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Go To Hell

• Chapter 7 of the Legends of the DragonRider

The Dragon Utopia had become far more vibrant since their arrival there, Anitra thought as she looked out across the mighty crater which formed its core, from the top of one of the Citadel's highest spires. These spires weren't the sort of towers that one would find in a human castle, mind - they weren't hollow, for starters. Rather, they rose as massive pillars to provide high perches for the flying dragons, and were quite inaccessible to humans. She'd climbed up the outside and was now trying to get her breath back - her exhaustion nicely illustrating why she was there. Her most recent 'adventure' had been dangerously leisurely, mostly involving her standing around and looking over a strategist's shoulders while he did all the work, leaving her physical condition to deteriorate. With her advancing pregnancy, she'd soon be partially immobilized, and she wanted to be sure she was in proper shape before that happened.

For a moment, she let her hand fall to her heaving belly, feeling the slight bulge there. It was still a wondrous feeling... and a great responsibility. Once upon a time, she would've climbed the spire without a second thought, trusting in her draconic agility and constitution to carry her to the top. Now, she had instead made sure to obtain a Ring of Featherfall from one of the Citadel's artificers before setting out. Her natural magical resistance would reduce its effectiveness, but her armor's magic deflecting properties wouldn't be affecting it so long as she was wearing it, so should she take a tumble, it would still be able to slow her fall enough that she'd be able to absorb the rest of the impact without risk. Plus, odds of her being intercepted on the way down by a helpful dragon were pretty good.

With an effort, she shook off her reflections and went back to admiring the view. There were dragons everywhere, of course - even more than there once had been, what with the slow-but-constant stream of 'converts' from ordinary Dragon-Homes. Somehow, though, they seemed to adorn the Citadel more than inhabit it. One got the feeling that the skies above, the lake below, and even the caves and mines dug into the crater's rim, were their true home - the Citadel was merely a convenient roost. No, it was the others who made it come alive - the 'lesser races'.

More and more scholars flocked to the Utopia, as word spread in whispers amongst the intellectual upper-crust of the continent. More craftsmen and magi showed up also - some of them not even because of the dragons or the Great Library, but because so many masters of their craft were already there. They came to study under them, or seek counsel about a particularly thorny problem, and often found half a dozen other masters who were happy to pitch in with their opinion too - leading to many loud discussions in the hallways, though always kept at a respectful tone. (Having dragons for neighbors lends itself well to polite conduct.)

The caravans were becoming more frequent - and larger - as well. Despite the best efforts of both the dragons and the merchants (who didn't want any more competition on such a lucrative route if they could help it), word had gotten out in those circles, too. As a rumor, a legend, a sort of "My wife's cousin's squire heard about it from an old army-buddy who worked as a caravan-guard..." type tale. Even in such a form, however, the whisper of enormous profits to be made lured many a desperate trader to the Utopia, carrying any wares they imagined might interest the dragons. Those found unsuitable had their minds carefully wiped using magic, and were sent back carrying a bit of gold - enough to provide them a reasonable, if not spectacular, profit on whatever amongst their stock had drawn interest on arrival. They never came back.

Those who managed to make a good first impression, however - either through honorable conduct, impressive ingenuity, or offering some useful trade-goods that nobody else had managed to source before - were allowed to establish themselves as certified traders there, in the ever-expanding Caravansary that had grown up around the Citadel's central plaza. Even that was only half of the infrastructure - a larger camp could be found at the foot of the crater, next to the main access-road that snaked up its sides. There, the traders slept and bartered amongst themselves, and decided which goods were worth schlepping up said road to offer to the residents of The Citadel itself.

One particularly foolish trader, however, had managed to get himself summarily executed for turning up with what he had figured would be in demand in a remote fortress populated by dragons... slaves. Mostly the 'young, nubile, female' sort. Perhaps he'd expected to find a more northern sort of Mirage City? Regardless, all he found was the wrath of the dragons. His 'inventory' was set free, and once suitably calmed down and treated for their accumulated trauma (both physical and mental), they were offered a chance to return home on dragonback, with a bit of gold in their pockets to help establish themselves. Most of them, however, had nowhere to return to - or at least, nowhere they could honestly claim would be safe - and had, by then, realized just how well the Utopia lived up to its name. They instead accepted another offer, and integrated into the Utopia as free citizens - finding work in the kitchens or as servants. A few who had grown too accustomed to their lives as pleasure-slaves to seek another trade even came up with a startling innovation, and proved that prostitution was, somehow, possible even in a currency-free society.

The Dragon Utopia, for its non-draconic residents, functioned along some fairly simple lines. If you contributed tangibly to the Utopia's function, you had earned a part of its bounty. Food and shelter was provided freely, and whatever you needed would be provided by the various craftsmen, who did so in order to provide their contribution to society. The handful of liberated sex-slaves quickly proved that people who'd gotten laid recently were better workers, more efficient, and far more cheerful than otherwise, which was enough to get them the dragons' seal of approval. The fact that this 'free love' also made the Utopia even more utopic in the eyes of most human visitors probably also contributed - as did the fact that the dragons were getting tired of walking on eggshells around some of their older and more sexually repressed visitors - the 'Free Lovers' (who had so named themselves in magnificently punny fashion) served as a nice way to start opening various old intellectuals' minds to a more sexually liberal philosophy.

And then there were the Rakshasa. They'd been dribbling in for a while, now - hidden in the regular caravans from Ganarãya, responding to the offer she'd given them before she left that jungle kingdom. True to her word, she'd made arrangements with the dragons, and ensured that there was a place waiting for them. The jungle around the Utopia probably felt a lot like home for them, and they'd happily settled down in a small village built for them just beyond the crater's edge, a ways from the main caravan-road. Just being able to walk around undisguised was clearly a great relief for them, but like anyone else, they had to provide the Utopia with some service to justify the protection they were afforded. Their abilities made the nature of this service both obvious, and a bit unusual in its application.

An alchemist working in the Citadel had, as Anitra had hoped, proven capable of producing 'Blood-potions' - essentially artificial blood, mostly meant for vampires. With it, the Rakshasa could use a measure of their abilities - enough to make them perfect infiltrators, spies, saboteurs and even assassins. Each Rakshasa family sent one member to serve in this regard - flying out to the far-flung reaches of the continent, to assist the Utopia in its grand design through various stealthy means - and in return, the rest of the family could live there in peace, comfort and security. The alchemist in question, with the habitual lack of self-preservation instinct that marked his kind, was unconcerned by the sudden appearance of a race of natural shapeshifters powered by human blood and flesh, finding them 'very curious, very curious indeed!' Presently, he was working on an improved formula for the Blood-Potions, which would (ideally) awaken a greater portion of the Rakshasa's potential powers...

And, of course, there was the Horse-People, whose shantytown had been converted into a neat little village while Anitra had been off stopping the civil war that originally drove them out of their homes. Upon hearing of this, some few of them decided to return home - but the majority stayed, reasoning that they'd somehow managed to find a pleasant, wealthy, and above all safe place to settle down. So why travel all the way back home again to participate in some newfangled kingdom with an uncertain future? The High Council had, after all, agreed to integrate them into the Utopia, offering them citizenship on equal terms with every other visitor - on the advice of Argila, from what Anitra had heard - so they were no longer mere refugees.

Many of them had taken up work in and around the Marketplace, lending their strong backs and arms to improving the simple shacks that most people there had set up shop in. Even if they weren't strictly speaking necessary in order to keep wind and rain out (what with the whole place being indoors), seeing properly-made walls and roofs there made it all look much neater, and seemed to inspire a somewhat more disciplined attitude in those who worked there. Many others, however - particularly young mares - took up work as personal servants instead, for dragons who (now that they were available) found that there was a great many uses a pair of hands could be put to. Of course, Melora's existence loomed large over the whole arrangement - many a young dragon specifically sought a Mare-servant in order to imitate the Utopia's great hero...

One might have expected this to cause a number of misunderstandings. Instead, it caused a lot of moaning. There were far more mares than stallions amongst the refugees, and those were mostly old greymanes or cowardly soldiers who had decided to run rather than fight in their tribe's hour of need. The rest were mere colts, barely weaned, who had made most of the journey on their mother's arms - or in her belly. So their internal dating-options were limited and highly unfavorable. Add to that a young dragon, vibrant and enthusiastic, polite and attentive, not entirely sure of what to do now that he's got the personal servant he asked for. A powerful being - and rich besides (old habits die hard, especially for until-recently starving refugees). And of course, they had heard about Melora's visit to the camp too - about how she walked tall, sending stallions scattering, with a dragon at her back.

So many of the mares proved quite willing to provide their 'Master' with services beyond den-cleaning and scale-scrubbing. The small-to-medium breeds of dragons were, like Blake, suitably scaled to provide a grown mare with a pleasing stretch, similar in dick-size to the most well-hung of their own kind's men. The larger breeds, like Reds and Golds, were more formidable, but also more desirable by reason of the inherent status having such a Master conferred, and like Melora, the mares proved capable of handling them with a bit of practice, making good use of hands, tongues, and their seemingly universally-huge tits in the meantime. It had become a bit of a game for Anitra (and, soon after, Direza and Melora) to try and guess which color dragon a particular Mare-servant 'worked under' based on how bow-legged her walk was.

Of course, the dragons weren't the only ones who'd taken advantage of the Horse-People's presence, she thought as she licked her lips and gazed down over their little town, clinging to the crater's rim. It had annoyed her mightily that, during her recent trip to the Lands of the Horse-People - now the great Kingdom of Equus - she hadn't been able to recruit any lovers amongst them, due to the need to 'stay in character' as part of Artemis Fowl's clever plan. Once she returned home, there were no such restraints on her, and she'd quickly rounded up a suitable selection of stallions. Former warriors who would rather be lovers than fighters, young colts filled with surging hormones and fresh desires, even some of the younger veterans, still vital and rich with many years of experience in the carnal arts. With Melora along to ride herd on them (heh), wielding the Ring of Priap, they'd provided her with a satisfying, no-holes-barred gangbang. The last one of its kind she'd be enjoying for a while, what with her growing womb - even then, she'd had to make sure that her pussy was mostly guested by the colts, and that the more well-hung stallions were pleasured only with her mouth and ass.

Remembering it made her shiver with pleasure. So many long, hard horse-cocks, drilling into all of her holes, heads flaring as rivers of cum were dumped into her... to be consumed by the fires of The Quickening, inspiring her with the strength and endurance of a horse, herself. She'd ridden them all into exhaustion, even the colts who'd come back for not just seconds and thirds, but sixths and sevenths. And they'd all been so deliciously eager to please - aware of her status, even if they weren't entirely sure what that status was, and determined to demonstrate how well they'd integrated into the Utopia's openly sexual culture.

Taking a deep breath, she did her best to banish the thought and started climbing down from the spire. She'd had enough of the view - she needed something else, right now. Something hot between her legs. Something big and thick and long, filling her pussy to capacity... ugh. But she couldn't have it. Well, she wanted the second-best thing, then - the same thing, but in her ass. Unfortunately, there'd be a short delay on that count too - Blake would still be in his meeting, mulling over important subjects with the rest of the High Council. Well, she had plenty of alternatives, but right now, she wanted him. The thought consumed her as she climbed, distracting her from the burning sensation in her arms and the tightness in her chest.

She jumped off the wall several yards off the floor, her legs absorbing the impact easily, and looked around. She needed a distraction while she waited for Blake to finish his meeting. From her high perch, she'd seen that a new caravan had just arrived at the caravansary, and with resolute steps, she headed towards it. Looking over whatever wares they'd brought might serve as a decent diversion, she thought - and if she should be overwhelmed by desire, she could always just bang one of their pack-donkeys. She laughed at the thought, the resulting mental image giving her step a little extra spring.

The Caravansary was bustling with activity when she arrived, with the new arrivals shouting greetings to familiar faces and/or loudly declaring how their wares would blow everyone away. A few dragons had landed in the plaza to take a look, and several craftsmen (or their apprentices) were emerging from the Citadel to see if the materials/tools/letters from home they'd been waiting for had FINALLY arrived. Amidst it all, caravan-guards were playing dice or ogling the pretty Mare-servants who were emerging as well, probably on some errand for their Master, and Anitra diverted herself by identifying one as definitely working under a Red.

A sudden burst of movement made her instincts - sharpened by past adventures - twig, and she automatically reached for her sword. It was riding on her back as always, out of habit more than need, and already emerging from its dragon-leather sheath as she turned to focus on the source of the movement. A seemingly-average caravan-guard had jumped up from a dice-game and sprinted through the crowd towards her, and as she focused her eyes, she saw a dull glow under his jacket even as he reached in there and pulled out a wicked-looking knife. An expression of dreadful exultation twisted his face as he unsheathed it, revealing a blade of jagged obsidian.

Even as she readied her blade to meet his charge, however, he slid to a halt just out of her sword's reach - even as the rest of the crowd began to turn to see what was going on - and whipped his blade across his wrist, drawing blood. Cackling, he swung the now-bloodied blade through the air, scattering crimson drops in her direction. "My Master requires your presence... IN HELL!" He declared, sending a shockwave of consternation and panic through the Caravansary. She, meanwhile, calmly stepped forwards and plunged her sword through his heart.

He collapsed forwards over her blade, blood welling from his lips courtesy of his perforated lungs. Nonetheless, he somehow managed to grin up at her, and gasp out a final sentence. "Hah... hah... thank you... my sacrifice... completes the Ritual... and my soul goes to the Master!" Then his head fell, and she watched in dawning horror as a handful of tiny red spots on her skin began to glow with a dark radiance. Her vision became clouded, as if she was looking through a wall of smoke and fire, and the shouts of the crowd - and angry roaring of the nearby dragons - grew dim and remote.

She was falling - she could feel it. Desperately, she clung to her sword, feeling bitterly certain that she would soon need it. Somehow, she even managed to put it securely back in its sheath. Then she started twisting herself awkwardly in the air, trying to get her bearings. Around her was darkness, lit by a dull, red glow from beneath - well, she figured it was 'beneath' based largely on the fact that she was moving rapidly towards it. Ashen clouds sometimes passed by. With some no-doubt ridiculous-looking gestures and movements, she managed to get herself turned around enough to look what she was falling TOWARDS.

The sight dispelled any hope that her crazy attacker might have been speaking metaphorically. She was falling towards a world of fire and brimstone - a volcanic wasteland dotted with dark structures hewn from dull basalt. She could see occasional flocks of birds flying over the blasted landscape, but as she focused her draconic eyes, she recognized that they weren't birds at all - but rather huge, dark-red bats. Demonic beasts, to be sure. She was plunging into Hell - or, to give it its 'proper' name, according to the sages, the Nether Planes. A parasitic dimension inhabited by fel creatures - demons, devils and monsters - who preyed on the lives and souls of mortals. Basically the worst possible place one could be falling towards.

She was high enough up that she could get a rough idea of the geography. The area she was approaching seemed to be a peninsula of sorts, lit up by veins of magma, and surrounded by a dark, jet-black... sea? She rather doubted that it was made out of water, whatever it was. Probably acid, based on what she'd heard of the place. Good thing she wasn't falling towards it! Instead, she seemed to be plunging in the direction of a megalithic structure built on a plateau, gleaming with as much bright obsidian as dull basalt. A demonic castle, of some sort? She could see a glow at its center, and as she refocused her eyes, the glow rose like a pillar, connecting to her. The spell that had torn her from her home and sent her into this place was pulling her towards that spot. Most likely, it was also designed to provide her with a safe landing - this whole thing was a bit too elaborate to be simply an assassination-attempt... and she hadn't forgotten what the demonic Legion had tried to do to her last time she met him.

Forcing herself to stay calm, she assessed her options. If she did nothing, she'd probably land in the middle of a demonic fortress and be swiftly overwhelmed and captured. What happened next was uncertain, but if Legion was involved - which seemed a fairly safe bet - it probably involved impregnating her with some kind of demonic hellspawn that would eventually tear its way out of her belly and ravage the world. Which, of course, would necessitate aborting her current, non-demonic pregnancy. The thought made her blood run cold.

Fortunately, the drop was long enough to give her time to formulate a plan. She waited, one hand on her sword, until - well above the dark castle - she felt her rate of descent begin to slow. Then she threw her body sideways, and at the same time, swung her sword towards the glowing bonds of the active spell. The ensorcelled blade forged from star-metal cut through the magic as easily as it usually severed flesh and bone, and as she had hoped, the sudden release of magical energy combined with her equally-sudden movement sent her tumbling sideways, over the black rooftops of the fortress, and its imposing walls.

Unfortunately, she had no way to stop the tumble. She could only roll herself into a tight ball to protect her belly, tuck in her head, and hope that the Ring of Featherfall she was still wearing would slow her fall enough to make it survivable. And that she wouldn't smack directly into some field of jagged obsidian and impale herself. Basically, there was a lot of hoping. Still, it beat accepting despair and facing a fate worse than death without doing anything!

Her luck held. She careened off the side of a cliff, crashed through a sheet of basalt that flew into fragments at the impact, and finally splashed down on a blessedly flat piece of land. Lying back, trying to catch her breath, she took a quick inventory of her injuries. Lots of bruises - those would heal quickly - and some bruised ribs by the feel of it. Those might take a little while longer. Still, nothing her accelerated regeneration couldn't handle, even without the benefit of a Quickening. The biggest problem by far was that she wasn't catching her breath.

The air was thick with sulfurous steam and fine ash. Trying to breathe deeply just made her cough. She struggled to sit up, hoping that the air would be a little better further off the ground, and found that it was - just barely. If she'd been the sort to wear a dress, she might have torn a strip off of it and bound it around her face to filter the thick air - but she wasn't. Although, on reflection, a dress might not have lasted that long, she thought as she glanced down at her armor. The Carbuncle set into her chestplate was glowing steadily, and she could see why. The very ground she laid on was cracked through with tiny fissures, and through them orange-red light was filtering - underground lava. Without the Carbuncle, it was likely that even her intrinsic resistance to heat wouldn't have been enough. As it were, she felt uncomfortably hot, but at least her hair wasn't catching on fire.

