The Tale of Athlynna

As expected, the first thing we saw about Gylnea was a dungeon. It was smaller, darker and narrower than the huge complex we had seen in Roxliana and its stoned walls were made of the orange-yellowish rocks of this kingdom more arid climate. We were first driven to and locked up in a cell with crude empty walls and soil, made to house six people rather than ten, while the balding man presumably communicated our arrival to his masters. There were some guards of lower rank waiting there that did not have their heads wrapped in cloth, just protected by a traditional open Gylnean helmet. One of the other guards pulled down a bit of the garment in his head to speak to one of the lower guards and we discovered, instead of a human or half-elf mouth, moving lips of gray stone, over a hard skin of same material and color. Golems. Thus the odd magical vibrations we had been feeling during our journey were explained. Then I remembered reading long ago about some Gylnean magicians who were studying the ancient lost art of creating these beings. The secret hope I had been harvesting during the last days of our journey about a sudden attack on the guards to gain our freedom received at that moment a tremendous blow and I just sat on the floor, struggling with defeat.

After a while, we were taken out by the golems and guided through beautiful pathways decorated by intricate golden lattices, magnificent carpets and complex statues of the unusual gods of Gylnea. It was obvious we were inside the palace of a member of Gylnean nobility. In a large room, presided by an exquisite statue with multiple arms at the back and its floor a mosaic of a myriad colors, where our tour ended we found ourselves in the presence of one haughty, elder human woman. Whitish hair combed backwards in a sort of bun, long dress of the finest textiles, a circle of golden plates covering her shoulders, upper back and chest. Our buyer was next to her, alongside two other bald men in the same clothes and wearing identical golden tattoos in their faces, evidently of the same rank or occupation as him. She looked us, all completely nude and chained together, with an almost painful smirk of contempt painted in her face. We all got it then very clear that she was not someone we should trifle with.

The woman then ordered her golems to cover each of us entirely with a dark red blanket. After so many days spent utterly naked and exposed, I found this strangely welcoming, even although my nude skin had already became by that point close to a second clothing of sorts for my scared mind actually. Unable to see under the blanket, I just followed the push on my chain forward. I imagine they drove us through elegant corridors and majestic rooms, like a procession of red ghosts.

When the blanket was taken out of me I was in the splendid throne room, several meters in front of the lord of that place and our final owner. He was leisurely sitting in a marvelous throne of delicate golden figures and shapes intertwined with a baseline structure of white marble, red velvet on back and base of the seat. A vertical collection of half-moon shaped shields of intrincate patterns in bronze, typical Gylnean, hang on the wall over the throne. He was rather muscular for a human, as his almost naked chest readily showed out and had the body type of a former warrior. Save for a long braid hanging down from the back of his head through a golden ring over the skin, he was as bald as his subordinates and also sported a different pattern of golden tattoos over the forehead that presumably displayed his higher status. He had a very thin mustache and a long and thin beard falling over the golden plate of the center of his chest from the pointed chin. Obviously used to such kind of presents, he seemed not surprised at all by us, yet pleased. Around the throne and at the sides of the great room there were more of those bald ministers, alongside golems and human Gylnean guards.

The woman presented each of us by our new names to him, whom she introduced to us with a word that I latter learned was simply 'Master'. Lazily, he stood up from his throne and approached me first. He was shorter than I expected. His strong fingers caressed my pointed half-elf ears first of all before proceeding to my naked breasts and latter went to firmly grab one of my buttocks. He then went to Isolanys next to me, putting an index finger in his mouth and sliding the index of his other hand over his exposed vaginal labia. He also caressed the runic tattoos of her clan in the forearms. We were a good acquisition, it seems. Naecynian half-elves, limited edition.

After he was done inspecting his new ten toys, he gave the woman a nod of appreciation, gave us his back and sat down again on his throne. I was violently forced to kneel down at that moment by the woman, who thus made us clear we were now supposed to kowtow to him, which we all did. After showing our respects we were rushed by the golems out of the grand room, completely naked and chained once more, across splendid pathways and spiral stairs to the seraglio, with the rest of the female slaves of the palace.

