What We Do to Survive

Miranda didn’t quite know how to feel. On one hand, she felt lighter than she had in years. Orion had listened, had really listened to her. It was something she’d been thinking about for weeks, months even. Ever since she’d started to suspect that not all of Orion’s cruelty came from a place of malice. It had been an incomprehensible thought at first, but the longer she considered it, the more right it felt. Ever since he’d sat her down for that terrifying talk though… it just had never felt like the right time.

Now, it was done. She didn’t know if anything would come of it yet, but she hoped so. Oh how she hoped so. Hope like she hadn’t felt in years, not since it had been washed away by the cruel realities her sponsor had never told her of. With Orion’s support… maybe she would survive this hellish place. Hope came at the cost of freedom, but that was okay. She’d accepted that she would never be free years ago.

On the other? Orion… Orion still scared her. Even when he said he cared, when he said he wouldn’t hurt her, when he told her she was going to be rewarded… She heard his words, understood that he meant them, and yet she still could not always suppress the icy dread rising in her chest. Orion cared, but it would not stop him from doing what he felt he had to. Orion wouldn’t try to hurt her, but he didn’t have to try. Orion would happily reward her, but it would be a reward by his terms. Invisible chains rattled and soft leather slid ethereally across her cheek.

There was an intensity inside him, thinly veiled insanity hidden under dark eyes, sharp features, and polite smiles. Sometimes that veil thinned and she would see a hint of the real Orion behind his ever present masks. He simply didn’t care the same way normal people did. He had his own values, his own beliefs, and even after two years as his ‘closest friend’ Miranda didn’t truly know what they were.

She still remembered the ice cold certainty in Orion’s voice the week before. ‘It won’t be enough,’ he’d said. He’d threatened the entire room with Oblivion the way an ambassador would threaten tariffs. Like it was a natural progression from where they were standing. Miranda suppressed a shudder. She’d glanced into the void once, on accident when she’d hurried past the portal room during a transition. The brief glance had shaken her to the core and left her feeling ill for days after.

Orion was going places. She clearly wasn’t the only one to see either. The attention teachers and older students gave him was intimidating, even if he seemed to brush it off like it was nothing. Maybe to him, it really felt like it was nothing. Whatever the case might be, she was going to be pulled along in his wake. Whether she wanted it or not, it was out of her hands. It had been out of her hands for years.

Miranda took a deep breath and tried to refocus her attention on the page before her, line after line of text written out in Orion’s messy scrawl. The oath Orion wanted her to swear was thorough. Page after page elaborated just how tightly she would be bound to him, how tightly she would have to bind herself to her master. She could instantly tell that this wasn’t his work. Orion was no oath-writer, that took skills he’d never sought to master. She wasn’t either, even if her own talents lay closer to that direction than his own. Still, that didn’t matter much. After all, centuries of more knowledgeable men and women than them had labored over such things. Even if the spells changed, the words could stay the same.

She recognized quite a few parts of the oath. They came from ‘The Words That Bind: Trusting Your Retainers’. It was the seminal text on this sort of thing and she was completely unsurprised that Orion had chosen to reference it. He always had been a studious person, and the complete set of eleven volumes was readily available in Avalon’s library. Despite his faults –Master is good and just and fair– she flinched. Despite how capable Orion was, he was always good about correcting holes in his abilities. The books might be banned in nearly every country in the world, but Avalon certainly didn’t care about any of that.

Orion had changed some things, adding some parts and removing others. In several places, he’d added specific restrictions that were clearly meant specifically for her. There were two paragraphs that neatly outlined how she could never feed on him without his express permission or use any of her other abilities to try and influence him. She made the most corrections in those spots, outlining places where he had been insufficiently thorough or had misunderstood how her abilities worked. Each word she wrote sent conflicting waves of worry and pleasure through her as her bonds fought with her instincts. ‘Feed and burn and never surrender. Do not give up your secrets,’ whispered the succubus. ‘Yes, good, serve your master,’ clinked the chains around her soul.

“Everything alright?” Orion’s voice asked from right in front of her, and she realized she had been sitting unmoving for too long.

She looked up, unable to quite suppress her flinch as their eyes met, and nodded quickly. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Sorry sir.”

“Good. How’s it looking?”

“I think I’m just about done sir.”

