They passed beneath the gatehouse and into the courtyard before the great keep. She had last seen it over her shoulder as she swam for her life. Now she returned in a way she never would have imagined on that fateful day.
"Helena!" shouted a familiar voice.
It was her brother, Sven. He descending quickly down the staircase, but stopped short of the procession. His expression fell from joy to confusion to sorrow. He had clearly been spared the details of her relationship with the goblins and now it was all realized by her only brother.
"You...you are..."
"You will address the king, not his concubine," snapped Margrite, who rode atop the throne beside the king. She wore a headdress and a great necklace of gold that nearly covered her tattooed breasts.
"Concubine?" wondered Sven.
"Yes. Helena of Bashowar does not speak unless commanded by her hefek. She is property, not a free woman. So if you wish her to speak to you, address your question to the king."
Sven looked sick as he spoke the words.
"Why is my sister pregnant?" he asked.
Helena pitied her brother. He could not know the pleasure of having a hefek. He could not understand her bond to Bashowar and her love for him. The goblin king heard Sven's words translated and he spoke a simple command to Helena. The former princess understood.
"I am pregnant because the king desired me," said Helena. "I am his concubine, his shara, and he is my hefek. It is...it is like a husband...but I serve him."
"A slave?" gaped Sven.
"I love him," said Helena and she proudly stroked her bare belly. "I will give him many litters and feed our sons and daughters with the milk of my bosom."
Sven was about to say something else, but Bashowar grew tired of the delay and ordered the procession to continue. When Sven moved as if he might stop the procession again, Helena fixed him with a hard expression.
"Brother, you are a knight, how many have you slain?" Her lip curled in an angry smile. "We all do what we must...for the good of the family."
Margrite leaned over the edge of the throne as it passed Sven by.
"Do not be sad, boy," she trailed her fingers over his head. "You can come and visit her when she gives birth. I will entertain you in my bed."
Helena did not know if Margrite was only teasing him or if there was truth in her words. She did know that the time would be soon. Helena di Quista now Helena of Bashowar would become a mother to goblins.
Book 2 - Sea Creatures
The hound's head banner of King Airnhulm was torn from the mast by another burst of grapeshot. Princess Livia Madeline Airnhulm cried out and her bodyguard, Duvas, threw himself atop her as the shot smashed through timbers and tore men from their feet.
The princess, slender and raven-haired, skin a courtly white, cowered from the violence of the cannonade. She had known there were pirates in the southern seas, but she had never imagined herself in any danger when she set sail aboard her father's warship to be married to a prince of Shaddobar. Resolute was a mighty ship. She could not conceive of pirates attacking.
They had come in two sleek corvettes, black flags flying high as they avoided Resolute's ponderous turns and massive broadsides. The corsairs were using their own grapeshot to hole the sails of the mighty Airnhulm warship as the much lighter raider corvettes circled in for the final attack.
"They're preparing grapples," said Duvas, peering across the smoky seas. "They want to capture the ship and what we have in the hold."
"My dowry," moaned Livia. She had seen the chests of gold being loaded in the day they set out. She had felt pride to know just how much she was worth to her father. If he had wanted a cheap marriage he could have sent her off to one of the Beggar Princes.
"How did they know?" she asked her bodyguard.
Duvas ignored the question. He looked across the swaying, blood-spattered decks to where the gray-bearded Captain Pike stood at the helm. The old man was issuing orders to his surviving crew. Livia saw a grim determination in Captain Pike's face that did little to allay her fears.
"Look," said Duvas. "Pike is giving the orders to blow the powder. He means to sink Resolute."
"By exploding the magazine?" Livia pulled herself to her feet on the splintered remains of one of the masts. "We'll be killed."
"I think he intends for you to die," said Duvas. "Better to deny you to the corsairs and that life of misery as a pirate ransom. But, my lady, I am sworn to protect you. Quickly. To the launch over there. I won't let them take you."
