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The depths of the ochre temple remained unlit by anything but the iron glowing red, standing tall in front of the stone, blood-drenched altar to Bhaal. The gray world of darkvision illuminated the rest of the squalid temple. Awaiting her punishment for the failure east of Reithwin, Minthara knelt in front of the slab of rock. Her armor and weapons were discarded at the entrance to the deep temple, to where the Absolute’s vessel kept her creature comforts swabbed in crimson.
Nude and made to wait, she knelt with head dipped toward the altar. Scars all over her legs and ankles from previous encounters brushed against rocks underneath her.
Minthara had considered before how odd it was to have a Bhaalist within the Absolute’s inner circle, but every time she did so a wave of psychic displeasure crushed the thought. It was not her place, she knew, to doubt the Absolute.
Nor was it her place to doubt Orin, who had made Minthara more than a subordinate. Upon their first encounter together, there was a manic energy behind Orin’s whims that stunned and drew Minthara to the pale creature. Powerful, violent, and more forward than even the cleverest Matrons of Menzoberranzan, Orin the Red was a bestial woman that exuded domination from all her pores.
As a once Lolth-sworn drow, Minthara knew the sight of power when she saw it and knew when to bend her knee in supplication and in pleasure. Even Matrons must submit to the Spider Queen, after all.
“It is good to see you safely in my net again, my precious web spinner.”
When Minthara heard the venomous tongue use the pet name she’d bestowed upon her, a cloak of cold spread itself over her. Her hands turned to ice, useless in her lap, and her lips felt numb. Her bare legs felt even stiffer than before. Orin’s domination had not only enthralled Minthara, it ensnared her. The creature’s words turned her brittle and reminded her of serving Matrons in the Underdark.
As Orin stepped into view beside the burning iron, a psychic and physical compulsion bent Minthara’s head farther down. Her body immediately deferred to her mistress, her master, and her mind surrendered to the Absolute as well as the knife-toothed grin splitting Orin’s face.
“It is good that you already understand what this is to be,” Orin said as she hopped up onto the altar stained black. “A mind-slave is only worthy when she wears meat-bruises on her knees. Come, what do you have to say to me?”
“I have failed you.” The lancing pain in her mind forced her to drop lower until she was bent on hands and knees before Orin. “Mistress, I have failed you and the Absolute.”
“I see.”
Orin slipped from the stone and walked with calculated sloth around Minthara. As she moved, Minthara’s eyes wandered against her better judgment. The red flesh armor revealed much of Orin’s lithe form, icy skin that nearly burned to the touch. Her legs dipped out of view, unmarred in contrast to Minthara’s scar-slashed thighs and feet. As Orin stepped behind her bowing form, the sound of a knife’s tang clacking against a bone sheath rang through the room.
“And do you remember what happens when you fail your mistress?” A cool, sharp pin pressed against the curve of Minthara’s spine. The knife danced on her skin in taps, leaving behind dots of blood as Orin opened her back in a dozen tiny places. “Have you lost the use of your pathetic bile-tongue as well, web spinner? The slave speaks when spoken to.”
“I apologize, mistress. One such as I must be reminded of what has been done.”
"And how long shall the punishment be?"
Minthara hesitated. Heat welled between her legs at the thought, thinking of what would most warm her. "It should be permanent."
A vile surge of need coursed through Minthara, one that touched her with frigid hands as it did in the days when she was whipped by a displeased Matron. Though an odd compulsion forced her to kneel, a deeper part of her — the purely Minthara part of her body — was eager to please Orin. Desperate to feel pride from Orin, only to feel disappointment. Shame.
Fear.
A lifelong fear that she would be reduced to nothing more than her House’s name flashed whenever Orin spoke of her displeasure. Without this, she would be nothing again. Though she was a True Soul, the power paled to the pleasure and delight of the Bhaalspawn. Minthara closed her eyes as the knife dipped into her skin, a penitent pain that she endured and cherished. Heat and pressure built between her legs from little more than her deserved punishment.
“Plain apologies are spoken by spine-bereft weaklings. Speak clearly now, slave, and explain how you betrayed me.” Orin needled her knife into a nest of scars above Minthara’s right hip bone. Blood wept from where she dug in harder.
“I have failed in the task you gave me, mistress,” she said, her voice cracking, “and it will not happen again.”
“Will it not? You said the same not long ago. Now look at you here.” The knife slipped out of her, a blinding white pain oozing along her skin where Orin left another mark on her body. Another mark to gaze at longingly on lonely nights when they parted once more. “Are you now worthless to me? Should I prepare to bury forever the lust-memories of your place at my feet?”
Closing her eyes, Minthara whispered, “Please, no.”
“Then how shall I make you understand that failure is unacceptable?”
“Whichever way most pleases you and the Absolute.”
A foul death rattle of a laugh answered her. A word formed on the curve of her lower back where Orin’s knife taught her its lesson, defining Minthara with five letters. Slave. Inked in blood, permanently scarred into her flesh as the trail of lettering bled in blissful stripes down her legs. Orin giggled as she carved the slave mark into Minthara's back.
Healing could remove the scarring. A simple laying of hands would destroy all of Orin’s decorations on her legs and now back. She wanted none of the healing, and all of the wounds.
Minthara hummed against her closed mouth in pain, gritting her teeth as Orin cast aside her knife to approach the smoldering, red-hot iron in the center of the room. Picking up the slender frame of metal, she met Minthara’s curious gaze, eyes now open. Orin’s face was a visage of her god — a grin of sharpened bone, teeth stained yellow with old blood that never washed out.
