Aanvil & Corset Chapter 1: JARED I Jared dealt in human flesh like his father before him, the fabled founder of the Dark Company of Slavers , Jed the Kidnapper. He pondered his father's tale as he drove his latest load towards Blackstone where tales of firerock veins wide as a river had made a boom town of the remote mining outpost. The men amassed there with their filthy garments and bursting purses from the sale of firerock to meet the military's war demands would need the products he was importing. His haul was mostly women and children; the former to be the mens' relief, the latter to cook and clean for them. The men had already been sold . The strongest went to the arena, destined to fight for sport as entertainment for the people, a spectacle put for them by their king as his gift to them. Those unfit for the arena but still good for war were sold to the king's legion to become generals or cannon fodder, as each made that choice their own each battle by the fierceness they displayed. That, plus the sum of bouts survived was how the legion organized its ranking. Each man had a name, a commander, and a number, so that a man named John under the general Maximus in his 11th battle was John Maximus 10 until his name changed or he died with it. The elders suffered the worst. Unfit to fight or work, some were sold to scientists, others were put to death; the saddest were left behind to rot in shame: those doomed to live after seeing their families taken away in cages. The remainder were dead.
Those who resisted conscription or refused to die as bloodied clowns or fall victim to experiments; all fell to the hounds in hunts his slavers were practiced at, the empire licensing their craft but punishing objectors of conscience summarily. Chapter 2: AANVIL I Aanvil was enjoying the chill of the morning dew on his back as he sipped his coffee when he first heard the caravan approaching.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and waited for the metal in his crucible to melt as he kept an eye on the slavers bringing their wares into town. That's when he saw her in the breeders cage, so named for it contained the women destined for their buyer's bed chambers. He noticed that she did not look towards the ground like the others within the cages. Instead, her eyes seemed to pierce him as she was pulled past his stall, as if she were calling out to him in the only way she dared.
Her gaze served as her prayer to him, for she'd allowed herself to hope. The slavers' wagon and their cargo came to stop outside his store where he made implements for mining, though he was known to tinker in arms and armor when coin or occasion called. It's driver called out to him. “Ay, smithie, my men need their weapons and armor repaired, and my horses need shoes, what say you, how many gold pieces for the lot, fifteen men, a horse for each of them, and four more for the wagon.” “A gold piece per man, and a silver each for the shoes”. “Good god smithie! Fifteen gold pieces to hammer out some bent swords and dented plate, that's more than we aim to gain by this entire venture! Surely we have something else you for which you might strike a bargain?” He asked, nodding towards the foremost cage in which the staring woman sat. “How much for the one who stares.” The slavemaster looked over his wares and spotted the one in question, the he-bitch he'd picked up in Ithlantar for half a dozen silver. “That's not a woman Smithie, she's a rooster in hen's clothing, the kind that looks like she would have one thing between her legs when she has another.” Aanvil was taken aback, but unperturbed. He'd heard stories of such folk before.
Some said they were spellborn, a race cursed to inhabit the rift between men and women by a powerful magic cast upon deserters by the fertility goddess Alhena that caused their wives to give birth to similarly soft sons so as to multiply their father's shame. “I'll take the spellborn, and the silver”, the blacksmith Aanvil pitched the slavedriver. “You're a shrewd man smithie! Take out the he-wench!” Jared barked at his first man Atmos, who in turn barked it at his squire Cobb, a boy not much younger than the girl he'd just been told to release. Cobb approached the boygirl with wild eyes to unlatch the lock that caged her. He reached into his shirt a pulled out a key hidden on a necklace fashioned from a strap of minotaur hide, a leather so tough only a darkenglass blade can work it, so fine was the edge required. The boy threw open the cage door causing the spellborn girl to cower, pressing back against the others who shuddered at her touch. She'd been let out before, and things had not gone pleasantly, so she recoiled in spite of herself, despite her intuition that the large man who kept the fire was buying her as she'd hoped.
She'd had a premonition about the one who dwelled there at the source of that distant flame. It'd come to her as a vision: that someone there would save her; so she'd begun to visualize her fate taking just such a path. She whispered to him with her mind, asking him to save her, as far back as when his hearth seemed a firefly in the distance towards which her captors drove: a desperate spellborn's prayer. Cobb lost his patience with the halfgirl and began cajoling her out of the kennel the way a houndsman does a dog. “Here halfgirl, come out here, the nice man wants to buy you. C'mon little one, it's alright”. One does not squire long in the Dark Company of Slavers with their compassion still intact. Being spoken to like a dog awoke Corset from her trance; that living death that befalls slaves when their freedom becomes a dream changing from a distant hope into a painful memory. She gripped the wooden bars at either side of the open door and slid herself out so her feet were hanging inches above the ground, but her body was so weakened from the journey that her legs gave out from under her when she tried to stand and she collapsed at Cobb's feet.
Chapter 3: CORSET I The road from Ithlantar had been rough on her, as had her time before being taken by the slavers, and indeed, her entire life. She been born in a brothel to the favorite whore of King Mathias, a cruel lord named John of Pathophys, a baron married to the King's cousin; the man who became her owner from birth.
He'd waited until the dawn of her eighteenth year as dictated by law, appearing in her room only moments before firstshine. His attentions were not unwanted. She'd grown up with full knowledge of the work that she was destined for, and felt more vexed than thankful for the king's law that prevented even spell born girls from being deflowered before their eighteenth yeardawn, an edict he'd put in place himself on the first day of his rule by royal decree that saw it posted far and wide. The people wondered at the king's rule in this regard silently, for questioning his dictate openly was to court death; Mathias being better known for his pride than his progressiveness towards women. What rumor did arise there-towards spoke of acts taken in princehood that made the king so disposed, but royal rumors spread dangerously, so that was all there was. And so Corset had grown to long for the day Lord Pathophys would come for her, yet when that day arrived she knew better than to let on that she wanted it as much as him, fearing knowledge of her enjoyment would enrage him by diminishing his, as he was a man who got off playing the villain, a thing she learned growing up in the back rooms of the brothel listening through the walls. Thus Corset played the virgin slave girl trying to slip away, fighting what she'd been waiting for since her sexuality first awakened. At last he was there. “Come here my little bastard princess, my king's bastard half-daughter, I wonder if he knew of you, would he come here to rescue his bastard blood or fuck you himself like the pervert he is? Do you know he was my best customer before you sow of a mother got pregnant with you? He so did enjoy her before that, she was his favorite wench. That's how I know your blood is royal, my royal little whore! I kept her on reserve for him, just like you'll be kept for me and the other nobles who fancy fucking a king's daughter!” Her mother had told her stories of the king's visit and how they'd stopped abruptly after she fell pregnant with her, how until then they'd been frequent and loving and he'd been the only one she'd been with aside from Pathophys since Mathias fist laid eyes on her. Chapter 4: AANVIL & CORSET I The memory of her first night as a woman was far away from her now. Now, she laid in a heap collapsed at Cobb the squire's feet, who, as if he'd done to dozens of women before her, picked her up on her feet and smacked her hard once across the face, telling her to behave.
Aanvil stood up and stepped around his metalworking table in response to the strike. “If I wanted my meat tenderized, boy, I'm perfectly capable”, he warned him, gesturing with the hammer. “Of course master Smithie, my apologies, it's just she was trying to act lame for you. Can't have her faking just so you'll take it easy on her.” “I appreciate the thought, son, but you needn't worry, she won't need to fake anything with me anytime soon”. “What's your name princess”, he addressed the spellborn girl who seemed less confident now than when she stared at him in her cage. “C-Corset...” she managed to squeak out. “Corset what?” “Corset, Master.”