The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Eyna looked enviously at the soldier’s boots.

Her own feet were rock-bruised and sore, her legs spattered with mud to the knees. Her dress was torn badly on the right side from when a mercenary who liked cuffing more than fucking had roughly pulled it off. Her undergarments had been lost six or seven rapes ago.

Sure, Tremona had gotten paid, but it was still rape to Eyna.

Noebe, the slave in line in front of her, stumbled over a root and the rope binding them yanked Eyna down, her knees splashing into the mud. She got her arm quickly underneath Noebe’s shoulder and lifted her to her feet, but Loro was already striding back towards them with his crop out.

The soldier stepped between the overseer and the slaves. “The bitch tripped. They’re up now. Get back in line.”

“She needs to learn her place,” Loro hissed, knuckles white around the crop handle.

“She’s a whore and a slave, I think she knows her place. And your coming back here every time one of the cunts stumbles is slowing us down.”

Loro glared at the soldier. “Think she’ll be nicer to you if you protect her? Maybe let you up her arse for free?”

The soldier’s hand went to the hilt of his sword. “I want to be out of this fucking jungle as soon as fucking possible and you coming back here every time one of these whores stubs a toe is slowing us down, dick-twist. Get back in fucking line.”

With a snarl, Loro turned around and moved forward along the line of bound slaves.

Eyna didn’t look at the solder, didn’t thank him. He might have gotten angry if she had; and anyway, when they reached Torr Gyn he’d probably get to fuck her anyway. If she still wanted to thank him by then, she could.

The rope jerked at her neck and she stumbled forward.

A different soldier pushed by on her other side. “Gods,” he muttered, “this fucking jungle.”

It was almost noon, by Eyna’s best guess; rare glimpses of the sun showed it far up in the sky. But between her and the sky were dark masses of leaves, and vines, and more leaves and more vines—the treetops must have been thirty or forty ells above; they were utterly obscured from here.

Around them, bushes and vines stretched out onto the newly-cut path. When Torr Gyn and the Trasdemere plantations were founded half a dozen years ago, Mark-Lord Feyne had hundreds of slaves put to work clearing trails through the jungle. The one that Eyna was now marching along was the most traveled, running from Feyne’s seat at Gildor City across the Rimbreaks and straight through the jungle to the Trasemere plantations. Three caravans a week plied the muddy, rutted path—and still the plants reached out almost to the middle of the trail.

Beyond the greenery was blackness. The jungle off the path was a quagmire of mud, fallen trees, and the detritus of centuries. The creatures that stalked there were fearsome; a caravan without armed guards would soon find itself hunted.

Behind Eyna and the line of roped-together sex slaves, male slaves in leg-chains grunted and swore as they beat the encroaching vegetation with machetes to widen the path enough for the wagons.

Eyna’s owner rode in the second of those wagons—the brothel keeper Tremona. Loro was her enforcer and he gave orders, but she actually owned the eleven women he lead by a rope—as well as the building in Torr Gyn he led them towards, and much of the cargo the other wagons held in their pitching interiors. She paid her taxes to the Mark-Lord, and his soldiers guarded the caravan and kept the slaves in line as they made their muddy, horrible way through the jungle.

Something launched itself from the bushes to Eyna’s right, and flapped shrieking into the jungle darkness. The guard walking next to her stiffened, then let his hand slip back off of his sword hilt.

No brigands threatened them; no humans lived in the Trasdemere, other than those recently settled in Torr Gyn and the plantations around. A shame, thought Eyna, being captured by brigands might have been a mercy compared to being a slave whore for Tremona. At least there would have been a finite number of them.

The rope jerked again and Eyna stumbled and fell to the ground, striking her knee on something hard. Lono began cursing, this time at someone in the front of the line. Eyna winced as she pushed herself to her feet, then frowned at the item she had bruised her knee on.

It was a paving stone.

It was one of several, coated in mud, running at a right angle to the dirt path the caravan was traveling. Beneath the dirt and the branches there was some ancient road here.

Eyna’s eyes widened.

Kaz Ghuul.

“They’ll keep us tied,” Linor said, as she ran the comb through Eyna’s hair. “It’s not that they’re afraid we’ll escape. They just don’t want to go chasing after us.”

