A Tale of Ties and Binds - Chapter 17

Chapter 17. A Thraldom of Thunderbolts

Penelope awoke to the sound of a distant tune - a lyre, some way away. From habit, she tested her arms and legs. Too often in this world she would wake up to find herself tied without mercy and awaiting the sexual gratification of her captors, whatever sexual debauchery they were waiting to inflict. The script was always the same but the captors came and went. To her surprise (and slight disappointment), she wasn't bound this time.

She rubbed her head, wincing at the slight lump where she'd been hit. The memory returned slowly. They had been at sea when a fog engulfed them, plunging them into blindness. She wasn't sure what happened after that, but it ended in her being hit on the head by her own ship as it crumbled apart.

Looking around, Penelope recognised she was in a dungeon of sorts. It wasn't underground though, and it wasn't cold despite her state of complete undress. Flames flickered in the wall sconces and streams of light poured in through the wide windows. This dungeon was clearly out in the open. Whoever owned it was certainly not worried about having her captives stolen from her.

Penelope was surrounded by an oval ring of bars made from thick wood. Upon closer inspection, the experienced sailor recognised the carpentry as that used in ships. The floor of her cell covered in thin wisps of brittle straw and a pair of old worn blankets. There was one more cell. Penelope wasn't alone.

"It's you," a nearby voice said. A bright-eyed figure stirred in the cell to her right. Her skin was dusted with dirt as though she'd been worked hard, and her hair was equally dark but with a slight maroon tint. Though she was kneeling on the floor of her cage huddled under an old and torn sailcloth, she was visibly quite short. "The goddesses are cruel that I should dream of you so vividly."

Penelope was cautious. "I'm no dream," she informed the stranger.

"No... No, you must be. You should be far away in Thessaly," the figure whispered. "You do not belong here."

I can agree with that. "Who are you?"

The stranger edged closer, moving slightly into the light. Her hair caught the sun in a way that sent Penelope back almost a year, to the night before they set sail of Mytilene.

The Queen had summoned her matriarchs to the palace to discuss the attack on the Trojans. Proceedings were tedious and repetitive, but necessary. The Celt gloated about how many captives she would take, General Cassia tried to emphasise the need to go over the tactics one more time, and the Queen was content to sit her throne and churn her phallic slave all evening. Penelope and one other had a different plan that night, however. The Matriarch of the Household of the Thunderbolt, with her dark red hair and olive skin, had managed to convince her Scylla counterpart to make an 'offering to Hera' behind the royal stables. That offering consisted of grinding themselves against each other until they both exploded in a storm of sexual release. It was a different storm that had resulted in the Matriarch of the Thunderbolt to never be seen again. Until now.

"Ellisia?" Penelope asked.

"Aye," the woman replied. "The astronomers were wrong; the world is rather small after all. How did you come to find yourself in a cage so far from home?"

"It's a long story," Penelope replied. And there were more pressing issues. "Where have you been all this time? And where are we now?"

"First, Scylla, I must thank you for something you did during the battle. You tried to save one of my sisters-in-arms, one of Hera's Daughters, when she was caught by a flying bola during the retreat. I never had the chance to thank you for that."

"Nor did she," Penelope recalled. "She was caught in more bolas again as soon as she found her feet. Doubtless she is still serving her Trojan captors to this day. We lost all of you after the storm on the return voyage."

Ellisia sighed. "That storm was the first of many. Further and further they blew us from home - Poseidon rocking in his undersea cage and sending wave after wave at us. We came within sight of Lacedaemonia, though that was all the land we saw for several days and nights. Somewhere in the seas far to the west, a fleet of pirates saw our vessel. They stalked us like wolves stalking a lamb in the dark. Their ships were smaller and less womanned, but faster and more numerous. Half of Hera's Daughters were taken captive in the battle against the Trojans, but the pirates didn't know how few we were until they got close enough to count. Night after night we narrowly avoided being raided. We were tired, drained and low on food and fresh water. It was only a matter of time until they caught us."

Penelope was not a stranger to pirates. Her conflicts with the Histri were likely to be the focus of songs for generations among the Picentes. "How many did you lose?"

