Legacy

Bitter Creek Chalet was built on a ridge high up in the Rocky Mountains. There were no roads; they arrived by helicopter. That evening, the air was cool and wet and cut through Dakota's top to awaken her nipples. She shivered and took out her letter jacket, pulled it on. Then she shivered again as she thought about how far she'd come from home, and how little anyone cared about where she was from. No one here gave a damn about the Raiders, or that she'd been all-district three times and all-state twice.

The sun was setting, but their new supervisor—a woman named Jolley, though Dakota didn't know whether that was her first name or her last—insisted on showing them around the property. The main lodge was a gorgeous wooden building facing south, with huge windows and an enormous free-standing fireplace at the center of a grand hall that could be seen from outside. Additional wings held, according to Jolley, guest rooms and play rooms, which made Mara shiver when she heard it. An amphitheater was built into the side of the hill, and other cottages and cabins dotted the area, offering more private and secluded getaways for those so inclined. Their main concern, according to Jolley, was the main lodge: it had to be kept spotless, as did all of the play areas, and all of the equipment needed to be maintained.

"If it sounds like you're being exploited as cheap janitors," said Jolley, "then good! That's exactly what you are until I say otherwise. You'll handle the day shift, beginning at ten o'clock in the morning. You'll handle the night shift, beginning at ten in the evening. Any questions?"

Neither Dakota nor Mara had any questions.

"Good. Take your things to your rooms and report to the main hall."

Their rooms were in the staff wing on the lower level. Dakota assumed it would be the basement, but it wasn't: the steep hillside allowed for windows to look out onto the mountains even after they'd gone downstairs. They found the staff break room and then the laundry and then Mara's room—tiny, with a cot and a dresser. Dakota's was upstairs. Mara left her bags on the cot and followed Dakota to her room.

"I guess we won't be working together anymore," said Mara. Her dark hair and amber skin looked dusky in the fading light. "But if you see me, don't hesitate to say hi, ok? And hang in there. We've done fine so far."

Dakota had been about to say that she was being a little dramatic when Mara caught her up in tight embrace. A feeling of warmth flooded through her, surprising her. She returned the hug, and they stood together for a long moment before, finally, one of them drew away. Dakota couldn't be quite certain who it had been.

Mara stood on tiptoe then, and she brushed her lips to Dakota's. That flash of contact became a kiss. Became a longer, harder kiss. Became a torrent of feelings that swirled and tumbled, muddled and mixed at the bottom of a waterfall of sensation. Their contact was undeniably erotic, but it didn't feel... Well, it wasn't erotic in that way. As if they were two fish and couldn't feel wet. They were so immersed in the erotic, in the torrid and the prurient, that a kiss couldn't have the same meaning for them. It was a slave kiss, shared between sisters. Not a kiss between lovers.

"Here's to three more months," Mara whispered.

Then Dakota returned to the main hall. She received uniform clothing—three pairs of slacks, five black polo shirts, a black sweater, black soft-soled shoes, and a black dress.

"You probably won't need the dress," said Jolley. "If you do, we'll have you fitted for heels. Your shift starts in about forty-five minutes, so you should go and get changed."

"My..." Dakota's voice trailed off before she could ask for clarification. It would have sounded too much like a complaint. And she didn't really need clarification; she understood well enough. She was starting now, without any rest, without time to adjust. And she didn't need that, either; she'd been playing janitor and groundskeeper for quite long enough already, and she knew perfectly well how to do her job. At least she thought she did.

At first, she was right. She mopped floors, cleaned sinks and toilets, she vacuumed and folded laundry. She felt like Cinderella in black sneakers, with a black shirt that was nearly perfect for hiding her barely B cup breasts no matter how magical her bra might be. For the first time, it seemed possible that she might meet someone other than one of the other participants in the program, but there was no chance at all of any prince charming happening upon her here. And even if he did, he might decide she was a boy with a ponytail. Not that she would want to meet any of the men who would frequent a place like this—and they wouldn't want her, either. A dominant man needed a submissive woman. Someone like her would just be a fly in the ointment.

