth, and the human slaves would collect the harvest. Here in India, where it was always hot, harvesting was constant, the slaves moving from one field to another. Any who passed out from exhaustion or heat stroke (usually the children) would be swapped out and replaced with fresh slaves. Only the sentinels with their whips would pause to bow down to the passing Dominion. The slaves were unaware, as they never looked up. They had long since learned that to stop working meant a sharp strike across the back.

“As you can see, food production is up 23% since your last visit. We work hard to keep up with our booming slave population,” said Claim, hoping to receive a word of praise or sign of acknowledgment from his creator. Dominion simply nodded, more than enough.

The Head of Agriculture should have been the one to give the report, but he was too stunned to speak. All of the executives were, having heard Dominion declare his intentions for Alisha and her daughter. They mentally commended her for her incredible force of will, from how she calmly asked to be excused from the remainder of the inspection, and tried to give their condolences when her request was denied. She was forced to continue on, riding in one of the carts with dead eyes, her mind filled the horrors that Dominion would inflict on her and her child.

After being updated on the progress of food production, Claim led Dominion on a tour through the monuments the slaves had created, the vast structures and obelisks constructed to appease Dominion’s ego and keep his slave population busy. It was a little hobby of his, scribbling up plans for some massive temple or obelisk and assigning the slaves of one or more prisons to build it. From a distance, the lands surrounding the concentration camps would resemble the beach at the end of a sandcastle-building contest.

“Master,” said Claim, walking alongside Dominion. Walking would be the correct term, but despite his easygoing gait, he was somehow moving faster than a sprinting human.

“Yes?”

“You arrived at a good time. We had been planning on celebrating a Red Revelry tomorrow. Our stadium would be greatly blessed by your presence.”

“Sounds like fun, count me in.”

The offer was planned but with the façade on spontaneity. They were currently passing by a full-sized replica of the Roman Coliseum, and its purpose was the same. Red Revelries were circuses of violence, a sort of holiday for the collaborators where they could gather in the arena and watch slaves fight to the death in gladiatorial battles. They were done every few months, never on the same day, more a spur of the moment sort of thing, though “coincidentally”, many prisons seemed to plan their Revelries during or immediately after their inspection, as if, perhaps, trying to curry favor with Dominion.

Young, innocent, corruptible eyes, combined with an adult figure at the peak of vitality, she was everything that Dominion craved. The inspection had gone without a hitch and Dominion retired to his bedchamber, but he wasn’t alone. Before him stood Alisha and Chanda Patel, the sexy mother-daughter duo currently causing his noticeable erection. He sat at the foot of the bed, gazing at them, his eyes catching every tremble as they held each other, his nose catching the scent of their tears, his ears picking up their frantic breaths.

“Both of you, strip.” They hesitated, paralyzed by fear, but a wave of bloodlust shook them from their stupor.

“Mother, help me. I don’t want to do this!” Chanda whimpered.

“It’s going to be ok,” Alisha replied.

The two women silently cried as they pulled off their clothes. Their instincts screamed at them not to, as they knew that every inch of flesh they exposed to Dominion was another inch that would be brutalized and tainted. The air on their skin felt instead like searing flames as their minds anticipated the torment yet to come. Standing naked before him, Chanda covered herself with her arms, but Alisha resisted. She had one last hope.

“Alisha, you didn’t tell me that your daughter was such a beauty. This is going to be a fun night.”

She dropped down onto her hands and knees, her forehead pressed to the floor. “Please, Lord Dominion, if I may speak!”

“Proceed.”

“Whatever you ask of me, no matter how degrading or sinful it may be, I will fulfill any request you have! But please, I beg you, spare my daughter! She has no experience! I can satisfy you better than she could ever hope to!”

“Let me stop you right there.” Dominion’s words made her look up. “You’re in the perfect position to initiate her. Instead of wasting your breath, begging, crawl over here and show your daughter how to properly use your mouth to serve your Master. Show her what you’re capable of.” As he spoke, he revealed himself to the two women, and the sight of his manhood made them nauseous with terror.

“Please, just let her go! I’ll do whatever you want! Just let her go free!”

“She lost her freedom the day she was born into my world. I’m being merciful in offering you a choice: either willingly submit and give me what I want, or I can punish you and take it anyway. So, which will it be?”

Alisha bowed her head, trying to hide her tears. “Mother!” Chanda exclaimed as she began crawling over to Dominion.