The fellow captain looked down at her fingers, curling them into her palm one by one. "We were twenty before Mytilene, ten after. The first raid was more of a scout, I think, to test us. They caught the sentry while she slept on her watch and took one other while she lay in her hammock. Her hand-gagged screams were enough to rouse us from our beds but we were too late to save her as she was hauled over the rails into the pirates' clutches. The next attack came on the full moon. They didn't bother to be stealthy then. We lost another three before we retreated below deck and barred the hatch above us."

"How did you force them back?"

"We didn't. We kept the hatch locked until they got bored and left with their catch. Five of us remained, a mere quarter of my company. When we were sure they had left, we came back out on deck and had no idea where we'd sailed. The winds had blown us somewhere new and the pirates made no further attempts on us. Soon, the wind died and the sea grew flat. A fog surrounded us and a sweet song played through the darkness. We ran aground and were taken by... them. It was then that I realised the pirates hadn't grown bored and left - they were scared."

Penelope felt a chill creep up her naked spine. "Scared of whom? Who's taken us prisoner?"

The Matriarch of the Thunderbolt shrugged the blanket from her shoulders to reveal her olive skinned nudity. The entirety of her body was covered in a dusting of dirt, like her face, but there were dots of cleanliness across her breasts and her crotch. "They torture us with hot wax. They like the noises we make - the moaning and howling. They say we're the muses for their songs."

"Who?" Penelope urged.

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They came for Penelope later that day. A woman with hair the colour of violets entered the prison. She wore a pearly white chiton belted with a golden rope and to look upon her face was to look upon the face of a goddess. Skin so smooth it seemed to be made of the waves themselves. Around her long neck hung a flute on a piece of string. She knelt down on her haunches, eye to eye with her naked captive inside the cage. With an inquisitive stare and a tilt of the head, she said, "Speak."

Penelope returned the stare. "Who are you?" Ellisia was huddling silently in the corner of her cage, hiding in fear.

The captor licked her lips - impossibly soft lips. "You have a pretty voice. That's good. It's always better when they have pretty voices." She stood and pulled a key from her cleavage to unlock the cage door. "Do not try to escape. I'm stronger than I look." The violet-haired woman didn't look strong at all. Penelope decided to test the claim.

As soon as the door was open, Penelope lunged towards her. All she needed to do was steal the key, throw it to Ellisia and hold her captor down long enough for the other matriarch to help her bind the strange woman. But the violet-haired woman stepped aside with speed that seemed better suited to a fish than a human, catching Penelope's wrist as she flew past and spinning her face first on to the stone prison floor. "They're always difficult at first. Your red-haired friend tried to fight us too but she went down just as quick."

"What have you done with them?" Penelope's hands were wrenched behind her and quickly wrapped with cord. Before she'd even finished her sentence her hands were already left uselessly immobile. The woman grabbed her under the arm and pulled her back to her feet.

The captor looked straight into her eyes. Penelope couldn't figure out if they were blue eyes or green. Whenever she settled on a colour, they seemed to change before her. "Them?" the woman whispered.

"Celaeno?" called an angelic voice from the other side of the room. Standing in the doorway was another woman, dressed the same in a white chiton and golden belt, but she had hair as green as the greenest grass. She held a turtle shell lyre under her left arm. "Is this one being stubborn too?"

"No more than usual, Ligeia." Celaeno replied as she pulled a strip of cloth from her cleavage before tying it into the unwilling captive's mouth. It tasted like salt. She shoved Penelope forward towards the doorway and the light outside. "She will sing for us like the rest."

The sun kissed her naked skin as she was escorted bare foot along the cobblestone path. Close behind her, Celaeno blew softly into her flute, tooting comically to the beat of the march. Several paces ahead, the one named Ligeia sang and strummed her fingers across the lyre as she skipped diagonally between the trees. Her voice was... mesmerising.

The island was covered with a dense forest and rock formations peering high above the tree line. When the path took them to a high clearing, Penelope could see the ocean all around her. It was a small island surrounded by dozens upon dozens of limestone stacks standing like soldiers among the crashing waves. Along the shoreline of beaten cliffs, the skeletal remains of ships lay motionless, stripped of useful material and left to rot. "Whmrm hrm nhh thgnng mm?" Penelope tried to ask for the fifth time. Her captors were no strangers to the muffled language of gagged women and knew exactly what she'd asked. Or perhaps it was a common question at this point in the walk.

