Content Note: F/m, Noncon of male
His lean blond body was stretched over the altar, shackled with the heavy manacles. He wondered how many had bent before, to the corrupted god of this shrine. He knew their rites favoured scourging, bringing about a holy trance within their chosen vessels as they were pushed to the brink of their endurance.
He wondered if she thought that he too could be made into an instrument. Would it be knotted rope, a braided cane or thorn branches? Regardless, he knew he could take much before succumbing. That his skin was largely unmarred was more a credit to the healers of his faith than a life lived without injuries.
This temple had fallen before the Necromancer and her army, its crypt seized to fill out her forces. As a Paladin, he had been drawn to this taint, discovering it all too late. Now he knew her to be a cancer in his homeland, growing strength in this ancient backwater. He believed his days were numbered, soon to become another victim. He prayed the people of the nearby village would notice he hadn’t returned, and not send a search party, for nothing they could muster would be stronger than him, but send word back to the temple or the royal guard. Anyone who could hope to stop her before she grew too strong.
In the room, once a place of worship but now little more than a half crumbling ruin on an ancient crypt, the shuffling clunk of her foul undead thralls patrolling was the only sound. If he had his sword, if his strength would let him break free, he would purge this place or die trying. But he had been stripped and restrained, body bared, and left with his back exposed vulnerably, hld so all he could see was the sleek feet of the shrine’s statue directly in front of him.
It was Nari, god or goddess, depending on the language and what they considered the neuter pronoun. They of the slim, sexless body, neither male or female, with skin that glistened like black tar in the light. Not his deity, not the three faced Purifier, whose name was so powerful that it was not uttered careless by even its most devoted. tHe Purifier commanded the dead be placed on pyres, lest they become, as those buried here had, more tools for a foul purpose.
“You are the very model of the pretty Paladin, are you not?” She, the Necromancer, had been there for his binding, cruel and imperious, dressed in black silk-satin slit to the thigh more daring than a courtesan and glittering with ornate silver jewellry to be the envy of any noblewoman. Her mouth was a berry of blood, mirthful, her eyes gloating. She had commanded them, the undead that had overcome in such numbers even his righteous gifts could not turn them all. Even with their crude movements they had managed to drag him and click the manacle in place.
Then she herself had peeled his armour and the clothed beneath from his body. Where they could not be unfastened, she’d cut, precise and relentlless.
“Posterboy. I suspect they paraded you out on feast days, had you stand guard when your high priest petitioned the court,” Her fingers hard run over his flanks, cool but alive, feeling the scrape of the points on the intricate metal gauntlets she wore. Soul Rippers, a profane instrument to weave and pull at the dead as she wished.