She staggered to her feet, breathing as best she could through clenched teeth, hoping to thus filter out at least the larger fragments of ash. She had to get moving. Even if the demons awaiting her at the fortress hadn't seen her divert her path, they'd soon realize that she wasn't showing up where she was supposed to. Then there'd be search-parties out looking for her. She needed to find somewhere to hide, and try to recover. Maybe with a bit of time, she'd adapt to the thickness of the air. Perhaps she could find a nice cavern somewhere? This much volcanic activity should theoretically leave quite a few such formations behind...

Moving ahead, away from the fortress, she forced herself to focus on things like that - things she could use. Actions she could take. She didn't think about what the polluted air she was breathing might do to her unborn child, lest she be consumed by despair and hopelessness. She didn't think about whether her beloved Blake was, even now, mounting a rescue-attempt, lest she give in to apathy and passivity. If rescue came, excellent. But she couldn't count on it. She had to do everything she possibly could to survive, and even escape from this hellish pit. The demons sometimes made it out, after all, so surely there was a way...

She'd been walking for a while when she heard voices from ahead. Her first impulse was to avoid them, but it seemed unlikely that a search-party would already be ahead of her. She needed information - a better idea of the lay of the land. The voices would probably belong to demons, but even they could be threatened - at least by someone with a suitably potent sword. And who knew? Humans WERE sometimes pulled into the Nether Planes, as had just been demonstrated - perhaps they were kept as slaves by the demons, or something. Slaves could be a good resource.

So she snuck towards the voices, keeping low and hiding behind the rugged landscape. Dotted as it was by boulders thrown up by volcanic eruptions and strangely-shaped basalt growths from when the subterranean lava-flow had temporarily risen, there was no shortage of hiding-places, at least. Her sharp ears already allowed her to pick out two distinct voices - one of them rough and bestial, the other strangely feminine. They did not sound friendly towards one another. Somewhat surprisingly, though, she could actually understand the words - did demons all speak the trade-tongue? Well, it was probably difficult to barter for people's souls if you didn't speak their language...

Carefully, she peered around a jagged rock-formation, and saw them at last. Before her, a basalt column rose from the ground, and bound to it was what looked like a female demon. She had bright-red skin, curly black horns, a mouthful of sharp-looking fangs, a mane of pure white hair shot through with lines of deep orange, and no clothes on whatsoever. Her chest was heaving, making her impressive rack bounce freely, and she was thoroughly on display - her wrists were attached to the pillar above her head, caught in something that looked like an improvised set of manacles, wrought from half-molten magma. Her legs had been wrapped back around the pillar, with her ankles similarly attached. She did not appear to be in a good mood.

Another demon was standing before her - this one looked male, though it was harder to tell. His body-shape was inhuman - a massive torso supported by short, thick tree-trunk legs. Arms like a gorilla, long enough to allow him to knuckle-walk. A misshapen head, more like a rough caricature of a face carved from stone by a disinterested student of sculpting than anything else. He was clothed - sort of. A belt with a couple of pouches, made from some sort of black hide, hung diagonally across his huge chest, and a dark-furred loincloth hung around his hips. It was currently pulled aside, however, revealing an erection that had to nearly drag around the ground when soft. It was a nasty-looking thing, with a head that reminded her of a scorpion's stinger and little chitinous knots marring the smooth surface of the shaft at regular intervals. Like the rest of him, it was an unwholesome shade of dark red, reminiscent of partially-dried blood.

"You won't get away with this, Karr..." growled the woman, struggling against her bonds - futilely, from the looks of it. The burly demon - apparently named Karr - laughed roughly, and offhandedly delivered a stinging backhand blow across her chest, sending her breasts swaying with a sharp sound. "Get away with, eh? I'd say I already have..." he said gutturally and stepped closer. He towered over her by a head and a half, and despite the relative shortness of his legs, his groin was still level with hers as she hung from the pillar. Having a side-view of the action, Anitra could clearly see Karr stoop down a bit as he guided his cock towards the demoness' surprisingly human-looking pussy. For some reason, the small bush of white hair with orange highlights above it struck Anitra as particularly odd.

The woman winced as the thick member was forced up her cunt, but apparently, she was physically able to handle its size. "You think this will 'put me in my place', huh? Screw you, Karr. I'll get loose sooner or later. Then me and my friends will show you where YOUR place is." She was snarling through gritted teeth now, and looking quite dangerous, but Karr just chuckled and began to thrust at a leisurely pace. "Oh you will, will you? Hah. As if. You always were a stupid cunt, Kylaess. There ain't gonna BE a 'later' for you. Once I've had my fun, I'll devour your essence. There'll be nothing left of you but ashes. And as for your friends? Pah! MY friends are dealing with them even now. They'll learn their place - and without you around to put stupid ideas in their pretty little heads, I suspect it'll stick."

The demoness - Kylaess - gaped at him, her bravado crumbling. "Devour... you wouldn't! That is against the Law, without the Lord's approval!" He laughed again, even more coarsely than before. "Law! As if I give two shits about that. NOBODY does. That's why I keep saying you're a stupid cunt. The Lords are too busy fighting each other and kissing the ass of the High Devils to bother actually enforcing their stupid rules." He pumped his hips, pushing hard against the bound demoness, making her gasp with sudden pain. "The only reason I ain't snacking on your pathetic excuse for a heart already is that I wanted to try a piece of that fine ass of yours first. 's such a shame, really. With a body like that, you could've gone far as a Succubus... too bad you were too stupid to understand that."

Anitra suddenly realized that, without any conscious decision, she had left her previous hiding-spot and started circling around the couple, so that she was now directly behind Karr's back. Kylaess was completely concealed behind his bulk, and she could see a pair of wrinkly, fist-sized balls bouncing between his short, bandy legs as he continued to rape the helpless woman. And a woman she was - a demon too, sure, but a woman still. From the sound of it, that wasn't an easy lot in Hell.

Of course, the very thought of interfering was insane. She was exhausted, beat up, and breathing heavily just from walking. She needed to keep a low profile, find a place to hide and recover, not get involved in internal struggles between demons. And yet... well, she could rationalize it in several ways. Helping the demoness might earn her an ally, or at least an easily-persuaded source of information. But the fact was, she just wanted to help. She'd been raped a few times herself - if one could call it that. The knowledge that her opponent's lustful actions were merely digging his own grave, providing the fuel for her Quickening, had always taken the edge off the experience. And yet, there'd always been an unpleasant undercurrent. Whatever the truth was, she always knew what the creature pounding her ass believed the situation to be. Letting them briefly harbor that belief was only endurable because she knew just how terminally they would shortly learn their error.

This demoness, though... she didn't have a Quickening waiting for her. She was suffering, be she ever so red-skinned and behorned. And she'd soon be killed by her rapist, who seemed confident that he could get away with it, despite it being against whatever passed for 'law' in the Nether Planes. Heck, the really chilling implication was that the rape wasn't against the law. It had to be stopped... and it seemed clear that there was no-one around who could or would do anything about it, other than Anitra. So she quieted her breath as best she could, and quietly walked towards the demon's broad back, sword in hand.

She'd slain demons before, but barely remembered it - she'd been in a trance, of sorts. Apparently, her sword worked wonders against them, though, which probably wasn't a surprise considering their unnatural origins and the starborne metal's magic-disrupting properties. Still, there was no sense taking chances, and the demon, Karr, was sufficiently focused on the pleasure he seemed to derive from raping the helpless Kylaess that she had ample opportunity to set up a perfect surprise attack. By the time he groaned and stiffened, and then stepped back to reveal a rapidly-softening cock dripping with vaguely-greenish cum, she was in position and knew exactly what she needed to do.

"Well, that was fun..." he grunted, and lifted his hand towards Kylaess' chest. "Time to finish this, then." Then he screamed in surprise as Anitra darted forwards, swinging her sword - the mighty blade BlackFire - in a powerful arc. The razor-sharp blade, driven by her inhuman strength, cut through the demon's rocklike hide, the bulging muscles beneath, and even the thick thigh-bone, as she cut his right leg off right beneath the hip. Even as he began to collapse sideways, she moved out of his shadow and turned around, blade flashing upwards to meet his neck as it descended into her reach.

His neck, thick though it was, offered no more resistance than his thigh, and a moment later, his head - wearing an expression of astonished befuddlement - sailed through the air and landed in the dirt where it rolled a couple of times before the pair of short, stubby horns crowning his brow dug into the ground and stopped it. The heroic figure Anitra no-doubt cut as she leaped to the rescue in the nick of time with such a spectacular decapitation was, however, somewhat ruined when she broke down into a coughing-fit immediately afterwards, forced to breathe too quickly from the brief burst of activity. Nonetheless, Kylaess was still staring at her with shock and awe written across her inhuman face by the time Anitra regained enough breath to straighten up and look at her. "You... you're a human! And you saved me... are you... a hero?" she gasped, eyes scanning Anitra's exotic equipment. Based on what she'd seen of demonic dress-code so far, the armor probably didn't even look noticeably skimpy to her eyes.

"You must be! I've heard about heroes rescuing maidens in the nick of time! And there's no way a human would be alive and free down here if they weren't a hero..." she was still talking, seemingly mostly to herself, while Anitra struggled to find her voice. She'd seen that sort of babbling before - a common reaction to sudden relief after a desperate situation. It was... disturbingly relateable. Finally, however, she managed to clear her throat enough to answer. "You're no maiden, demon - and I'm no hero. Just because I didn't feel like letting that creature do whatever he pleased, doesn't mean I'm your friend." A look of consternation crossed Kylaess' (admittedly rather beautiful) face, and her eyes panned to the sword still in Anitra's hand. She shifted uncomfortably in her bonds. "Umm... so... does that mean you're going to kill me too?"

Anitra pondered the question. Well, obviously, the answer was 'no', but there was more than one way to say that. Play it hard and threaten the girl to extract information? Or play it soft as the reluctant hero, and earn it with gratitude? She'd been generally disposed towards the former, based on what she knew of demons, but what little she has seen of Kylaess so far was already making her instincts point in the other direction. Sighing, she shook her head. "No... though I've got half a mind to just leave you there, so you don't raise an alarm or lead other demons to me. However... I hear your kind are big on bargaining, no?"

The demoness squinted up at the manacles holding her wrists in place, as if gauging how hard it would be for her to work her way free if she was left alone. Then she quickly nodded. "Yeah. We're famous for it, even. When we strike a bargain, we always stick to the letter of it! Otherwise, people would stop selling their souls to us, right? So... you want to make a deal, then?" Anitra chuckled, and immediately regretted it as another vicious coughing-episode racked her chest. "Yeah... stick to the letter of it, all right. I've heard as much." she finally managed to gasp out. "You also merrily violate the spirit of any agreement, but I suppose one has to fault anyone stupid enough to expect otherwise of a demon. Still, yes, I'll make you a deal."

Kylaess actually looked somewhat concerned by the coughing, thought Anitra, but she still nodded in a professional sort of way. "All right. What do you propose?" Anitra shrugged, straightening up as best she could, in the face of the growing pain in her chest. "I need information, and a safe place to hide out and recover. In return, I offer you your life and freedom. Sound fair?" The demoness' eyes narrowed, and she shot Anitra a speculative look, before slowly shaking her head. "Not really. Information for my freedom, I can agree to that. But if you actually want me to help you - by offering you a place to hide, for example - you'll have to do better than that."

Gritting her teeth, Anitra swiftly lifted her sword to rest it against the demon's neck. "You're not exactly in a great bargaining-position..." she said threateningly, but while Kylaess flinched somewhat from the touch of the black blade, her eyes remained hard. "Neither are you, human. I can tell that the air here isn't agreeing with you. How long do you think you're going to survive like that, without help? You can't run OR fight while you're busy coughing your lungs up..." Anitra made a disgusted sound. Demons! Why had she thought saving one's life would in any way persuade it to accept a bargain that wasn't entirely in its favor?

"What do you want, then?" she asked through clenched teeth, her blade still close to the demon's neck, and shaking slightly as she suppressed the urge to cough again. Kylaess' eyes flickered from the blade to her face, and she swallowed something. "I... want your help. Help for help. You can't say that isn't fair." Anitra blinked in surprise, and then suddenly remembered something she'd overheard while sneaking up on the pair of demons. "Your... friends. They're in trouble." She said slowly, glancing down at the corpse of the fallen Karr. Kylaess nodded, careful to keep her chin clear of the sword. "Yeah. Unless he was bluffing, which would be strange when he was planning to kill me anyway, Karr's 'friends' will have moved against mine. And I doubt I'll be able to do anything about it by myself." Her eyes gleamed, then, with hope and eagerness. "But Karr was the worst of the lot, and you took him down in the space of a breath! Please - help me rescue my friends, and I'll help you with... whatever your quest here is, in return."

Anitra groaned and ran a hand over her sweaty, soot-stained face. When she put it like that, she didn't have much choice... not if she wanted to stay true to her resolution. She'd decided, after reaching the Dragon Utopia, that she wouldn't walk all over people in pursuit of her desires anymore - she didn't want to reach her goal, and then look back to see a trail of wreckage behind her. She was facing a demon, sure - but a demon who was driven by concern for her friends. Who knew that demons even had friends?

So, with a sardonic grimace, she lowered her sword and cut apart the magma-shackles that bound Kylaess' legs to the pillar. "All right, demon. We have a deal." The crimson-skinned woman nodded eagerly and landed nimbly on her feet when Anitra raised her sword in a broad arc to slice through the manacled holding her hands. She stepped back, then, cautiously, but the demoness made no move to attack, and instead approached the fallen Karr's corpse and started tugging at the belt of pouches he wore across his broad chest. "I don't suppose there's anything in there that might help me breathe easier?" Anitra asked with more sarcasm than hope, and Kylaess quickly looked up with a guilty expression. "Ah... no, there won't be. They're mine, see. He took them off of me when he tied me to that pillar. I know there are items and spells used to keep human slaves alive here, but only Devils and their higher-ranking servants know about stuff like that..."

Anitra nodded tiredly, and coughed up a lump of blackened phlegm. She was feeling increasingly woozy. "Maybe I shouldn't have killed that bastard so quickly..." she muttered, mostly to herself. "If I'd just crippled him, I could've sucked some demon-essence out of him. That would've done the trick, I'm sure..." Kylaess, however, seemingly had sharp ears, and she quickly raised her head. "You can do something like that? That's great! I doubt you'll be much help to me in that condition, anyway... so, if you can absorb demonic essence somehow, can't you just take some of mine?"

Blinking a bit, Anitra looked over Kylaess' mostly-naked body and considered that question. The demoness had gotten back to her feet already, and the belt that had hung across Karr's chest was now pulled around her waist and from her left hip to her right shoulder. It didn't conceal much of anything, and the thin leather strap between the tits actually managed to make them stand out even more. However, Anitra still had to shake her head. "Nah. It doesn't work well on women. I can get a bit of energy that way, but... only a tiny bit. Wouldn't be enough. Would take too long to be worth it."

Kylaess, who seemed to be an inquisitive - or possibly just curious - sort, seemed somewhat confused by that. "It... only works on men, then? Uh..." Then a grimace appeared on her face and she hesitantly asked another question. "Well... exactly how 'male' does someone have to do for it to work, exactly?" Glancing at her, Anitra shrugged. Normally, she kept the details of her Quickening secret - her ace in the hole - but it seemed pointless right now. Her head was hurting, and her eyes were getting blurry, and maybe this naked red chick had an idea - she certainly wasn't in any condition to think of anything clever. "Well, this part's the important one... as long as that's there and working, I'm good." She poked the fallen Karr's lumpy dick with the toe of one sandal.

Kylaess nodded thoughtfully. Then she took a deep breath. "All right, then. I know what to do. Give me a moment..." Leaning over Karr's hefty corpse, she put her left hand on his chest to steady herself, and raised her right arm, bending it and straightening her fingers like a spear. The obsidian talons crowning her fingers creaked slightly as they grew and twisted together, becoming a solid, nasty-looking edge. Then she plunged her arm down, tearing through the fallen demon's huge rib-cage, sending up a spurt of black blood. Anitra winced slightly as she watched her new ally rummage around inside the monstrous demon's body, and then finally withdraw her hand - clutching a black lump shot through with fiery-orange veins, reminiscent of a piece of partially-cooled magma.

Hesitating for a moment, Kylaess stared at the thing, grimacing again. Then she pushed it into her mouth and chewed quickly, spurts of black liquid covering her jaw in rivulets. At that moment, Anitra decided, Kylaess did not look attractive in the least. She did, in fact, look like a demon, ravenously devouring the heart of a fallen peer. As she ate, however, something began to change. Her body shifted and grew, with muscle-definition suddenly appearing on previously-subtle flesh. Her shoulders widened. The curly black horns on her forehead grew several inches, twisting as they did, producing a creaking sound that was almost painful to the ear. When she rose from her grisly feast, it was also clear that Kylaess had just grown about a foot in height. She looked less the seductive succubus and more like a demonic amazon, now.

On the ground, Karr's corpse began to hiss and fall apart, turning into a rapidly-scattering pile of ashes and fine dust. Blinking slowly, her head still foggy, Anitra connected the dots. "You've... devoured his 'essence', or whatever... like he said he'd do to you." Kylaess nodded gravely. "Yeah. It's against the Law, but... it wasn't the Law that just saved me. And now, I can do this..." She lowered her hands to her naked groin, her pussy still dripping slightly from the late Karr's rape, and pressed her bloodied fingers against the flesh above it with a look of concentration on her face. The tissue swelled and twisted, pushing out and assuming a familiar form, even as the labia below grew thicker, heavier and more solid. It was clearly a far more biological process than the spell Anitra was so intimately familiar with, but the result was the same - a few seconds later, the otherwise female-looking Kylaess had a long, thick cock hanging between her legs. In fact, it looked exactly like Karr's had - same pointy head, same hard nodules along the shaft...

Looking down at it herself, Kylaess nodded, and then crossed her arms, bracing herself. "There. That trick you talked about should work on me now, right? Go ahead - quickly, if you can. My friends need help." It occurred to Anitra that Kylaess had no idea how her 'essense-extraction' trick worked, and that she might be expecting something painful and/or invasive. Could a demon really be displaying such selflessness? It rather went against everything she knew of demons, both from stories and prior experience. She didn't have time to philosophize now, however - her lungs were still laboring, and her headache was getting worse. She needed a Quickening, and fast.

