Chapter 18: Findings
The silence in the sacrificial chamber was glassy, brittle. Ulrika’s whip hung loose in her hand, its tip brushing the etched lines of the matrix. The crossbow in Dravion’s grip didn’t waver, its small, cruel bolt aimed squarely at Minnie’s broad chest.
“Undress,” he repeated, his voice a velvet-coated blade. “Or the tea-loving sister becomes the first verse of my tragedy.”
Minnie’s chins quivered, but her voice was steady. “Och, lad. Ye’ve made a terrible mistake. My sister’s comin’. And she doesnae take kindly to folk pointin’ things at her family.”
“Your sister is lost in a maze of stone,” Dravion sneered, though a flicker in his eye betrayed him. “Now. The garments. I wish to see the architecture of your despair.”
Ulrika’s mind raced over the geometries of violence. The distance was too great. The bolt would fly before her lash could strike. A cold, calculating part of her acknowledged the command. Survival was the priority. Betrayal could be avenged with interest later.
With a sharp, deliberate motion, she unbuckled the harness of her leather corset. It fell to the stone with a slap. She kept her amethyst eyes locked on Dravion as she unbuttoned her shirt, shrugged it off, then peeled down her breeches and boots. She stood naked before him, her jet black skin stark in the chamber’s gloom, her posture not of submission but of frigid, coiled contempt.
“There. Your tableau,” she spat. “Now lower your toy.”
“The plump one,” Dravion said, gesturing with the crossbow.
Minnie sighed, a sound of profound inconvenience. She set the brake on her trolley with a click. “A right palaver, this.” She wrestled her voluminous floral-print dress over her head, revealing a body like a rolling, pale landscape of hills and valleys, clad in a massive, practical cotton brassiere and bloomers. These too she removed, folding them neatly on her trolley shelf beside the teapot. She stood, unabashed, a monument of flesh. “Satisfied? Or d’ye need to count the moles?”
Dravion’s breath hitched. The raw, unpoetic reality of them was somehow more affecting than any sculpted ideal. This was real despair, real humiliation. It was perfect.
The moment of his rapt distraction was the width of a hair.
From the shadows of the tunnel mouth behind him, a six-inch flicker of light shot forward. Honeymuff, having trailed the group at a distance, drawn by the sounds of conflict, saw her chance. She zipped through the air, a tiny, furious comet, and landed directly on the back of Dravion’s hand holding the crossbow.
“Bad elf!” she squeaked, and sank her needle-sharp teeth into the tendon between his thumb and forefinger.
Dravion shrieked, more in surprise than pain, his hand spasming. The crossbow clattered to the ground.
Ulrika was already moving. Her whip became a blur, its crack not a warning but a conclusion. The leather coiled around Dravion’s ankles and yanked. He crashed to the stone floor, his head connecting with a damp thud. Before he could blink, Ulrika was on him, her knee driving into his spine, her hands wrenching his arms behind his back. Minnie, with surprising speed, waddled over and retrieved the crossbow, pointing it at his head with a grim steadiness.
“Try a poetic wee twitch, see what happens,” she murmured.
“You ruin everything!” Dravion wailed into the stone, his beautiful face smeared with grime.
“Aye,” Minnie agreed. “It’s a gift.”
Meanwhile, Griv led Brutehilde’s group through the intestinal tunnels, his fungus pendant bobbing. The air grew warmer, damper, and the sound of frantic, wet shuffling and panicked lowing echoed up from ahead.
“Newt pit,” Griv announced, stopping at a jagged lip of rock. “Your others. Stupid, but tasty-looking.”
Brutehilde peered over the edge. The sight below was one of surreal pandemonium. Grakthor was spinning in a circle, bellowing, blindly swatting at the slick, pale amphibians swarming over him. Scoffer sat happily in the middle, his belly a swollen drum, burping as he snatched and swallowed newts whole. Scruffulus and Elophelia were in a shadowy recess; she was on her knees, his cock buried to the hilt in her throat, her head bobbing with frantic, gagging rhythm as newts slithered over her bare thighs.
“For fuck’s sake,” Polly muttered, lighting a cigarillo.
“Grakthor!” Griv called down, cupping his scaled hands around his mouth. “You big, horned idiot! You forgot the rule!”