“Why is that?” Eyna asked.

Linor paused. “Don’t you know where they’re taking us?”

“She’s an Almeri,” Noebe said, looking over her shoulder from where she stood at the window. “She’s never heard of Trasdemere.”

“Sure I have,” Eyna said. “It’s a big jungle. No one lives there.”

“No one lives there now,” Linor replied. “But they used to. Back in the days of... Kaz Ghuul.”

Linor paused in her combing, and Eyna looked over her shoulder. “What’s that?”

“A long time ago,” Noebe said, coming over from the window and turning a chair around, “the whole Trasdemere basin was ruled by the city of Kaz Ghuul. It was a huge place; their rule stretched across most of central Gedain. Their armies fought with Pyrr and with Katt’nia. They say the city of Kaz Ghuul itself was home to half a million people.”

“What happened?”

Noebe shrugged. “They were destroyed. The other nations decided that Kaz Ghuul’s... practices... had gotten too foul, too wicked, and they allied against them and razed the city to the ground. They dammed the Tras river so that it would flood the whole plain.”

“Lake Trasdemere.”

“The same. Took it almost four hundred years to drain,” Noebe observed, “and when it did, it left behind only swamp and jungle.”

“But underneath that jungle,” Linor whispered, “is the city of Kaz Ghuul.”

Eyna scratched her head. “So what? Are there ghosts?”

Linor shook her head. “Not ghosts. Demons.”

“What?”

“That’s why the other nations allied to destroy Kaz Ghuul,” Noebe said. “They were demon worshipers. They made human sacrifice—hundreds at a time, sometimes. Most of those sacrifices were abducted from other countries. The need for fresh human lives drove Kaz Ghuul to make constant war.”

“Abducted from other countries,” Eyna said bitterly. “Sounds familiar.”

“Oh, darling,” Linor said, going after Eyna’s hair with the comb again. “It’ll be all right. Tremona will take decent care of us, we’re her bread and butter after all. She was a whore like us, once.”

“Not like us,” Eyna replied. “She was never a slave.”

“They didn’t allow slavery back then,” Noebe said.

“Well, they do now,” Eyna snapped. “And I don’t think being in Tremona’s good graces—”

The door slammed open and resounded against the wall; the comb pulled through Eyna’s hair so fast it almost yanked some out.

“All right cunts,” Loro snarled from the doorway, “It’s time to go. You don’t own anything so you can just come right the fuck downstairs and line up.”

There was a brief pause before he raised his crop. “Now!” he screamed.

Kaz Ghuul.

Were they in the city? Eyna looked around, but all she could see were the leaves and branches of the rampant undergrowth, and beyond them the shadowy trunks of trees. Nothing looked like a wall or a building at all.

The rope jerked sharply on her neck, and Eyna stumbled forward and quickly resumed walking. She kept looking around, hoping to see a wall, a pillar, a statue. Something to indicate that they were making their way through the bones of the ancient city.

But all she saw were plants, and mud.

Why did she want to see the city, anyway? It was five hundred years dead, and were it alive the inhabitants would doubtless tear out Eyna’s heart and present it to their evil gods.

That might be worth it, if she was allowed to see Loro get his heart torn out first.

That idea was so appealing that Eyna could almost see it—the Ghuuli priests chanting, the masses of people bowing, Loro strapped screaming to the sacrificial altar... perhaps they could take out his eyes, first...

Eyna realized suddenly that the screaming was not coming from her imagination.

Soldiers rushed past her, suddenly thankful for the stifling cuir bouilli coats they had been cursing a moment before. There was something—something huge—thrashing in the jungle ahead, at the front of the column. Loro, crop amusingly still in his hand, stumbled backwards past Eyna, his face pale. A soldier cuffed him aside into the underbrush as the soldier pushed forward, sword drawn.

The slaves at the front of the line were stumbling backward, crying and wailing, getting in the way of the soldiers moving forward. Now there was shouting at the front, and some terrific... clicking sound? Like wooden sticks, scraping past each other.