When the mopping and the bathrooms were done, she checked the schedule for the playrooms. There were two doors to each: the front and the back. To keep staff out of sight, she was instructed to use the back door, and only after the room was vacated and locked. She picked up after the guests, sanitized anything they had used and everything they had touched, from whips and chains and shackles to binders, hoods, and gags, and everything in between. When that was done, she mopped the floors as well. For what was explicitly intended as an extreme private sex club, the chalet provided her with a bevy of entirely mundane tasks. The most interesting moments came whenever one of the staff would stop to give her a lesson in knots—both the tying and the untying. The only strange moment in her first two or three shifts was when she saw what she thought was red wax that had dripped onto the floor. Wax play was ordinary enough; she reached down to scrape it up with her thumbnail.

It wasn't wax.

A thrill of fear shivered through her, and then it faded. The blood on the concrete floor became only one more fact out of all the facts she had learned in a lifetime of storing away new facts and then forgetting them. She cleaned it and went on.

The first break from that rule—clean it and move on—came on Sunday after a long party had concluded. She was sent into the club room upstairs to perform a specific job. "Fill this jar with cum," said Jolley. "It's all over the stage. Just take this and scrape it up and put it in the jar. Same with anything else you find there. Whatever's on the stage goes in this jar. You got it?"

"Yes, ma'am," she answered. She got it. She genuinely didn't know whether she could actually do it or not, but she got it all right.

There had been a bukkake session, or a gangbang, or a blowbang, or... something. The floor was coated in awful, awful things. Vomit. Spittle. Snot. Piss. There were horrid lumps of semi-solid things that swam in puddles of yellow liquid things. The smell of it—the stench of it!—permeated the air, stuck to her nostrils, made her feel unclean as soon as she topped the stairs and walked through the door. Most of the room had already been cleaned, the chairs put away, the floor mopped and tables wiped. The couches had been stripped of their cushions and wiped down. Yet the stage had been left to...

Her stomach churned.

It had all been left to ferment.

They hadn't even given her a pair of gloves.

She used a squeegee and a plastic dust pan to scrape the awful mixture from the stage. She tried to just push it off the edge of the stage at one point, but that proved completely ineffective. She ran it together and pushed it onto the dustpan and then let it drip, slowly, into the jar. And she tried not to vomit. In less than ten minutes, she was pale and shaking, clammy with sweat. She didn't know what it was, but something about this was far worse than anything else she'd been told to do. It took her the better part of an hour, because three times she had to stop and go stand outside until her stomach settled a little. She finished with a mason jar about one quarter full of the most disgusting yellow soup she'd ever seen in her entire life.

For the rest of the night, everything was normal. She helped someone get a cross out of storage. They decided it wasn't large enough. She helped them put it back in. She helped the same person get a circular saw and a sander and a hammer and some other things instead. Perhaps they were going to make one. She didn't know, and she didn't care. She still felt queasy when breakfast came, and when she lay down after work, with the pillow pressed over her face in a vain attempt to keep out the sun. She wasn't going to last at this rate, if a little thing like cum on the floor was enough to make her sick.

The obstacle becomes the way.

She probably should have locked her door, but her door didn't have a lock. She lay there on her cot, hand down her shorts, t-shirt lifted to expose her breasts and her belly, slowly massaging her clit. She shuddered and shut her eyes and thought of the stage. The smell. The women kneeling. The men standing over them, penetrating them, driving long, thick cocks into willing, too-tight throats, bruising them and dredging up loads of bile and—oh, fuck it was too much. She felt sick even lying on her bed, but she kept touching. Kept pushing herself forward. The obstacle becomes...

Dakota imagined it on her skin, sticking to her, hot and slick, running between her breasts and down her stomach, following the lines and the curves. She pictured it in her hair, clinging to her lashes. She shuddered again, didn't know whether this time it was pleasure or revulsion. Why was she getting off on this? She couldn't simply choose to get off on this, could she?

But she did get off. She lay on her cot after and listened to her own breathing, her own heartbeat. She felt the sweat cooling on her skin, on her belly and her breasts. She tasted her fingers. It wasn't the taste that bothered her—it was knowing where they'd been. Where it had come from. In a kind of daze, because she'd hardly slept all week long, she got up and went to the staff restrooms. She took a red cup from the break room with her. She squatted in one of the stalls—there was no door, but there were stalls at least—and she stared at the door and prayed that no one would come in, and she squeezed a little of her own urine into the red plastic cup.

