However, her goblin lover had a will as inflexible as iron and an imagination as slippery as stream-bottom rocks. He had no intention of letting her suffering end so easily. Instead, with a maniacal grin, he fetched the rope from the far wall and looped it twice on the iron chandelier above the table. Laya could not fathom his purpose until he unhooked her left leg from under the table and lifted it into the air, taking care as he did so not to shake the candles still burning on her breasts. He tied the first leg in place, then, with the other end of the rope, did the same to her right leg. Now both her legs pointed to the ceiling, spread by the width of the chandelier, so that her wax coated clit lay open between them.
And still he was not done with her. He found two more candles, long ones, and brought them to her lewdly displayed crotch. He chipped away some of the wax, exposing the hole of her cunt. With a swift movement, he drove the stem of the candle into her sheath.
Unprepared for the assault, Laya emitted a squeal of shock.
“What are you doing?” she cried, only to scream again, this time when he plunged the other candle into her anus.
Laya squirmed in discomfort. The candles on her breasts punished her with hot splatters of burning wax. Tears stung her eyes and she groaned with the effort to still herself.
“What are you doing to me?” she repeated.
“Why, putting you to good use, little elf,” laughed Akraz. “You were the one who complained I valued you less than a candlestick. Now you can feel equal to one.”
So saying, he lit the last two candles, the one in her anus and the one jutting from her cunt.
“You will not move from this position until all of the candles have burned out on their own. If you snuff out one of the candles, I will spank you and light a new one in its place, until you succeed in following my orders.”
“But what are you going to do while I lie here, burning?” she demanded.
“What would you expect me to do by candlelight? Read a good book, of course,” he replied. She had not noticed any books in his den, but somehow he had procured one when she hadn’t noticed, and he waved it in her face.
“But—” she began.
“Oh I almost forgot,” he added, pulling out another candle. “We really must get you over your oral phobia. But until you are able to take a real cock in you mouth, perhaps this will help train you to it.”
He placed the end of the candle into her mouth and lit it. “Don’t move,” he warned again. “I don’t like my light to shake while I read. It makes me queasy.”
She couldn’t believe it until he did it. While she squirmed and itched with unmet needs, candles burning in all orifices, he calmly read a musty old tome written in some dead human language.
The slow meltdown of the candles coated her sexual parts in successive shells of wax. Where it landed on virgin flesh, it caused her to jerk and jump in surprise. Where it built up into cool, hard shells, it caused the flesh beneath to itch. Her furtive squirming grew bolder and bolder, especially since Akraz seemed absorbed in his dratted book. When she was sure he wasn’t looking, she finally dared to lift her right arm from its uncomfortable position over her head in order to scratch a particularly bothersome spot on her pubis.
Her knuckles accidentally brushed the candle in her anus, knocking it from its post to the floor with a clatter. Laya froze.
Akraz glanced up from his book. A fiendish smile spread over his face. “Naughty, naughty girl. What did I tell you about how I would punish such an infraction?”
“Mmmmf mmmf mmf,” begged Laya around the candle gagging her.
He replaced the candle with a hard thrust that made her grunt. He relit it. “Now for your spanking.”
She though he would use his hand again, but he lifted the heavy book and smacked her raised buttocks with it. The candles in both her nether orifices seemed to sink deeper into her with the impact. All the candles shook along with her body, despite Laya’s best efforts to maintain her balance.
Again, he brought down the book on bottom. It flamed with a heat more diffuse than that of the hot wax. She bit hard against the candle in her mouth.
A third time he spanked her with the book. Each time, the feeling built upon the previous smacks, cresting into something greater than any one blow. To her relief, he sat down again and resumed reading the instrument of her torment.
Much later, after Akraz had finally unbound her, Laya snuggled in his arms on a great mound of pillows. His face had reverted by now, and he snored though his bulbous pig-shaped nose. She stared at his hideous profile, reflecting that she hardly saw him as ugly even when in his monster form. She saw only his true face, the face of the man beneath the monster.
It was not his fault he could not love her. He had never learned how. She could not even hate him for killing Lathaniel. To Akraz a person was either a possession, a master or an enemy. She was his possession; Zathstragomal was his master, and that had made Lathaniel his enemy.
She could not hate Akraz; but she dared not love him either. She had a duty to her people, to her dead friend and to herself. She had to live by the rule of honor. No matter how tempting it might be while she writhed under his touch to dream of abandoning herself forever to being his plaything, she had to remember she was a warrior of Sylvindell.
The door unlocks from the inside, he’d told her. She would see about that.
The instant he awakened from a troubled sleep, Akraz knew she was gone. He leapt to his feet and lit a candle to be sure. The cavernous den showed no sign of her and the deadbolt across the door had not been replaced.
She left me.
He fought down panic. Akraz had hoped Laya would have the good sense to be too frightened to try to escape the subterranean hell of Mount Murk by herself. He should have known better. Terrors of all the things that could befall her assaulted him. He must find her, and soon. Before someone else—or something else—found her first.
Grudgingly, Akraz admitted that Laya had come much further than he’d ever expected. She had threaded her way through the densely packed military barracks, through the lower warrens filled with goblin women and children, through levels filled with smoky factories and smitheries and dungeons. He had been so busy enjoying the sumptuous innocence of her body, that he had forgotten she was also Nemesis, expert tracker and stalker.
Furthermore, she obviously knew about the Sticky Tunnels, the secret maze of caves that even most goblins knew nothing about. The Sticky Tunnels were the only underland route out of the valley below Mount Murk. The mountain passes otherwise all crossed beneath the baneful eye of Zathstragomal’s tower.
All well and good. But how in the name of the Thirteen Hells did Laya think she was going to pass through the Sticky Tunnels by herself?
Akraz tracked Laya’s trail deeper and deeper underground, until he reached the level where noxious fumes more often than not crowded out the breathable air. As a goblin, he could deal with it, but he worried about Laya.
He slowed down when he saw the first wisps of webbing draping the cave walls. The Sticky Tunnels commenced here. The further in he ventured, the more webbing clung to the walls, until soon the stone could not be seen for the hazy curtains of gooey thread. Larger, intact webs crisscrossed the corridors, sometimes blocking the path completely. Red-eyed things skittered in the dark, always out of sight of the torch that Akraz held.
Her spore was harder to follow here. Other, fresher marks, obscured it, a disturbing notion. The only good news was that he was closing on her. Originally he had trailed her by several hours, now less than one.