Without another word, she dropped to her knees in front of Kylaess and started tugging on the semi-hard tool, running her fingers over the knobby little growths on the otherwise-smooth shaft. The demoness jumped slightly, and so did the cock - unfamiliar or not, the sensation was clearly twigging the right instincts, making the demonic dick harden and rise rapidly. As it rose to the vertical, the tackle beneath came into view - a compact ballsack built close to the body, with a thin, vertical slit down the middle. The dick was, apparently, an addition, rather than a replacement - but hopefully, the testes were properly functional anyway.

With no time to lose, Anitra bent over the bobbing cock and swallowed half of it in a single move. Her throat already hurt from breathing the ash-choked air, so rubbing the knobbly shaft over it wouldn't make much difference. More to the point, she was on a tight timer. Within a minute or two, her nostrils would start to clog up from the ash and grit in the air. She'd never delivered a blowjob on a timer before, but she DID know quite a bit about how to make men - and various other bedicked creatures - tremble and groan with just a touch of her tongue. In that moment, she was applying every last one of those tricks.

She sucked hard, twisting her head, caressing the glans with her tongue, then started bopping her head in a rapid rhythm, gradually increasing the movements until she'd deep-throated the entire tool and had her nose lodged in Kylaess' little bush of white pubic-hair. It smelled a good deal better than anything else she'd been near during her trip to Hell so far. She stayed there for a bit, working her well-trained throat-muscles around the cock. It was a good deal bigger than anything a human might've been packing, but still well short of her usual standards. It was nearly as thick as Melora's equine tool (when she was using the Ring of Priap), but not as long, and it lacked the flared head. Of course, it WAS a good deal rougher in the textures, and Anitra found herself wondering what it'd feel like going into her ass...

Kylaess, who'd only just acquired a cock, and thus had never experienced a blowjob, was quite literally blown away by Anitra's skills. Shuddering and moaning, knees nearly buckling, she leaned forwards to put her hands on Anitra's head - mostly for stability - and came. It had taken nearly a minute. Thick, demonic cum poured directly into the DragonRider's belly, bypassing her mouth and tastebuds altogether, and her inhuman body immediately went to work. It seemed as if it was responding to the dire situation, accelerating the absorption beyond its normal, rapid pace. Within seconds, the first waves of The Quickening's recuperative energy flooded Anitra's system, boosting her regenerative abilities and beginning the arduous task of undoing all the damage that the Nether Planes' foul air had done to her so far.

The boost had the expected effect. As she pushed her head away from Kylaess' groin, letting the now spit-covered cock out into the hot air again, she found that she could breathe just fine. The ashes and sulfurous vapors no longer bothered her - in fact, the air tasted rich and sweet. The oppressive heat was also gone - the Carbuncle on her chest still glowed, of course, which had the effect of making her feel pleasantly cool. Combined with the stimulating effects of The Quickening, it all worked to improve her mood endlessly, and she jumped to her feet with boundless energy, grinning broadly. "That hit the spot! All right, I'm ready to take on the Hordes of Hell now. Snap out of it, Kylaess, and lead the way! We've got friendly demons to rescue!"

The demoness blinked, nodded, and turned on a heel to start dashing across the blasted landscape, with Anitra in close pursuit. Kylaess set a quick pace, zig-zagging between boulders and basalt outcroppings with the ease of long experience, and Anitra found that she had no trouble doing the same - soon drawing up alongside the fleet-footed demoness, and watching with some amusement as she warped her dick away in mid-run, presumably having gotten tired of the thing slapping against her thighs all the time. What with the bright-red skin she couldn't be sure, but based on Kylaess' expression when she glanced sideways at her and saw her grin, she suspected that the demoness was probably blushing at least a little bit.

"Umm... so, that was an interesting trick... are you sure you're actually human?" Kylaess asked, never slowing - she apparently had breath enough to talk and run at the same time... and so did Anitra, as it turned out. Despite the quick pace and frequent changes of direction, she felt like she was engaging in a light jog at most. "I never said I was human - that was just YOUR assumption!" she fired back. "But I'm not some kind of... reverse-succubus or whatever, if that's what you're thinking." Kylaess shot her a grin in reply. "I've never heard of anything like that existing, but yeah, the thought DID cross my mind. How'd you do it, then? I didn't feel my essence diminishing at all..." Anitra rolled her shoulders in a shrug as she took two corners in rapid succession. They'd left the boulder-strewn wasteland and entered a series of canyons, presumably carved out by lava-flows. "It's complicated. But basically, I can copy some of the powers and abilities of anyone whose... seed I ingest. Gives me a power-boost too. It's some kind of metabolic thing, I think."

The demoness nodded, her face curious - but she notably did not ask whether Anitra WAS human, after all, or if not, what she was. Perhaps she preferred to maintain some mystery. Anitra, meanwhile, lifted an eyebrow. "So, my turn to ask a question. What are we running into? What's the deal with you, your friends, that demon I killed, and his friends, exactly?" Kylaess' expression darkened, but she nodded and started to explain in a clipped tone as they continued to move. It was the short version, obviously, but Anitra found that she picked up on the underlying meaning remarkably easily - perhaps much of it was instinctive knowledge for demons, and she was tapping into it.

Apparently, the 'laws' of Hell were unsurprisingly brutal. Personal power reigned paramount - and personal property amounted simply to whatever you had the strength to take and hold. The only restraint was on devouring the essence of another demon - about the only way to kill someone permanently. The life of a demon was considered the property of his or her Liege-Lord, and as such, ending them was the same as stealing from the Liege - drawing a swift and brutal retribution. Any demon 'killed' without such action would, over the course of a few days, be reborn in a fresh body, no worse for wear - though, of course, likely to find that everything he once 'owned' had been stolen during the interval.

Considering that female demons generally were smaller and weaker than their male brethren, it should thus come as no surprise that they usually figured as property, rather than combatants - male demons would claim females through force of arms, using them as they saw fit. Kylaess had been... dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and sought a way to change things. She'd started organizing other female demons, banding together for mutual protection - even if the male demons were individually stronger, they usually couldn't stand against three-to-one odds... And the males themselves were too busy butting heads to organize in the same fashion... or so she's thought. "Apparently, they felt sufficiently threatened by our combined strength that they put aside their differences just for the sake of stopping us." She said, bitterly.

Halfway through the explanation, they'd slowed from a dash to a loping walk, keeping low. Kylaess was fairly confident of the general area where the other demons would be, but she didn't know exactly where - and there was no sense running blindly into the middle of them, wasting the element of surprise. Confusing echoes making their way down the canyons soon informed them that they were getting close, however, and as they snuck ahead even more stealthily, the echoes coalesced into the sound of rutting grunts and pained screams.

The canyon they were in suddenly hit a large, round, decidedly unnatural-seeming clear space, as if a giant hand had simply reached out and flattened a circle in the midst of the cracked, land. Together, Anitra and Kylaess snuck up to the edge and looked around the corner into a truly hellish horror-show, lit by magma-filled firepits. The arena-like space was filled by several dozen demons, and half of them seemed to be having a really bad time...

There was a dizzying degree of variety in the demons, Anitra noted. 'Big and burly' seemed to be the only general theme, and even that had exceptions - there were a few who were spindly and skeletal, with unnaturally-long limbs and thin, stooped shoulders. Even the common, thuggish-looking ones, however, displayed a lot of variations on that theme. Some were craggy and lantern-jawed like the one she'd fought earlier. Some were covered in slick, red scales. Some had messy, dark-brown or black fur. Some had huge bat-like wings. Some had pointy tails. Many had animal-heads, with a broad selection to choose from there as well. The spindly ones stood out in that regard as well - a couple had wings, but they were bird-like, albeit ragged. The same ones also had bird-like heads and nasty talons for fingers, but they lacked the majestic aspect of birds of prey, and more closely resembled great carrion-birds - vultures or ravens.

The same sort of variety could be seen in the female demons - they all possessed clearly feminine attribute (that is, tits), but other than that were just as chaotic. Their human-looking bits were generally quite pretty, but none of them looked as human - or as attractive - as Kylaess. And their INhuman bits were rather noticeable - horns, tails and wings were much in appearance, as were double-jointed legs and hooves. A couple had extra sets of arms, and one of them sported a long snake-tail instead of a lower body, reminiscent of the Lamias she'd heard of on the surface-world. Of course, Lamias didn't usually have six arms, a pair of stubby horns, and a mouthful of nasty fangs.

All of the female demons were either tied up, or currently being manhandled by the male demons. The male demons, meanwhile, were busily at work, raping and torturing their female counterparts. Several basalt structures had been erected in the arena, reminiscent of the pillar Kylaess had been tied to - such as a thick stone frame where three she-demons were trussed up next to one another, spread-eagled, while a heavily-muscled, blue-skinned demon who looked vaguely toad-like whipped a nasty-looking, barbed lash across their backsides, drawing lines of black blood from their buttocks.

Several of the more attractive, human-looking she-demons were bent over a series of hewn stone stocks, wrists and necks tightly held, while a steady stream of male demons groaned and rutted over them, roughly ramming whichever hole they liked, and often forcing the demoness to lick the instrument of her rape clean afterwards. As Anitra watched, one of them flinched away from a badly-stained tool that had been pulled freshly out of her ass, and then angrily bit at it, fangs sinking into the shaft. The demon grimaced in pain, then angrily lashed out with a punch that could have broken a bull's neck, but only served to stun the female demon. He roared at another demon - a big, scaly bastard with burning wings - who huffed a reply, and picked a lump of near-liquid magma out of a nearby firepit. In the demon's hands, it was quickly reshaped into a vaguely phallic shape, and began to glow even more brightly. He then marched up behind the offending demoness, and jammed the burning thing unceremoniously up her pussy, creating a hiss and a cloud of steam, even as she screamed in agony. The first demon nodded with satisfaction and stepped over to the neighboring demoness who - after a frightened look at the girl next to her, who was now sagging in her stocks, putting no-doubt uncomfortable pressure on her neck - started to obediently lick the demon's stained cock clean.

Anitra winced, and Kylaess hissed with anger, her claws digging into the stone wall they were leaning against. Smoke was still curling up from the broiled genitals of the twitching demoness, and all around her, several others were undergoing similar torments. One was stretched out in a circle, and being used for target-practice by a couple of demons using handfuls of burning coals, with crudely-drawn circles marking her breasts, crotch and face as high-point targets. Another was racked over a firepit as a large demon cruelly raped her from behind, his thrusts pushing her towards the roaring fires and forcing her to push back against his huge, scale-covered tool in order to avoid the flames. Someone who had, perhaps, particularly offended her captors, had been hung from a stone gibbet via a pair of cruelly-hooked chains attached to her nipples, her arms bound behind her and her legs tightly trussed, while three demons worked to whip every exposed inch of her skin, attacking her from all sides as she dangled painfully.

Anitra couldn't bear to watch anymore. Even if they were demons, she couldn't stand seeing women subjected to such a clear attempt to definitively subjugate them, teaching them that it was better to just submit to their betters and accept that they were traded back and forth like cattle, rather than attempt to assert themselves and suffer torments as a result. She'd submitted sexually many times - to her beloved Blake, as well as others - and enjoyed it. Direza and Melora were the same way. The domination, the power-games, even the carefully-tuned torments, were all just part of a game that had love, trust and desire at its foundation. This was something else - something despicable.

Kylaess seemed to have just as hard a time seeing the torturous display. She'd pulled back from the edge, turning her back against the rock wall as she breathed rapidly, claws digging reflexively into the stone behind her. Staring at Anitra, she whispered "We... need a plan of some sort. There's even more of them than I thought. Some of the toughest, nastiest demons in the region are out there. Heck, the only demon from the 'toughest, nastiest' list I can think of that ISN'T there is Karr, just 'cuz you already killed him." Anitra, however, was still looking at the ongoing torture and rape, and slowly shook her head. "No. No time for elaborate planning. I'm going to hit them as fast and as hard as I can, aiming to cripple whoever I can't kill outright. You focus on freeing the captives. Then finish off whoever I put down. Have the other girls help if they can."

Then, without waiting for a reply, she focused her mind, tightened her muscles, and flew around the corner at a dead run, sword in hand. The demons, focused on their own pleasures, didn't notice her until the first one of them fell, BlackFire neatly separating his head from his body. Before he had even had time to fall to the ground, she'd cut down two more - taking a leg off one, and an arm off another. They howled with surprise and pain, even as she jumped straight through the arms of one of the spindly, bird-like demons, bisecting his torso entirely and sending his top half spinning through the air, carried by lax wings.

She was pushing the added speed and enhanced perception granted to her by the Quickening, along with the demonic strength and endurance she'd borrowed from Kylaess, to the limit. Whenever she Quickened, she found herself seized by a visceral desire - a need to exercise her body, to push it to the limit... whether through sex or through combat. This time, combat was the name of the game, and she was holding nothing back. Supernatural fury combined with the combat-experience she had earned through her adventuring-career, all backed by unyielding strength and a blade that seemed to cut through demons like they were made out of straw. Whatever demons were actually made from, it seemed to just melt away at the touch of her magic-dispelling sword.

By the time she'd crossed the length of the arena, the surviving demons had gotten their feet under them, and launched themselves towards her in a roaring, enraged attack. There were still more than a handful of them left untouched by her blade... but even as they turned on her, Kylaess emerged from hiding behind their backs, and darted forwards to slit throats and crush skulls, silencing those who were still groaning on the floor, short an arm or a leg. Then, as Anitra carved a deep gash in the chest of the first demon to carelessly leap into her reach, Kylaess began to cut, smash or break the restraints that held the amazed-looking she-demons in place.

The surviving demons heard the sound, and several of them instinctively turned to see what was going on. Eager to seize on such a foolish mistake, Anitra feinted left then jumped right, circling around the three demons who were still trying to press her, then dashed past the backs of their more foolish brethren, severing legs, spines or necks as she could manage. Another demon was too slow to follow her sudden relocation, and got a sword through the gut for his failure. The last two, suddenly realizing that the odds had turned against them in a flash, gave each other one look, then fled - each running in opposite directions. Growling under her breath, Anitra bounded after the nearest, quickly running him down with the speed of her by-now flagging Quickening and cutting his feet out from under him - before taking off his head to silence his scream.

As she turned around, ready to go after the last, cowardly foe, she saw that she needn't bother. The snake-tailed demoness, freed from her restraints by Kylaess, had lobbed a hefty chunk of those selfsame restraints after the fleeing demon with unerring precision, hitting the back of his head and knocking him to the ground. Before he could get back up, he was mobbed by a pile of enraged, shrieking she-demons, out for his blood. The screams cut off quickly.

Breathing heavily after the exertion, and feeling like the air was rapidly becoming less sweet and wholesome, she watched Kylaess make a speech that would've impressed even Artemis Fowl, explaining to her 'sisters' that the Law was a sham, protecting only their tormentors, and that only by seizing true power with their own hands, claws and talons could they hope to protect themselves. It was quite fiery, and helped along by the fierce, muscular appearance she had taken on after devouring Tarr's essence. The captive she-demons, their rapes and tortures still fresh in their minds - with many of them still covered with wounds and burns - agreed as one, and with expressions of mixed revulsion and dreadful eagerness, they set upon the fallen demons - carving the hearts out of their chests, and devouring them on the spot. There was enough to go around, and even a couple of extras, which were given to Kylaess and the lamia-like demoness by general agreement, for their contributions.

The display she had watched when Kylaess first broke the law was repeated twenty times over. She-demons warped and grew, horns and fangs growing more pronounced even as they gained height, muscle, and shoulder-width. Those with added features tended to see changes there, too - wings grew wider, tails grew longer, spikes grew spikier, snake-tails grew thicker and scalier... as the tooth-grinding creak of twisting bone finally grew silent, the she-demons no longer looked like victims, but like... well, demons. Dangerous, fierce, and intimidating. Presumably, they could also all do that trick Kylaess had done... which was a matter of no small importance, considering how difficult it was getting for her to breathe, again.

She approached them, and had to suffer through a quick, somewhat-exaggerated introduction courtesy of Kylaess. Apparently, she was a great hero and fearsome demonslayer from the Upworld (what they apparently called her home plane), in Hell on a dread mission and willing to aid those who were willing to aid her in turn. "That's not entirely accurate..." she commented, wincing as she felt the ashes begin to burn in her lungs again. "But the help-for-help bit sounds about right. And seeing as I just got you all out of a serious jam, I hope you won't mind repaying the favor... a bit quickly." Kylaess nodded quickly, and several of the less ragged-looking she-demons - which generally speaking meant the prettier ones, who'd endured more rape than torture - stepped forwards as well, fierce looks on their faces. They'd had a taste of blood, now - quite literally, at that - and seemed eager for more. Unfortunately, she'd have to disappoint them, for now.

"What do you require?" Kylaess asked, somewhat formally, and Anitra coughed. "More essence, for starters. I used it all up on that charge. In a few minutes, I'll start choking on this miasma you call 'air' again." Kylaess' face fell while the other female demons standing by her side looked questioningly at her, and Anitra once again had the feeling that the girl was blushing invisibly under her bright-red skin. "Oh... ah. Right. That makes sense." One of the other she-demons blinked, and stepped forwards with an expression somewhere between confusion, wariness and determination. "You can... drain essence from demons to sustain yourself here? Well, you can take some from me - you've already taken some from Kylaess, right? There's no need for her to bear that burden alone." Anitra looked the girl up and down. She was, indeed, rather attractive for a demon. Not quite as human-esque as Kylaess, but close enough. She had a tail, which was currently dancing nervously behind her, and her legs were double-jointed and ended in goat-like hooves - but her face was pretty, and one hardly noticed the fangs or the tiny, pointy horns hiding on her brow. Her skin-tone was more orange-y, veering into something that could ALMOST belong to an actual human, maybe from somewhere near Ganarãya. Nodding, Anitra grinned. "Oh, I wouldn't mind taking yours at all..."

At this point, Kylaess apparently overcame her embarrassment, gave a quick cough of her own, and stepped in to explain exactly how Anitra 'drew essence' from demons. The others looked momentarily taken aback, embarrassed... and thoughtful. Anitra, meanwhile, chuckled and made a quick correction. "Actually... since there's less time-pressure this time, there's an alternative. As long as the seed enters my digestive system, it doesn't matter which end it's from... if you get my meaning." They got her meaning, and a couple of them blushed visibly, thanks to having lighter skin-tones than Kylaess.

