He found three of that approximate size. None bore numbers at all, though.
Can I etch the eleven into it?
You know how to write?
Yes, Hiram answered, my mother taught me.
His father hadn’t been keen on the idea, but indulged his wife and son as much as he could given their meager conditions. Hiram remembered being tired from a day’s work on more than one occasion when his mother would jab him in the side to keep him awake to learn. He reached across the worktable for a chisel and small hammer.
Etching out the symbols proved a challenge because the eye kept slipping. He wedged it between a vise and tap-tapped until he figured he’d done his best.
Secret’s excitement flooded him.
Hiram sprinted back to the dungeon and the darkness. The wraiths, or whatever they were in the other cells, were unusually quiet. He felt them watching as he hurried to Secret’s cell. “What do you think?” he asked.
She strode forth to examine the eye. Her mouth twitched just before she bit her lip. “Place it in the lock.” Pale fingers pointed to a rounded gouge in the junction of bars.
He obeyed.
The eye flickered to life. It glowed red-orange.
“Is it working?” Hiram asked. “Should it do that?”
Secret shrugged.
The eye twisted and turned as if seeking to focus. It stopped, the dim pupil in its center fixating on Hiram’s face. It sees me, he thought, startled. He took a step back and then another.
The eye blinked off and on and began to spin with a slippery whirring noise.
“It’s working!” Secret shouted.
With a sickening pop, the golem eye shot from its perch. The gate groaned and swayed open. The maiden stepped forth, free at last. She leaped at Hiram, her smile somehow sinister in its glee.
“You did it!” she shouted.
Gushes of emotion overwhelmed him. He staggered, but managed to hold onto her. She was a head shorter than him, her weight slight. She smelled delicious which made no sense being locked away as she had been.
Kisses bedecked his cheeks and neck. Her tongue tested his skin. The heat she brought to life made his legs weak and his balls prickle. He crumpled to the ground, his maiden atop his lap, and for the first time in his life, Hiram felt like he’d done something powerful.
He wanted to laugh, to dance round and jump for joy. He’d done it! Anything was possible.
Secret’s kisses became insistent. She pawed at his tunic, pulling the laces free and working the front open where her mouth suckled and tongue licked his chest. She bit at his left nipple like an animal.
He cringed and combed a hand over her thick hair. “Slow down,” he whispered, his breath catching when she twisted his nipple with her lips. “Shouldn’t we leave the keep first?”
She tilted her head up. Those dark eyes regarded him. She giggled and shook her head from side to side. “I want you here, now…to taste you.” Lips and tongue roamed lower. Fingers unlaced his pants, forcing them down over his breeches. Those too, she tugged away.
His cock, thick with the excitement of the moment and the prospect of finding a proper sheath, sprung up to meet her lips. She kissed him there, licked and teased with a wet abandon he had never known. Her mouth sucked the head of his length into her warmth.
His voice caught in his throat.
In and out, she guided his thickness, her tongue twirling and tickling. He curled his fingers at the back of her head and tried not to force her to go faster. Hiram closed his eyes and saw her forest. He couldn’t hold back, but feared coming in her mouth. Trying to lift her away, he was shocked when she sucked harder.
His seed burst free and she swallowed it down. Every inch of his thickness became fiery and sensitive. She continued her ministrations, licking him until he could not take the succulent torture. “Stop…please.”
She slowed.
“Secret, please…”
She groaned and lifted her head. With the back of one hand, she wiped her wet mouth clean. “Did you like it?”
He nodded.
His minx of a maiden climbed away from him to crawl on all fours. She rifled through patches of old hay, seeking something.
“What are you doing?”
She grasped her target. “I need the eye to free the others.”
Claws scrabbled over stone and metal. Small voices squealed and chirruped from the remaining dungeon cells.
“Others?”
She stood and nodded.
Before he could question her further, Secret inserted the golem’s eye into a lock-slot. It lit and spun in a similar fashion as it had before. When it popped out, she caught it with a dexterity Hiram found unsettling. The maiden was much more than she seemed.