The Minotaur stopped spinning, peering up through the gloom. His bovine eyes widened. “Griv? Is that you?”
“Who else saves your hide from hungry slugs, eh?” the kobold cackled. “You went the way your gut said, didn’t you? I told you: always go opposite!”
Grakthor’s shoulders slumped. “I… I forgot. It felt so right to go left.”
“Your feelings are a liar with a bell on its tail,” Griv stated, as if reciting an old proverb. He began uncoiling a grimy, knotted rope from his harness. He secured one end to a stalagmite and tossed the rest over the edge. “Up! Before they learn to climb!”
One by one, they ascended. Scoffer came first, his clown shoes finding improbable purchase, his belly audibly sloshing. Then a flustered, sticky Scruffulus and a dishevelled, grinning Elophelia. Lastly, a relieved and deeply embarrassed Grakthor hauled his massive bulk up, newts still clinging to his fur. Brutehilde helped heave him over the ledge.
The reunion was brief and wordless. Brutehilde’s eyes scanned the missing faces. “Ulrika. Minnie. Dravion.”
“The fancy one went that way,” Griv piped up, pointing down a passage that smelled of ozone and old magic. “He looked… hungry. Not for cheese.”
“Then we’re not resting,” Brutehilde said, her voice leaving no room for debate. “Rest later. Retrieval now.”
They moved as a unit, a battered, bizarre procession. The passage opened into the high-domed chamber. The scene that greeted them was stark: Ulrika, nude and kneeling on Dravion’s back, her whip now a binding around his wrists. Minnie, similarly unclothed, holding the crossbow with tea-lady determination. Honeymuff buzzed triumphant circles around Dravion’s head.
For a long second, no one spoke. Tulip’s eyebrows rose. Polly’s grin was a slice of pure malice. “Well, well. Having a costume party?”
Brutehilde strode forward, her clogs echoing like judge’s gavels. She looked at her naked sister, then at the trussed, weeping noble. The black altar, the metallic door, the charged air—it all told a story grimmer than any tavern tale.
“Explain,” she commanded, her voice low.
Ulrika did, in clipped, military tones. The Sorrowing Well. The sacrificial matrix. The betrayal as key. “He was going to kill us on that stone to power the door. For his ‘tragic romance’.”
"No ... No ... you've got it all wrong!" squealed Dravion. But Brutehilde wasn't listening. The cold fury that had been simmering in her chest now crystallized into a clear, murderous intent. She bent down, her shadow engulfing Dravion. “You. Threatened. My sister.”
“It’s not personal!” Dravion blubbered. “It’s art! The tragedy of—”
Brutehilde’s fist, moving with the slow, inevitable force of a glacier, drove into the stone an inch from his face. The impact cratered the rock, sending hairline fractures racing through the sacrificial matrix. The chamber trembled. Dust sifted from the ceiling.
“It’s personal,” she said.
She straightened. “We camp here. Now. We eat. We rest. And we put this piece of shit on trial.” She looked at the colossal, sealed door. “That’s our way out. We’ll need to figure how to open it without murder. But first, justice.”
No one argued. Exhaustion, a deeper enemy than any cave worm, was upon them all. They made a rough camp away from the altar’s etched lines. Scoffer immediately began building a fire from strange, dry fungal stalks, producing a flint from his posing pouch. The fire cast flickering, monstrous shadows on the dome.
Clothes were redistributed. Ulrika dressed with stiff dignity. Minnie got back into her dress with a sigh of profound relief. “Kettle’s on,” she announced, and the familiar, hissing sputter of her portable stove was the most comforting sound in the Underworld.
As tea was brewed and passed around, the atmosphere shifted from urgency to a grim, weary settling. The adrenaline seeped away, leaving raw nerves and the glaring, shared knowledge of treachery.
Scruffulus and Elophelia, their own nerves jangling from the pit and the reunion, sought their particular solace. They retreated to a darker alcove, just beyond the firelight. She pushed him against the cold wall, her hands diving into his trousers, finding him already half-hard from the lingering thrill.
“That was exciting,” she breathed, her voice sugary with faux-innocence. “All that danger. My heart’s just pounding. I need to be thrilled!” She dropped to her knees, yanking his trousers to his ankles. His cock, long and veined, sprang up. She didn’t hesitate. She took the whole length into her mouth in one smooth, practiced motion, her lips stretching obscenely around the girth.