Bringing it to her lips was a feat of herculean self-discipline. Her throat closed before she could swallow. She panicked with it on her tongue and bent over the toilet and vomited her breakfast back up.

The worst was her sleep schedule, though. There was a gym; there were running trails; and the altitude was perfect for honing her fitness; and she still had more than enough free time, but finding the energy became a test of will and desire. If she wanted to run, she needed to stay up after her shift. If she wanted to spend time in the weight room, it needed to be in the evenings before. She did it, but the result was a creature that was never quite human—always frazzled, never quite present. Not until she stole some foil from the break room did she start to get enough rest, but even then she was exhausted all the time. She thought she was the only one who noticed until Mara mentioned it to her in the gym.

Mara was cleaning the weight benches. She finished what she was doing and came to stand beside Dakota by the dumbbells. "You're looking really..." She trailed off before she could finish. "I mean, you're definitely staying in shape."

"Thanks," said Dakota.

"I like to watch you," said Mara. "On the last few reps? Or the last ten minutes on the stair climber? When I can tell you're in real pain. I think that's what subspace must look like. You go somewhere else, you know? It's beatific."

"Beatific?" Dakota couldn't tell if she was kidding or not.

"Like... Think of a martyr's joy."

"Yeah, I think I knew what it meant, I just—guess I didn't associate that with a gym rat..."

"You're too beautiful to be a gym rat. Maybe a gym bunny. I don't know."

Dakota finished her set and looked mournfully at the stair climber Mara had just mentioned.

"But you look so tired all the time," added Mara. "I talked to Jolley. I want to see if they'll let us switch shifts. You wouldn't mind, would you? I can take nights for a while and you can get some real sleep?"

Dakota looked at her. She couldn't think of anything to say. She was up too early. Or too late. Both. Didn't matter. She absolutely wanted to change to the day shift and absolutely didn't. Her misery—her endurance of this unendurable circumstance—was the only thing she had. And this time it had nothing to do with the ludicrous idea that someone might dock her points for changing shifts. By this point, the only thing Dakota knew about how they were being scored was that—if there were judges scoring their performance—the scoring system didn't make any fucking sense, and yet her first instinct was to cling to what she had.

"Don't worry about it," she mumbled. "I just need a little time to get used to it."

"It's been three weeks," said Mara. But they never finished that conversation.

That same day, or night, or whichever it was, Dakota wound up staying up late. She worked past noon helping to prepare another, better cross. The man had already felled trees, but he asked Dakota's help in smoothing and shaping the wood, preparing the crossbeam to fit into place. It was frighteningly rustic.

"What's this thing for?" she asked.

"For the seance!" the man declared. "You haven't heard?"

"Heard what?"

"A real wand-bearer is coming."

Dakota mopped sweat from her forehead. "A what?" she said.

"An elm-wand slave," he said. "Sarah."

For an instant, Dakota's heart stopped. He must have seen the recognition on her face, because he kept prattling on about something idiotic that she couldn't bring herself to care about. She realized in the very next instant, of course, that it wasn't her mother. Her mother was dead. She wasn't going to show up at the chalet.

"I've never heard of her," she said, slowly, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice.

"Sarah Brennan," he said, as though the addition of a last name might help. "There are only nineteen living elm-wand slaves, and she's one of the most experienced. The Court of Thorns is holding a seance! She's going to serve the Court of Thorns."

Dakota was almost embarrassed by how many of those words meant nothing to her, but she did understand the bit about the elm wand—and it frightened her. Nineteen living slaves? That seemed like a strange thing for him to emphasize. How long did most of them live? If she won the elm wand, how long would she live?

"When is it?" she asked.

"Tonight, from sunset to sunrise."

Some part of Dakota wanted to wake early, to go and see everything that she could see. But another part of her was afraid to go. She woke at her usual time—or a little later, honestly, since she'd slept poorly that afternoon—and tried to focus on her workout. It was practically impossible. Every step on the stair climber became a reminder of all that Mara had said about subspace or the apparently beatific look in her eyes, and of how her entire life had been spent either in pursuit of pain or else developing her ability to endure it. That's all athletics had ever been, when she really thought about it.

