Page 79 of The Kingdom of Flames

Now, he rode in a carriage. Lord of all he saw. Purveying his domain.

It was Celestine who pulled the carriage.

The riding whip, half stick, half lash, danced across her back. Where once she had felt pleasure, there was only pain. Pain with the promise of more.

“Faster,” her master commanded.

Celestine grunted, walking as hard as she could, but it was impossible. Her legs and arms were bound. She could only take steps of maybe six inches. The single-seat palanquin behind her. Every movement was agony. Every moment a further degradation that held only pleasure for the one abusing her.

Aidric…save me. Yet the mirror-faced captain was nowhere to be seen.

A bit was between her teeth, her head was encased in bindings, and the back of her collar ran a yellow rope that looped down her spine, keeping her posture rigidly upright.

Her muscles strained, obeying the bit, and his commands all working against each other. The entirety of her body was a mass of lash marks. Another crack of the whip sang through the air, stinging her buttocks, and she picked up her pace.

“Good,” Tristien said. Celestine could not turn. She could only walk forward. She had been at this for two hours. The road was smooth, finely manicured, but no citizens of the Yellow Banner were anywhere. Not in the fields. Only in their homes.

Celestine felt shame even without an audience. There was no devotion here, no lesson to be learned except that he was life and death itself.

They labored further. She hadn’t had water since this morning, and her head swam in a daze. Finally, she collapsed to her knees, body still bound tightly around her. Tristien stepped down from the carriage, his circlet hissing with the sound of whips; the screams of the tormented. He stood over her.

“Pathetic,” Tristien stared down. The riding crop came out, and he beat her with an abandoned fury. Celestine tried to cry out, but the gag in her mouth only emitted the coughing spray of saliva.

His strikes were usually strong and practiced. But now they were careless. Each time he struck her, her body broke under his yoke. She had not been allowed to move, to see anything, to live in darkness. Now, the light of his crown hurt her eyes.

What a mistake I have made. I dug my grave with that circlet.

Whatever had doted upon her that was gone now. Tristien beat her until she collapsed on the ground. Celestine wished it would end now, that oblivion would come. Yet even that he denied her.

“Now,” he spoke down to her. “Continue. We’re going to be late.”

Late? Celestine tried to turn her head, but each time she did, the rope went tight, flexing against the hook in her rear.

“There is no one,” Tristien stated, slapping her flank with the impatience of a cruel stableman as she rose. “The world shines with my might, with my allowance. You thought you would shape it with your wishes?”

Celestine continued walking, her mind going to that soft, blank place where she felt nothing. A place that used to be comfort but now held only the emptiness of the void. Each time she began to settle into a pace, pulling the intense weight of the single rider carriage, reduced to a pack animal, he knew it. Tristien would bring her back to reality with the bite of his whips.

No one was out on the roads. The estates were as if no one lived here, but in the wind, she heard soft clanks of metal, people hiding indoors, trying to batter their doors.

Celestine pulled for hours. When they finally stopped near the ocean, Tristien stepped down and unhooked her. The merciful relief of the instrument leaving her rear was the reprieve she so badly needed. He dropped a waterskin on the ground, and with bound hands to her side, she crawled to it, trying to bring her mouth to the trickling water.

“You can’t do anything, can you?” Tristien scoffed. He bent low, dribbling water in her mouth. “Swallow. No, you’re choking. I said swallow!” he slapped her. She tried to do as he asked. But her jaw wouldn’t move, and the labor of bringing them here wore her down. This was his way. He kept her in darkness so the sun hurt her eyes. He labored her, so the water was all she wanted and she couldn’t have.

Finally, he undid the bit in her mouth and looped a leash around her neck. “Come, come,” he said.

She didn’t dare stand. Celestine crawled behind him, her knees splitting and rubbing raw on the gravel and harsh stone near the hillside. They walked on a pathway, taking them to a beach.

After days in darkness, the ocean was a beautiful sight. Celestine wept through her gag. What had once been a world of silken whips and ribbon bindings was now dirty metal.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Tristien asked. Celestine glanced up from the ground where she crouched. Tristien, or Lord Solis as he demanded he be called now, was terrible and to behold.

When she had met him, he was a lean and tall aristocrat, beautiful. Demanding, yes, controlling, absolutely. She had been well on her way to being completely shaped by him. The needs he had within him morphed him. But they came on slow and steady, and it was a journey she had been glad to take, abandoning portions of herself, becoming only for his devotion and usage.

Now, he was slavery incarnate. Denial, not of her climax or his body, but of hope. This was the fuel for his lust. She couldn't muster the energy to hate. She was too abused to resent. Here now, watching this beautiful ocean, where maybe across the sea her home and the banners of the Painted Realm lay, it was too much.

Tristien showed her beauty so he could deny it. He choked her, not for her to taste his control, but to deny her air itself.

“Yes, Lord Solis.”

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