They were interrupted as a demoness with a feline face - not amongst those who had first stepped forwards to volunteer their 'essence' - staggered towards them, nose crinkling. "Whatever you're planning to do, we need to make some shelter first. There's a storm coming. I can smell it in the air." Kylaess winced, her eyes darting to Anitra, and then quickly nodded. "Thanks for the heads-up. Right, girls - anyone who feels up to it, make us a roof! Close off the canyons while we're at it. We'll sit out the storm here." Anitra blinked, slightly confused at the sudden turn of events, but then she remembered the 'seas' she'd seen during her fall... they clearly weren't made of water. So it stood to reason that the rain wouldn't be either, and the way Kylaess had glanced at her seemed to confirm it. Uncomfortable for demons, deadly for 'mortals'? Wouldn't surprise her.

What DID surprise her a bit was the way the she-demons turned the 'arena' into a cozy shelter. Several of them, including Kylaess, simply approached the canyon-walls on all sides, and put a hand (or several) on them. Then, a creaking, cracking sound could be heard from above, and great shelves of basalt suddenly grew from the clifftops, extending unsupported into the air even as it thickened steadily at its base. Such shelves emerged from each wall, extending and spreading until they met in the middle, supporting one another and shutting out the dark skies. More rumbling could be heard as basalt blocks rose from the ground at the opening of the various valleys, shutting them off and creating a hermetically-sealed solid-stone bunker, dimly lit by the various firepits the male demons had lit earlier - with several more soon added by other she-demons to improve the lighting. It was actually quite cozy, if one did not think too much about the piles of ash and dust scattered around the place.

Anitra raised an eyebrow at Kylaess as she walked back from the wall she'd been working on, looking slightly fatigued. "Very impressive. So you can all do stuff like that? Shape things out of the stone?" Kylaess nodded, with that somewhat-vague look people often got when they were explaining something to an outsider that was so natural and endemic to them that they'd never really bothered talking about it. "Uh... yeah, pretty much. We're part of this land, see. Extensions of it. We're born of the ground, and reborn of it if we are killed. So we can command it, to a point. We can't manipulate anything that's been crafted by someone with stronger essence than ourselves, though - like when Karr bound me to that pillar of his, you know - and it takes skill and practice to make anything really elaborate. Oh, and it takes a lot MORE practice and at least a bit of talent to work with Obsidian - but basalt and magma is easy."

Nodding, Anitra had to suppress a grin. There were sages back in the Utopia who'd drop their jaws when she got back and passed those nuggets of applied demonology on to them. Nobody really had a working understanding of what demons were like in their own world - people didn't usually return alive from Hell, and those who did tended to be badly traumatized... not to mention having been held as prisoners or slaves by sadistic captors who were thoroughly disinterested in making small-talk about the nature of their demonic powers. "Good to know..." she said, glancing up at the newly-made roof. "Certainly explains where all those racks and gibbets standing around before originally came from." Those implements of torture were no more - the she-demons had taken some satisfaction in crumbling them all to dust, just like those who created them. "And I assume the 'storm' would be rather uncomfortable to get caught out in?" Kylaess nodded glumly. "Yeah. Acidic. Burns like a sonofabitch. I mean... we could survive it, probably, but it'd be rather unpleasant - especially for those who still have wounds. And... well, I don't want to sell that fancy armor of yours short, but..." Anitra could only shrug. "Yeah. I have no idea how it'd stand up to an acid-rain, either. And I'd just as soon not have to find out.

She could hear the winds begin to pick up outside, howling against the stone roof. The rapid patter of falling rain followed soon after. She coughed. The surprising display of demonic stonecrafting had distracted her from her situation for a while, but the last vestiges of her Quickening was rapidly burning out. "Now then... if you or one of your friends might attend to me... I really need a fresh infusion, or I'm going to start choking to death on the air. Again." Kylaess quickly nodded, and once again placed her hands on her lower abdomen with a look of concentration, causing the same impressive, pointy-headed and heavily-textured demon-cock from before to unfold, shaping itself out of her flesh. Several of the other she-demons, returning from having helped raise the roof, quickly ran towards them. "Kylaess! We weren't done talking about sharing the responsibility!" One of them called. "Yeah!" another remarked, before skidding to a halt in front of them. "She saved us too, y'know? I've never been saved before... but you're supposed to try and repay the favor, right?"

The handful of she-demons before her - human-esque in appearance, if still obviously demonic - mirrored Kylaess' earlier gesture of concentration, and underwent a similar change. Their genitals warped and mutated, labia shifting into dangling ballsacks and clits growing into hefty cocks, their designs presumably cribbed from whichever of their demonic tormentors they had feasted on during the post-battle massacre. It was quite a variety, but they all looked satisfyingly thick and heavy, with most sporting various enhanced textures such as scaly plating, ridges or knobs. Licking her lips, Anitra felt a hungry desire rise in her chest, providing a counterpoint to the dawning fear that her growing inability to breathe the air was creating. "Come, now, girls..." she said hoarsely. "There's no need to fight. The more the merrier! I'll last longer with more... sources, anyway."

Then, unable to wait any longer, she dropped to her knees in front of one of them and swallowed her cock, applying both her well-trained oral skills and a few tricks she'd thought of after going down on Kylaess earlier. Namely, working a couple of fingers up the middle of the ball-sack beneath the shaft's base, and into the still-present but now enormously tight pussy that hid between the two heavy testicles. The demoness groaned, hips flexing instinctively as the unfamiliar pleasure rushed over her, and she didn't last any longer than Kylaess had done, spraying a refreshing load of demon-cum down Anitra's gullet within the minute.

This time, however, there was no rush. If anything, they had time to burn, waiting out the storm. Also, she desperately wanted to feel one of those heavily-textured demon-cocks inside something more sensitive than her throat. Driven by equal parts gratitude, lust, and curiosity to try out their newly-acquired tools, the she-demons happily provided for her. There were six of them to begin with - five who had been raped rather than tortured by the male demons during their recent travail, and thus were in better shape than their sisters (not to mention being 'prettier' by demon-standards - which mostly meant human-like in appearance), as well as Kylaess, who didn't seem to mind donating another few loads.

Demonic virility, she would eventually learn, was effectively infinite. They were constrained only by their baseline physical stamina, which they'd all just received a hefty boost to thanks to devouring the essence of the bigger, tougher male demons. Anitra, meanwhile, had already suffered from mounting horniness when she was first pulled into Hell - a sensation that had been renewed and refreshed after the brief blowjob she'd dealt to Kylaess earlier. Her appetite for destruction sated by the earlier melee, it was her desire for pleasure and raw, visceral fucking that dominated once her Quickening was renewed and her breathing again became easy.

She didn't even remember tearing off her panties - only moaning eagerly as the first spit-slickened cock found its way into her ass. Layered scales covered the lower half of it, creating a series of rough ridges that roughly caressed her sphincter going in - and tore painfully at it on the way out. Aroused as she was, however, that kind of pain did nothing to deter her - it just added that special, masochistic cherry on top of her pleasure. Her mouth also soon found something better to do than moan, as another cock was proffered to her lips. It was thick and covered in bulging, throbbing veins, with a flat, leaf-shaped head. It tasted smoky and savory on her tongue.

More warm bodies clustered around her, presenting a forest of hard dicks pointing upwards - or, for the heavier specimens, right at her. She reached out for them eagerly, working a shaft with each hand to get them ready for when another place might be ready. It didn't take long for the one in her mouth to cum, and this time, she was careful to pull back and let the thick jizz explode across her tongue instead of pouring directly into her belly. The flavor was strong, spicy... not that different from what she'd tasted from the Hellhounds and Cerberus, last time she'd tangled with demonic beings. Also not that different from the spicy peppers she'd come to enjoy during her sojourn in Ganarãya.

Cum filled her ass as the demoness behind her found the tightness of her well-trained ass-muscles too much to bear any longer. The freshly-lubricated member that had just left her lips took its place seconds later, as the scaley-cocked demon stumbled away to make room. Meanwhile, she leaned towards one of the shafts she'd been jacking, and eagerly swallowed it to the root. It was long enough that she could feel it poking into her stomach, deep at the bottom of her gullet, as she licked it around the base - a long, relatively thin tool, it was - albeit with several smallish bulges along the shaft, like unfinished knots.

Her quickening surged with every load of demonic seed that was deposited in her mouth or ass, filling her with energy and redoubling her desires. Somehow, however, the she-demons around her were able to keep up. Their numbers, in fact, seemed to have grown. She was surrounded by them, cocks everywhere, thick and thin, long and short, simple and complex - a dizzying variety, like her own personal candy-store. And she wanted to sample every last flavor...

It got progressively easier to keep the orgy going. After the first handful of demoness she-cocks had unloaded in her ass, her sphincter was sufficiently caked with slobber and spunk to provide reasonable lubrication by itself. The friction was significant when a cock that hadn't first been prepared by her lips entered there, but that burning pain only added spice to her pleasure - and the demons didn't seem to mind. Hot members also soon made their way into her pussy, adding another point of pleasure. The sensation seemed particularly intense, there - it made her writhe with eager desire. She knew, at the back of her mind, that she had to be careful with that... but these demons weren't THAT well-equipped. It'd be fine, surely.

She was surrounded by warm bodies, the smell of sweat and sex mixing with the background scent of brimstone and hot stones. Hands were everywhere, lifting her into place, positioning her so that all three of her holes were easily available... grabbing her breasts, pulling on her nipple-rings, teasing her clit... scalding-hot lips found hers, and her tongue explored mouthfuls of razor-sharp fangs in deliciously deep and dangerous kisses... all the stress, shock, fear and concern that had accumulated since she was so unceremoniously pulled into Hell seemed to evaporate as she let the familiar sea of pleasure flood her senses. It was an enormous relief.

She had no idea how long it carried on. The Quickening ebbed and flowed, never ceasing, providing her with limitless energy. The demons surged around her, eagerly fondling and fucking her sweat-drenched body. Every time a cock emptied itself in her pussy, ass, or mouth, another appeared to take its place within seconds. For a while, the taste of her own ass was noticeable on most of the cocks that entered her mouth, but then the flavor began to fade, her ass having presumably been scrubbed clean of any debris save the caked-on layers of cum that had been pumped in there by then.

Finally, gaps began to appear in the wall of curvaceous she-demons surrounding her, as one by one they began to stagger away from the orgy and collapse, exhausted. Intervals where one of her well-worn orifices went empty started to occur. Finally, she found herself all but alone, riding Kylaess' familiar, knob-studded cock as the demon-girl leaned tiredly against the wall. The Quickening still surged in her veins, but the pleasure had diminished enough, now, that she could start to think straight. She'd had innumerable orgasms - literally, in the sense that there was no way to count them. They just faded smoothly into the background surge of the Quickening.

She felt one more rise from her pussy, helped by the hard knobs lining Kylaess' cock, and then - with a deep breath and an effort of will - got herself under control and pushed herself off the exhausted demoness. It had been a while since she'd last been so utterly consumed by pleasure. Perhaps her advancing pregnancy was making her blood hotter? Or it could just be because she hadn't been able to let Blake fuck her pussy for months... either way, despite the continuing arousal brought on by the Quickening, it was time she displayed some self-discipline.

Sitting down next to Kylaess, she took stock of her body. Her nipples and clit were pulsing steadily, hard and erect like tiny dicks. Her labia were puffy and red, skin worn thin - but even as she watched, the redness faded. She was loaded and overloaded with demonic sperm, providing her unnatural metabolism with ample fuel for necessary repairs. She couldn't see her own asshole, but based on the steady thump of pain radiating from it, it was in at least as poor condition - though, of course, that pain was fading rapidly as well.

She ran a hand over her belly. Somewhere during the orgy, she'd shucked off her breastplate - she could see the two halves of it lying on the dusty ground nearby. It wouldn't fit right now, anyway - between her pregnant womb and a stomach swollen with cum, her abdomen bulged significantly. In a month or two, her armor wouldn't fit even if her stomach was empty. At that point, there'd be no more adventuring or getting into fights before she'd given birth... not that THIS little excursion had exactly been planned.

Focusing for a moment, she felt the slow pulse of life through her fingers. Her child was still safe and intact. There was an element of luck to that, alas - during the orgy, she hadn't given much thought to it, beyond reassuring herself that there were no dragon-sized dicks in play. As her womb grew, however, the size she'd be able to safely handle would steadily diminish. She needed to exercise more restraint. Avoid taking stupid risks like that.

She suddenly noticed her fingertips. Her nails... they weren't nails anymore. They were talons - long, sharp, obsidian-looking ones. Reaching up, she stuck a finger in her mouth and ran it over her teeth. Pointy. Mouthful of fangs. She reached higher. Yep, sure enough - a nice little pair of horns poking out of her hair at the top of her brow. She wondered what her face looked like. It wasn't really a big surprise, she supposed. Big enough loads of cum - powering fierce enough Quickenings - often caused outright (though fortunately temporary) physical changes in her. The impressive bit was that she'd completely failed to notice growing horns and having her teeth realigned into fangs, during the orgy. She must have been even farther gone than she'd realized. Well, at least it should help her 'blend in' - though, perhaps it actually made her less attractive? Apparently, demonic standards of beauty basically came down to looking as human as possible...

Leaning her head back against the wall, she breathed deeply and tried to relax. Her head was buzzing strangely. She could feel the wall behind her, feel the stone shift by microscopic bits as the volcanic activity continued far beneath her. She felt fairly certain that if she put her mind to it, she could compel the stone to shift as she wished it to, altering its shape and profile to suit her needs. And further down... the very land she was sitting on seemed to pulse with a steady throb, like a vague heartbeat. Like the land itself was alive. Power was surging through it, with lava-flows as its veins. She could sense it, just out of reach - indeed, she had an instinctive idea of how to grab on to it and draw from that endless well, but it didn't work. The energy-flow slipped away from her, denying her. Perhaps it sensed that, for all the changes the Quickening had wrought on her, she was not truly a being of Hell.

Kylaess groaned next to her, leaning forwards to bury her head in her hands. "I'm sorry..." she said, voice muffled, as Anitra refocused her attention away from the esoteric senses she'd borrowed. "I never meant for something like that to happen... hadn't realized how that male essence might affect us all..." Kylaess continued, and it slowly dawned on Anitra that she was apologizing for the delightful orgy she'd just enjoyed. In retrospect - now that her head was clear - it WAS a bit strange how it'd turned out. She'd started with a handful of semi-reluctant she-demons willing to 'do their part' mostly out of obligation, but then somehow EVERYONE had joined in, it seemed. And they hadn't been short on enthusiasm.

"Don't sweat it. I had a good time. Though I AM a bit curious about what came over you all." She grinned disarmingly at Kylaess, who seemed to relax somewhat at that, and settled back towards the wall, still looking a bit embarrassed, but no longer mortified. "Well... it's your emotions, see..." she tried to explain, seemingly fumbling for the right words to describe something she instinctively understood. "Well, your base emotions. We can... feed on them, if that's the right word. It's like... well, it's not really like eating a soul, but it's something that grew from your soul, so it works kind of the same way." She shrugged, scratching her cheek. "I don't really understand how it works. But when we're near a mortal who's feeling something strongly, we absorb those feelings. It makes us a bit stronger, a bit more energetic... but we can also wind up being affected by those feelings, if we aren't careful. Sometimes in reverse, sometimes directly, depending on the emotion in question."

Anitra blinked, trying to get it all to fit together in her head. "Reverse? What do you mean?" Kylaess looked embarrassed again. "Negative emotions cause the opposite effect. Like, being around a terrified mortal makes you feel brave, being around a mortal who's in agony makes you feel good. Well... just to be clear, I've never been involved in it myself... it's something the high-ranking Devils and Liege-Lords get up to. They demand living sacrifices from worshipers in the Above, see, and keep them as slaves. Torture and mistreat them to draw emotional energy from them. Anyway, POSITIVE emotions like lust and desire are felt directly. Usually, it's professional Succubi who draw on stuff like that. But it seems like males are more susceptible to lust... would explain some of their behavior, I guess. Point is, I wasn't prepared for how much your lust would affect me. I don't think any of us were."

Nodding slowly, Anitra began to put Kylaess' clumsy explanation together with the instinctive understanding of demonic energy that her presently-altered state had given her access to. "I think I get it... my pleasure infected you all, made you go crazy with desire. Sounds like I'm the one who should be apologizing, then, though I obviously didn't know about that. 'sides, it wouldn't have happened at all if I hadn't been having a good time." Kylaess blushed in response - Anitra was growing increasingly sure of her ability to recognize this, despite the demon's bright-red skin. "Well... I suppose. You certainly seemed to be radiating a lot of pleasure. Like... a lot." Anitra just grinned, winking at the demon-girl in reply.

They were silent for a bit. Then Anitra's brow wrinkled. "Hey, Kylaess... you said something earlier about being born from the land. What did you mean by that?" The demoness shrugged, shifting around to sit more comfortably. The storm was still howling outside. Or had it stilled and then started blowing again while they'd carried on with the orgy, blind and deaf to the world around them? "Well... exactly what I said. We're not like you mortals. There are no demon children. We are spawned, fully-formed, from the land itself. We are not truly biological - more like... manifestations of infernal energy. Like the Elementals found in your world."

Anitra's eyes panned down the demon's naked body, past the heavy, round tits to the limp but still formidable dick lying between her legs - she hadn't found the energy to warp it away after the orgy ended, apparently. "Sooo... why do you have genitals? And, for that matter, genders?" Kylaess grimaced. "Same reason we have a digestive system, despite drawing all the energy we need to survive from the land itself: Because we're based on you guys. This world... it's hard to describe, but it basically can't exist on its own." Anitra nodded quickly. "I know about that. Heard about it from some Sages specializing in demonology. It's a parasitic dimension, leeching off the energy of our world." Kylaess shrugged, trying to look offhand - though it seemed clear that she wasn't terribly fond of the facts on display. "Something like that. We're all basically shaped according to the norms above. Like humans, mostly, but we take bits and pieces from other races too - it's all pretty random. Tail from a Lamia, legs from a Faun, wings from a Harpy... face from an Orc, in the late, unlamented Karr's case. Hah!"