Scruffulus groaned, his head thudding back against the stone. “Oh, ‘Phelia… yes…” He tangled his hands in her elaborate hair, not guiding, just holding on.
Elophelia began to fuck her own face on his dick, pulling back until just the slick head popped from her lips, then plunging down until her nose pressed into his pubic hair and his helmet was probing her gullet. She gagged, tears springing to her eyes, and did it again. And again. The wet, rhythmic slapping sounds, punctuated by her choked gags and his stifled moans, echoed softly in the chamber. Spit dripped down his balls, onto the floor.
She worked him with a ruthless, desperate energy, one hand cupping his heavy sac, rolling his balls, the other reaching between her own legs to rub frantic circles over her clit through her silk dress. She was getting off on the degradation, the filth of it, the sheer animal need. The sounds grew louder, messier.
“I'm going to spend,” Scruffulus hissed, his hips beginning to stutter. “I'm about to fill your dear throat…”
She redoubled her efforts, taking him deeper, swallowing convulsively around the invading shaft. That was all it took. With a strangled cry, he erupted. Hot, bitter jets of cum shot down her throat. She swallowed desperately, greedily, milking him with tight sucks until he was soft and spent, dribbling onto her chin.
She pulled off with a final, wet pop, a strand of saliva and semen connecting her lips to his glistening cock. She smiled up at him, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Better, darling?”
The cave was vast, a cathedral of stone where their firelight seemed a blasphemous, tiny sun. Dravion sat apart, wrists bound with a silk cord Tulip had grown from a seed, his elegant face a mask of wounded pride. Every so often, he’d open his mouth, then remember his predicament—on trial for his life the next morning—and shut it with a click.
“Right,” Brutehilde boomed, her voice echoing. “We rest. Properly. Minnie, see to it.”
“Och, already on it, sister,” Wee Minnie chirped, her squeaky trolley wheels cutting through the silence. She bustled about, the kettle clanking. “A nice cuppa’ll settle the judicial humours. Even yours, Lord Fancypants.” She shot a cheerful glare at Dravion.
Polly Panzerfaust kicked off her combat boots and stretched, the fishnets sighing. “Fucking finally. My feet are killing me.” She eyed Tanna Sharp, who was meticulously polishing a gauntlet. The knight’s innocent profile, lit by fire, was at odds with the knowing curve of her smile.
“You fought well, Tanna, against all the foes we've faced” Tulip said, her green hair almost luminous in the moss-light. She leaned into Polly’s side.
“The plug helped,” Tanna said matter-of-factly, not looking up. “I could feel the rage… channeled. It was very… focusing.”
Ulrika Grimquim stood sentinel near the tunnel mouth, her Dark Elf eyes seeing deeper into the dark than the rest. “If we manage to get through that door, the path ahead converges with the Silk Marches. The arachnid clans are neutral. They respect strength and… fertility.” She glanced at Honeymuff, who was perched on Grakthor’s broad horn, chattering.
“Ooh, spiders! Intelligent ones! Do they have many babies? Do they need help with babies?” Honeymuff’s wings fluttered with excitement. Her tiny belly, rounded from her own recent encounter with a surprisingly amorous arachnid, was visibly swollen.
Grakthor the Minotaur shifted, causing Honeymuff to squeak and hover. “Sorry. It’s just… warm. The horn.”
Scoffer the Orc-god belched, the smell of fermented cave lichen filling the air. “The goblins will sing of this judgement! A poem! Ha! The thief of words has his words taken!” He slapped his leather-clad thigh, the sound like wet meat on stone.
“Quiet, Scoffer,” Brutehilde said, but it was without heat. She was rubbing her own neck, the iron balls in her hair clinking softly. “Griv. How far to the next decent crossroads?”
The Kobold looked up from a wedge of moldy cheese he’d been flattering. “Two marches, maybe three. Providing we can get through that door without sacrificing most of us, of course. Tunnel’s tight after the Marches. Smells of wet rat and old magic. Not a cheese-friendly place.”
The tea was passed around, a bitter, earthy brew Minnie insisted was “fortifying.” The fire popped. A drip fell from a stalactite in a distant corner. The exhaustion of the road and the tension of Dravion's betrayal began to melt, leaving a raw, quiet space in its wake.
