Aareesha screamed out in pain, “Seventy-SEVEN! Seventy-EIGHT! Seventy-NINE! EIGHTY!”

Her waist was once again bent over the bar on the discipline frame. Her wrists and ankles were shackled to ensure her bare buttocks were completely unprotected. She was naked except for her collar. Her buttocks were a dark blazing red. Tears rained from her eyes.

Bon had locked her onto this frame, and begun paddling her, the moment they had returned to his home from the dungeon. His harsh and lengthy discipline would have been something to remember even without the runes in her collar. The excited rune made her body unnaturally sensitive to pleasure and pain, as if her entire body was an erogenous zone. His full-strength paddling had mercilessly shown her, again, what sensitivity to pain could do to her. The clear rune ensured she felt its full effect, as she was unable to go into shock. The punish rune was giving her a deep painful anguish, as she knew she had deliberately displeased her master.

Bon declared, “You think you’re a princess, but you aren’t. You’re nothing now but a stuck-up haughty bitch. You’re a foolish wench who needs to have your attitude thoroughly corrected. Remember who I am. I am your master. You are my slave. As my slave, you must obey me and please me. You must never aid my enemies.”

“Sir, master, please. Please no more. I can’t take any more. Please forgive me. I’m sorry.”

“At least you acknowledge me as your master. You have experienced some of my punishment for betraying me earlier today. It’s time for you to pleasure me, as a sign you have started to learn your lesson. I will release you from this punishment frame, and you will go to my bedroom.”

“Yes, sir, master,” she wept.

Bon put the wooden paddle back in its place. He released her. He led her up the stairs to his bedroom on the second level. She meekly followed, fearful of his discipline if she didn’t obey. He unlocked the bedroom door and waived her in. She went in, but she feared going further. He sat on the bed, staring at her still standing.

“Kneel, slave.”

“Yes, sir, master,” she said as she knelt. Hands back, tits out. Her face briefly lit with pleasure from the adore rune as a result of her obedient act. She knew the adore rune was training her to be obedient, but that didn’t prevent it from working.

Bon pulled out a locking O-ring gag and placed it in her mouth. She felt its leathery material cover her teeth. He swiftly locked the gag onto her. Aareesha offered no resistance. She found that the gag didn’t significantly interfere with her speech, but it did prevent her from biting down. He next bound her wrists behind her with handcuffs.

Bon ordered, “Suck my cock.”

Aareesha sighed. She knew this would happen sooner or later. She didn’t want to do this, but she saw no alternative. The gag and handcuffs would prevent her from harming him. They would also ensure she would eventually perform the task. She deeply feared what he might do if she disobeyed. She decided further resistance was futile. She admitted it with three simple words.

“Yes, sir, master.”

Bon pulled out his ragingly hard cock. She licked it and suckled it. She began thrusting his cock in and out of her throat. Bon felt waves of pleasure as his pressure built. Bon’s cock soon erupted. She swallowed each drop of his cum and continued to suckle his cock. She felt rune-induced pleasure. Their eyes met again. Shared pleasure gave them both a sense of happiness and peace.

Bon cooled down as Aareesha continued to gently suck his cock. Bon finally spoke.

“Thank you slave, you may stop.”

“Yes, sir, master.”

“It’s been a long day. We’ll talk more in the morning. For now, go downstairs. I will follow and lock you in the closet.”

“Yes, sir, master.”

Aareesha gingerly laid on her side on her bed. She ensured her brutalized buttocks touched nothing. Her cunt, ass, and nipples were sore. The closet interior was dark. Her only clothing tonight was her damnable collar. She was no longer gagged, but her wrists were still bound behind her by handcuffs.

Even if she could remove the cuffs, she knew she had little hope of escaping the closet, never mind the house. Even if she did, escaping Ston seemed impossible. This city had too many humans who would see and detain a lone female elf. The humans might kill her outright. She was also exhausted. The stamina rune gave her energy a boost, but after such a long day she had little energy left.

She couldn’t escape for now, so she decided to instead try to think things through. There was a lot to think about. She had important decisions to make.

Before this month she’d only lived in the world of elven society. A world where honor and pride and rank were what mattered. Where long lives gave perspective that humans could never have. Where promises of elves were always kept, as otherwise a harsh revenge would occur decades later. It was a world where ancient magic and ancient traditions reigned. Pleasures and entertainment had abounded in elven cities. Those relatively few with high status, like she had once had, never needed to work with their hands. Endless servants and slaves did all the undesirable jobs.