The gate swung open with a terrible screech.
Small, black creatures came scurrying out. There were so many, he lost count. They ran past Secret’s ankles, some reverently touching her with their sharp-looking, dark fingers. Soon they all fled through the door and vanished. Gate after gate his maiden unlocked. Hoards of the things escaped.
“Why don’t they look like you?” Hiram asked.
She giggled and tossed the golem’s eye away. “I’m different, my savior. I’m Beorolf’s Secret.” She pushed her hair from her shoulder, turned her back on him, and ran off down the aisle.
“Wait!” he called. He scrambled to stand and pull his clothes back on. A sickening sense of foreboding welled in his chest. “What have I done?” Hiram whispered. He ran out to the hall only to find it empty and his maiden with her peculiar charges missing as well. Their dingy footprints marked the stone floor. Tiny, filth-stained fingerprints tainted the metal wall.
Hiram followed in their wake.
He emerged in the shrine room where a path of destruction and carnage showed what manner of beings he had freed. Lord Beorolf’s throne lay on its side. Bits of stuffing were spread here and there. Books had been torn apart, their pages scattered all over every surface.
He edged toward the room where the golem alcoves stood. There the little creatures busied themselves dismantling the metal monsters. Forged arms fell and clattered on the floor. Heads ripped free to be rolled back and forth in a macabre game of kickball. One of the dark creatures had hold of a large stone. It sat atop the table in the midst of the hall, bashing away at whatever lay atop its surface.
He stopped by the table and reached to snatch up one of the objects. His fingers narrowly escaped a barrage of hammer whacks. The small piece felt like stone or perhaps clay. Hiram held it closer to his face. Writing decorated the rectangle’s surface, mysterious and not a set of symbols he understood.
The thing on the table hissed.
Hiram looked down.
It tried to reach for what he’d saved, so he shoved it in a pocket and moved away from the little thing’s snarling teeth and sharp claws.
“Secret?” he called as he went further into the labyrinth of the keep. “Secret, where are you?”
Pottery crashed against a wall behind him. Hiram glanced back to see one of the creatures scurry away, chortling in an evil way.
Secret? he thought, hoping he could reach her somehow. Please, let’s leave this place together. Come with me.
Her voice didn’t slip into his mind, but a faint flicker of revenge registered in his thoughts. It came from her.
A set of stairs led him into a squared tower. He became aware of the connection he shared with the maiden, as if a thin wire bound them. He had only to reach for the wire and follow its path. He came to the end of the stairs and a door that was slightly ajar. Dipping inside, he found his maiden pinned to the floor by the golem lord.
Be silent, she cautioned.
“Lord Beorolf!” Hiram shouted.
The lord growled and heaved his captive up. “How did she escape?” he grumbled. “I destroyed the key!”
Whirling around with Secret in his grasp, he faced Hiram.
All manner of courage he felt when he had l
et his maiden out vanished. His heart skipped a beat.
Lord Beorolf’s golem eye glowed bright red with fury. “Well, speak, boy!
“I know not,” he lied. “When I woke she was free and all the doors in your dungeon were open.”
“What!” the lord bellowed. “No! Impossible!” He held Secret by her wrist with his golem hand. She winced when he started toward the door, dragging her along.
“Wait, my lord…sir…” Hiram went after Beorolf, running to keep up with the man’s angry strides down the staircase. He feared the lord would injure his maiden or worse, toss her down the stairwell to die.
Beorolf’s mechanical leg made his gait quick. He left the stairs and raced along the hall ahead to his workshop.
There, Hiram caught up to him.
“Curse you all!” the lord cried in anguish. “Damn gremlins. I should have killed you when the thought struck me.”
Secret gasped and tried to pull away.
“I don’t understand,” Hiram said, hoping for some explanation.
Beorolf ignored him. He went to the worktable and retrieved a hammer. Placing Secret’s wrist on the vise, he held her in place.