She hated thinking about it. It was as though her whole life were unfolding before her eyes. Shifting. Changing. Transforming. Like the bud of a flower opening—but even that metaphor was fraught, wasn't it. She shut off the machine and bent over double, gasping and gagging, unable to continue. Then, because it was an undeniable part of her nature to push past boundaries such as this—because she couldn't fucking help herself sometimes—she did a long, slow set of squats, her legs trembling, sweat dripping from her body. Then it was time to shower, to change into her uniform, and to make her way out to the amphitheater.

The stone amphitheater was lit by flaming braziers and warmed against the cool Colorado night. It was filled with an audience clad in black robes. She caught glimpses of cuff links and expensive watches, of glittering evening gowns and black ties when people glanced in her direction, but few did. They had no reason to. The real attraction was on stage—on a stone altar at the heart of the theater.

On the altar, a woman was bleeding. She was writhing beneath the cutting tails of whips—the brutal caress of stone-tipped scourges that tore flesh and cracked bone. She was chained to the corners of the altar, but those chains were loose. After each smashing impact, her abusers waited for her to lay flat once more. They waited for her sobs to cease, for her body to lie still, and for her hands and feet to return to an outstretched X. She writhed and was still, and the whips raised and fell again, and the sound was like the fall of an axe. Dakota was sick to her stomach at once, flinching and turning away. But she couldn't turn away. She couldn't make herself turn away.

This was an elm-wand slave. Her mother had been one of these. Her mother might have died on a night like this.

She counted seventeen strokes, and then they released her chains. They bade her to kneel upon the altar, first facing the crowd as they began to beat her back instead of her front. Then, after she collapsed for the first time, they bade her turn and face the cross. It was only then that Dakota noticed it for the first time: the cross she'd made with her own hands. It had been installed here in the amphitheater. The slave was going to be crucified.

The slave turned and Dakota saw her back, ripped open by the whip. She imagined she could see bone in one of those lacerations. She found herself imagining the pain—the impact of the stone, the sharp trauma of its cutting edge. She wondered if she could take it. If she would scream longer and louder than the slave. She wondered if her mother had screamed or accepted her torment in stoic silence. Images crowded her mind: what her mother might have looked like on an altar like this. But was it truly her mother, or was she only imagining her own naked body on the altar?

They continued to whip the slave until it seemed her whole body was streaked with red, and then they commanded her to walk from the altar to the cross. It was only forty feet or so. A matter of a few steps for any normal person on any normal day. For the slave, though, to take those steps knowing what they meant, after all that she'd endured. Dakota hardly dared to blink now. She had to see every instant of this. This was what her mother had been. This was what she could never be. This icon of true, deep, long-suffering submission.

She carried the nails with her. She carried the hammer. She gave them to those who would nail her in place. She kissed their hands and thanked them—begged them not to show mercy. And then she lay on the cross, her bleeding, tattered flesh against the wood—that wood that Dakota had worked to finish on her last shift. Dakota felt hot. Dizzy. There was no place for her to sit. She knelt on the ground as she watched from the back of the amphitheater.

Every sound of the hammer made her jerk. She imagined the nails in her. Breaking, grinding, crushing her bones. She bit down on her lip to keep quiet. She forced her eyes open and watched as the slave offered her hand for the second nail. And her foot for the third. She passed out after that; they brought her back with smelling salts and she begged forgiveness. Begged for the last nail. Then they put her up, and everyone watched her die. For hours and hours they watched as she suffocated, then revived and took a breath, then hung from her broken, bleeding hands and feet once more.

A man stood before the crowd and said that the seance was complete—that the slave would be left until morning and, if she still lived, she would be taken down. He said they were free to watch or to enjoy themselves as they saw fit.

Dakota couldn't move.

Dakota helped to carry the slave into the infirmary in the morning. Her clothes wound up covered in the slave's blood. In Sarah's blood. She had to remind herself, again and again, that the slave had a name. That she was human. That she was a woman like any other. A doctor began to treat her injuries—they were many and horrible, and Dakota didn't watch it all—but other than the bandages and the needles and the machines around her, the slave remained naked. No hospital gown. No bed sheets. No human comforts. Maybe that was why Dakota took it upon herself to sit by Sarah's bedside.