It laid behind a small door guarded by a golem after a descending flight of steps. Most of its space consisted in an open squared courtyard and a covered passageway where the entrance and access to several bedrooms stood. At the center of the open area of the courtyard there was a beautiful pond of tranquil waters where lillies were floating and scores of naked women were bathing together. The sun was able to make it to the courtyard, yet high and impressive walls made in the style of colored bricks typical of Gylnea emerged at the borders, indicating that the seraglio was built over a lower ground that the rest of the palace, making any potential escape attempt much more difficult. At last, our captors freed us from the chain connecting our group together, as well as from the chains in our backs, giving us freedom again to move around and our arms as we pleased. They also substituted the cuff in our neck with a somewhat more stylish animal collar, although the handcuffs in our wrists and ankles were to remain. All those collars had a small square plaque at the front with the exact same word engraved in it but it was written in the strange Gylnean alphabet that none of us could read. After giving us some last unintelligible words, the matriarch made her exit through the door alongside two golem guards.

We looked around, confused and disoriented. It seems our owner was a collector, a connoisseur of slave girls. All around us there were beautiful women looking at us with curiosity, some of them dressed in revealing attires of precious silk but most just walking around completely naked. All of them were wearing handcuffs in their wrists and ankles, as well as the same collar in their necks than us, the same word written in their plaques. They were sitting, walking around, taking baths in the central pond or simply lying with their backs on one of the columns. There was a good deal of human women, the most beautiful human females I have ever seen, many perfectly on par with us half-elves. There were also more exotic races: stripped or spotted cat-folk, fauns, half-orcs, rabbit-folk of different varieties, giggling hyena-girls, wild raccoon-women, seafolk with shimmering blue skin, fairies, a gnome with beautiful green eyes and a large etcetera. The one that eventually approached us had pale light blue skin and dark teal colored long hair. Her eyes had light gray irises and sclera of a darker gray hue and her triangular ears ended in a bifurcated vertex. I recognized her as a panna'udri. Very few have heard about them because the panna'udri are natives of dark and inhospitable lands full of particularly dangerous necrotic monstrosities that are rarely visited, save for the most desperate slave raiders. In spite of being indigenous to such a brutal environment, they are peaceful and hospitable people. The entire species was enslaved a century ago by marsh trolls. Not a whole nation like us but their whole people. All of them, down to the last panna'udri alive today are slaves.

This panna'udri gently introduced herself as 'Tender-Cunt'. She spoke to us in Gylnean, albeit not in the overwhelming and disdainful way of the palace matriarch but going slowly and using many movements of her hands to clarify. Like us, she was only wearing her collar and handcuffs. I could not avoid staring into her pale blue nipples, dark grayish lips and the sparse dark teal hair over the vagina. When she told us to follow her, we saw deep healed wounds crossing the skin of her back, mementos of whipping. Tender-Cunt showed us all around there was too see: the lavatories, the toilets, the pond, two row gardens populated with beautiful and strange flowers, the almost non-existent and empty wardrobe room and the three rather large bedrooms. Instead of beds as such, these latter rooms were filled with a helter-skelter of pillows and blankets over an intrincate carpet.

Lying resting on the pillows were several women already who met us with varying interest. A stark nude handsome human with red hair and green eyes, whose fair skin and freckles pointed to an origin in the northernmost human realms, presented herself nonchalantly as 'Ginger'. Another human, this one with olive skin, black eyes and very beautiful wavy black hair, dressed in something that could barely be counted as garment at all, was 'Curly-Pussy'. The nude anktapa resting next to the latter, looking at us more apprehensively, was 'Doggy'. In case you do not know about them, anktapa have the furry head of a fennec, complete with large vulpine ears on top and a cute muzzle. They have brown skin in most parts of their body except down the knees, past the elbows and the ears, which are pitch black. The fur of their head, which stops growing past the neck, is similarly brown-colored except for two stripes of black around the golden eyes that give them a kohl-like look. Between the large ears a mane of black hair, identical to what you would find in a human or half-elf, hanged down in the medium bob hairstyle characteristic of anktapa. Over the well-formed, firm naked buttocks sprouted a black scorpion-like tail leisurely twisting in the air, around a meter long and six centimeters wide. However, the sting at the end of it had been sealed within a layer of gold, rendering it harmless. Her breasts, somewhat modest but beautiful and her hairless vagina were identical to those of a human or a half-elf.