Polly caught Tanna’s eye again and nodded toward a recess in the cave wall, shadowed from the main fire. The knight’s blue eyes glinted. She stood, her silver armor whispering, and followed.
The alcove was cool, private, the stone floor dusted with fine sand. The pulse of the wall-moss painted their skin in watery, shifting greens.
“You’re still wound tight,” Polly said, her voice low and rough. She backed Tanna against the wall, one hand on cold silver plate, the other pushing between the knight’s armored thighs, finding the seam. “All that righteous fury needs a better outlet.”
Tanna’s breath hitched. “Mistress Ulrika said the plug should remain for tactical readiness.”
“Fuck tactical,” Polly breathed, her mouth close to Tanna’s ear. She unclasped the side of Tanna’s fauld, the lower armor falling away with a thud. Her fingers found the tough leather of Tanna’s leggings, then the hot, damp cleft beneath. “I can feel how ready you are. Soaking through this leather. You get off on it, don't you? Beating your foes down. Being the good girl with a magic fuck-toy in her ass making her a weapon.”
Tanna moaned, a soft, helpless sound. “Yes.”
Polly kissed her, hard and demanding, biting at her lower lip. She yanked the leggings down to Tanna’s knees, the cold air a shock against the knight’s bared skin. Polly’s own skirt was already hiked, her fishnets torn at the crotch. She was wet, her cunt swollen and eager.
“Turn around,” Polly ordered, her voice gravel. “Hands on the wall.”
Tanna obeyed, the silver of her cuirass scraping against stone. Polly spat on her fingers, then pressed two, roughly, into Tanna from behind. Tanna cried out, back arching, her perfect knight’s posture breaking into a desperate curve.
“That’s it,” Polly grunted, fucking her with her fingers, feeling the tight, clutching heat. She curled them, seeking the spot that made Tanna’s legs tremble. With her other hand, she traced the base of the obsidian plug buried in Tanna’s ass. “This thing make you clench? Makes you want to be filled everywhere?”
“Gods, yes,” Tanna gasped, pushing back onto the fingers.
Polly withdrew her hand, slick with Tanna’s arousal. She sniffed a small quantity of the fungal spores up her nostrils, grinning as her clitoris lengthened into a straining cock. She guided her new temporary penis—thick, hard, summoned by the sex-crazed fungus—to Tanna’s entrance. She didn’t ask. She just pushed, a brutal, singular thrust that buried her to the hilt.
Tanna screamed, a raw, echoing sound that was swallowed by the cave. Her head dropped forward. Polly held her hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh above the armor, and set a punishing rhythm. Each slam drove Tanna’s metal-clad torso against the rock. The plug shifted with every impact, a secondary invasion.
“You’re my good, fucking weapon,” Polly panted, her own pleasure coiling tight. “My holy little cunt. Taking it all. Taking this fat fucking cock while that thing in your ass makes you crazy.”
The filthy words drove Tanna higher. She was babbling, pleas and prayers and Polly’s name. Polly could feel the knight’s inner muscles fluttering, feel the impossible tightness around her shaft compounded by the knowledge of the plug filling Tanna elsewhere. She reached around, her fingers finding Tanna’s clit, rubbing hard, fast, in rough circles.
It tipped them both over. Tanna came first, a silent, shuddering collapse that squeezed Polly like a vise. The sensation ripped Polly’s own orgasm from her, a wave of harsh, grunting release, pumping deep into the knight’s clutching depths. They stayed like that for a long moment, joined, panting, the only sounds their ragged breath and the distant hiss of the main fire.
Polly pulled out slowly. Tanna slumped against the wall, legs barely holding her. Polly helped her pull up her leggings, the gesture almost tender in its practicality.
“Still tactical?” Polly asked, a ghost of her smirk returning.
Tanna turned, her face flushed, eyes dazed and sated. “More than ever.” She turned to look at Polly with love in her eyes. “Next time … can I be the one who sprouts the cock?”
Polly grinned back in utter delight.
Back at the fire, Ulrika had not moved, but a faint, approving smirk touched her lips. Tulip was pretending to study a moss pattern, her golden skin flushed. Honeymuff was giggling, nestled in Scoffer’s matted hair. “Sounded like a good pounding! Very vigorous!”