“Good,” he repeated, nodding sharply in that stifled way he often did. “Pass it here when you’re finished, I’ll take one last look.”

She was going to reply, but he looked away and she simply returned to the paper in front of her. Despite herself, she couldn’t help but watch out of the corner of her eye as he gently played with the girl kneeling beside him, stroking her hair and scratching her scalp like she was a dog. For a moment, the lavender skinned girl’s figure was replaced with her own, and she barely suppressed another shudder.

She was morbidly curious where the poor girl had come from. She knew Orion had been out in the port during the attack. Had he simply picked up some random civilian on a whim? It seemed unlike him, but she didn’t really know how well she truly knew the man who owned her. Miranda didn’t want to know what things he’d done to the poor girl, what cruelties and magic had turned her into the… thing kneeling beside him, the tip of her tongue peaking out between her lips as she all but moaned under Orion’s ministrations.

She forced herself to look away and focus on her work, but inevitably her eyes were drawn back to the other horror put proudly on display for her. She’d known Orion had captured and kept Verdan, she’d helped him do it after all, but she had deliberately not considered what might have happened to the poor elf. For weeks, she’d assumed that the second year had been rendered down into potion ingredients and ritual components. Then Orion had given her that accursed vial of wonder and she’d been forced to consider what other uses a female elf had to someone like him.

Still, even in her wildest nightmares she hadn’t considered something like this. For one, it wasn’t just Virdan that Orion had captured. It seemed she’d been right in thinking that Orion had something to do with Mistletoe’s disappearance at the start of the year. She’d never been certain, but it had fit too well for her to discount the idea. The two had never gotten along, and Orion liked to be proactive about dealing with threats. The fact that she was an elf was another consideration. On one hand, elves were powerful, leading to the popular belief that some fourth year had dealt with the stuck-up redhead. On the other, she’d always known that Orion was better than most people knew, and that he absolutely loathed elves. It was good she’d never shared her suspicions with another soul.

The two elves were bound in metal frames that Miranda couldn’t help but imagine had once been meant for her. Their arms were pulled up behind their backs, each finger and joint immobilized by rune-covered metal bands. Their legs were spread widely apart, toes just barely brushing the ground as the shackles on their ankles held them in place with short lengths of dull metal chains. Tight collars wrapped around their necks, attached to metal supports that held their bodies parallel to the ground. Though she couldn’t see them from this angle, the edges of their blindfolds were unmistakable, and she could see feeding tubes leading up towards their faces even as more tubes collected their priceless milk drop by drop.

It must be a horrible existence, something she wouldn’t have wished on even her worst enemy. They couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t speak. Knowing Orion, she doubted he had ever removed either from their frames. They were elves after all, their bodies wouldn’t deteriorate from such treatment. He wouldn’t care about anything more than that. In his mind, she doubted he saw them as anything more than cattle. Meat and milk, blood and bone. They were just elves. Not really people. ‘He wouldn’t have cared even if they were people,’ a tiny voice whispered.

In the relative safety of her mind, she wondered if there was a third frame somewhere, one fitted for someone of slightly smaller proportions than an elf. Something to keep her contained and fed, just in case. He probably did. Orion was proactive that way. She didn’t know what properties, if any, her own breast milk might have, but she didn’t care to find out. Her blood and flesh was plenty valuable as it was.

She shook herself, trying to clear her mind. Focus. She still had a task to do. Everything would be fine. Orion promised. Everything. Would. Be. Fine. She took a deep breath, heart still racing in her chest. Things would be better soon. ‘Master is kind and just and fair,’ clinked the chains. ‘A man like him… A limbless torso is plenty fine locked in a chest,’ hissed her grandmother’s voice.

She quickly made the last few changes, a word here, a phrase there. Then she shoved the entire pile across the table towards Orion, not bothering to reread it one last time. She didn’t have to, every word was meticulously recorded inside her mind with the clarity only magic could bring. It wasn’t a circulation most cared to master, too complex and finicky with so many things that could go wrong. The common wisdom was that it was easier to use a one time spell when it was needed. Orion certainly hadn’t thought so. ‘This seems very useful. We should learn it. Let me know if you have any problems.’

“That all?”