She shook her head, dispelling her own lame joke. "Anyway, just about everything up top eats food and has two genders which have sex with each other on the regular. So we're shaped accordingly. It's not entirely without a point, mind - it gets relevant if we manage to visit your world, through a natural rift or by being summoned. Up there, we can't draw energy from the land, so we have to eat and drink. And... well, female demons can't get pregnant no matter what, but male demons can impregnate mortal females, sort of. Apparently, it's more like... injecting the womb with infernal energy, forcing it to spawn an embryo, and then corrupting it into a kind of half-demon entity. Doesn't work much, from what I hear. Anyway, I say 'we', but I've never been to your world. You have to be around the big Nodes to even have a chance of going Above, and the Liege-Lords guard those jealously."

Anitra nodded hesitantly. She could easily believe that Kylaess had never left Hell - after all, she clearly wasn't used to talking to people who didn't already know a whole bunch of background facts about the place. The bit about the Nodes prodded something in her borrowed demonic instincts, though... yes... they were central nodes in the underground network of lava-veins, where the infernal energy accumulated and grew strong enough to form bridges to the World Above. In other words, the place she'd been descending towards before she diverted her path. It made sense that whoever held authority would construct their fortress around such a place, to make sure that any natural rifts or summoning-rituals would draw on their own loyal soldiers and agents... so that they could carry a bounty of energy back home. Carry home? Yes... she knew that instinctively, too. That was why demons always sought to reach the World Above. The souls and lives - and, apparently, emotions - of mortals were the very energy that fueled the Nether Planes. With enough of a surplus, more demons could be spawned from the land...

"All right, I think I kind of get it..." she finally said, hoping she was right. It was vaguely disturbing to just suddenly know a bunch of stuff, but it made sense - there'd be little point in demons spawning fully-grown, if they didn't also come pre-equipped with whatever knowledge was needed to survive and prosper. Then she sighed. "Unfortunately, I think I now also have an idea about how difficult it's going to be for me to get home." Kylaess blinked, looking surprised. "Get home? You came here without an exit-plan?" Anitra barked out a laugh, shaking her head. "I didn't come here on purpose. Some crazy cultist dragged me through a portal with a blood-sacrifice. His own, to be precise. So yeah, my only 'heroic quest' here is finding a way home. Which I suspect would involve a Node..."

Kylaess grimaced. "Yeah... there's no way to bridge the gap to the World Above from anywhere else. And the Liege-Lord controls the Node. Doubt he'd let you borrow it. I'm amazed you managed to escape from his fortress in the first place." "I was able to divert my descent so that I landed outside the walls... but yeah, he'd probably be delighted if I showed up at his door. And since you all are outlaws now, what with feasting on the essence of all those demons, I don't expect you'll be able to sneak me in there either." Kylaess quickly shook her head. "Yeah, no dice there. Even if we didn't now carry the taint of Eaters, we wouldn't be able to get in there. Only way a female demon goes in there is as a Succubus Recruit - and... well, even in your present form, nobody would mistake you for an actual demon. More to the point, you wouldn't want to enter as a Succubus Recruit. At least, I sure don't."

Anitra mirrored Kylaess' earlier grimace. Considering how the male demons apparently treated the average demoness... yeah, she didn't like the thought of how they'd deal with someone who was being specifically trained to be a sex-crazed seductress. Sighing again, she looked up at the ceiling for a moment before asking her next question. "Okay, then. Tell me what you know of the local political situation. Who is the Liege-Lord? What's he like? How good is his army? Does he have allies on hand? How many demons are living in his lands, and how loyal are they?"

Kylaess answered as best she could, and a couple of other she-demons - having started to recover from their orgiastic fatigue - joined in to explain bits that Kylaess wasn't too sure of. By the time the rain stopped and the howl of the wind died down outside, Anitra had a fairly thorough picture of the area she had landed in. It was, to put it bluntly, a desolate backwater by infernal standards. "No rifts, basically no summonings from above... not for centuries, anyway." one demoness complained. It made sense - each area of Hell corresponded to a geographical area in the World Above, though not necessarily in a linear fashion. And this region was, obviously, directly beneath the Dragon Utopia and the surrounding, uninhabited jungle. Not exactly a hotbed of demon-worship! Meanwhile, whatever region lay beneath the Temple of the Bloody Dawn Cult was presumably the demonic equivalent of a bustling metropolis...

Being such a backwater, it unsurprisingly didn't have the best leadership. The local Liege-Lord was, theoretically, a mid-ranking Devil and a Duke of Hell, but he was still beholden to Legion (no surprise there) who was one of the biggest movers and shakers in Hell. Apparently, he'd done something to annoy Legion, and as a result had been assigned these mostly-worthless lands as his kingdom. Named Agares, he was known to be particularly depraved, even by demonic standards, taking great pleasure in breaking down virtues and dignities, as well as teaching immorality. "Doesn't do much actual governing..." another demoness commented glumly. "Mostly, he just amuses himself with the slaves he's managed to beg, borrow or steal from more prosperous territories, and running his little breeding-programs." Turned out, he had a bit of a hobby breeding powerful and nasty hell-beasts - something worth keeping in mind, thought Anitra.

"He's hard on the Succubus Candidates too!" a third demoness piped in with a fierce scowl. "I hear that between him and his new General, they aren't turning out a lot of actual Succubi - but his troops have plenty of Broken Toys to play with." There were quite a few sickened expressions amongst the she-demons as they explained that phrase. Succubus training was rough, of course, but ideally designed to turn a demoness into a competent sex-maniac and keen seductress, ready to part mortal men from their souls. Those who cracked under the 'training', however, instead wound up as empty-eyed husks, little more than lust-driven animals, unsuitable for answering any kind of summoning - and were instead termed 'Broken Toys' and handed over to the demonic legions for their amusement.

While disgusting, it had little tactical value. The new General, Berial, meanwhile, was another matter. He was apparently quite a bigshot - recently ascended to the lower rank of the Devils, though still incapable of taking a remotely human form. But according to the rumors, the very first time he'd been sent through a portal to the World Above as part of an important mission, he'd almost instantly been defeated by some white-haired demon-hunter and sent plunging right back down to Hell. Legion had not been amused, and thus sent him to this effective exile as punishment. Still, by all accounts, he was generally considered a fearsome warrior - a leonine demon with centauric body-shape and a talent for fire-manipulation, he towered above most of his soldiers, and clearly had a fierce temper. He also didn't seem to care much that his sheer size tended to inflict significant damage on the Succubus Candidates he helped 'train'.

Other than the towering general, Agares theoretically had three legions of demons at his disposal... but due to any halfway competent warrior amongst them eagerly seizing on any job-offer from a more prosperous land, they were all severely short-handed and incompetent besides. The lack of any actual summonings for them to respond to also ensured that they lacked any real combat-experience, and their discipline and training was lax at best - though, apparently, Berial had been working on rectifying that since his arrival, at least.

The lands themselves were, predictably, thinly populated. Outside of the fortresses, where a Devil would keep order, demons didn't usually band together or form villages, but instead tended to live mostly solitary lives in order to protect what little they had from rivals. Of course, she-demons usually counted as 'stuff they had' rather than someone to band together with - but Kylaess had broken that mold somewhat, and the she-demons present had all been living together in a sort of proto-village, looking out for each other. Until Kylaess had been lured away by a fake plea for help from a nonexistent demoness, and an unlikely alliance of male demons had descended on the village and dragged them all from their homes to the pre-prepared torture-arena here. "This place is pretty defensible, actually..." one of them commented thoughtfully, looking around. "Maybe we should just settle here? Though, someone should head back to the village and see what can be salvaged. I don't think the menfolk bothered to loot the place properly."

Several she-demons volunteered for that duty, now that the storm had cleared. Others, meanwhile, had been digging through whatever bags and purses their tormentors had left behind once turned to dust and ashes, and one of them hesitantly approached Anitra and Kylaess carrying a nasty-looking collar forged from black metal. Anitra's keen eyes could see magic surging through it - like a dark flame, twisting and surging. Infernal power. Two spells, actually, from the looks of it, but intimately intertwined. "Umm... I found this on one of the menfolk. He must've taken it from the corpse of a runaway slave, planning to return it to the fortress for the usual finder's fee. I figured... if the hero didn't prepare for a trip here..."

Blinking, Anitra looked at the collar again. Maybe if she had Blake's eyes, she could get some idea of what the spells were for, but... "The name's Anitra... and I'm no hero, though I've been called as much before. More to the point - why would I need a slave-collar?" The demoness winced a bit, and Kylaess grimaced beside her, nodding. "Good thinking. Um. Well... have you given any thought to how you'd get, you know, food and water while you're here?" Anitra recoiled in shock. She hadn't thought of that at all. Right now, The Quickening was filling her with vitality, making her feel good, but... that wasn't the same as being good. Between the long walk over the volcanic plains and the sweaty orgy, she'd be dehydrated by now. Food wouldn't be a problem for a while longer, but... it didn't seem likely that she'd be able to reach the Node and get home within the next couple of days, so it WOULD become a problem if she survived that long. More to the point, while demonic spunk could fuel her Quickening, it provided no other nourishment - being, after all, a sort of infernal simulacra of actual cum, rather than anything designed to cause a natural pregnancy.

But of course... if the demons kept mortals as slaves, they'd have a way to keep them alive, and it wasn't as if they could grow food or drill wells here. "The slave-collars... they provide the wearers with food, water and air?" she asked, but Kylaess shook her head. "Not air. They've got large-scale magic set up in the slave-quarters that keeps the air breathable there. It's a measure to deter runners - it's not hard to escape from the slave-quarters, but if you aren't a demon, you'll be choked by the air not long after, as you know. The collars DO provide for other physical needs, though - from what I've heard, they basically draw on the land's energy, like we do, but then convert it into biological vitality. It's just that... they do other things too."

"I can tell..." Anitra said, waiting for the other shoe to drop. "Two spells bound in the same collar. What does the other one do?" Kylaess hesitated, and the demoness who'd first found the collar replied instead, in a rather small voice. "It makes the wearer... obedient. Eager to please. It's a potent magical compulsion. It's... part of a kind of ironic torture, you see - the collars have no locks. The slaves can take them off any time. But if they do, they'll immediately start to feel terribly thirsty and famished, and if they leave it off for too long, they'll die." Anitra sighed. She'd figured it would be something like that. "Right. Give it here. I've got some magical resistance, so it shouldn't be too bad. Beats dying, anyway."

Once the collar was in her hand, however, she hesitated, and touched her belly. She remembered how her desires had overwhelmed the she-demons earlier, dragging them into an orgy where nobody were in control of themselves. She'd still need to maintain a near-constant quickening to avoid choking to death on the air. With the collar on, she'd be even less in control of herself than she had been during the recent orgy. She'd have to take precautions. With a deep breath, she looked around at the nearby she-demons. "Any of your have a needle and thread on hand? Preferably sturdy thread."

One of them did. The needle was razor-sharp and made from obsidian, and the thread was sinew from some small hell-beast - generally used to sew using similarly-tough hell-beast leather. In front of the gaping demons - there wasn't much point in playing coy considering their recent shared activities - she then sat down, spread her legs, and went to work. With her Quickening still running on max, the pain was significantly dulled, but there was a difference between taking a harsh blow in the heat of combat, and coolly ramming a needle through your labia. At least the swelling and soreness from the orgy had already disappeared, thanks to her rapid healing, or it would've been even worse.

She ran the thread down her slit in a zig-zag pattern, drawing a single drop of crimson blood with every stroke as she idly wondered if the nearby demons were enjoying the pain, or if her Quickening dulled the emotional radiation too much for that. At the bottom, just above her asshole, she reversed direction and zig-zagged her way back up again, before pulling the thread tight with a wince and carefully tying it off with the strongest knot she knew. Her pussy was now thoroughly sealed, and it would take a strong, sharp, and carefully-applied blade to open it again. It probably wouldn't deter a truly determined rapist - if anything, it might spur him on - but it should suffice to prevent any 'accidents' while she was around the grateful, but not necessarily in-control, she-demons.

Finished, she got back on her feet and slipped her panties and breastplate back on, before nodding to the wide-eyed demon-girls. "Right. That should do it. Now, before I start fogging my mind up with that collar, we should talk about what comes next. I know what my purpose is, and I've got a vague notion of how to accomplish it. But what about you lot? You're outlaws, now. What are you going to do? Just hide here until Agares gets around to sending out a punitive expedition to grind you all into the dirt?" There was no immediate answer. Only a lot of eyes switching from shocked to scared, and then panning towards Kylaess. The demoness who had originally organized them shook her head sadly and sighed. "I... dunno. When we first organized, I was hoping that the men would just decide that we were more trouble than we were worth. Clearly, they didn't. I don't suppose there's much hope of Agares doing so either, then. I suppose we'd better try to hide... it's not like we can fight him, after all."

This was the opening Anitra had been waiting for. She grinned, shaking her head. "Can't you? I think you're wrong about that, actually. I mean, what's he really got, huh? A fortress staffed solely by soldiers too incompetent, lazy or undisciplined to find work somewhere more prosperous. YOU have a scattered population with no real loyalty towards their leader to recruit from. Certainly, you can't be the only females who are dissatisfied with the way things are. If you play your cards right, you could launch a successful insurrection. Oust Agares, seize the fortress and the Node... then you make the rules. Perhaps Kylaess could become your Liege-Lord. She'd make an impressive Devil, don't you think?"

There was a murmur from the she-demons, all of whom had now assembled around Anitra - including the couple who'd just returned from searching their ruined village, carrying several heavy packs. Kylaess, meanwhile, recoiled. "You're kidding... me, a Devil? I may have the looks, but... gah! It doesn't matter. Even if the local legions are trash, they've got a General who could wipe the floor with the lot of us all by himself." Anitra, of course, had been prepared for that protest, and grinned even wider as she pointed a thumb at herself. "Yeah, well, so do you - if you want me. I've fought demons before, and I've yet to encounter anything my sword couldn't kill. I can take down Berial. And I can help you make the most of your strength. I'm not saying you could beat Agares' legions in a fair fight, of course - I'm suggesting you should fight them in decidedly unfair ways! Why just last week, I was looking over the shoulder of a genius strategist as he plotted out a swift end to a bloody civil war - and I'd like to think I learned a few things in the process."

All eyes were on her now, including Kylaess', and they were wider than ever. "So, what do you say, girls? Join me, and we'll unite the people of this land, kick the guys out of their pathetic fortress, send Agares packing, and rescue whatever poor wretches are being 'trained' as Succubi in there right now. All I ask in return for my help is a chance to use the Node to get myself home afterwards... oh, and whatever slaves are kept in the fortress. I'll take them back to the World Above too. Then, you'll have a fortress of your own, and a by-then experienced army - the other Devils will have to deal with you as equals, and considering the low value of this territory, it REALLY won't be worth the effort to unseat you."

The answer came swiftly and loudly, as she figured it would. Demons, she'd had to conclude, were still people - in the sense that they acted like any other people would, when desperate and uncertain: They seized on any lifeline that appeared before them with immediate eagerness. So, in the handful of hours since she was pulled into Hell, she'd gone from being a gasping, choking refugee, to leading an armed insurrection with nothing to lose. Not bad for a half-day's work. Now all she needed was to turn the demonic equivalent of a mob of farm-girls into an elite force of bloodthirsty guerrillas and defeat a foe that currently outnumbered them about a hundred to one. Oh, and she needed to stay alive in the meantime. With a sigh, she raised the demonic slave-collar and closed it around her neck.

The collar had clearly been designed to accommodate a variety of slaves, not just humans - including dwarves, with their natural resistance to magic. So it was strong enough to largely burn through her own resistance, once it was clasped to her skin and thus unaffected by her armor. That was, of course, fortunate, since it kept her alive - but also meant that she could put up only a token resistance against the compulsion to submit and serve her demonic hosts. Fortunately, it didn't get in the way much - she 'served' them by providing weapons-training, teaching them small-unit tactics, and plotting large-scale strategies for the ongoing campaign. In a sense, the compulsion only served to keep her focused on the work.

However, she still needed to maintain her Quickening at all times, or start choking within minutes. The nights were worst - not that there were nights, per se, in Hell. No sun, no moon, no stars - the whole place was constantly lit by volcanic activities and brimstone-laden fires. The demons didn't need to sleep, either - not while they were in Hell, constantly supplied with energy through the very ground. (On the surface, as with many other things, that changed - as she knew from her ill-fated attempt to sneak past sleeping hellhounds, ages ago.) But she did, and it was thoroughly unpleasant to wake up after a couple of hours' shut-eye because her Quickening had run down during the interval and she suddenly couldn't breathe anymore.

The only way to keep a Quickening going for long enough to provide her with a decent night's sleep was to overload her metabolism - once the quickening was running full-blaze, any excess sperm would remain in her belly, only being metabolized as-needed to keep it going. Thus, in addition to regular 'top-ups' during the day, she found it necessary to end every evening with a major orgy, so that she might go to sleep with her stomach bloated and distended with vast amounts of hot demon-cum. It was during such orgies that her collar came into its own.

Once the pleasure started to build, the collar's compulsion to service and obey combined with her natural submissive tendencies, and the lust radiating off of her inevitably pushed the dozen or so demonic shemales who'd turned up to 'assist' her over the edge as well. With her pussy sealed, her mouth and ass had to pick up the slack, and the bedicked she-demons eagerly made use of both orifices, pounding her mercilessly. Even that, though, was just the beginning. Unlike them, she knew exactly how a submissive should act - and driven as she were by the collar's compulsion, she didn't hesitate to educate them all.

Any cock that emerged from her ass received a swift and thorough cleaning, her tongue and lips carefully removing any trace of filth from the tools - with the more heavily-textured shafts, the ones with bumps or ridges, requiring particularly thorough servicing. Ball-sacks were kissed, licked and sucked, the tight little pussy hiding between the testes eagerly tongue-fucked. Frequently, her face would dive under a pointy tail, between two muscular ass-cheeks, so that she could lick, kiss and suck on a taut little asshole, poking her tongue inside the sphincter to taste the spicy slime hiding within.