Ginger and Curly-Pussy seemed at worst indifferent to the perspective of having to share their dorm with the new cohort of slaves, which was a quite nice new impression from the scorn thrown at us, to say the least, until then from their human kindred. The three spoke in Gylnean with Tender-Cunt with fluency in spite of their thick accents, implying that they had been there for quite a long time. Our group of ten became concentrated around a corner while, as the light started to dim, scores of naked or almost naked women of a myriad species started to come in to pass the night as well. There might had been in total around sixty women there, counting us in. As much naked females bodies as that might seem, it was nothing compared to the army of chained nudity of our degrading nude parade in Roxliana. We slept relatively well that night, our bare bodies all cuddling together over the cushions.

Thus our lives as new slaves of a Gylnean warlord started. During the day we were forced out of the seraglio and obliged to do all kinds of servile work around the palace: cleaning stuff, scratching the floor of enormous rooms crystal clean, washing a wide variety of textiles and dishes in pools of water and soap or taking care of the enormous gardens spreading outside, far to the palace walls, under the warm and harsh sun of Gylnea. As the house matriarch had been obviously instructed not to harm our bodies, we were allowed to put on a humble and untidy piece of clothing while performing these chores during the day. Still it functioned minimally as garment I should say, for leaning forwards past just a little, such as when cleaning stuff, wearing it left our asses and velvet folds completely exposed for everyone to perfectly see them. After the sun had set, different kinds of chores were awaiting us in the palace, of which we all had to perform strictly naked, save for our chains. They would mostly involve serving as waitresses, cup or cigar-bearers and sometimes polishing and cleaning the nails of Master fingers or toes, as well as those of the matriarch, the prince or some visiting high member of Gylnean society. By that time I had almost become used to the lascivious gazes of the many male guests me savoring my naked body as I waited to serve them drinks, clean tables or hold glasses in a plate.

As humiliating as the latter might seem, we soon learned to sometimes prefer it to our daytime schedules. The matriarch might had been instructed not to damage our bodies but she had certainly not had been so about our minds. Our slightest faults were invariably met with savage screaming, taunting, brutal threatening, throwing food at us and even spitting. If asking any of us to clean her nails, scratch her back while taking a bath or massaging her feet, she would often skip washing herself for a couple of days before that so as to annoy us with her stench as much as her self-respect would allow. She was a wicked, cruel, perpetually angry and tyrannical woman that despised and hated all of us. Yesrina, now Stupid, was her favorite target. Her cleaning of the Azure Salon was once not up to the matriarch standard for some reason and she therefore punished the half-elf by forcing her to clean the great room beautifully tilled floor entirely all over again... using only her tongue. For days thereafter on setting foot in the Azure Salon one would still get a slight odor of saliva. I was not spared much myself either. I could never forget the time she made me submerge into a room filled with rotten fish entrails and quite a lot of maggots for an entire day, to search for a bracelet that was not there. At least once a week I would also serve in her quarters as her desk for various hours, with diverse items (scrolls, bowls with grapes or glasses) as well as occasionally her feet resting on my back.

Nobody in our group would talk openly about it but by no doubt all of us were overwhelmed by the same depressing, miserable thoughts. Just a month or so ago we were respectable citizens, some of us renowned members of an independent and powerful society. We were free, respected, had our rights and a modicum of our wishes granted. We were people with a purpose, a place, a name, a reputation and a destiny. Now we were nothing. In the space of little more than a month we had been turned into domestic slaves, humiliated daily and without a name or any kind of dignity, at the feet of strangers.