Brutehilde ignored it all, sharpening a giant cleaver on a stone. “We rise at first watch cycle. Five hours. Sleep if you can. Then we need to sort out what to do with Lord Shit-for-brains, and how to get that door open without anyone getting killed.”
Dravion watched the two women return, Tanna walking with a slight, new looseness. A poet’s pain flashed in his eyes—to witness such visceral, unromantic passion and be condemned to only write of the fey, chaste beauty of a pixie. It was, he decided, the most exquisite torture.
As the others settled into bedrolls, Griv sidled up to Brutehilde, his nose twitching. “Boss. That wet rat smell from the tight tunnel? It’s closer now. Not rat, either. More… lizard. But clever. They’re watching. The Lurkers.”
Brutehilde’s hand stilled on the whetstone. She looked into the perfect, swallowing blackness of the tunnel ahead. The firelight did not touch it.
“Let them watch,” she said, her voice low and final. “They can watch us sleep. And then they can watch us leave. Or they can try to stop us.” She laid her rolling-pin across her knees. “My knees aren’t trembling. Let’s see if theirs do.”
Sleep took them in ragged shifts. The moss-light never changed, but Brutehilde felt the watch cycles in her bones. She woke the camp with a sharp clap of her hands that echoed like a stone cracking. “Up. Justice doesn’t wait for beauty sleep.”
A drowsy, grim assembly formed around the cold fire pit. Dravion was hauled to the center, still bound. His elegance was frayed, silk stained with cave damp and worm ichor. The others formed a loose circle, a jury of the disheveled and the dangerous. From the tunnel mouths, subtle scrapes and the faint scent of wet scale suggested Griv’s “Lurkers” were observing this surface-world ritual.
“Right,” Brutehilde began, no preamble. “The charges are betrayal and attempted murder. Your defense?”
Dravion lifted his chin. “I seek only to open the path! My methods are misinterpreted! The tragedy is in the misunderstanding, not the act!”
“Bollocks,” Polly said around a cigarillo. “You were gonna bleed them dry on that rock. We heard the whole poetic speech.”
“Circumstantial!” Dravion cried. “You lack the full context!”
Brutehilde nodded to Ulrika. “Search him. Everything.”
The dark elf governess stepped forward, her movements clinical. She patted down his silken robes, extracting a few gold coins, a dry inkwell, a lock of some unfortunate’s hair in a locket. She tossed them aside. “Nothing.”
“The shoes,” Tulip suggested, her druid senses prickling. “The kobold mentioned a sock.”
Dravion’s eyes widened. “A vulgar rumor! My hose are a private matter!”
Polly strode over, shoved him to a sitting position, and yanked off his left leather shoe. She upended it. A few pebbles fell out. She reached for the right foot. Dravion kicked, a pathetic squirm. Brutehilde planted a clog on his thigh, pinning him. Polly pulled the right shoe off, then peeled down the fine silk sock.
A small, heavy object clinked onto the stone floor.
It was a figurine, about three inches tall, carved from pure onyx. It depicted a voluptuous female form with an eerily smooth, featureless face beneath a cowled robe, one hand outstretched as if beckoning or accepting an offering. It was the spitting image of the statue upon the black dais.
Silence pooled, thick and cold.
“You stole from the Temple of the Sighing Veils,” Ulrika stated, her voice hollow with recognition. “That is a sacred icon of the Onyx Maiden. The penalty is flaying.”
Dravion sagged, all defiance bleeding out. He stared at the figurine with a mixture of terror and longing. “I had to. You don’t understand. My family… we are devotees. Have been for centuries. Our fortune, our prestige, all lent from Her midnight coffers. And now the debt is called.” A real tremor shook his voice. “I couldn’t pay. I am penniless. The only way to rekindle Her favor was to return one of Her lost children to a place of power.” He nodded to the dais. “To this place. And to open the Door of Last Lament, which is Hers. The sacrifice wasn’t murder, you fools!”
He took a heaving breath, his eyes sweeping their sceptical faces.