The she-demons responded as one might have suspected... whether due to picking up her emotional radiation, or just because they enjoyed being on top after a lifetime of being treated like glorified sex-toys by the male demons. They handled her roughly, fucked her without restraint, took full advantage of her willingness to debase herself, and often delivered a bit of pain to go with the pleasure. Open-palmed spankings from a firm, inhumanly-strong hand, nipple-pinching and ring-tugging... the occasional stinging finger-flick across her clit, barely exposed above her sewn-up pussy. She didn't mind, of course. With her Quickening burning constantly, any pain they inflicted disappeared quickly, and with her submissive side in full flower and reinforced by the collar, it all added up to intense enjoyment for her.

Actually, it was the smaller 'top-ups' during the day that were problematic. She had things to do, after all, and couldn't afford to let matters get out of hand outside of the necessary evening diversions. But she DID need a fresh load of cum up her ass or down her throat several times per day, just to keep the fire in her belly burning. The problem, of course, was that her rather lustful nature tended to easily overwhelm her partners - and with the collar on, she was only too happy to let anyone with a dick indulge themselves in her body any way they liked, wherever they liked, for as long as they liked. In fact, she tended to encourage them.

So after a couple of unfortunate situations where her 'general staff' descended into an unscheduled orgy, with her being fucked roughly across the planning-table, she saw to it that she was assigned a couple of 'personal assistants' who possessed above-average self-discipline. Her favorite was Marilith, the snake-tailed demoness who had been amongst the 20-odd she originally saved. Her serpentine lower body meant that she could simultaneously manifest two dicks, and while Anitra's sealed pussy prevented her from taking advantage of that in the most natural way, their combined girth also served to stretch her sphincter delightfully - as well as providing double the loads for her unnatural metabolism.

Not only did she have the necessary restraint to ignore the lust radiating off Anitra whenever she had sex, she was also a quick study, soon learning how to handle her. At pre-scheduled times, she'd pull Anitra out of whatever planning-meetings or training-sessions she'd been involved in, and drag her away to somewhere secluded where the lust-radiation wouldn't be affecting anyone else. She'd restrain Anitra's legs with her powerful tail, bend her over, and lob a glob of thick saliva that burned like acid at her asshole for lubrication, before forcing both her cocks into the tight orifice without further preparation. As the campaign went on and more male demons fell prey to her and had their essence devoured, her arsenal of available cocks also grew, enabling her to vary the experience significantly. The shafts might be covered in bumps and ridges that would torment Anitra's sphincter ruthlessly, or thick enough that their combined girth strained even her capacity painfully. They might have knots that would inflate tortuously just inside her sphincter, or equine-like heads that flared deeper within. Or, considering her ability to combine any two dicks in her selection, perhaps all four at the same time.

After a thorough ass-reaming and two fresh loads added to her ongoing Quickening, she'd inevitably be fired up and eager for more. Marilith, however, would keep her cool, and allow her to satisfy her submissive desires by worshiping the twin cocks, lovingly licking every square inch along with the double-layered balls below, the tiny pussy hiding between them, and the puckered asshole beneath. No matter how eagerly she licked, sucked and rimmed, however, any request for further fucking would be answered by a stern recrimination and the stinging snap of a whip-like serpent-tail across her buttocks. This would continue until she had calmed down enough to return to her work, at which point her ass generally glowed bright-red, and her pussy dripped hungrily through the stitching.

Compared with managing her own body and mind in the face of a permanent Quickening and a submission-inducing collar, running the actual campaign proved almost laughably easy. When she'd promised her allies victory, she'd been running off a simple assumption, based largely on what passed for 'culture' amongst demons; the primacy of personal power. That assumption was swiftly proven true. The demon's primary 'strategy' involved marching a suitably overwhelming force out to meet the opponent, and then crushing him with raw power. 'Simplistic' did not begin to describe it. Enough said, Agares' forces were woefully unprepared for nonlinear warfare.

The she-demons were, as a whole, quick studies - lacking any preconceived ideas about combat beyond individual brawling. They quickly picked up on the syllabus of traps, ambushes and backstabbing, with several of the more creative individuals soon adding their own flourishes - particularly when it came to weaponizing the demons' intrinsic ability to reshape the land. Meanwhile, a concerted recruitment-effort drew more and more female demons to their side, each asked only for a single display of loyalty: Devouring the essence of a male demon, and thus being branded forevermore an outcast Eater. It was a nicely symbolic act, which served to both weed out those who were too weak-willed to fight for themselves (who were, as a result, relegated to 'support duty' - assisting the growing force with various non-combat tasks) and provide those who DID have the will, with the power and strength to stand in the front lines. A number of terrified prisoners were usually kept for the purpose of providing new recruits with a first meal - but as the reputation of the rebels spread and grew, more and more she-demons showed up already empowered, having worked together to bring down whatever local men they could get their hands on.

Their most decisive victory came when Agares, clearly aiming to crush the rebellion once and for all, sent out his 'elites' - the Bloodcrushers. Mounted on armored war-beasts of his own creation - something resembling a cross between an armadillo and a rhinoceros, only blood-red and twice as ornery - and wielding various heavy weapons, the sheer weight of their charge would crush anyone and anything that stood in their way. At least, that was the idea. The rebellious she-demons met them in a wide canyon, behind a line of basalt barricades, ready to greet them with a variety of ranged weapons. Bows crafted from the bones and sinew of hell-beasts firing obsidian arrows, leather slings hurling burning lumps of magma, and plain old fireballs thrown by she-demons whose mastery of the infernal energy endemic to the Nether Planes allowed them to do so.

The Bloodcrushers eagerly charged the barricades, confident in their ability to crush them, and knowing that their beasts' armor would shrug off most projectiles. Just before they reached their target, however - at a point where it was too late for them to halt their charge - the barricades were lowered to about ankle-height, and the defenders (who were far fewer in numbers than one would have thought) quickly disappeared into caverns shaped into the canyon walls, quickly sealing the entrances behind them. Most of the first line of onrushing Bloodcrushers, seeing the trap appear, had the mental acuity to prompt their beasts to jump, easily clearing the barricade-slash-tripwire... only to discover that immediately behind it, a shallow pit had been dug into the ground, ready to snag their beasts' legs on the far edge. The second line just stumbled over the barricade, seeing it too late.

With a sound like a crashing wave carrying several kitchens worth of pots and pans, the charge collapsed into a pile of braying animals and confused riders. Many were gored or crushed by the panicked beasts, before the main arm of the ambush even got started. Then several nimble warriors jumped down from atop the canyon, Anitra amongst them, and started dancing around atop the carpet of fallen beasts, tearing off heads and breaking spines left and right. (Anitra, of course, always removed her collar before taking active part in a battle - The Quickening could carry her through the resulting dehydration and starvation, and the collar could be replaced before she suffered any damage from the situation.)

A handful of minutes later, all of the 'elites' were dead, as were half their chargers. The rest were led away by a demoness who claimed to have experience working with hell-beasts, and swore that she'd be able to sway the creatures' loyalty, making them potentially useful to the rebellion. She proved as good as her word - to a point. Half the survivors remained stubbornly disobedient, and had to be put down. The rest, however, proved tractable, and while the devastating charge they'd been designed for didn't figure in Anitra's general strategies, their speed and endurance lent itself well to deadly hit-and-run attacks.

Not long after the beasts - dubbed Juggernauts, for obvious reasons - were added to the rebellion's forces, Anitra's curiosity got the better of her, and she arranged to 'inspect' the corral where they were kept. There were no compulsions at work in that case - the collar's effects extended only to demons and devils, not hell-beasts (who, while similar in many ways to demons, were also quite different in a number of very basic ways) - she simply had to know what the large, heavily-armored creatures were packing between their pillar-like hind legs. It wasn't as if it was hard to justify, anyway, was it? Their sperm would support her Quickening and keep her breathing the air as well as any other, thus freeing up her personal assistants for other duties...

The demoness in charge of taking care of the Juggernauts no doubt saw through this rather transparent excuse, but made no protest. All of the rebel demons seemed to have come to terms with Anitra's voracious sexual appetites rather easily - maybe they thought it was normal for humans? None of them had ever been to the World Above, after all. At least it meant there was no real need to hide - a fortunate fact, considering that there was nowhere to hide in the basalt-walled enclosure where the Juggernauts were kept.

Up close, the creatures looked a bit more mixed-up than just 'armored rhinoceros'. Not that she'd ever seen an actual rhinoceros up close - she knew that her 'old friend', the Sultan of Mirage City, had one in his Menagerie, but despite visiting him twice and 'meeting' a couple of creatures from there, she'd never actually gotten around to seeing the zoo itself. Still, she'd seen drawings in textbooks, and heard enough descriptions of them to recognize that the head, at least, was straight-up rhino, what with the huge nose-horn and the smaller one behind. The horns of actual rhinos probably weren't made from gleaming obsidian, though. The rest of the creature's huge, heavy body, meanwhile, reminded her somewhat of a bull - and there was something dog-like about its legs. It was hard to tell, really, under the overlapping plates of blood-red, organic metal that covered the Juggernaut from head to toe.

Well, of course, there were necessary gaps in the armor, like at the eyes, the mouth, the nostrils... the groin. Slipping underneath the multi-ton monster, she was able to confirm that Agares had, indeed, made the creatures male, presumably for 'enhanced aggressivity'. A thick sheath hung down through a slot in the abdominal armor, and swelled intriguingly when she began to rub it. The dick that emerged was jet-black - surprising, considering the otherwise red-on-red color-scheme they had going on - and throbbed eagerly. The shape was straightforward - conical, with a gentle slant. A relatively narrow tip, with a flat, diagonal cockhead, gradually thickened to a diameter greater than her balled fist at the base. Thick veins covered the length of it, adding a bit of texture. All in all, it was nowhere near as brutal as the rest of the creature - she wasn't quite sure if she was happy or disappointed about that. (What had she been expecting, anyway? An armor-plated dick? Well, considering some of the tools she'd seen on the demons, it hadn't been entirely out of the question...)

She gave the tool a thorough once-over with her tongue, coating it in slippery saliva, then got on her hands and knees before the Juggernaut. Hell-beasts weren't affected by emotional radiation the way demons were - but it still readily responded to her lust, and snorted steam as it mounted her. The sensation of several tons of muscular, heavily-armored bulk pressing down on her back was intoxicating - drawing sweet memories of her beloved Blake, as well as various minor conquests she'd made on her journeys. Her ass hungrily gobbled down the long, thick cock, right down to the base where the growing girth made her sphincter strain painfully.

The Juggernaut fucked her with long, slow strokes, its sheer mass rendering faster movement unfeasible - but that same mass also supplied each thrust with rock-shattering inertia. It tore into her with a level of raw power only a dragon could have equaled, and even then, not likely surpassed. The impact of the Juggernaut's hips against her ass-cheeks flattened them, and pushed her shoulders against his forelegs with bruising force. The same impact sent shockwaves up through her internal organs, and made her head roll on her neck. Several orgasms had already torn through her, making her ass contract eagerly around the unyielding, rock-hard shaft, when she found out for sure that the mixed-up beasts did, indeed, contain at least some canine parts.

The already-thick base of the shaft began to swell, revealing an until-then unseen knot. The expanding mass filled her, causing her sphincter to bulge obscenely outwards, and painfully deforming her sewn-up pussy. The sensation, peppered with such familiar stretching-pains, prompted an epic orgasm - prior to landing in Hell, she'd almost forgotten how delicious the feeling of a knot expanding inside her could be. There wasn't a lot of creatures up top who had both knots, and a size suitable to satisfying her... in the end, it was almost an anticlimax when the Juggernaut finally sprayed his load of thick, hot cum up her ass and, with a rapidly-shrinking and deflating cock, pulled out and wandered away, having lost all interest in her.

Her 'inspection', however, wound up running well over the allotted time. The burst of lust that had consumed her when the Juggernaut revealed his surprise knot had been fierce enough to affect the caretaker outside the corral, despite the distance, and before Anitra could recover from the orgasm, she found herself face-to-cock with the sturdy, muscular demoness. With the collar's submission-induction snapping into place, she had no intention of resisting when the thick cock was rammed down her throat - let alone when the caretaker commanded that, having pleasured one of the Juggernauts so much, she really needed to do the same for all of them, to avoid conflict within the herd.

She didn't actually wind up getting sodomized by the entire, thirty-odd herd of well-equipped Juggernauts. By the time she'd gotten through about half their numbers, Kylaess - who served as her Captain - had grown impatient waiting for her return, and sent Marilith to look for her. The snake-tailed demoness easily got the lust-crazed caretaker under control - by then, the demon-girl had been on the receiving end of half a dozen blowjobs, a thorough ball-sucking, two deep, questing rimjobs, and a full demonstration of Anitra's cunnilingus-skills, leaving her fairly close to collapsing from fatigue and pleasure overload anyway.

By the time Marilith had managed to pull Anitra out from under the Juggernaut currently mounting her, however, her asshole was gaping hugely, her shoulders were bruised purple from being rammed into the armored beasts' front-legs, and her skin had taken on a metallic, red sheen from the accumulated Quickening. Her collar-enhanced submissiveness was fully engaged, too, and Marilith's disciplinarian presence did little to change that. It took ten solid minutes of harsh tail-whipping of her already-sore ass to quiet her insistent pleas for more. Enough said, she was subsequently informed - in very polite terms - that she would not be required to 'inspect' the Juggernaut Corral again.

Other than that slight lapse, things progressed in a rather satisfactory fashion. In a matter of weeks, they'd bled Agares' three short legions halfway dry, having killed virtually every unit of hostile demons who had dared stick their noses outside the Fortress. Meanwhile, their numbers had swelled, their members had grown stronger from devouring the essence of slain enemies, and their armaments had improved - including a surprise shipment of hellforged steel weapons (crafted using secret techniques known only to the ranking Devils) from a neighboring territory, delivered with a snide, unsigned request that they use them to suitably humiliate Legion's minions. An unexpected but welcome windfall of a larger political situation...

The Fortress was an imposing structure - tall walls of basalt, studded with obsidian spikes, and the only entrance a thick, stone gate banded with hellforged steel. Agares and his forces could probably have held out there indefinitely. But that wasn't really an option - loss of face was frequently a fatal condition amongst the Devils who ruled hell, and his star was already in the descent. Requesting reinforcements from his overlord, Legion, would have been as good as embracing death - if not at the hands of Legion himself for incompetence, then from his more direct rivals, sensing weakness. Nor could he simply stay within the fortress and let the rebels control the countryside (however worthless). He HAD to suppress them, in order to show his strength and ruthlessness.

And so, after only three weeks of skirmishing, ambushes and traps, Agares himself emerged from the Fortress, along with his General, Berial, and the majority of his remaining legions - leaving behind only a skeleton crew to hold down the fort. Anitra watched the army sortie from a safe distance, her inhumanly-sharp eyes shrinking the distance as she focused. It looked impressive - certainly, more disciplined than the smaller detachments they had skirmished with so far. Presumably, the remaining legions had been thoroughly whipped into shape by Berial, their motivation no doubt assisted by the presence of an army of deadly, cannibalistic she-demons around the Fortress.

Still, the male demons were a familiar threat. More concerning was the ragged, loosely-grouped mob of mutated hell-beasts that was being driven before them. The results of Agares' various breeding-experiments - many of them awkward, mixed-up critters that had no doubt been stamped as failures, but now had a chance to shine. Hardly two were alike, so their individual capabilities would be inherently uncertain, as would the presence and location of any vital points. Agares himself was riding atop one of his greatest successes - a vast, crocodile-like creature with sooty-red scales, with jaws large enough to swallow a knight whole... horse and all. A grandiose, golden throne stood on the behemoth's back, with the Devil Agares, Duke of Hell, sitting high and mighty upon it.

Like most devils, he looked mostly human. In fact, he mostly resembled a fierce old man, with bushy white eyebrows, a drooping mustache and, of course, a pointy goatee that matched his rather pointy nose nicely. His ears were pointy as well, and if he had any hair, it was hidden under the gleaming crown he wore. A black-feathered hawk rode on his arm, its eyes gleaming like rubies - no doubt another successful experiment, and more dangerous than it appeared.

However nasty the hell-beasts, and however disciplined the remaining legions, this was the battle they had been preparing for since they first started their guerrilla-campaign. They weren't about to back down now. General Berial was no doubt expecting an ambush, and he wouldn't be disappointed. Of course, that didn't mean he was about to make it easy - the marching army was refusing to venture into any chokepoints, reshaping and flattening the land as they went rather than risk themselves in valleys or near cliffs. The rebels had launched assaults from above often enough to make it a recognizable pattern.

Which was, of course, the idea. The army's route was relatively predictable - they were heading towards the area where the rebellion's semi-secret HQ was located. So there'd been time to prepare. Even as the demonic soldiers leveled every escarpment and overhang that might have concealed a scout, they roundly ignored the ground beneath their feet - right up to the point when it suddenly stopped being there. Pits opened up beneath them, plunging half the army into a vast and carefully-shaped cavern, with lava-ponds strategically placed underneath the weak point in the ceiling. The demons' intrinsic resistance to fire and heat prevented the magma from being an immediately deadly trap - but it still burned and weakened them, and the thick porridge of molten rock slowed them down long enough for the she-demons stationed around them with polearms to finish them. Like shooting demonic fish in a lava-filled barrel, basically.

The trap had only been sprung after the vanguard of twisted hell-beasts had passed, but they could still have ruined it if they had promptly turned around and dashed for the holes. This opportunity would be denied them, however, by the large, swift-moving force suddenly emerging from the still-unflattened canyons ahead. A large pack of Hellhounds, led by a handful of imposing, three-headed Cerberi - the fruits of a secret alliance. Once a casual mention informed Anitra that a Cerberus-led Hellhound-pack dominated a corner of the northern region, near the borders of a neighboring territory, she'd wasted no time making overtures.

Hellhounds and Cerberi were natural hell-beast, arisen from the land in much the same fashion as the demons, but generally looked down upon as, well, animals - even the ones, like the Cerberi, who possessed heightened levels of intelligence. They lacked the demon's ability to craft and reshape the land, the capacity for tool-use (due to having no hands), and the potential to shape the infernal essence of the Nether Planes in the demonic equivalent of spellcasting. They were to be suppressed, enslaved, or at best ignored. But Anitra's meeting with a Cerberus and his abbreviated pack during her trip to the Temple of the Bloody Dawn Cult had taught her otherwise, and she knew that they could, in fact, be negotiated and bargained with. So she'd gone to meet their Alpha herself, along with a couple of particularly open-minded she-demons from her staff.