In elven society, not all slaves were human, but all humans were slaves. She hadn’t seen humans often when she had lived in the palace. For security reasons, only a few human slaves had been allowed near elven royalty once the war between humans and elves had begun.

There had been many slave revolts before the war. They had always been brutally put down. For centuries, rule by fear had worked well for the elven nobility. Each revolt had been addressed with torture and amputations of the rebels’ friends and more distant family members, followed by death of the rebels and their immediate families through lengthy public torture. These dissuaded future revolts, but there was more to it. Few things pleased male elves more than power, especially clear displays of power. Their love of power and its display encouraged endlessly creative and cruel acts. The elves’ power had smoothly sailed on rivers of blood.

The elves’ repeated victories had led to their overconfidence in their ability to defeat humans again and again. The elves liked having many slaves, so they had foolishly let the humans multiply. The war had begun about a century ago, before she was born, as yet another slave revolt. This time, instead of being put down, the humans’ overwhelming numbers had turned the tables. The fury of the humans, who had been terrorized for centuries by the elves, had known no bounds.

She now realized the elven world had been a world of foolish arrogance. The elven kings had ensured every princess that yes, other elven cities had fallen to the humans, but Merifuge would never be taken. Elves were superior to humans. The elven kings assured everyone that their defensive preparations would defeat the humans. Soon all humans would again be enslaved by the elves, as was proper. The kings were far older and more experienced than her, so while she had had some doubts, she had ultimately believed them.

The claims were all lies. Or at least, they were all false. They were falsehoods based on pride and arrogance. Hubris had now been fully revealed.

She was now a slave to a lowly human. A man who clearly intended for her to be a subservient and obedient elf. A man who would exploit her for his pleasure. She felt deeply degraded.

She sighed in the dark. In the end, she had known that some form of submission was always in her future, even if Merifuge had never been defeated.

She realized that humans had never really understood elves. For many centuries elves had been in control and all humans had been slaves to the elves. The humans had learned some things, of course. Humans had learned the elven tongue. Humans had learned to copy and build on elven magic. Yet humans only saw the surface. Perhaps their short lives made it impossible for humans to see deeply. Humans never did fully comprehend what it meant to be an elf.

In elven society, female elves would never marry far below their station. No female elf would have wanted it. Even if she had, no female elf would have received permission to do so from her father. A noble female elf was the most valuable commodity available in elven power politics. When a male elf of the female’s rank or higher decided he wanted some noble female elf, the negotiations for possession of her would begin.

Aareesha, like any princess, would eventually have been married to a noble male elf of her father’s choosing. There would have been negotiations of some male elf with her father, and courtly dances, and ceremonies. The dull-witted humans might be been fooled by these externalities, but elves were not. There would have been a negotiation of the bride-price, a quiet reminder that she was being purchased. She could use procedural tricks to delay the wedding, but such delays would be limited. Once the negotiations completed, Aareesha would have been wed. She would have next suffered the same fate as any elven wife.

Once any elven marriage was complete, the husband would routinely exercise his coital rights over his wife. Male elves were far stronger than female elves, so female elves could not resist their husbands. Even worse, female elves could not escape their own nature. Every time a female elf’s cunt received the seed of a male elf, she would become a little more obedient and a little more fearful of his displeasure. Eventually, after a wife was repeatedly fucked, contemplating disobedience or displeasing her husband would be torture for a female elf. It took decades to fully break a female elf this way, but elves lived for many centuries.

Elven husbands would fuck their wives often after being wed. Male elves received exceptional pleasure from fucking their wives. Female elves were designed to pleasure males. A male elf would routinely demand that his wife do her best to pleasure him. Repeatedly fucking their wives often made the male elves aggressive. Many male elves enjoyed savagely beating and raping their wives, often, in the privacy of their bedroom. The main reward to a wife for her submission, and possibly her suffering, would be his occasional granting of magical orgasmic pleasure to her. Orgasms were reputed to be amazing for female elves, but they were gifted solely at the male’s discretion. Female elves had nothing to barter for such gifts. Some female elves waited decades between such grants of pleasure from their husbands, if they were granted at all.

Elves rarely had children. The incentives for husbands to fuck their wives had not helped as one might have expected. Getting a female elf pregnant required complex and lengthy cooperation between both parents. The overdrive in male aggression made it difficult to sustain this cooperation for pregnancy. The elves’ love of pleasure and power had doomed them all.

She hadn’t been close to any male elves. Her father and brothers had considered her as a prize heifer, to be sold to the highest bidder. She did have many female elf friends. Elven social politics had made it too dangerous to trust any of them, but she did not wish evil on them. They were now almost certainly slaves themselves. She expected to never see them again. She grieved, not only for the loss of her friends, but for the loss of her whole culture.