The rope around Eyna’s neck suddenly drew tight and pulled her backward as the other slaves continued their scramble back towards the wagons. The rope was tied in such a way as to not throttle her, but Eyna wanted to see—wanted to see what horror they had stumbled upon. Was it a demon?

The shouting was more organized now, Captain Koorh’s voice discernible over the voices of the other men. Whatever it was, they were fighting it.

There was a knife on the ground.

It must have been a soldier’s—just a knife, not a dagger, dropped in the mud as he hastened to deal with the jungle monstrosity. Eyna lunged for it—and was yanked firmly back, the rope binding her to the other slaves taut and straining as they continued their fearful rush back towards the wagons.

No, thought Eyna. I NEED it.

On her knees, she clawed at the mud, pulling against ten other women, desperate to reach the sharp bit of steel glinting on the ground. She stretched her utmost—it was just a few inches, not even half an ell.

Then sudden slack. She seized the knife.

And looked up at horror.

It was an insect, or something like, but a monstrous one thrice the size of a horse. Its glossy black carapace dripped with ichor from a dozen wounds, but its glittering eyes locked on Eyna as she stared up at it, and it opened jagged pincers the size of men’s arms.

And shrieked, as a spear plunged into its backside.

It turned to battle the soldiers once more, leaving Eyna staring upward from the mud, green ichor spattered on her face.

She looked behind. The rope that had held her to the other slaves was severed—the others so afraid of the monstrosity they had cut Eyna loose somehow.

In front of her, the soldiers shouted and stabbed at the beast.

Behind her, she could see Loro, next to the first wagon, staring fearfully at the melee.

Eyna got to her feet.

And ran into the jungle.

She had thought that it was dark on the trail, but at least on the trail there had been a thin strip where the trees had been removed. Once in the jungle proper she was hardly able to see four arm’s lengths ahead of her face.

Her feet sank into decades of spongy, rotten leaves; she stumbled over fallen trees and scraped through dense thickets of barbed and tangled vines. Within only a short time her whole body stung from a thousand cuts and scrapes.

Birds and animals were just sounds in the dark as she thrashed through the undergrowth. She was surrounded by noises—things moving, slithering, clicking and cawing to each other. Her own hapless thrashing was just one more component in the general noise of the jungle.

Finally she fell over yet another hidden deadfall and collapsed to the ground, drawing her aching shins in close to her body, gasping for breath.

Had she left a trail? It was impossible to tell—the jungle looked exactly the same the way she had come as it did in every other direction: centuries of dead wood and fallen branches, tangled vines that strained to climb upward, a morass of mud and rot.

But they wouldn’t pursue her, anyway. That’s what Linor had said. They were afraid.

Kaz Ghuul.

Eyna looked around. She had seen the pavement, without question—but that alone. A brief glimpse of cut stones beneath the jungle mud. Nothing else since. No crumbling walls, no toppled pillars. If this was the site of the lost city, it had somehow crumbled away to nothing at all.

More like this was the site of nothing, and the road she had seen merely an ancient path to it, passing through lands that had never known a mason’s trowel.

What was she going to do?

Free... the word hardly applied. She had no way to survive out here, no hunting skills, no idea what plants were edible and which were poison. No way to avoid the predators that stalked the jungle floor.

She pictured the three-horse bug, and shuddered.

Even if she returned to the trail, it led only to Torr Gyn in one direction, and Gildor City in the other. Neither place would welcome her. Being returned to Tremona would be the best she could hope for. And the Trasdemere would take weeks to traverse in any other direction, even if she did find food.

If she went back now, they would beat her badly. But she still had value—spreading her legs would earn Tremona coin, killing her would earn Tremona nothing.

Although, Eyna realized, looking around, the point was largely moot.

She was completely lost.

With a groan, Eyna rose unsteadily to her feet. She thought she could tell which grasping bush she had crashed through most recently—but beyond that? There was no way to tell where she had come from. No footprints in the deadfalls and waist-deep leaf rot, or on the mouldering logs that crossed them.

Looking around, she saw nothing. Trees, vines, fallen logs, and darkness. No—there, some distance away, a shaft of light. Some hole where a tree had recently fallen, where for a few brief weeks the sunlight could reach down to the jungle floor.

Might as well go that way. Might as well walk, while waiting to starve.

