First Day (1 of 8)
Breaking a Warlord: A war hero falls, bound and broken, awaiting the one who conquered him
‘Breaking a Warlord’ Content Warning: Erotic Horror
Story contains non-consensual sex, psychological manipulation, power imbalance, humiliation, dehumanization, and other dark, disturbing themes.
This story invites reflection on what happens to the mind under sustained horror, how identity reshapes itself around trauma, and what traces of agency persist when autonomy has been stripped away.
Proceed with extreme caution.
23rd day of the 9th moon
1103 HC
Damion is led through the Water Sanctum's war camp. Abrasive rope binds his wrists and wings, tearing feathers and rubbing skin raw. A collar has been tightened on his neck. Its embedded talisman has ripped his wings into the material realm, a painful process, just so they can be bound. Just so he can be grounded.
The collar's buckle isn't metal. Of course it isn't. This is the Water Sanctum. They know how to control the Emberai. They wouldn't be foolish enough to bind a talisman empowered Emberai Windborne with metal that they could simply melt away. He sure wishes they were dumb enough to use a metal buckle, though.
One guard was dumb enough to pull a metal sword on him. A sword! Against an Emberai with nothing to lose? Damion dissolved the sword into ruin and snapped the guard’s neck faster than he could blink. A guard dumb enough to wield metal against an Emberai doesn't deserve life as a Sky-Touched from the Water Sanctum.
They've now got him surrounded with guards armed with wooden clubs, obsidian axes, and stone tipped arrows. I am the Harbinger of the Flood. I deserve no less than such an armed escort to keep me contained.
His chin is held high. He did well today. Yesterday. The whole damn civil war. He fought with every drop of his heart. It may be ending with his surrender. It may be ending with his execution. But he fought well. And now, he will die as an Emberai warrior worthy of songs. He couldn't hope for a better conclusion to his life.
This war camp is filled with his enemies who glare at him as they pass. His reputation has always preceded him. He is Scaldmere's pride and joy, the greatest warrior in living memory. He is the Harbinger of the Flood. And they all know it.
They lead him into a tent, raise his arms and secure him to the roof supports. He tugs and yanks at it to see how secure it is. This is a sturdy tent. He closes his eyes and senses for metal connection pieces. None. He expected as much. But he had to be sure. He heard reports from scouts that infiltrating their war camps to try to collapse their structures was useless since they cleverly avoid metal on anything important. Of course. This is the Water Sanctum. They know how to control the Emberai. They were designed for it.
They use metal shears to cut off his armor. He melts them for the pure joy of it. A backhanded blow splits his lip on his teeth. A bloody smile grows across his face. Worth it.
They take obsidian axes and begin to saw through the leather straps and fabrics. His armor, his most prized possession, once flowed around him like water, its scaled surface flickering like flame. Now it falls away piece by piece, sluicing like cold water dousing his fire.
They toss the pieces into a careless heap. They'll be destroyed. His breath hitches. This armor was his closest companion. His second skin. His flame-forged friend. But he's dying soon, and he can't take his armor with him to the great beyond. He straightens and raises his chin to pay his proper respects. He stares at the pile and says his goodbyes to both the armor and his life.
He was born with a name, lovingly given by his mother. It was taken when they ascended him, renamed him Damion to mark the start of his new life. They called it an honor. And maybe it was. He was five. Too young to understand what it meant to be powerful, but old enough to remember the way his mother held him as she wept. Her face, her voice, her name, though, have been swallowed by the tide of becoming.
She loved him. He knows that. She wanted him. But the caste they lived in couldn't keep him. His powers outstripped hers, and so the Emberai came for him. The Hearthhold he was born to has turned cold, emptied, dissolved, scattered, and resettled like floodwaters through brittle reeds. His mother is lost to that tide.
He wonders, not for the first time, if she still lives. He's sure she would know of the warlord called the Harbinger of the Flood. Everyone does. Is she proud of the Harbinger? Does she tell stories about him to children who aren’t her own? Does she feel anything when she hears that name? And will she grieve his death? Never realizing this Harbinger was her beloved son, taken from her by the cruel rituals of caste.
He breathes in slow and exhales as his farewells settle into his bones. Farewell to the name they gave him. Farewell to the fire he became. Farewell to the life he made.
He lived well. More than well. He became everything they hoped he would be and more. He's ready. He'll die with his head held high.
A guard turns away with the fabric of his shorn clothes bundled in his arms. Then suddenly Damion's nude body is splashed with soapy water. A servant comes with a brush of coarse bristles and scrubs him down like a horse. His blood runs cold. This is not normal. There must be a reason he's being washed. A reason to erase the sweat, the grime, the blood he earned from this morning's battle.
His heart beats a little harder. Someone intends to use him. To use his body. To humiliate him. A man fucking a man is a great taboo in Emberai society. If discovered, the bottom is ostracized. Forgotten. Erased.
They intend to try to erase the memory of him. To sully his name. Taint his accomplishments and make his victories taste like shame.
And it's a humiliation he's going to have to endure. He's going to have to feel it. Experience it. Be here as it happens. Something he hasn't felt before creeps along his skin.