“No!” she wailed. “Father, no! Have mercy!”
Father? Hiram burst forth, unable to fully comprehend.
The shadows of the gremlins converged along the edges of the wall.
“I’ll teach you to meddle in my affairs, to disobey me and release your abominations into my hold.” The hammer began its descent.
Hiram leapt through the air, intent on knocking the lord to one side.
Secret’s body twisted and turned, a gaseous mist encircling her shape. Her terrified shriek changed to a haunting cry—the foul voice of a beast made from unnatural magic.
As Hiram crashed into the golem lord, he was set upon by the clawed creatures as well. They tumbled together to the floor, squeaks and growls ringing in his ears. Beorolf flailed in his effort to escape. Gremlins scratched him with their claws. The distinct pain of teeth clamped onto his ankle.
He screamed and rolled off Beorolf. Sitting up, Hiram looked around, hoping to catch sight of his maiden, but she was gone. He rose and left the workshop to find her.
“Secret!” he shouted, hoping she’d answer.
At the portal in the shrine room, he paused. He stopped to stare at the surface of the magicked passage. Green and black shimmered and swirled there. He reached to touch it. His fingers came closer, closer, and halted a breadth away when Beorolf’s voice broke into the silence of the room.
“Stupid boy!” he grumbled. Click-clank, click-clank, his footsteps sounded. “Did she bewitch you like her mother did to me?”
Chapter Five
Lord Beorolf Revealed
Lord Beorolf’s skin showed off the attacks he’d undergone. Blood stained his sleeping gown and scratches and small bite wounds tainted every visible patch of skin on his body. Hiram and the lord sat at the righted table in the workroom, saying little. The lord dressed his wounds with care, groaning every so often in obvious pain.
“She’s your daughter?” Hiram asked.
Beorolf tore off a piece of linen and wrapped it over his wrist. Somewhere in the shadows, the small sounds of gremlins scratched and creaked.
“Secret is my only child. Conceived before this happened to me.” He waved his human hand at his golem body. “She is too much like her mother…like them.”
He eyed the corner of the room with disdain. A small chunk of twisted metal flew from the very spot he watched to land at his feet.
Beorolf glowered. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll catch all of you again and this time, it won’t be the dungeon where you find yourselves.”
“How could you…?”
The lord hissed. “How could I what? Lock away that halfling?”
“But she’s your child, your daughter.”
“She’s a gremlin who can shape herself into a human, a changeling, a vile, evil creature bent on causing mayhem and mischief, just like her mother was.”
He still couldn’t understand the man. “But she’s your child. You locked up your own child?”
“I should have killed her.” He snarled and leaned forward. “Just like I did her mother.”
Hiram sat back, pursing his lips. He stared at Beorolf’s golem eye until the lord went back to mending his wounds. He tore off his ruined sleeping gown, revealing a body that no longer held the parts a man needed between his legs. Instead, a metal plate covered most of his lower abdomen and the place where his cock should have been. Hiram shuddered. Thick scars, old and rippled by time, wormed along his skin near the place where the metal met it.
“What happened to you?” he whispered.
Beorolf sat back in his chair, glaring at Hiram. “She did this to me. Secret’s mother. We had a pact and she broke it…”
“How erm, how did you meet her?”
The question made the lord’s face change. His anger and bitterness slackened until his expression became wistful. “It was a long time ago,” he began, “long before this keep and the golems. I was just past boyhood when I passed the boundary of the rift and entered the woods beyond. My mother told me never to go into the woods, but I was a brave lad then, brave and stupid.”
He scratched at his half beard. “I lost my way. The shadows swallowed me up. I wandered for days and nights seeking my way out, or a new, better life than I had in the poor village I’d been born in. I found Okil by the river.”
Beorolf’s eyes slipped shut.
Hiram noticed his golem chest and a symbol scrawled over the plate that, he guessed, must open as all the other golems’ chests did.