Armed with foreknowledge, she knew what tack to take in the negotiations - and better yet, the Alpha of the pack turned out to be familiar with the Cerberus she had met previously, and respected him, providing her with a useful reference. Of course, they still needed to observe the formalities in order to become honorary Pack-Members, and thus cement their alliance - which meant a fair bit of ritualized dog-fucking and asshole-licking. Like the first Cerberus she had met, they were willing to 'bend the rules' a bit, but this particular Alpha Male already had an Alpha Female by his side, so she couldn't bypass the ritual entirely by that tack.

The bending, thus, took the form of spreading the load around. The ritual, as it were, required the applicant to submit sexually to the Alphas, and lick the assholes and balls of every other pack-member. Rather than having to do it all by herself, though, she got to share that duty with the lusty she-demons she had brought as her 'aides', specifically because she'd predicted that necessity. The three of them spent the better part of a day with their tongues buried in a succession of spicy hellhound assholes, or sucking on dangling ballsacks like they were candy-canes - all while being constantly mounted by the Alpha Male and his two Cerberi lieutenants.

The she-demons were able to handle the Cerberi's tripple-cocked configuration the same way Anitra had the first time SHE had discovered that a male Cerberus actually packed two sets of three heads - splitting the shafts between pussy and ass. Anitra, obviously, couldn't do that, what with her sewn-up pussy, and as a result found her sphincter painfully stretched to its very limit. The way the three canine cocks came together meant that their bases formed a single knot the size of a small melon - big enough to create a genuinely solid tie even with her well-trained asshole. The waves of raw pleasure and lust that radiated from her as she learned this probably contributed significantly to the eagerness with which her 'aides' threw themselves into their own labors...

And after all that, there still was the matter of satisfying the three female Cerberi... the she-demons could simply bring out their dicks and apply them to the task, but Anitra had to put her by-then worn-out tongue to work again, licking the drooling pussy of the huge, three-headed bitch who was the Alpha Female. She was rather surprised when, with her mouth clamped over the wet orifice, her mouth began to fill with a bitter, acrid liquid, but the surprise didn't prevent her from dutifully swallowing several mouthfuls of hot dog-piss. The Alpha Male later explained to her that, while Cerberi and Hellhounds didn't need to eat or drink as long as they remained in Hell, their bladders still naturally filled in order to provide them with the means to mark their territory.

Regardless, it had all been worth it. As an acknowledged pack-member, she was entitled to the pack's protection, and was considered sufficiently trustworthy that her promise of an inviolate range set aside for them was accepted. They'd kept the bargain secret, bringing their canine allies into place through hidden paths and underground tunnels, away from the prying eyes of Agares' scouts. Now, it was all paying off - the horde of Hellhounds and the handful of Cerberi who led them tore into the mob of twisted, mutated beasts, fighting them fang to fang, and conclusively demonstrating the supremacy of the true, natural Hell-Beasts over Agares' handicraft.

The biggest and toughest of the Cerberi, however - the Alpha Male - didn't join the melee. He barged straight through it, shouldering aside lesser beasts and the milling ranks of the demonic legionnaires alike, carrying his light-bodied rider safely through to her target. Anitra, uncollared and riding the crest of her demonic Quickening, was joining the battle - and her target was the towering form of General Berial, who was already starting to roar orders to his troops, telling them to carve new holes into the underground cavern where the rebel's main force was at work, to strike at them without falling prey to the lava-traps. Given time, he'd no doubt rally his troops and put that plan into work - but she wasn't going to give him that opportunity.

He certainly cut an imposing figure as she rode towards him on the back of the Cerberus. His body-shape was reminiscent of a centaur, but feline instead of equine - essentially, the body of a lion, with a human-like torso where the head should be. His actual head was quite leonine as well, though... giving the impression that a man's chest and arms had just been shoved into the middle of a big cat's body. Not that anyone was likely to mistake him for an actual lion, mind - shape aside, his skin was far from furry, instead seeming to be composed of magmatic rock, shot through with lava-veins. His mane was as much fire as anything else, and a pair of broad wings of flame emerged from his shoulders. An immense greatsword of hellforged steel glowed bright-red in his hand, seemingly heated by his grip alone. Oh yes, and he stood tall enough that she probably would've been eye-level with his knees if she had been on foot. No wonder the rebels had originally considered his presence alone to be a conclusive deterrence.

But she'd fought and killed bigger creatures before. Well, ONE bigger creature. Sort of. Technically, it HAD just been an ordinary dog, but she'd been about the size of an ant at the time, so it amounted to the same. Regardless, she had drawn on her experience from that battle when she'd formulated her plan to take the towering demon-general down. Back then, she'd had a swift and powerful flying steed - a Rhinoceros-beetle - and while the Cerberus couldn't fly, he could match it for speed and agility easily. Nor was he inclined to be intimidated, despite the magnitude of the foe they were facing - when Berial saw them coming and roared his challenge, raising his immense blade, the Cerberus answered in kind, howling from all three throats at once.

The howl wasn't just a reply, however - it was also a signal for the last stage of the trap to activate. Not far behind General Berial, Agares himself was watching the unfolding ambush with a stormy face, and however incompetent he was as an administrator and leader, he was a high-ranking Devil and a Duke of Hell. His magical skills could turn the battle against them as surely as Berial's raw power. That had to be prevented. On the signal, five more pits opened in the ground, all around Agares' gigantic crocodile steed, and explosions resounded from below. Pockets of volcanic gas, prepared beforehand, were now detonated to propel five boulders into the air - and riding on top of each of them were the most elite fighters in the rebellion, led by Kylaess herself. All five of them had fought in several skirmishes and devoured the essence of numerous enemies - indeed, all of them were part of the original group of 20 that had started the uprising. (Marilith was, unsurprisingly, amongst them.)

Leaping from the airborne boulders to the colossal crocodile's back, the five of them immediately launched a coordinated assault on Agares himself. None of them could hope to stand against the destructive, magical power he could bring to bear, but true to form, they weren't even trying. Instead, they went after him like a pack of hyenas after a lion - darting around in criss-crossing patterns to confuse his eyes and evade his attacks, then launching attacks on his exposed sides and back, forcing him to wheel around to meet the assaults - and thus expose his back to another attacker. Powerful wards protected him, but they weren't perfect, and even his power had limits. They couldn't simply cut him down, but they could wear him down, glancing blow by glancing blow. Meanwhile, it was Anitra's job to prevent Berial from assisting his master - that was the minimum required of her. If she could actually slay the towering monster, well, that was just gravy.

At least, that was the theory. In practice, while the other she-demons stood a good chance of outlasting Agares' stamina, she was unlikely to be able to do the same to Berial. She was, after all, fighting without her collar, which meant that underneath the deadening effects of the Quickening, she was parched and starving. If she kept pushing her body to fight in that condition - something that was entirely possible, so long as her Quickening remained strong - she would eventually drop dead from dehydration, sword still in hand. And that 'eventually' was dangerously close at hand. So rather than try to take advantage of Berial's vast bulk to outmaneuver him, she went straight for the kill from the word go.

It was a fierce battle, to say the least. Her opening blow - a leap from the back of the charging Alpha Cerberus, straight towards Berial's head - was blocked by his enormous blade, denying her the opportunity to deliver a quick, deadly blow to his neck. She was on her own afterwards - the Cerberus had to return to the ongoing beast-on-beast battle, and with good reason. After she'd avoided a few heavily-telegraphed swipes with the demon-general's sword (which was bigger than her entire body), he roared in frustration and released an omnidirectional shockwave of infernal energy, burning several nearby legionnaires who had been inching closer in the hopes of helping their general to cinders. There was no way to avoid it, and she could smell burned hair - but her skin remained uncharred, even as the carbuncle on her chest glowed brightly. The shockwave's force still sent her staggering several yards backwards and peppered her with smoldering rubble, but at least she could survive it...

Her next attempt involved running underneath Berial's towering body, cutting at his legs to destabilize his stance. That part worked, but while she managed to stagger him, there was more fire than blood emerging from the wounds. It was enough to make her suspect that her usual ultimate killing move wouldn't work on him - his blood already appeared to be on fire, so would it really make any difference if she activated BlackFire's power while it was embedded in his body? Still, there was no reason not to try it - so when her attack on his legs finally made Berial stumble sideways and fall over, she nimbly rolled out of the way of his descending mass and plunged her sword deeply into his flank. It took her whole weight and a good deal of inertia beside to penetrate his rock-like skin, but with black blood and orange flames welling out around the blade, she knew she was in direct contact with what passed for a circulatory system in a creature such as him.

When she activated the blade's power, Berial roared in pain and jerked away, rolling his mighty body away from her and getting to his feet despite the injuries she had inflicted to his legs. It had, as she had feared, not been an instant kill - but it certainly had an impact. The wings of fire emerging from his shoulders flickered and shrank, and he staggered like a drunk as he tried to get his balance. Perhaps she'd been foolish to imagine that he might shrug it off altogether - after all, the fire now dancing merrily along her blade wasn't just any old flame, but rather the burning breath of her beloved Blake! The flame of a Black Dragon held potent, anti-magical properties, and demons - as she had discovered - were more magic than flesh.

And yet, Berial's mastery of fire seemed to enable him to fight back. Orange flames welled from the wound she had cut in his side and his shoulders shook with effort, but he did not fall, and instead stared down at her with great wrath. "Human... what have you done to me?" he shouted, but she just grinned and waved her flaming sword at him. "Hey, look what I've got! Yours might be bigger, but it's how you use it that matters, you know..." Roaring in anger, he swept his hellforged greatsword at her in an enraged overhand blow, just as she'd hoped - clearly, he no longer had the concentration to unleash radial fireblasts.

Rather than roll away from the impact-site, she simply side-stepped the attack and let it land mere inches from her side. A wave of fire and shrapnel washed over her, drawing blood here and there, but it was no big deal - she was right where she wanted to be. With a powerful backhand, she swept her sword over the back edge of Berial's, drawing a shower of sparks and a loud hiss. Under the disrupting effects of the dragonflame, even the hellforged steel could not bear up - slivers of metal flew into the air, curling in on themselves, while what remained melted and deformed. A flat, if white-hot, patch on the otherwise-keen blade.

Nimbly, she leaped on top of it, balancing like a tightrope-walker, even as Berial jerked his blade out of the ground with a mighty pull. If he had been at his best, he would've almost certainly been able to react to her trick - but punch-drunk as he was, half his concentration focused on preventing the dragonfire from devouring him from within, he was simply too slow, too unfocused. She rode the blade up, bending her knees to absorb the force, then leaped from it directly towards the huge, leonine face of her opponent. This time, there was nothing for him to block her with. He roared a burst of fire at her, but it lacked force, washing over her without even singeing her hair as the carbuncle glowed afresh. Then she buried her still-flaming blade in his skull, and rode his body to the ground as it fell.

Without his willpower and mastery of fire keeping the dragonflame in check, it quickly consumed his body, burning his insides to ashes and leaving his charred, stone-like skin to crumble into a pile of rubble. There was nothing left for an ambitious demonette to devour, and Anitra idly wondered if the anti-magical fire of a black dragon perhaps was capable of destroying a demon's immortal essence, of if Berial stood to be reborn in a few more days. Even if he did, though, the rebels would be in control of the fortress and the Node by then, and he would be alone and unarmed, so they'd probably be able to handle him. Besides, she couldn't babysit them forever.

A high-pitched scream resounded across the battlefield, and Anitra instinctively turned to look at the source. On the back of the gigantic crocodile, Agares was (loudly) dying - apparently, seeing his General fall had distracted him for one vital second, and now Kylaess' obsidian-taloned hand was emerging, covered in black blood, from his chest, clutching his lava-veined heart. Then the hand pulled back, and Agares, Duke of Hell, silently collapsed in front of his opulent throne, even as the triumphant demoness devoured his heart and with it, his power.

The change was immediate, and nearly as notable as when she had first become an Eater by devouring Karr's heart. Most impressive was the way her horns shifted, slanting back and growing thinner until they became part of her hair, visible only as a pair of jet-black streaks in the long, white tresses. Her skin, meanwhile, lightened - it was still reddish, but now had a shade that wouldn't be unthinkable in a natural human. Her talons shrunk into nails, though they remained long, sharp, black nails - and while her fangs seemed to shrink, they didn't turn into squared-off human-like teeth. Her eyes also remained as they had always been - featuring blood-red irises set against venomously-green sclera. Nobody was going to mistake her for a human being without some additional effort put into disguising those traits, but at the same time, she had also obviously taken a step beyond the form of the average demon, and become a Devil in truth - a member of Hell's ruling aristocracy.

The battle was over by then. The huge crocodile, which had phlegmatically ignored the battle raging on its back, seemed to recognize Kylaess as its new master - having been bound to Agares' now-devoured essence - and the falcon he'd carried had never had a chance to show off whatever power it had, having been slammed from the sky with bone-breaking force by Marilith's tail during the initial assault. The mutated hell-beasts in the vanguard, freed of the magic that had controlled them with Agares' death, immediately routed and scattered, making it easy for the Hellhounds to chase each of them down in turn to put them out of their misery. Meanwhile, the surviving demonic legionnaires realized that they were faced with a battle they could not win, and tried to flee as well. Emphasis on 'tried'. The Juggernaut Riders had been held back for just this occasion, and swept in to ensure that not a single soldier would escape to make a pest of themselves in the future.

Some of the survivors tried to surrender, but the she-demons gave no quarter. All were chased down, slain, and devoured. Cruel, perhaps, but it sent a clear message - and such ruthlessness was respected in Hell. With the battle thus over, all that was left was to march on the Fortress, with the colossal, hell-warped crocodile as an unstoppable battering-ram. The tiny force of demons holding the Fortress put up a desperate, but ultimately doomed defense - they had been the laziest and most useless of the already-undisciplined legions, of course, to have been thus left behind. The great, steel-bound gate was torn from its hinges, and the she-demons - still hungry for slaughter after their recent victory - flooded the basalt hallways with Kylaess and her elites as the vanguard.

They all had orders to leave any slaves they found unharmed, of course... but sadly, this proved to be largely irrelevant. The garrison had, in their desperation, sought to bolster what little power they had by devouring the handful of slaves they had. A few had escaped the slaughter, only to perish in the sulfur-choked air shortly afterwards. There were no-one left to save. It struck Anitra as a cruel reminder that, whatever her accomplishments, she really wasn't a Hero. A Hero would've found a way to rescue the slaves, and not just save themselves. Maybe if she'd convinced the rebels to take prisoners or accept surrender? Then the garrison wouldn't have been so desperate, and might have surrendered as well, instead of putting up such a doomed resistance and taking the slaves down with them... but, no what-ifs could bring the soulless husks that had once been tortured slaves back to life.

It was with such dark thoughts in mind that she stood in the slave-quarters, looking out over the corpses that dotted it. The air - magically filtered and enriched to make it breathable for surface-people - smelled strange to her currently-demonic nose. Sighing, she turned around and was about to head back out into the courtyard to take a closer look at the vast altar that was the foundation of the Node, when she heard a faint, scratching sound. Anywhere else, she'd have taken it for a rat - but the Hell-Beast equivalent of a rat was scaly, fanged and the size of a terrier. They could easily make short work of a helpless slave, and were thus kept out of the slave-quarters (along with various other, potentially-deadly vermin) with carefully-crafted wards.

Going in the direction of the sound, she looked around with narrowed eyes, searching for anything that might seem... off. Her ears, meanwhile, were sharpened and focused, ready to intercept any other noise that didn't belong. As she approached the wall, they began to pick something up - very faint, so faint it could be wistful imagination... the sound of breathing. It was coming from a corner where some trash and ratty old blankets were piled up. It wasn't a very big pile - certainly not big enough to conceal a person, not even a dwarf or a halfling... well, maybe a faerie, but that seemed unlikely, and there was no way she would've been able to hear such a diminutive breath.

Nonetheless, she crouched down and brushed the pile aside... revealing a small cubbyhole dug into the wall, its entrance concealed by the trash. It must have taken a colossal effort, over a period of years, to dig that far into the solid basalt of the wall - even if it wasn't the sturdiest sort of rock. Apparently, it had been worth the labor, at least for the girl who was lying in there, tightly balled-up with her naked skin pressed against the roughly-carved back wall of the hole, her eyes large and scared. She was pale, freckled and red-haired, and something about her seemed strangely familiar.

The girls eyes widened. Her breath seemed to stop. Then, in a tiny voice, she said something rather surprising. "...Anitra? Is... it really you? Have I finally gone insane and started seeing things?" Suddenly, memories flooded back. She HAD met that girl before. Her name was... Tiffany, wasn't it? She'd run into her in a rather similar situation, on a remote, tropical island, many months ago. Rescued her from a life of slavery at the hands of the ruthless Amazons. Last time she'd seen her was when she'd dropped her off near her hometown of Caristad, feeling smugly confident that she'd be well-set there once she told the grateful citizens that their great hero, Anitra, had rescued her too.

Opening and closing her mouth a few times, she finally managed to shake off her bemusement. "Um... I'm pretty sure you're still sane, somehow. If, apparently, insanely unlucky. How in the nine Hells have you managed to get enslaved by Demons so soon after I saved you from the Amazons?" She didn't get an immediate answer - instead, the girl just crawled out of the cubbyhole and threw herself at her, crying and hugging her. She let her finish, awkwardly patting her on the back and mumbling "There, there..." until the storm of relieved weeping had worn off.

Finally, the sobs receded, and Tiffany regained her composure. Drying her eyes, she sat back, staring at Anitra like she'd seen a ghost. "I can't believe you've rescued me again... you ARE going to rescue me, right?" Her eyes flickered somewhat nervously to Anitra's horns and talons, but she did not appear to doubt the affirmation that she would, indeed, be rescued. "I'd hoped to save ALL the slaves, actually, but... apparently the defenders thought eating up their souls would give them a better chance against me and my friends." Anitra said, bitterly. "But at least you've survived. Somehow. Now... how did you say you'd ended up here?"