Her feet aching, Eyna began to move.

She had almost dared to hope for a building, some ruined structure, ancient stonework laced with roots but still managing to keep the forest at bay. Instead she found:

A fallen tree.

Just as she should have expected.

The thin shaft of sunlight was already sliding away, slipping up a vine-shrouded tree trunk. The space on the jungle floor was waist-deep in bushes, glossy green leaves soaking up the rare light during the few hours it was available.

The bushes had, hidden beneath the leaves, some deep purple berries.

Poisonous? Probably.

Eyna sighed and leaned against a tree. What now? Poison might be preferable to starvation, but she had a few days worth of fight in her yet.

Then, of a sudden, there was a crashing and a cracking and great k-k-k-k-k sound. Eyna whirled—there, not five ells away, another of the great black bugs reared up out of a mound of debris. Black mandibles glinted in the sunlight; black eyes fixed themselves upon her.

So this was how she would die.

She didn’t even have a stick. Maybe... maybe the bug wouldn’t like the light. Arms raised in a futile attempt to protect herself, Eyna backed through the berry bushes, toward the brightest spot left on the jungle floor.

The monstrous insect came forward and reared up, then crashed down on her, chitinous legs striking the ground hard on either side of her, mandibles clicking shut-

-where Eyna used to be.

Because she was falling, tumbling backwards; the bug’s pounce had broken the ground, somehow, and Eyna realized distractedly that it must have been hollow, that the berry bushes were atop an empty void, one which she was falling through-

-she hit water, hard, and it hurt.

But didn’t kill her.

Spluttering, thrashing, Eyna bobbed to the surface. She was in a great black void, a pool strangely lit by the thin rays of sunlight.

Beneath her, under the water, visible in the light beams, the floor was stone.

The room was stone.

She was in some sort of hall.

Treading water, Eyna stared around herself with wide eyes.

The water seemed to grow shallower in one direction and Eyna swam that way, away from the light. Very soon her feet could touch the bottom, and then she was walking, and then she was out of the water entirely.

She stopped and looked around in awe.

It was a great vaulted chamber, the roof arched with great stone vaults, the walls decorated with colorful mosaic. It was difficult to make out what the mosaics depicted but the pattern swirled and danced, running the entire circumference of the room.

Kaz Ghuul was here. It had been buried.

Of course. The Tras river drained a vast area, a thousand thousand miles of central Gedain; when the river became a lake, its silt filled the valley. A hundred years of muck had settled over the corpse of Kaz Ghuul.

The bug had not tumbled down after her. Peering at the bright hole in the ceiling, Eyna could see no sign of it.

She seemed safe, for the moment. And had no shortage of water, though how drinkable it was she couldn’t guess. But there was surely no food down here, nor any tools or clothing, and in the moist environment there was no chance she could make fire. There were dark halls stretching away from this room, but Eyna had no way to illuminate them.

Still, better lost in the dark than being eaten by a wagon-sized bug.

Eyna made her way to the nearest wall. The floor was cool and even. It felt a little slick under her feet, but there was no sign of moss or algae. She stopped and stared up at the wall.

The mosaic covered the wall from knee height to well over her head, and Eyna was surprised and a little reassured to discover that it depicted scenes of agriculture. Tessellated men and women in colorful shifts planted seeds and cut grain, harvested crops from trees and bushes, dug in the earth. Eyna followed the wall away from the water and slightly uphill—the whole room was tilted—and watched the crops ripen and the little tiled men feast and give thanks.

Then she paused, and walked back down. The water that a group of women were sprinkling onto the fields, from some sort of gourd—the drops were red.

They were watering the crops with blood.

With a swallow, Eyna retraced her steps along the mosaic. It was a depiction of agriculture, yes: planting, pruning, weeding, watering, harvesting. But... here several men were squeezing out human hearts over the young plants. There curling, fruit-bearing vines were growing from an open corpse. And near the end, a crucified skeleton hung from a trellis with grapes dangling all over.

Kaz Ghuul.

Human sacrifice.

Demon worshipers.

The mosaic culminated at an open archway. Eyna looked back down the slope, at the water and the sunlight which illuminated it.