She nodded soundlessly, not trusting herself to speak right now. Her eyes drifted back towards the elves. Towards the feeding tanks. Towards the hooks in the walls and the small table laid out with knives and whips and iron pokers. A human couldn’t feel it, but the succubus inside her had keen senses and some things lingered. Sex could last for weeks. Pain… pain didn’t fade. She could still sense her own, feel Orion’s inexperienced hands. Above it were layers and layers, fresh layers. The skin of her thighs peeled away under a razor sharp knife that tasted like joy. Meat cooked and fat crackled, dark marks lining her breasts and buttocks. The crack of leather against skin as–

“Everything looks good, well done Miranda. I would have missed some of this without your input.”

A wave of pleasure washed through her at his praise, shoving aside the foreign memories before they could overwhelm her. It felt more sincere than usual this time, and her bonds rattled approvingly as they flooded her with ‘positive reinforcement’. “Thank you,” she said with a small blush, “it was nothing. Just my duty.”

The answer seemed to please Orion, who smiled widely and stood up, setting the stack of papers aside. “You have everything memorized,” he stated more than asked, and she nodded. “Very good. Well, before we begin, a small reward for your continued service. Strip.”

Miranda squeezed her eyes shut and obeyed, fresh fears rising up to replace those that had already passed. Was… was this… Hadn’t they just spoken of this sort of reward? She didn’t know if she wanted it now, but what she wanted had never mattered before.

She was glad she was wearing something simple today, a form fitting halter neck dress with a long slit that went up past her hips on one side, because she doubted her shaking hands could have dealt with knots or buttons. She carefully slipped out of the dress, lifting the straps over her head and letting the rest of the dress slide off her to pool on the floor. As always, she wasn’t wearing anything under the dress. No one in her village had ever worn them, or much of anything really. She’d never even encountered the concept before she ventured out into the world for the first time in her teens. Undergarments had always felt wrong anyway, and her heritage ensured she never needed them.

She stretched languidly as she stepped out of the dress, her instincts directing her to show off her goods, no matter how little she wanted to do so. Orion gave her a once-over, slowly examining her from head to toe like she was an art piece or an animal at auction. There was no attraction there, no warmth or lust or any of the myriad of emotions she knew she should feel. Simply cold, detached observation.

Orion stepped forward and she froze in place, hands folded behind her back, chest thrust forward, and legs spread shoulder width apart. She was almost surprised when he roughly grabbed one of her breasts, his other hand toying with the gold hoop pierced through her nipple. A slow heat rose inside her chest, making her skin flush and her core clench. Still, she didn’t move a millimeter, even as he leaned in to get a closer look.

After a minute, he switched to her other breast, one hand holding her heaving chest steady, the other twisting her nipple this way and that. Then he let go of her and stepped away, walking towards his desk off to the side of the room.

Over his shoulder he called out, “Give me a moment. Rea, move the cups and papers out of the way. Miranda, lie down on the table.”

Both rushed to obey, Miranda’s mind spinning with theories. It was always terrifying to not know what was happening, but at the moment the heat and the ache in her core pushed most of her more rational thoughts aside. Being around Orion made her so very sensitive, loose chains links tugging at the edges of her own magic. She just hoped she wouldn’t drip too badly on Orion’s table. It was good quality wood and she would hate to damage something he’d likely made himself. Orion hated when his things were damaged.

She lay in silence for several minutes, legs dangling over the edge of the table as she watched Orion rifle through his drawers out of the corner of her eye. Eventually, he straightened and turned back towards her, a short length of fine chain dangling between his fingers. “What do you think?” he asked, holding it between his hands so she could see it.

She didn’t respond for a moment, studying it curiously. The short silver chain was hung with seven thin silver bars evenly distributed across the chain’s length. Each was about an inch long and a quarter inch wide, inscribed with tiny runes that she struggled to make out even from such a small distance. The entire thing smelled of magic, pain, and pleasure, suffusing the metal of each link and charm.

“May I, sir?” she asked speculatively, reaching out towards him.

He nodded and dropped the chain into her waiting hands. She sat up, draping the chain across her bare thighs so she could examine it more closely. She didn’t recognize the enchantments, that sort of thing was beyond her knowledge without the use of analysis spells and rituals, but she could sense the purpose in the metal. It was meant to protect and aid, though in what way she couldn’t tell.

“For you,” he said after a moment. “It shouldn’t interfere with the magic of your piercings, I checked, but if you feel anything irregular let me know and I’ll fix it.”