He pointed across the sawing deck as another blast of grapeshot smashed into Resolute. Livia moaned as she saw a man blasted in half. She reached out to Duvas and took his hand, allowing him to lead her in a desperate, ducking run for the launch. The corsairs were closing in. Their grapples were hooking into the side of Resolute. The few remaining seamen began to draw their pistols and cutlasses to fight off the boarders.
"Quickly, into the boat," said Duvas. "I'll lower you to the water with the winch and dive in after you."
He helped her into the boat and began to crank the winch. There was no time for a gentle descent. Corsairs were climbing onto the deck. The sound of pistol shots crackled through the air. Duvas was struck with a shot and he sagged onto the winch. Princess Livia watched in horror as his shirt darkened with blood. Her body guard's last heroic act was to release the brake on the winch lowering her into the water.
The launch plummeted to the surface of the waves and Livia was knocked senseless. Before she could recover from the pain and shock of being dropped into the rough seas, she was overwhelmed by the pressure and heat of the blast that tore open Resolute and the corsair's corvettes.
The tiny launch was cast violently through the water and smashed apart. The churning seas swallowed up the virgin princess. She had only a moment to realize that she would never see the rain-lashed shores of her father's kingdom of Iron Coast, nor meet her fiancée in the desert isles of Shaddobar. She said a last prayer to the strange gods that ruled the sea as the roiling ocean drowned her.
Princess Livia dreamed of the sea. She dreamed that it was a great fish with dead eyes that did not care for her at all and scales that shifted from irridescent blue to a black even darker than the night. Those scales were the lightless black upon black of the strange deep. The great fish of the sea opened its mouth and it swallowed her up. She was sucked past thousands of curving teeth and into the tightness of its alien esophagus, pulled deeper and deeper with the crushing weight of its all around her.
She awoke coughing up seawater in a chamber so dark that she believed she was dead for a long time. Then her body began to hurt and she realized that she could hardly hear at all and her ear drums were hurting. It was a terrific pain that pierced into her head. A foul smell surrounded her, like being buried inside a fisherman's catch.
"Must be some...sort of...undersea cave," she gasped, feeling the tide pulling at her legs. She pulled herself onto slick, spongy rocks. Her clothes had been torn away in the current. Her long legs were bruised and there were odd scratches on her arms.
She hauled herself onto her hands and knees and coughed out more of the seawater. Her vision was slowly adjusting to the darkness in the cavern and she realized it was not completely black. Tiny blue lights winked on and off beneath the water. Red, pink, and purple glows danced around the edge and tickled at her toes that still dangled in the water.
She realized they were tiny crustaceans. She was not afraid of such things, growing up in a kingdom of fishermen, so she scooped some into her hand and held them up to see the inside of the cave. The light was just strong enough that when she drew close to the interior wall she saw something that terrified her.
"Carvings," she whispered.
The walls were covered with carvings. The stone, almost like ivory, was polished by the hands of one or more skilled carvers. The figures were a strange mixture of humans, mostly women, and fish-headed men. The likenesses were uncanny and the acts they depicted, some violent
and some lewd, turned her stomach.
The sculptures reminded her of the much simpler idols of the murklings that used to live in the dark seaside caves along the Iron Coast. Those beasties were only the size of a tot and not much danger to a human. They were considered pests and had gone extinct long before Livia was born into the world. She only knew of them from old books and some of the carvings that were traded as curios among fishermen.
"Does this cave belong to some relative of the murklings?" she whispered to herself. "The ones in the carvings are at least as tall as a human. That is like no murkling I have ever heard tale of."
The small carvings served as part of some grander mural and as she lifted her light-filled hand she began to see the shape of a vast depiction of a much larger being with humans and fish-headed humanoids gathered at its feet. The crustaceans cupped in her hands began to flicker and die and their light faded to nothing. Cast back into darkness, she could only follow the glow of the water in the hopes of finding more of the luminescent creatures.