The people here were long dead. They couldn’t sacrifice her to their gods.

She felt around in her dress for the knife, found it, and clutched the handle in her hand.

Eyna peered into the blackness beyond the arch. As she had feared, it was impenetrable- no, wait.

There was a far-away light.

There must be another hole. Another crack in the ceiling of this ancient temple, allowing sunlight in.

Perhaps it was a way out.

Eyna took a last look at the great mosaic’ed hall. Then, carefully, slowly, she felt her way into the darkness under the arch.

She walked through the darkness slowly, and somehow managed not to hurt herself.

Which was not to say that she did not hurt. Her shins and knees were bruises atop bruises, her arms and legs and face scored by hundreds of tiny scrapes and cuts from running through the jungle. And her feet... better not to think of her feet.

Tremona would take care of them, Linor had said.

Tremona had not even given them shoes.

Slowly, slowly, Eyna felt her way forward. The floors were clean, and even; a few times there were ropy roots in the way, but her toes found them and she stepped over them and did not fall. Sometimes the walls fell away and she found herself in a room, making her blind way towards the distant light without the aid of walls to lean on.

But she fell down no holes. A few times there were stairs, but never more than a couple. A few times she would encounter some stone object—a plinth, a fountain, in the darkness she could only guess—but she walked slowly, slowly, and she did not strike any of them with force. She worried she might tread on a spider, a snake, but nothing touched her or squished beneath her feet.

She kept her knife in her hand, but other than her shuffling steps, nothing disturbed the stillness.

And the light grew brighter.

Then, as she passed through some great dark chamber, she realized that she was almost there. She could see, in the next chamber, through the next arch, figures and shapes. They were puzzling; for a moment it appeared as though it was the jungle, albeit oddly well-lit; then it seemed like a room of statues, giant figures reaching their arms towards each other. She stared ahead, trying to understand what lay in the room that was now just beyond.

It was strange how well-lit the room was; as though the jungle above it was not there.

Eyna walked on. She could see the floor beneath her now, the tiles in twisting patterns first gray, then revealed as a myriad of colors as she stepped into the light spilling from the arch.

A pause to take a breath; and then she walked through it.

It was another great domed room, larger even than the one she had fallen into, and this one glowed with light. A great circle of radiance shone from the center of the dome; it took Eyna several long minutes to conclude that it was not a hole in the ceiling, not the sun at all, but rather a painted circle, pouring out light.

Magic.

And in the room? Her first impressions had not been wrong: it was statues and jungle both. The room was filled with human figures, though twice the size of any man, carved in a reddish stone, their poses ranging from cringing agony to kneeling devotion, men and women, all nude. There were a score of them Eyna could see, and she could only see a small part of the vast interior space. Around and upon and atop these statues grew a wild variety of plants; not the brown and blacks of the jungle floor, but a riot of red and yellow and blue and a thousand hues of green.

It was beautiful and mysterious and utterly quiet.

There were paths among the statues, neatly tiled in red and white, and the greenery only just encroached upon them. None of these paths were straight, preventing any line of sight, and they branched and intersected almost at random.

Eyna walked along a path and stared up at the statues and the plants that surrounded them. She walked slowly, looking to either side, awed and uncertain.

How was this here? What magic kept it this way?

Her stomach rumbled, and only then did she realize that many of the plants had fruit, ripe and heavy. Many of them she did not recognize, but there were several she did.

Still, something stopped her from hurrying forward and plucking them.

Eyna made her way towards the center of the room, turning left or right as necessary when the path she was on met another and turned away. Finally, as the path she trod widened and faced the room’s heart. When Eyna saw what was there, she stopped and stared.

It was a statue of a woman; a woman with six breasts and four arms, nude, reclining on a stone divan. In one of her four hands she held a crystal orb, which she gazed into. No plants grew atop her, though the divan on which she lay was surrounded by flowers.

She was exceedingly beautiful—and somehow terrible as well, a figure to be revered rather than welcomed. The aeons-dead sculptor had captured the image of his demon Queen in perfect red stone, and her essence still lingered there.

The statue turned her head to look at Eyna.

Her eyes were green orbs, with black, snake-like slits.

Come.