Reaching him, she looked up at his towering cock with wide, fearful eyes. She grasped it, the tips of her fingers and thumb nowhere near each other. She had a husband back home. She had been with no other man than him. After this, she’d never be able to return to him, not physically or emotionally.

She stroked Dominion’s member, trying to get a sense of what she was dealing with. It felt even larger than it looked, and it had a manly musk that could never be washed away. She paused, swallowing her pride, and began making several broad strokes of her tongue, like an animal enjoying a saltlick. She wasn’t very skilled in fellatio, this was the best she could do. She climbed her way up to the head and took it in her mouth, though it took great effort to actually fit it in.

The shame was unbearable, for her mouth to be dirtied by this devil’s manhood, to be taken like property and used. She tried not to think about her husband, what he would say, what he would think. He was a collaborator, she knew what that meant. She knew what he was forced to do to the breeders, but she forgave him because he knew he had no choice. If she ever saw him again, she had to hope he’d forgive her for this. Even worse was the fact that she was not alone in this. Her daughter stood right behind her, naked and defenseless. She was watching as her mother kneeled on the floor and served as this madman’s whore.

Yet despite her turmoil, Dominion was unimpressed with her efforts. “Is this it? Is this the best you can do? The way you sold your skills, I thought maybe you had a nympho side to you, but this is pathetic. Hopefully your daughter will be better.”

Pulled by an invisible leash, Chanda was dragged over, her head brought up to Dominion’s lap. He grabbed her hair and forced her to work the shaft with her lips. Alisha instinctively tried to pull away to shield her daughter, but Dominion held her still with his other hand. The two women, each poisoned by the taste of cock on their mouths, looked up at Dominion with tear-filled eyes.

“Now, show me what you can really do.”

The mother and daughter worked together to try and please him, if only to avoid angering him further. Alisha did her best to slurp on the head, with her saliva mixing with Chanda’s as she ran her tongue and lips along the shaft. When Dominion felt they weren’t putting enough effort in, he’d grab their hair and control them like puppets, smearing his cock across their faces and wetting it with their spit and tears. After a few minutes, he got bored and decided to move on.

He stood up and threw the two women onto the bed. Chanda tried to crawl away, but Dominion dragged her back and buried his face in her ass. She yelped in surprise, having never been touched in such a way before, and the swirling of his tongue inside her robbed her of her strength. His saliva felt like poison, like she was being eaten out by some scavenger that fed on rotting carcasses. She felt like she’d go into septic shock, and the flicks of his tongue in her womanly garden, it was like he was molesting her soul. When his tongue penetrated her anus, she shuddered and wept, knowing that he’d inevitably rape her there as well. But there was pleasure. With Dominion’s victims, there was always pleasure.

Then he turned to Alisha and flipped her onto her back. “Spread your legs for your Master.”

She reluctantly obeyed, presenting herself to Dominion, but refusing to look him in the eye. He took a few minutes to caress and suck on her breasts, making her grimace from the stubble of his beard against her skin. Chanda watched him, feeling like her mother was more endowed than she had originally thought. Her breasts, when being bullied by Dominion, looked larger, fuller. Her nipples were becoming more and more erect as he toyed with him, and she could hear her mother panting.

Dominion headed south, dragging his tongue—long and forked, like a demon’s—down her stomach and began feasting on her femininity. Alisha could no longer contain herself. Her voice was slipping free, a primal moan of carnal bliss. Dominion’s skill was more than she, used to a very vanilla sex life with her husband, could bear. Chanda stared with wide eyes, having never heard her mother make this kind of voice. His tongue was so deep inside her, hitting every sensitive spot. It was taking all her strength not to climax.

“Ah, you taste just like your daughter.”

Once he had had his fill of her womanly nectar, Dominion stood up and fully undressed. He rested his cock on her labia like it was a beached whale. He had altered her flesh to be able to withstand him, as was protocol when dealing with human slaves, but her sense of touch hadn’t been suppressed.

“Are you ready to be taken?” he asked. She didn’t respond. “I want to say it loud and proud. ‘Please fuck me, Master!’ Go on, I want your daughter to hear it.” Alisha shook her head, groaning in humiliation. Dominion grabbed Chanda by the throat and the crotch and lifted her up off the bed with his fingers slipping inside her. Chanda screamed from the violation, or she would have, if not for Dominion choking her. “Fine, then your daughter gets it first.”