Tiffany blushed slightly - it was quite visible against her pale, befreckled skin, and told her story - much like she had before, in a cell on the Island of the Amazons. After being dropped off at Caristad, she had - as expected - been welcomed with open arms. Everyone was rebuilding, extra hands were always needed, and virtually everyone there understood what it meant to have lived as a slave. Once the farmland surrounding the fortified city was restored and resettled, her past experience saw her adopted by a friendly and kind-hearted farmer, who had lost his entire family during the orcish occupation, and thus needed some extra hands to restore and run his old farm. It had been a first for her - having a genuinely loving (and, for that matter, sane) father, if only by adoption.

Things had been pleasant and idyllic at first, but... after several weeks, she'd started to realize she was missing something. Basically her whole life, from age 10 onwards, she'd been sexually active on a daily basis, whether by rape or by choice. First with her father, then with her brother, then with the various animals on her father's farm... then with her amazonian slave-masters. Most of it had been horrible, of course, but she'd loved her brother, and loved having sex with him, however sinful most would call it. Regardless, now that she'd finally tried going a while without sex, she'd found that it had drawbacks. She missed the sex. She'd rarely achieved orgasms during her many, often painful experiences, but it had been part of her life for so long that it had become something like a habit. Her pussy and ass just started feeling wrong, empty, and the feeling mounted.

Feeling too awkward and soiled by her past experiences to look for a boyfriend, she'd instead drawn on past experiences and sough her pleasure amongst the farmyard animals once again - this time by choice rather than by force. And she'd found it a lot more pleasurable that way around. In fact, her favorite animal was exactly the one she'd most hated in the past - the donkeys. Once, they'd been a painful ordeal - but what with her body's growth and adaption to the many indignities she'd suffered at the hands of the amazons, their size was just about right for her now, and the boundless virility and horniness that had made nights spent in their paddocks torture in her teenage years, now made them ideal sources of orifice-filling relief.

Not that she hadn't cast a wide web. Dogs, goats, boars, even bulls and horses, who could still manage to stretch her painfully - but somehow, she still couldn't help seeking them out. Sometimes, being painfully stretched was just what she was in the mood for. It had worked well, for a time - her adoptive father had even congratulated her on the strong kinship she had built with the animals, and how well they always responded to her. However, she was eventually caught in the act by a pair of farmhands, who had been temporarily hired to help bring in the first harvest after the city's liberation.

They hadn't been locals - rather, they'd been part of the mob of migrant workers and vagabonds who had swarmed the newly-liberated city in search of work. And they didn't have much empathy for former slaves. At first, they simply demanded sexual favors in return for keeping her secret, and she found herself agreeing disturbingly easily. Nothing they asked of her could cause much consternation, after all - whatever sexual variants she hadn't learned from her father or brother on her childhood farm, she had been educated in by the perverted Amazonians. Whether it was simply getting her ass roughly fucked, or being dragged behind the cowshed on a near-daily basis so that they could piss in her mouth, she handled it all with nary a flicker of consternation. If anything, it almost felt more 'normal' to her than the 'idyllic' life previously had.

Then, however, they'd started to drag her out at night to meet some of their 'friends'... red-robed friends with deep hoods, often escorting several other, easily-cowed girls. Servicing a dozen men in turn seemed sufficiently natural to her that she never realized that she'd fallen into the grasp of one of the Bloody Dawn Cult's many pastoral chapters. Misfits, bullies, and fools with more ambition than wit were often drawn to such chapters, and those who didn't get in over their heads would eventually graduate to real demon-summoning. Orgiastic rituals like the ones she'd been compelled to participate in were relatively small-time... but of course, that too was due to change.

Eventually, a 'teacher' from the Cult's main Temple visited covertly, to give the prospective recruits a crash-course in demon-summoning... and suitable sacrifices. She had no idea what she was getting into - all she knew was that she'd been told to get on a roughly-carved altar and let a goat fuck her there, which was really an average day for her, save for the size of the audience. Then a portal had opened, she'd been dragged through, and found out the hard way that the amazons she'd once 'guested' were comparatively gentle slave-masters.

The demons had raped and tortured her ceaselessly, though 'fortunately', her past experience helped ensure that it was more of the former than the later, and she once again found herself clinging to sanity far better than her peers. She'd been traded around like a side of meat several times, before finally being bunched together with a handful of other slaves and given as a gift to Agares by someone who owed him a favor. Agares' fortress had proven to be a comparatively pleasant berth - the demons there were too lazy to put much of any effort into torturing the slaves, dishing out nothing more than some half-hearted whippings every other day, and a handful of rather lame threats to keep them scared.

Well, until quite recently, when General Berial had arrived, and started whipping the demons into shape. Among his initiatives had also been a concerted efforts to get the 'cattle' up to 'full production' - in other words, 'milking' the slaves for as much pain, fear and despair as possible. Then the flaming whips, the brands and the obsidian spikes had come out, and Berial himself had raped a couple of slaves to death, his huge cock tearing them apart even as his fire burned them inside and out. It had certainly served to inspire fear, bordering on panic, even if several of the legionnaires had quietly mumbled about wasting such hard-to-replace slaves.

Tiffany had managed to evade the worst of it, however - mostly by virtue of discovering the hidden cubbyhole, dug by some previous resident who'd presumably met a sticky end. When the demons were on the prowl for someone to make an 'example' of, she'd hid there, quailing at the thought that she was merely ensuring that the horrid fate that might have been hers, were instead visited on some other misfortunate soul. In the end, though, it had saved her life - she'd already been ready to dash there at the least sign of trouble, when the demons launched their final massacre. The slaves, of course, had not been informed of the ongoing war - but the growing nervousness amongst the demons of the garrison had been hard to miss, especially when it pushed them to take their frustrations out on the slaves.

So she'd hid. And heard the others scream and then go quiet. So she'd kept hiding, too terrified to come out, too afraid that some demon might be waiting there to finish her off too. But instead, she'd been found by the same mysterious hero who had rescued her before... Anitra, the DragonRider! And now, it was Anitra's turn to blush slightly. Tiffany hadn't been the first person she saved - but she was probably the first person she'd saved without having a personal connection that compelled her to do so. She's simply seen a girl with a desperately tragic past, in need of help - and provided it, mostly on a whim. Perhaps her motivations hadn't been terribly heroic, but that didn't change the results. And if it hadn't been for the girl's monumentally bad luck, she probably could've lived happily ever after! Then again, perhaps 'bad luck' wasn't the right word. After all, her winding up randomly traded to the one Hell-Fortress that was about to be raided by someone with heroic aspirations was pretty lucky, as was finding a pre-made hidey-hole in that fortress. Perhaps Tiffany's karma merely had some far more pronounced hills and valleys than most...

She told Tiffany to wait in the slave-quarters - reminding her that she wouldn't be able to breathe anywhere else - and promised her that she'd be back to pick her up as soon as she'd secured a portal to the World Above. Clearly remembering their first encounter, the girl showed no sign of doubting Anitra's eventual return, and merely bundled herself up in a corner, as far away from the dead slaves as she could manage. The air outside felt particularly sweet and invigorating after her stay in the surface-air of the slave-quarters, and she was gratified to find that Kylaess was already working on the enchanted altar that seemed to control the Node itself.

"I think I got a dose of instinctive understanding when I devoured Agares' essence..." the newly-minted she-devil reported, subtly moving her fingers above the altar, causing the Node itself to shift and flicker. The Node was an odd, reality-defying sort of thing - it looked like nothing more than a flat oval hovering in the air, visible only by distorting the view through it. But if you moved around it, the oval would continue to face you - nonetheless giving no impression that it was anything other than perfectly flat. To Anitra's magic-sensitive eyes it looked even more mind-boggling and otherworldly, seeming somewhat like an inverted sphere, pulsating with infernal energy and chained to the altar with carefully-crafted spell-chains.

The Node pulsed stronger and faster, then calmed down again, and Kylaess lowered her hands with a sigh. "...but I don't get it. I feel like what I'm doing SHOULD open a basic portal to the World Above. Without a suitable summoning-ritual to connect to it would be a tenuous connection at best, and a demon wouldn't be able to use it - a Devil would, but only by expending most of their energy forcing their way through the dimensional divide, leaving them to arrive weakened and vulnerable, so obviously not something that happens much. A human, though - or indeed, anyone else who belongs to the World Above, would be able to step through without trouble. However, I can't make it work, and I have no idea why!"

Anitra was already grimacing at this unpleasant complication when a coolly aristocratic voice spoke from behind them. "I can tell you why. That, and much more." Along with Kylaess and her handful of elite bodyguards - all of whom had been staring at the altar with expressed curiosity - spun around with hands reaching towards their weapons. Standing behind was something horrifying. It looked like a tall, black-haired woman of noble mien, except for the lack of skin. Muscles, bones and tissue was openly exposed, including sickening mounds of exposed fat on the chest. Only her face held some semblance of skin, with fine, red lips maintaining a calm smirk, but even that looked more like an ill-fitting mask, sloughing off underneath the eyes (entirely white, with only a black pinprick at the center of each) to display more weeping tissue. Bright-red blood dripped from her entire body, pooling around her feet, and her long, black hair grew progressively bloodier as it fell towards the ground, until it reached it as a tangled, clotted mass more reminiscent of tentacles than anything else.

BlackFire whistled from its sheath as Anitra took in the terrifying sight, cold sweat breaking out across her body. The only thing stopping her from launching an immediate attack on the abomination was the realization that she was the only one to have pulled steel - Kylaess and her demoness bodyguards were merely gaping, wide-eyed, as several of them whispered "The Bloody Lady! It's really her!" The apparition, meanwhile, merely waved a skinless hand at Anitra, finger-bones clacking. "Calm yourself, hero, and put up your sword. I do not come as an enemy, but to offer aid."

Kylaess quickly put her own vote in the same direction, sidling up to Anitra's side and whispering out the side of her mouth. "Please, don't start a fight... that's The Bloody Lady, a Marquise of Hell and the most fearsome She-Devil there is!" Hesitantly, she complied, raising an eyebrow at the horrifying woman as she did so. "A Devil, you say? I thought they all looked human, and not like a Necromancer's fever-dream." The she-demons groaned, inching away as if expecting Anitra to be suddenly struck down by a possibly-not-very-discriminating force, but The Bloody Lady just smiled and nodded. "Very perceptive, hero from Above. I could look perfectly human, if I wished to. This appearance was one I chose for myself, out of necessity and a desire to make a point."

She let her pinprick-eyes fall on Kylaess, and gave her a respectful nod. "There are other female Devils around. But with the exception of myself and our most recent peer, they have all - to my knowledge - attained their position through sexual exploits, usually by seducing established Devils and earning or stealing a portion of their power. They do nothing to change the popular perception of she-demons as purely sexual beings, useful only for satisfying the men's urges and seducing foolish mortals. I sought my own position with the intent to change things from within, and chose my appearance so that none might mistake me for a glorified Succubus."

Then she sighed and shook her head, sending a spray of bloody droplets scattering about it. "It has not worked. She-demons are still treated as property and sex-toys at worst, and as seductresses at best. I am merely seen as a singular exception. Which is why my interest was keenly roused when whispers reached me of a violent rebellion perpetrated by female demons, in a remote and poverty-struck corner of Hell. Having seen the results thereof with my own eyes now, I am happy to be the first to congratulate you on your ascension, Kylaess, Duchess of Hell." She bowed elegantly from the hip, and Kylaess awkwardly tried to imitate it, stammering out something along the lines of "Thank you, um, please, no need, it's my pleasure, um, my honor..."

The Bloody Lady smiled smoothly as she straightened up again. "Might I assume, Duchess, that unlike your predecessor, you owe no allegiance to Legion, King of Hell?" Kylaess quickly nodded, while Anitra's eyes widened. "Wait, KING of Hell? I knew Legion was powerful, but I hadn't realized he was THAT high-ranking..." Both She-Devils looked at her with momentary confusion, then The Bloody Lady seemed to have an 'Aha!' moment, and quickly waved a clattering hand. "Oh, I suppose a traveler from Above would not know... the Kings of Hell are powerful indeed, but not as much as you might think. For starters, there are no less than seven Kings of Hell at the moment, and new ones occasionally emerge... or old ones disappear. The Devils play dangerous games, and there is no single ruler who can command the loyalty of Hell in its entirety..." She smiled slightly, her lips an oasis of humanity in the midst of her ruined face. "I suppose this is quite the relief to you, considering his clear and malevolent interest in you... DragonRider Anitra."

Anitra blinked, then narrowed her eyes. "You know of me, then?" The bloody apparition nodded. "I have crossed swords with Legion on a number of occasions, and have thus made it a point to keep an eye on his affairs and plan. That's how I learned of his plans for you." She cocked her head for a moment, then turned her attention on Kylaess again. "Duchess. I believe we have many shared interests, and I grow tired of trying to change the way of things from within the establishment. Perhaps the time has come for more direct action. I propose an alliance. Lend me your strength, and the strength of your victorious forces, and I shall lend you my knowledge and the information gathered by my network of spies and infiltrators. Including information that I believe to be of vital importance to your ally, the Lady Anitra..." Kylaess nodded without hesitation. "There's no need to dangle bait like that, your Ladyship... I mean, I've heard about you before and stuff. Heck, rumors of your accomplishments were part of the reason I originally started organizing the other she-demons against the men's depredation!" She reached out her hand to take the Bloody Lady's, never flinching as an instrument of weeping tissue and naked bone embraced it. One quick shake, and an alliance that would shake Hell to its very foundations had been settled.

Moving with purpose, The Bloody Lady then stepped up to the Node-Altar and made some quick gestures. "The reason you cannot make it reach for the World Above is the same reason this area is so poverty-struck. The area located just above here is mostly covered in a vast barrier which prevents extradimensional intrusions, among other things. In order to open a conduit that can send the Lady Anitra home, it had to be re-targeted, which - alas - makes for a rather limited selection of possible destinations. The connection is tenuous to begin with, after all, and stretching the conduit further will worsen this. Only places where the veil is already weak will suffice." She made a few more, rather technical, explanations to the attentive Kylaess while deftly manipulating the altar and the spells bound thereto, making the circle of the Node itself tremble and shift visibly.

Once she had retargeted the node to her satisfaction, she channeled a bit of infernal energy into the altar, prompting a faintly-glowing portal to appear behind it. With a final, satisfied nod, she then turned to face Anitra. "Before you step through the portal and return to your homeland, DragonRider, you should know what foul plans Legion has devised for you. It would be foolish of you to assume that your conquest of this Fortress counts as a victory against him, after all - the minions of his you defeated were incompetents and exiles in the first place, after all, and he has never hesitated to sacrifice his pawns for a greater prize..."

Anitra had, indeed, been worrying about that. The whole thing had seemed too easy. The pursuit she'd feared when she'd first landed not far from the Fortress' walls had never materialized, and both Agares and his general, Berial, had seemed woefully unprepared for her powers and abilities. In fact, she'd started to suspect that even if she'd landed where she was supposed to, she would have been able to escape or even fight her way out. Which would, in itself, suggest that she'd never been supposed to be captured. Sighing, she brushed back her hair and nodded. "Doesn't surprise me. So, what HAS that old bastard been up to? Why go to all the trouble to pull me into Hell just to let me run roughshod over it?"

The Bloody Lady's disconcerting pinprick eyes panned down from her face, and stopped at her stomach as she pointed towards it with a bony-white finger. "THAT is why, DragonRider. His previous plan, centered on using your extraordinary body to hatch a powerful Hellspawn that would ravage the World Above in his name was foiled, so he hatched an even more insidious variant on that idea. He knew of your advancing pregnancy from his own spies on the surface, and he has devoted extensive effort to studying the nature of your unusual abilities and the way you use them."

A cold spike of fear was already slicing down Anitra's spine when The Bloody Lady shook her head with expressed sadness. "I am sorry to have to tell you this, Lady Anitra... but your child-to-be, the life that grows within you, has by now been thoroughly corrupted by infernal energy. As you used your ability to draw on the essence within demons' seed in order to survive down here, you took infernal energy into your body, and through you it entered into the child as well. It was Legion's express plan to let this happen, and then allow you to escape back to the surface, where you would, eventually and unwittingly, give birth to a corrupted horror which would combine the strength of man, dragon and demon in one terrifying package. Indeed, he is banking on the fact that even if you should learn of this, or otherwise discover what had happened, your instincts and your love for the Black Dragon you are mated to would prevent you from aborting your pregnancy or otherwise harming the child."

She sighed, shaking her head again, even as Anitra began to tremble with dawning horror. "Most of our kin do not understand the things that drive mortals - love, loyalty, motherhood and so on. But Legion is not amongst them - he understands such things quite well indeed, and never hesitates to take advantage of them for his own insidious ends." A gentle smile crested her lips then, and a jerk of her arm seemed to hint that she had momentarily considered putting a comforting hand on Anitra's shoulder, but then thought better of it for obvious reasons. "Do not despair, Lady Anitra. All is not lost. That which has been corrupted can, perhaps, be cleansed anew. I picked the destination for this portal with forethought. It will take you to the High Temple of the Church of the Bloody Dawn, whose masters know much of demonic energy and its handling - and whose leader, I believe, still owes you a favor. With any luck, you may find a way to undo the damage there."

Anitra swallowed, then slowly nodded. "With any luck... hah. Well, if I don't find it there, I'll search elsewhere. There's a great library in the Dragon Utopia, after all... heck, for that matter, the old records from the Library of the Perverse might have something I can use. This isn't entirely outside its primary field, after all. One way or another, I WILL ensure that Legion doesn't win this." Her hand was resting heavily against her armored midsection now, pressing down as if to reassure the life that grew within. She wouldn't allow this to happen. There was time to fix it. Once she was through the portal, she'd have a great number of friends, allies and contacts to draw on.

Steadying herself, she nodded again, more firmly this time. "Thank you for the information, Marquise. I'm not foolish enough to think you passed it on out of the goodness of your heart, but if it serves your purpose that I foil Legion's foul plan for me, then I'll be happy to play along. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go pick up the last surviving slave of this place - and then get the Hell out of this infernal place..." Then, after a quick round of goodbyes and a loose promise or two, all that was left was to half-guide, half-carry the coughing and wheezing Tiffany through the hot, brimstone-laden air of the courtyard and into the flickering portal that would take her, if not home, then at least to the same plane of existence as her home...

THE END

Things should get slightly more pleasant in the next chapter - Infernal Affairs! (But only slightly.) Stay tuned!