“You have it backwards! The matrix doesn’t want blood. It wants life. The essences of creation. Seed, cunt-juice, milk, all of it. It is a well for generative power, not death. The Onyx Maiden is a goddess of fertile darkness, of secrets sown in the deep. The door opens when the well is filled with… with spent passion.” He flushed, his poet’s soul struggling with the crude reality. “It requires an offering of sexual fluids. A communal spillage. An orgy, if you will.”
A stunned silence blanketed the chamber.
Scoffer belched. “Orgy? I like orgies. Goblins have good orgies. Lots of slapping.”
“You’re full of shit,” Polly said, but her voice lacked its usual conviction. She glanced at Tulip, who was studying the etched matrix with new, analytical interest.
“The fungal spores,” Tulip murmured. “They manipulate generative biology. It… fits a certain thematic logic. This entire cavern system could be a giant… reproductive organ for the deity.”
“I find that incredibly distasteful,” Elophelia sniffed, while Scruffulus nodded enthusiastic agreement.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dravion moaned. “The ritual requires a quorum of participants. And I… I cannot contribute. Since leaving the city, my sexual prowess has deserted me. My penis is penitent. My pips are seedless. I am functionally inert. The key is here, the well is here, but I am a dry vessel. The tragedy is complete!”
He wept, genuine tears cutting tracks through the dirt on his cheeks.
"Oops!" said Minnie, "That'll be the bromide, hen."
Brutehilde stared at him, then at the onyx figurine, then at the imposing metal door. Her pragmatism warred with a deep, instinctive revulsion. “So. To get out, we all have to… fill that bowl.”
“Precisely!” Dravion snuffled. “A symphony of climax! A chorus of release! It’s beautiful, in its way!”
“It’s a fucking mess,” Brutehilde corrected. She scanned her crew. Wee Minnie had her hands on her hips, a thoughtful frown on her round face.
“A communal… spillage, ye say?” Minnie said. “Intae the bowl. And that opens the door for good?”
“For a time, yes!” Dravion insisted. “The energy will suffice for our passage and seal itself behind us! It’s the perfect solution! No one dies! We just… partake.”
“And you cannae do your part because some bampot poisoned your tallywacker,” Minnie summarized, failing to confess that the bampot in question was her. “Right.” She turned and bustled to her trolley. “Well. That’s a problem. But every problem has a solution waitin’ in the kettle.”
She began rummaging through her myriad tin canisters, clinking and muttering. “Bromide, bromide… a suppressant. Needs a counter-irritant. Something to get the blood flowin’ again. Ignition for the pilot light.” She pulled out a small, pewter tin labelled in shaky script: FORTIFIER.
“This’ll do. A strong black tea base, with ginseng, cayenne, yohimbe bark, and a wee pinch of powdered griffon testicle. For vitality.” She set her kettle on the portable stove. The hiss of the flame was loud in the quiet. “Brews strong. Tastes like despair and pepper. But it’ll reverse a pharmaceutical-grade slump, I’d wager my last biscuit.”
The group watched, a collective numbness giving way to bizarre, practical acceptance. The reality settled upon them, heavy and strange.
“So we’re actually considering this,” Tanna said, her innocent face pale.
“Considering?” Polly barked a laugh. She ground out her cigarillo. “It’s the only key we’ve got that doesn’t involve murder. I’ve had worse Tuesday nights.” She looked at Tulip, then at Ulrika, a slow, wicked smile spreading. “Could be educational.”
Ulrika’s lips were a thin line. “The logic is sound, if blasphemous. The Onyx Maiden’s rites are often… fluid-based. I had assumed blood. This is a more typical manifestation.” She eyed Dravion. “You will drink first. A large cup. We will see if your ‘tragedy’ is reversible.”
“And if it works,” Brutehilde said, her voice a low rumble of discontent, “we get this done. Efficiently. It’s not a party. It’s a task.” She looked at the empty stone bowl atop the dais. “A messy, fucking task.”
"Messy ... fucking ... oh yes," breathed Polly with glee.
Minnie’s kettle began to whistle, a shrill, cheerful sound utterly at odds with the circumstance. She poured the dark, steaming liquid into a large mug. The smell was pungent, earthy, and sharply metallic. She carried it over to Dravion. “Down the hatch, laddie. Every drop. Then we’ll see what your ancestors’ goddess can work with.”
Dravion looked at the offered mug with terror and a desperate, gleaming hope. He opened his mouth.