The sandstone citadel of Cloudkeep stood perched atop the highest peak in Elgeist, overlooking the rocky northern shores of Heron Bay. Powerful waves crashed against the cliffside some seven-hundred feet below, and in the distance, the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon. From Cloudkeep’s rooftop atrium, where Lord Thomas Rosemont, his son Erick, and the Highwayman now sat around a large round table, one could see for hundreds of miles in any direction.

The Highwayman watched a pelican glide through the evening wind, wryly comparing its freedom to his own lack of it. His wrists were still manacled behind his back, and though the Lord’s guards stood back at the far end of the rooftop, he certainly wouldn’t survive a jump from the parapet. Surrounded by sky, he was still quite trapped.

“This is who we’re sending to find Elena?” Erick asked his father in disbelief. The younger Rosemont was a fit fellow, with dark, wavy hair, an aquiline nose, and narrow green eyes. He possessed the sort of bland, inoffensive handsomeness that one only noticed when it was preening and strutting about. “The so-called Highwayman? The man who couldn’t steal an apple from an applecart without getting caught?”

Lord Thomas ignored his son. He was a balding, dour fellow to whom the years had not been kind. When he spoke, he spoke with a gravelly authority. “They say you can steal the virtue from a nunnery, Highwayman; and that you can find gold even in a beggar’s boot.”

Erick rolled his eyes.

After a long moment, the Highwayman replied. “People say a lot of things. They like to talk.”

“But not you, do you?” asked Thomas. “We’ve been up here for a while, now. You declined both food and drink, and sat silent while I ate. And still you haven’t asked why I have sent for you.”

The Highwayman nodded. “There’s two types of people; talkers, and doers. Only one of them’s worth much,” he added, glancing ever so briefly at the Lord’s son.

“You really are quite the asshole, aren’t you?” Erick glowered.

The Highwayman simply nodded, and though he could not help but be amused at how much this flustered the younger Rosemont, he was careful not to betray his thoughts to his hosts. Let people talk for long enough, his mother had told him, and eventually they’ll tell you who they are. Such as the careful, almost tentative way Lord Thomas spoke – a man who deliberately projected strength and certainty almost always did so because he felt weak and powerless. He reckoned that what the old Lord needed was something very important, and that he was running out of options to achieve it. Such a man could be taken at his word – though never taken lightly, for the weak are also desperate.

“My daughter, Elena, has been kidnapped,” Lord Rosemont continued. “Two weeks have passed since she was taken. I’ve received neither a demand of ransom nor any other word as to her whereabouts. I request that you find her, and if she lives, bring her home to me.”

“In exchange for my life.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” the Highwayman said, “that doesn’t seem like much of a request. It feels more like a demand.”

“You don’t understand your position here, do you, ruffian?” Erick angrily interjected. “My father is giving you an opportunity to escape your fate! You should be groveling at our feet in gratitude, or begging for our mercy!”

At this, the Highwayman slowly rose from his chair, and when the guards across the atrium started to run toward them, Lord Rosemont motioned for them to halt.

“I ask the Gods for nothing, and men for even less,” the Highwayman told them, his voice cold and bleak as winter. “My life belongs to another, and cannot be taken until she comes to claim it. You can make whatever threats you like, but you can’t make good on them.”

After a long, tense moment, the Highwayman sat back down. “No one escapes fate.”

“Let us call it an offer, then,” Lord Rosemont finally said. “Find out who took Elena, and what has happened to her. In exchange, I will grant you your freedom, Highwayman, and if you return her to me, you shall have half her dowry. Gold and jewels enough to live like a King for the rest of your days shall be yours.”

The Highwayman considered the offer. The gold meant little to him, but to get away from this place would be worth his own weight in it. For while the Highwayman truly did believe he could not be killed, he thought death preferable to spending the rest of his days in an Elgeist dungeon. “What can you tell me about the kidnapping?”

And he’d always had a bit of a soft spot for those in need.

“Only that she was taken in the middle of the day, by a group of men wearing black from head to toe, from Market Commons. They overpowered her guards and dragged her into an old church nearby, and from there, we presume, into the catacombs beneath the city.”

“And who else is searching for her? You sent your house guards? The City Watch?”

Lord Rosemont’s face was grim. “Yes, to both. And none of them have returned.”

*

The hour was drawing near. The once-stale catacomb air was thick with rich, carnal smells, and the chanting of the cultists, their voices raw, and cracked, yet still they continued their litanies to the beings of the Indigo Realm. And their voices were heard. The moist, purple cleft their prayers had rent in the fabric of reality was slowly opening, like a mother’s cunt ready to spill her spawn into the world.

With each dripping pulse, and every eager shudder of the gate between realities, the cultists’ cocks grew heavier, fuller without firmness, steadily drooling their seed upon the stone floor as they were milked by some slowly building, throbbing force deep within their loins. They trembled in the throes of that mad pleasure, their minds scoured bare by whispered promises of even greater decadence that awaited them beyond the gate.

Still their chanting did not falter, as though they had given up their voices as well as their bodies to be used by the Indigo things.

The woman who had once called herself Elena writhed on the floor at the center of them all, her naked body slick with her own fluids, as well as the dark, slippery ichor that dribbled out from the gate itself. She gazed deeply into the Indigo beyond, awestruck by what her eyes now witnessed. She no longer required her fingers to pleasure herself. The Indigo did that for her, now. Tears of joy streamed down her cheeks as she moaned, a sound full of needy desire and dwindling humanity.

Whether the cultists and their sacrifice did not wish to stop, or were no longer capable of stopping, their erotic ritual was a difference that held no meaning. For what man or woman, having drank so deeply of such sweetly tainted pleasures, could ever turn away from them?

The empty air around the gate began to quiver and bulge, as something on its other side forced itself against it, and then slowly, insistently, through it. The appendage of some squirming, undulating thing, dark and glistening; it was not beautiful, but gloriously strange and wrong in just the right way, just the way her body needed it to be. Mewling with inhuman desire, her hips rose to meet it. And when the tentacle, yielding but firm, insistently slid deep inside her, what remained of her mind was capable of thinking only one thing.

More.