“She was a wild thing, tall and dark, with thick hair and glittery yellow eyes. I feared her.” The lord’s hand strayed to the metal between his legs as if remembering what it was like to be a man once.
“She held me down and tore away my clothes. It was a primal mating, like animals.” He opened his eyes and crossed his hands over his chest. “That’s all she was! An animal!”
Hiram swallowed. “And she…she was like…”
“She was a gremlin, boy! Just like the others. They can take many forms if they choose. Or no form at all!” With that, he stood and started toward the hall that led to his bedroom. “And now they’re free in this realm again. Gods help us.”
Beorolf left him alone with the shadows and the chattering sounds of the gremlins. It surprised him not to be resigned to the dungeon, and he didn’t know what to make of it. When dawn peeked through the high window in the workroom, he found it too late to sleep.
A stray gremlin, green and scaled as if it had severe mange climbed up onto the table before him. It sat cross-legged and began to chew on the rags the lord had left behind. It stared directly at Hiram as it tore away bit after bit of blood-soaked cloth.
“Where’s Secret?” he asked the creature.
It lowered its bald head, eyes aglow with mischief.
“Do you know where she is?”
The gremlin cocked its head to one side, picked a knot of fabric from its sharp teeth and cackled.
Hiram pushed away from the table and trudged out. He had come to this place in the hopes of finding a new life, but all he’d discovered was misery and an old tyrant who’d become one of the lifeless creations he made. He didn’t want to stay any longer. He wanted to go home and forget he’d ever left. Mending pig fences and marrying a manly woman might not be such a bad fate after all.
In the shrine room, he stopped in front of the portal. It pulsed with greenish light, luring him to pass. Closing his eyes, he stepped through.
Chapter Six
Stretching Bench
Falling into a blackness he had not expected, he screamed in terror. The other side of the keep should have been there when he passed through, but instead he’d entered a void. No stars bedecked the black. When he finally made contact with the earth below him, it smelled of compost and rain. Hiram rolled onto his back to stare at the emptiness and wo
nder how he would find a way out.
Secret, he thought, I need you now.
He couldn’t hear her clearly, but he sensed her thoughts, muddled and drawn with sorrow. Hiram crawled toward where he thought she might be.
The emptiness he traversed gave him no solace. He called out for her time and again, but to no avail. No sunlight came to light his way, no moonlight, no sensual images of the maiden he’d freed.
He stubbed his toe on something hard before he finally stopped. Exhausted and alone, he felt the shape in front him. Cold and hard, it seemed to be a bench of some sort. Hiram lay across its unyielding surface and closed his eyes. Sleep washed over him, but like the nights he’d spent in the dungeon, he dreamed in vivid, erotic detail.
Secret stood over him, her body backlit by silvery moonlight, her curves appealing and her full lips parted in a small smile.
“I need you,” he told her.
She waved three fingers of her right hand.
Vines curled from the ground beneath the stone bench to twine about his wrists. They tightened in place, holding him still.
“You would betray me…like my father.”
“No,” he said.
She waved her fingers a second time.
Vines encircled his ankles, gripping him so tight that he whimpered.
She bent her knees, one hand reaching to the unseen loam. When she stood up, Hiram noticed the shine of a dagger in her fist. Secret’s eyes flickered with amber light like the embers of a fire. In a motion anything but demure, she reached down, took hold of the hem of his breeches and poked the tip of the blade straight through. Fabric tore.
Hiram’s eyes widened. “What are you doing?” he choked out.
“This is the stretching bench,” she explained. “The forest does not know you, just as it didn’t know my father.” She cut his tunic and tossed away the ruined fabric. Secret stepped up onto the stone and stood over him, her parted legs revealing the pink of her folds.
Despite his fear and the bonds holding him down, his cock reacted. His mind still longed for her, remembering the warmth of her mouth clamped to his length. He wished he were free to reach for her hips and ease her down to his growing hardness.
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