Livia approached the gently pulsing glow of the swarms of crustaceans. She fell to her knees beside the lapping water and reached down to scoop out more of the tiny shrimp. As her hands approached the surface of the water the entire swarm of crustaceans blinked into darkness. She stared into the sudden blackness.
"They didn't do that the first time," said Livia. "I wonder what spooked them th-"
A bright blue light flashed beneath the water, dazzling her vision and making her cringe away from the water's edge. The light flashed again, casting the cave into momentarily sharp relief. Livia trembled in fear and backed away from the edge of the cave's entrance. A third flash was accompanied by a surge of water that washed over Livia's naked body.
Livia stared in horror as a massive, pale-skinned beast heaved itself out of the sea and into the cave. It possessed a long, cylindrical body which it lifted almost upright, pulling itself onto the rocks at Livia's feet with huge tentacles that pulsed with blue light. Black eyes regarded her with malevolence as the creature pulled itself fully into the cave and towered above her. A beaked mouth, big enough to swallow her whole, snapped open and closed.
Livia was too terrified to scream. She scurried away from the creature, slipping over rocks and sliding down into a trough in the smooth floor. She fell into a shallow pool of water and knocked the air out of her lungs. The massive squid-thing followed after her, tentacle-lights waving in the air and cycling from blue to red and back again.
There was no more time to run. Nowhere to go in the dark cave. The young princess stared up in hopeless awe as the squid-thing reared up on its muscular tentacles and snapped its hungry beak. It held its tentacles poised to strike. They swayed from side to side and flashed with hypnotic light that the young princess could not look away from.
The cold, sticky tentacles slowly wrapped around Livia. She could not move to defend herself, simply watch, frozen in terror, as the sea creature imprisoned her in the powerful grasp of its appendages. If she had hoped for a quick end, it did not come, as the foul beast lifted her off the floor and held her suspended from its tentacles. Her body became slick with the mucus produced by its limbs and these began to slither against her, wrapping her arms and spreading her legs. A glowing tendril caressed her inner thigh and slid against the princess's pink furrow.
Any pleasure she felt from the alien touch of the tendril was more than offset by the fear paralyzing her body. Tendrils wound around the tan caps of her nipples and plucked at her pert breasts. More squirmed the crescent of her ass and slicked her tender hole with their foul mucus. She stared past the hypnotic lights of the beast's tendrils and into the dark circles of its beastly eyes. There was a hateful intelligence there, stroking her and teasing her for its amusement.
Worse than the terror of being caressed by the alien appendages of the squid-thing, was the pleasure that it brought to her. Its suction cups plucked at the firm curve of her bottom and caressed her inner thighs. Delicate tendril-tips teased the swollen lips of her sex and lashed the bud of her clit. They squirmed between her firm cheeks and felt like tiny tongues lapping at the pink wrinkle of her anus. Caught in the rapture of its swarming tendrils, Livia felt sick with fear at what might happen next.
Her nausea only grew when a strange, pink tendril extended from beneath the squid-thing's pale trunk. The tentacles around her legs tightened their grip and the creature pulled her legs so wide apart that she was afraid they would be wrenched out of their sockets. The pink tendril slid closer. Thick, white mucus dripped from the bulging tip of the foul appendage.
Through her pain, Livia knew what the monster intended. It was said that krakens took women into the deep and used their bodies for pleasure before devouring them. If this was a kraken, then would inflict unspeakable depravity on the princess before swallowing her up.
"Nooo," the princess managed to moan as the squid-thing took aim at her virginal cove.
Her body tensed with involuntary pleasure. The tendrils around her nipples wound tighter and stretched her tender breasts. Her heart pounded and she clenched her inner muscles against what surely would be a painful intrusion. Far from being resigned to her fate, the terror-stricken princess tried to fight against the hypnotic power of the beast and throw the powerful tentacles from her arms and legs.