She had lost the only way of life she’d known. She had grown accustomed to the pleasures of an elven city. Its delicate elven cuisine. Its pleasure-magics designed for elven sensibilities. It had certainly not been perfect for her. Yet, in spite of its being a gilded cage, there was an honor assigned to elven princesses. She had enjoyed the gilding. Her new future seemed to require her submission without the exotic pleasures or honors that compensated for it.

In the surprise of seeing Eeltanuu, she’d instinctively healed him so he would rescue her from Bon. She hadn’t thought through what Eeltanuu might rescue her to. Eeltanuu couldn’t undo the results of the war. He couldn’t bring her back to her old life, the life she had known. What could he offer?

Eeltanuu had been a lower-ranking member of the royal guard, but with the fall of the city, Eeltanuu must be one of its highest-ranking male survivors. By elven custom, Eeltanuu would now be considered a worthy suitor for her. Aareesha had never had any positive feelings for him. She remembered him as quick to anger and the kind of elf who acted first and thought later. He was not the kind who sought or took advice. She had certainly never wanted to belong to him. His lower rank would once have ensured its impossibility.

She now had no father or king who could protest a match to Eeltanuu on her behalf. There would be no bride-price. By elven law, Eeltanuu could claim her as his property and he would be unopposed. He could immediately complete the rituals in her presence. She would then belong to him. After she had been claimed and repeatedly fucked, her own nature would begin to compel her to appease and please him. Over a mere few decades she would increasingly feel an unstoppable driving need to obey and please him.

Aareesha hated the runes on her collar. She knew other paths of her life would have eventually led her to a similar fate. After all, the humans’ magic runes were copies and modifications of the magic that the elves employed and embodied. The humans had not fully understood their source. Elven magic and nature had been the basis for the runes.

Eeltanuu might treat her better than her human master. There were also no guarantees. Their lives as fugitive elves would be hard. They would be constantly hiding and fleeing from humans. She could easily imagine his temper flaring under those circumstances. Eeltanuu might choose to take out his frustrations by beating her, raping her, and never granting her any orgasmic release. There would be no way for her to escape her bonds if Eeltanuu did so.

She wanted to hate Bon. He had savagely disciplined her. He had forced her to suck him off. There was also the deep humiliation of having to obey a lowly human. Yet she found it hard to hate him. He had thanked her several times. She couldn’t remember any elf ever thanking a slave. Elves treated their slaves, even elven slaves, worse than Bon had treated her. Many elven males treated their wives worse than Bon had treated her.

Aareesha wondered if Bon was the better option. There was hope that Bon might not treat her too badly. Food, reliable shelter, and protection were on offer. He certainly treated her better than the elves had treated their slaves. He had never threatened amputation, blinding, or death, normal elven practices on disobedient slaves. He even gave her the same food he ate, a surprising and delightful practice to her. There was also something about his eyes. She suddenly felt pleasure when she thought about pleasing him. It was clear to her the runes were doing their work all too well. Her feelings were fiendishly complicated. Part of her hated Bon. Part of her wanted to sneak back to his bed to suck him off again.

“No!,” she thought to herself. She was going to keep resisting the runes. She sure as hell didn’t want to become subservient to a stupid human. Eeltanuu wasn’t who she had in mind as a rescuer. Still, their chance meeting suggested she might have other options than being enslaved by a human.

Why had she and Bon encountered Eeltanuu in the first place? After surviving the fall of Merifuge, Eeltanuu must have searched for a shelter that humans didn’t know about. Until recently, the humans hadn’t known about the dungeon area they’d encountered him in. She knew huge bounties were on offer for any remaining elves, dead or alive. Teams of humans were currently scouring the continent, looking for any remaining elves. Those searches may have revealed the previously-unknown dungeon as a potential hiding place. Bon preferred looting newly-discovered areas. Once someone had reported the new area, Bon had predictably gone to it, with his new healer in tow.

Aareesha was surprised that the dungeon bed’s tentacles had done no permanent damage to her body. The bed appeared to have been designed to avoid permanent damage. Her hymen had been pierced, but her insides hadn’t been permanently stretched. Still, she had no desire to ever undergo that hell again. She knew that if Bon threatened to bring her back to the dungeon to use the bed again, she would comply with nearly any command.

Perhaps she could find a way to escape by herself. Such a life would be hard. She would be forced to try to hide where humans could not find her and re-enslave her. Humans were actively looking for elves, making that difficult. She would also need to avoid the many dangers that could painfully snuff out her life. She was no warrior. She only had healing magic. She was defenseless against most threats. A single man could easily defeat her, and there were many worse dangers out there. Food and shelter would be a constant risky struggle.