The servant kneels before him and washes his genitals with a rough cloth. Around his cock. Around his balls. Through all the crevices between his legs. He's never been touched here by a man before. Damion looks to the ceiling. He doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want this to be happening.
The servant takes that rough cloth and cleans harshly in the cleft of his ass. Doubt is removed from Damion's mind. They are preparing him to be fucked.
But not by the soldiers. They wouldn't bother to clean him for their comfort. They're preparing him for a higher ranking official. The commander maybe? There is a small relief he isn't going to be bent over and passed from soldier to soldier for days on end.
At least... not yet. What if the commander just wants first dibs before releasing his ass to the masses. The anger those soldiers will have for him. He personally killed so many of their friends. His people started this war, and they'll use him to release their rage and grief.
They will tear him apart from the inside out.
That creeping feeling on his skin grips tighter. What is this feeling? What is this sensation?
The servant leaves. The guards throw knowing smirks at him before they depart. He's left alone to stand there, naked, in the center of the tent with his arms tied above his head.
He looks around the room. To his right, there is a brazier with a crackling fire. His left is a trunk. And from what he saw behind him there is a table with leather straps for a six-point restraint. To restrain a person to the table. There is a smaller table between the large table and the trunk.
He listens to the crackling fire while trying to figure out what this sensation is that is crawling along his skin. It's skipping up his spine and he feels he's on the urge of trembling.
The feeling is familiar. A distant memory. He tries to place it. He was young. Very young. Too young. He remembers now, standing somewhere frozen in place with this same dance skipping on his spine. What was he doing? He was looking. He was looking at... Kindlepoint. He was seeing the Hearthhold Kindlepoint for the very first time. He had just been painfully ripped from his mother and transported to Kindlepoint and he was looking at that place for the first time. Alone. His first time alone. He was feeling...
... afraid.
Damion is afraid right now. His heart clenches and simultaneously almost chuckles at the absurdity. He'd forgotten what fear felt like. But then he sobers. He is afraid. He doesn't want his body to be used. He doesn't want to be fucked. He doesn't want to feel it. He doesn't want the shame associated with it.
He pulls on the rope holding his hands to the ceiling rafters. He'd like to just walk away right now. He can't. He tries to ruffle his wings in frustration, but they're bound in rope and the movement just painfully disrupts his feathers even further. He closes his eyes and concentrates on dismissing his wings. But it's no use. The collar is forcing them to be manifested in this plane.
He tries to soothe the creeping sensation of fear by meditating. This is part of his training. Close the eyes. Center the breath. Dissolve the body into flame, memory, sky.
But memory is louder than breath. His mind shifts to this morning when he surrendered.
The battlefield was quiet. The wind and the slow crunch of his boots as he took his final steps as a free man. The Water Sanctum commander had kept her weapon lowered. Just watched, eyes wary, as Damion knelt before her.
He’d felt every gaze on him. His soldiers, the dead, the Emberai ancestors watching through fire and spirit. He had laid his sword on the ground, and with it, the final ember of this long-smoldering civil war. He had chosen survival for those still breathing behind him. He gave himself for them.
He had expected pain. Shame. Maybe the peace of death. But what came was silence. And then they bound him.
He tries to banish the memory, no use thinking on it now. Focus on his fire discipline. Emotional containment. But the fear gnaws, and the stillness feeds it.
He tries casting his mind outwards. He senses two guards outside the tent. They're afraid of him. They're afraid he'll escape and hurt him. He smiles. He imagines breaking out of these ropes and breaking their necks.
He focuses in on the blood flowing in the veins of the one on the right. Then he takes a deep breath and pushes. The guard stumbles forward and falls to his knees. His fear spikes high, sharp and hot, and the crash of it slams into Damion without even trying to reach for it.
The guard lurches to his feet and bursts into the tent, "Do that again and we'll beat you senseless!" Damion smiles devilishly and winks at him. The guard freezes, then backs out of the tent without another word. He knows. He knows if Damion focused closely enough, he could push the very blood out of his heart again and again until he died.
But Damion won't do that. He's just a soldier following orders and this isn't a battlefield. He's not going to just senselessly kill him.
He casts his mind further. He senses people walking past. Some are afraid. Some are aroused, hoping Damion will be released to the soldiers. Some are proud to have defeated him.
Time passes, though, and the entertainment of sensing people walking by wears thin. His knees ache. His raw wrists sting. His thoughts blur at the edges.
He drifts in and out of focus, not quite sleeping, not quite conscious. A sort of meditative daze that is anything but peaceful.
Time crawls ever forward. Then collapses.
Someone with great emotional stillness approaches the tent. The kind of stillness that lies at the bottom of an ocean. Pressure. Weight. Depth. This person's still emotions don't just ripple towards Damion. He is being surrounded.
They turn towards the tent. Whoever this is isn't afraid of him. He's approaching the tent's entrance in cool calm either because he is very ignorant, or very powerful. Not even the commander of this camp is this emotionally controlled.
The person enters. He wears a black tunic with a wide dark blue belt with cresting waves tooled on it. He has inky black hair that shines and cut short. And he just strolls in casually with his hands in his pockets. Damion breathes in and can feel the humidity of the air has risen. This can be only one person.
Water Master Mulsae. The highest authority of the Water Sanctum.
Continue reading: First Day (2 of 8)
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