All of her struggling only seemed to amuse the squid-thing as the bulbous head of its breeding tendril pressed so close that the surprisingly warm mucus from it splattered over Livia's thighs. She tried to close her eyes, to endure the horror without being forced to look upon it, but the hypnotic lights would not even grant her this small mercy. She was forced to watch as the head of the squid-thing's monstrous cock took aim at her precious cove and...
The creature froze as if unable to plunge its tendril into the princess to claim her maidenhead. The lights at the ends of the squid-thing's tentacles faded and lost their hypnotic effect. Livia blinked away the haze over her mind.
The squid-thing shook violently, its tentacles tightening so much it felt as if they might crush Livia. A sound like steam whistling out of a kettle escaped the pale beast and it dropped the princess onto the rocks. She was stunned by the fall and could only watch as it began to trash its tendrils. Hurt and out of breath, she just managed to avoid being crushed by it as it turned the quivering trunk of its hideous body.
A man was clinging to the back of the kraken, fighting to hold onto the limp quill of its main fin as the kraken wildly twisted and thrashed. The princess could not clearly see the man in the midst of the chaos, but she could see that he drove a trident into the kraken's body again and again. Blue blood spilled out of the injuries he was inflicting. The kraken screamed again with the voice of a kettle, so loud it hurt Livia's ears. It thrashed again and managed to fling the man off its back. The kraken's glowing tendrils flashed an angry red and it emitted several bright pulses of light, followed by a useless spurt of defensive ink onto the floor. With a last whistle, it heaved itself into the water and disappeared.
The cave was once more plunged into darkness. In the disoriented silence that followed the kraken's departure, Livia listened to her own ragged breathing and the shifting of something else, or someone else, inside the cave. She remembered the strange man. He had saved her from the kraken. Was he a friend? Where had he come from?
"Hello? Are you there?" Livia's whispered words hissed strangely within the water-sealed cave. She reached out her hand in the darkness and felt something cool and smooth beneath her fingers. It gave when she pressed on it. "Is that you? Are you alive?"
She was answered by a soft voice, almost feminine, in a language that she could not understand. She could not even be sure it was speaking in words as the sound reminded her of the crash of distant surf. It spoke more loudly and its language worked a sort of magic over the cave, causing natural-seeming globules on the walls and ceiling to burst into white-green radiance.
Livia resisted the urge to scream at the creature that stood beside her. She
realized she had been touching his webbed foot. Her gaze traveled up his muscular legs, over his tight loincloth and scaly belt, up his slender torso, with shoulders that seemed set back from the line of his hips, to the hideous, black-eyed face of a deep-sea fish, complete with a fin atop his head.
The resemblance to a murkling was undeniable. His mouth opened and closed, exposing a nest of needle-like teeth. He flicked a serrated pink tongue and spoke again in that same voice like the sighing of the sea.
He reached a hand down and took hold of Livia by her shoulder. He was deceptively strong and lifted her to her feet with ease. He stood a head taller than her. Livia was pinned by the intensity of his black-eyed gaze. She took in the smoothness of his gray flesh and the pink flaring of the gills on his wide neck.
"Th-thank you, for, um, for saving me," said the princess. "I dare not think of what would have happened to me if...ummm..."
He reached a webbed hand out, not unlike a man's but tipped with curved black nails, and he stroked the glistening curve of Livia's breast. His claw trailed lightly from one breast to the other, the hard hooks plucking at her nipples and causing them to stiffen.
She took a half-step back and the creature followed her. His jaws opened and closed and he spoke in his soft language, words flowing into words, so that the meaning of what he was saying was indecipherable to her. Livia continued to slowly back away as he continued to come towards her.
"I appreciate...you...saved me...but...."
Her bare bottom collided with the slick wall of the cave. There was nowhere left for her retreat. The glowing orb hanging above them cast long shadows on the floor of the cave. The fish-man stopped a pace away from her and his webbed fingers went to the belt around his slender waist. He opened the belt and untied the loincloth and exposed a strange dark-blue phallus.
Princess to Pleasure Slave Collection: The Forbidden Book of Monstrous Pleasures Page 5