She looked between Orion and his… gift several times, slightly confused. Why would it interfere with the piercings? “Um…”

“It's meant to dangle between your breasts. The magic will work better that way, though I could probably rework it into a necklace if you want me to. Some sort of choker maybe, it would take some time but–”

“No, no, it’s great,” she quickly interrupted with more enthusiasm than she really felt. She might be collared by magic, but she didn’t want to wear an actual collar. That would be… too much. She looked quizzically down at the chain, noting for the first time the small clasps on either end of the chain.

“Here, let me.” He grabbed the chain from her lap, turned it around, then firmly grasped one of her rings and clipped the end of the chain over the enchanted piece of jewelry. Before she could say anything, he repeated the gesture, leaving the chain dangling in a shallow arc between her breasts.

She felt a small hum, the magic of her current jewelry trying to interface with the new additions. “Try to channel some mana into the chain,” Orion ordered her. Despite her reservations, using unknown magic items tended to be a good way to get yourself killed, she obeyed.

The chain flashed momentarily, lines of the rich burgundy her mana naturally took writing themselves across the runes on each silver plate. She gasped slightly as everything shifted slightly, a small stutter as dormant enchantments connected to her mana. The drain was minor, barely more than her current equipment consumed, but she still couldn’t quite tell what it was doing with that mana.

“It's a… protective charm of sorts,” Orion said, answering her unspoken question. “Each of the plates has a different enchantment. They should stay dormant most of the time and it shouldn’t be hard for you to learn how to trigger them” He began to grab each plate in turn, tugging on it slightly as he spoke. “This one is a particle shield, it should keep things like dust, sand, bugs, and any sort of other small debris out of your eyes and mouth. It won’t help against anything much smaller than that, but there’s quite a few common potion ingredients and poisons that it will be effective against.

“This one should be an upgrade on your current rings, as long as the poison isn’t too magical it will directly transmute any unnatural gasses you breathe in into a balanced mix of atmospheric elements. With your ring it might also let you breath under water, I didn’t have a chance to test it, by keeping your mouth closed and cycling the already present air, but it won’t do anything about any water you inhale.”

She jerked slightly as he tugged much harder on the third plate, meeting his eyes as he looked directly into her face. “This one is a panic beacon.” He dipped under his shirt and withdrew a chain with several small rings looped through it. “You activate it and my ring will tell me you need help and let me find you as long as you aren’t too far away. Tell me ahead of time when you practice with this one, and don’t use it carelessly.”

She nodded quickly, not sure how comfortable she was with the idea. She had a bad feeling that she wouldn’t have to activate it herself for him to find her.

“Good,” he let go and continued to the next plate, “This one is sensory, it should protect your eyes and ears from bright lights and loud noises. Even with it only passively on, it should keep you from being too badly startled. Put some mana in it and you’ll be able to look at the sun without being blinded and stand under a waterfall without damaging your hearing.

“The next one is a key, I put a tiny touch of my own mana into it and tied it into my room’s wards. If you channel some of your own mana into it, it will let you into my room here at the academy. Don’t overuse it. It will only work for you and it will alert me that you’re here.”

She nodded again, “Of course sir. I won’t.” She knew how paranoid Orion was about his things and his safety, so this came as something of a shock. She wasn’t surprised Orion hadn’t tied her into his wards properly the way she had done with her own on his orders, but this was still a big show of trust.

“Good. The last two are pretty simple, this one is a shield and the other one is a force spike. Don’t overuse them, the design isn’t perfect and they will burn out after you put too much mana in them, but they could come in handy in a pinch. The shield is a full dome, pure force and pretty weak. It should be pretty comparable to a second circle spell but won’t last for more than a few hits of that level. The force spike is about that strong as well, you probably have three or four shots if you use them back to back, maybe ten if you give it time to stabilize in between. Understood?”

“Yes sir. Thank you sir.” It was quite a gift, even if she wasn’t fully happy with everything it did. This wasn’t the sort of thing she could have just gone out and bought, not at a price she was able to pay at least. From the sound of it, he’d made it himself, specifically for her. It was… touching. Not something she would have expected from him, but appreciated. She looked down at herself. And it thankfully didn’t look too bad either, though something like that would typically be hidden under even the revealing clothing she tended to wear.

“Very good,” he said after a moment, stepping away from her. “Don’t bother getting dressed, you should be naked for this. Let's get this oath thing done!”