Aareesha did not expect the female humans to help her. When she’d first been captured, she’d had some hope that they would.

She knew female elves and female humans had similar situations within their respective societies. Aareesha knew that like female elves, every woman had to obey her father, husband, or whoever else was her male guardian. Like female elves, women were not allowed to own property or arbitrarily select their marriage partners. A woman was typically married on her 18th birthday to a man chosen by her father. She would be barefoot and pregnant a few months later. Women were judged by their submissiveness to their male guardians, how well they sexually gratified their husbands. and the number of children they bore and raised. Women’s clothes, friends, and activities were entirely determined by their male guardians. Many women were not allowed to leave their homes without specific permission. Every human city had a public flogging area designated for women foolish enough to disobey or disrespect men. Any woman who still rebelled against men, after repeated private and public discipline sessions, was thoroughly tamed by magic runes. Women’s obedience was not always voluntary, but it was always inevitable.

As an elven princess, Aareesha had far more education than a typical human. Every grown princess, including Aareesha, could read, write, cast simple healing spells, and comprehend basic magical symbols. Aareesha was specially educated in elven music, elven genealogy, and how to pleasure elven males. Yet there were many similarities in the educational situations of female humans and female elves. Female humans, like female elves, would be brutally beaten if they were caught trying to learn educational topics beyond the limited set considered socially appropriate for females. Females had no means to safely barter for any such knowledge. Both female humans and female elves didn’t even own the clothes or jewelry they wore.

Aareesha had thought at least some women would be understanding of an enslaved female elf’s plight. Wouldn’t they? When men deserted the military, or fell into bankruptcy, Aareesha knew their wives and daughters were sold into slavery. Human whorehouses were filled with female slaves. Surely women would have some sympathy for a female elf being sold into slavery. Aareesha had even heard, in whispers, that women didn’t have magical submissiveness built into their nature that triggered when they were fucked. Aareesha had held hopes that some women would be willing to quietly help a fellow female, especially if it was true that women weren’t subjugated by innate magical submissiveness. It wasn’t much of a hope, but it had been some hope.

Aareesha’s hopes had been crushed. Every woman she’d met, while she was being transported to Ston as a prisoner, had felt no sympathy for the plight of a captured female elf. All of the women had beloved family members who had died in the war for freedom against elves. All had stories of friends and relations, both male and female, who had been maimed or killed by the elves after lengthy torture sessions. Every woman she had met harbored a deep undying hatred of elves. Every woman preferred serving men to serving elves.

Aareesha had tried to explain to the women that she had not sentenced any of their loved ones. She had never had that kind of power. The women asked her if she had ever tried to help a human. Had she begged for clemency for any humans? Tried to reduce the torture of any? Aareesha had no good answer, and the women knew it. As a princess she could have at least reduced some of their tortures. She had never even considered being kind to a human. She was terrified of the humans doling out on her even a tiny fraction of the cruelty her family had meted out to humans through the centuries.

Elves still ruled on other continents, but the risks of traveling so far were great. Multi-story waves, city-sized monsters, sudden gales, and fierce storms of magic made inter-continental travel treacherous. Few survived. She had no ship. She knew no one who had a ship or who lived on another continent. She knew of no way to even contact anyone on another continent. The only ways to communicate between continents, that she knew of, had been burned with the elven cities.

Even if she got to another continent, her life would be terrible. If a human found her, she’d probably be killed as revenge. If an elf found her, she’d probably be enslaved. A female elf’s status was entirely based on the social power of her male relatives. Her male relatives, and their city, were no more. If her luck was especially bad, she’d be turned into a whore, getting fucked during every waking moment to earn money for her elven master. If she was lucky enough to not be enslaved by an elf, her new lowly status meant she would be soon wed by a low-status male elf who had no prospects for anyone better. Her elven husband might treat her far worse than Bon. Her new low status would mean she would never have access to the pleasures she had once enjoyed.

If she stayed here, Bon would eventually break her in. She would have to obey and please a fucking lowly human. She couldn’t imagine anything more humiliating. The thought of her stooping so low made her angry.

Only poor options were available to her. She decided she would look for a chance to escape and hide alone in the hills. It would be a terrible, lonely life, but at least she wouldn’t be enslaved to a low-life human. Once she escaped, she could search for ways to remove her collar and halt the runes’ progress on her. In the meantime, she would work to not give up too much of herself, to Bon or anyone else, so she could have that chance.