Skin froze all over Minthara as Orin straddled the altar again, her legs dipping over one at a time before she sat herself down. Spreading her legs wider and wider, revealing the crease between thighs that Minthara failed to will her eyes to look away from, Orin cackled with sinister glee. She spun the iron rod in her hands twice in a full circle, staring at it like an artist inspecting her finest tools.
“Kneel here.” She pointed to the space between her legs with the iron. Minthara noticed that the tip of the rod was shaped in the crest of Bhaal, the skull and its ring of blood droplets.
Minthara crawled to her bidden place and pushed her face into Orin’s leg just to feel the cold touch of her skin again. She breathed in the aroma of fresh blood, and inhaled the musk of wetness building between Orin’s thighs.
Whatever pleasure Minthara derived from the exchange, Orin devoured with the same need and intensity.
“You know what this is, do you not, web spinner?” Orin hovered the searing tip of the iron near her face. The heat sizzled the air. “You’ve experience with flesh-branding before.”
“I have, mistress.” It came out weak, a desperate plea.
“You’ve used your fair share on those lesser than you?”
“I have.”
The iron twirled in the air, floating above the curve of her back. Without warning, Orin pressed the branding iron onto the flesh there.
Pain.
Pain was everything, it subsumed all else. It was death, it was euphoria. Fire and ice, panicking and overwhelming. Minthara’s flesh shriveled and her bones cracked apart as the unbelievable agony rocked her core, turning the arousal into a desperate need to come.
The claws of suffering reached into her skin and rived Minthara into bare nerves. She wanted to make right her mistake. She needed it until even breathing was secondary to correcting her failures.
As she screamed in pain, Orin’s hand not holding the brand forced its way into her hair and wrenched her mouth between the legs where flesh-armor retracted from Orin's body. Though cold all over, this part of the Chosen was anything but. While Minthara screamed, Orin moaned. Delighted ecstasy at delivering immeasurable pain turned Minthara into the mind-slave Orin demanded. Weak, pliant, eager for approval.
Bare, hot flesh met her mouth as she howled at the unending pain along her back. Her muscles worked without being told by her mind or Orin. She licked lips almost impossibly wet and sucked the throbbing clit she was pushed into, Minthara obediently falling to worship even as she was branded with tormenting heat. Flattening her tongue inside of Orin, she pulled back to taste the dripping slick that flooded her mouth.
“My, my,” Orin moaned above her, nails digging into Minthara’s scalp, “you might yet be a worthy slave still. Indulge in my lust-folds and I can find forgiveness my heart of hearts and— Oh. Oh, yes. Good. So good good good, slave.”
Between the pain and the taste and Orin’s praise, Minthara could feel herself falling apart. She wished to lavish her mistress with nothing but tongue and sucking mouth for unending days, months, years. Decades, centuries of searching for her approval.
When the brand unstuck itself from her skin, Minthara’s entire lower body flooded with the same pulsing mania that filled her mind. An urgent need to do nothing but spread the legs at either side of her mouth wider and please her mistress consumed her, shredding any semblance of reason for the need to taste Orin’s pleasure. If it meant she would still be in the good graces of her chosen master, she would kneel for eternity. Endure the burning suffering for as long as Orin wished.
Swallowing slick pouring into her throat, Orin’s nails dug into her shoulders. Piercing skin, the pain elicited a moan that defiled the air and warmed her mouth against Orin’s cold thighs. Slave still poured droplets of black-and-red down her legs, the Bhaal mark now seared into her flesh as well, and Minthara’s own release climbed in her weakening body.
“I feel your soul collapsing into me, darling web spinner,” Orin whined. Somehow, she always knew when Minthara was on the brink, and she always knew how to eviscerate any sense of propriety. Orin’s nails on her shoulder carved a single letter, O, into her skin. “Another mark, another one. Oh, my dear slave you wear me on your flesh so well. A tortured soul in rot and ruin.”
“Yes, mistress,” Minthara said between kisses and licks. “Ruin me.”
She greedily lapped up Orin one last time before the iron clattered to the ground beside her. Both of Orin’s hands gripped her head and forced her mouth to cling as tightly to Orin’s cunt as possible, Minthara’s nose buried in her clit. As she rode Minthara's face, Orin cackled with delight. Darkness closed in on Minthara, life fleeing her sight, and Orin moaned with the same passion as when she branded her god’s mark into a once proud servant’s skin.
As she tasted the tightening muscles around her tongue and mouth, lost to all but the sensation of hot flesh, Minthara didn’t dare breathe any longer. She licked and lapped and swallowed all she was given as if it was the taste of the Absolute's will itself, a gift from a dark god in the flesh of a mistress and her cunt. Minthara was no more in that moment, only the slave on her knees with a sweltering brand and a bleeding mark on her lower back. Burying her face in overwhelming heat, legs wrapped around Minthara's shoulders and powerful thighs forced her to endure seemingly endless moments of heat.
Buried in Orin's cunt, slick drooling into her mouth and on her face, as her nose pushed against the pulse of Orin's clit. If she were to die here, would she care? Could she?
The realization that she didn't came with another, more sinister one: it wasn’t the pleasure of her mouth that brought on Orin’s climax.
Minthara wished to suffer one thousand knives at the hands of her mistress when she realized that her suffering made Orin come. Nails digging into her scalp, legs wound around her neck, riding violently her mouth like an unbroken horse, Orin moaned and cackled and giggled with each dying breath that Minthara never tasted.
All she was given was more of her mistress. That was all she wished to know.
One day, perhaps, she would know the end of their bloody tryst. She wished their time together would not end for those centuries of torment to come. She knew, even as Orin rode her face to that choking release, that she could at least be a worthy servant to one goddess.