"You look tired," said Sarah after a long while. Her voice was a barely-audible croak, broken by screaming and cracked by thirst. She was on IV fluids, but she must still have been thirsty. Dakota brought her a paper cup with a few sips of water.

"I'm not tired."

The slave sipped the water. Dakota reminded herself that the woman's name was Sarah.

"Thank you," said Sarah.

Dakota sat once more.

"You don't have to stay here with me," whispered Sarah. "Your shift was over an hour ago, wasn't it?"

"At ten o'clock," Dakota mumbled.

"Get some rest," the slave suggested.

Dakota didn't move. Then she went to bring a little more water, and she sat again, not looking at the slave but not looking at anything else.

"This isn't easy for you," said Sarah.

"For me?" said Dakota, unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice. "You were crucified! They nailed you down after beating the shit out of you and you're worried about me?"

Sarah's deep brown eyes watched her. "I have to suffer. You don't. That's all."

Dakota sighed and buried her head in her hands. But then something about those words took root in her. I have to suffer.

"Why?" she whispered, lifting her head to look at the slave—to really look at her for the first time. "Why do you have to do this? Is it for the money?"

Sarah Brennan laughed. It was a weak, painful sound. "No one could do this for money."

And Dakota had no doubt of that. Sarah Brennan's body had more than just the scars of tonight. There were others. Layers of others. Even her face had scars, here and there. Little ones that might not be noticed at first. She had eight toes—one missing from each foot. One of her fingers was cut short as well. She had what might have been a series of brands down her thigh, and Dakota's breath caught in her throat when she noticed the terrible damage done to Sarah's sex. Her labia, both outer and inner, had been carved away. Only a clean little hole was left—no lips, no hood, no clit. The sight of it made her feel sick again. She turned away in shame.

"What do you do with it, then?" she asked. "The money, I mean." She was grasping at straws. She didn't know how to... She didn't... She...

Dakota didn't know what this was. What she was seeing. She didn't have a name for it. No one had given her any fact shaped like this before, and she was afraid she'd never be able to forget it. She couldn't store it away and turn out the lights and shut the door and walk off, because there was no place in her mind that could hold it. She had to stare at it instead, face it in the cold light of day, and try not to flinch. Her lame question was her only defense.

"It goes to charity," whispered the slave. "To a children's hospital somewhere. I forget."

Dakota's lips were dry. She licked them, but it didn't help. "Why do you do it, then?"

"It doesn't matter," said the slave. "You have to find your own reason."

Sarah Brennan was beautiful. Some would say that she had been beautiful, before, but Dakota would never have said that. She was still beautiful, in a way that some people probably couldn't understand. She was young and strong and vital and hanging by a thread, and it made her even more beautiful. Dakota could hardly bear to look at her.

"Will you do something for me?" said Sarah.

"Yes," said Dakota. "Whatever—anything you like."

"Don't promise," said the slave. Then she nodded toward the IV equipment nearby. "That gray one—that's the morphine."

Dakota's heart seized within her. They did this in war movies, didn't they? When someone was hurt too bad, they'd give him a lethal dose of morphine. They'd shoot him full of it and he'd die at peace. Dakota held her breath and looked away, holding her hands beneath her armpits so they couldn't shake.

"Turn it off, please?"

"Off?" said Dakota.

"Please."

Dakota stared at the slave. She didn't—couldn't—understand this. She refused to understand this. This wasn't anything she could understand. No. But then, her hand shaking, she reached out to the machine, and she did what Sarah instructed. The dose went to zero. Sarah gave a soft sigh and closed her eyes. And then, slowly, Sarah's pain began to mount.

It etched little lines on her face.

It made her skin glow with perspiration.

It made her breaths shorter.

Dakota held her hand—very, very gently. The slave squeezed Dakota's hand in answer, even though the slave's hands were broken. Little moans and whimpers escaped her as the drug left her, abandoning her in the face of all the damage done to her body. Slowly, it seemed as though the mounting agony reached a plateau. The slave grew quiet. Dakota hoped that the pain she felt might have become something almost manageable—but then she saw it. That look in the slave's eyes: the beatific joy of the martyr.

"I have to go," she whispered, almost choking on the words. Then she stumbled out of the room.