Celaeno prodded her in the backside with her flute again. "To a place where magic happens," the violet-haired girl had replied, and no further questioning got anything other than more sharp prods.

The magic took place in a gully, set between curved cliffs stretching high around a central point. The walls of the formation had been painted white with the depictions of women strapped helplessly to the ground as fire burned above them, waves all around, and the goddesses laughing high in the heavens. Even from a distance, Penelope could hear the echo of the lyre and flute bouncing around the hard walls, and the roar of the ways was a constant rumble in the darkness.

At centre stage were two X-shaped racks with a pair of strange arms reaching around them. The racks themselves were quite obviously designed to do what all racks of that design are for - keeping a captive bound spread open like a flying eagle, exposed to the whims and wishes of her or his captor. But these ones had a special purpose. The extra arms held a tray each, both loaded with a dozen red upturned candles. They were freshly made and as long as a forearm. Small specs of dried wax were spread across the frame and the surrounding area. A lone torch stood wedged between some rocks alight with a vivacious flame.

It suddenly dawned on Penelope what was about to happen to her. She unconsciously slowed down, only to have the flute rap against her bare arse cheek painfully. "Mmph!"

Ligeia put her lyre aside and the two captors carefully unbound their Greek prisoner. After the embarrassing and short-lived escape attempt from earlier, Penelope wasn't about to try again so soon. They strapped her down, naked and exposed, leather cuffs digging tightly into the flesh of her wrists and ankles, a larger strap holding down her midsection, wax candles hovering above her chest and crotch like carrion birds stalking a weary beast.

They disappeared out of sight and could be heard walking away. Penelope was left to struggle pointlessly in her restraints for a while with little else to do but contemplate her near future and chew on her gag. There were worse tastes in the world than salt, though it dried her mouth somewhat. All the while, she could hear the echo of her struggles and gagged moans bouncing off the stone slopes around her. And the candles stood guard above her, waiting patiently for their time to shine.

It wasn't long before the Sirens reappeared. She could hear the lyrist and the flutist playing their tunes a while away, but the familiar moaning struggles of their other prisoner were both comforting and distressing. They strapped Daphne down just the same beside Penelope in the rack beside her, the redhead struggling furiously in bondage as she always did. The two naked captives shared a look of knowing fear as they anticipated what was to come next, their eyes wide above their gags.

Ligeia skipped towards the torch and plucked it from its place between the rocks, playfully waving the bright flame about in the darkness of the theatre. The other Siren, Celaeno, sat on a step to the side, lips pouting above her flute and blowing a soft note.

The lyrist strolled towards the pair of captives. Penelope couldn't help but tense up as the green-haired Siren slithered her fingers around the gag and slipped it out. "Please," Penelope said, "let us go." She tried to make it sound a firm command, though the captor surely knew the difference between an order and a plea.

"You are our inspiration," Ligeia confided as she ungagged Daphne. "Your song shall fill our hearts and our soul, and we shall play to the goddesses in the heavens and the spirits in the sea."

She brushed the torch with expert precision underneath the upturned candles, lighting all twelve above Daphne's breasts in a single swipe. "Persephone take you!" the redhead cursed as Ligeia lit the second tray of candles above Daphne's lap. "Let us go! NOW!" But the Sirens didn't care what Daphne had to say and moved on to Penelope's candles, lighting them all up.

The captain could feel herself really tensing. Every instinct was screaming at her to cover herself up or to twist away from the melting wax, but the leather straps held her tight and dug painfully into her soft skin when she tried. It will be painful either way, she realised. The small flames were licking away at the candlewax like a dutiful handmaiden servicing her mistress' chalice, slowly getting wetter and wetter. The waiting was excruciating, but Penelope knew it would be far from the worst of it.

A droplet as small as a tear splattered against the edge of her nipple. It sent a sudden spasm of burning pain through her entire body such that the wooden rack creaked beneath her, but it held. "Ah-aaa," she gasped. The wax quickly cooled, leaving a little red dot. More soon followed, each filling her with short-lived pain. It became reminiscent of being caught in the rain if the sky had been dripping fire, and Penelope found herself muttering nonsensically as her chest and crotch were painted red.

The Sirens took up their instruments and played their songs in tune to the gasps and moans and screams of their two Greek captives, filling the theatre with the music of torture.

Continued in Chapter 18

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