Story by DarkStories
http://subscribestar.adult/darkstories
Chapter 2: The Salt Mine of Masi (Part I)
Vulmon dragged Alina into the camp and left her bleeding in the dust as he went to greet the mine commandant, Thurrec. Thurrec regarded the bleeding girl with a mixture of contempt and excitement. Her pain energized him physically while her existence filled him with hatred and anger. He took a pain stick and pressed it hard into the girl’s bleeding breasts, watching it light up brightly like a beacon in the night. Alina’s pain energy flooded through him like a drug and his cock stiffened at the prospect of her torture.
“You were expected an hour ago, you worthless cunt. You’re going to have to work to make up for it or else. You got that, slave?”
Alina said nothing as all four draks pushed their pain sticks into her body, ripping agony through her like a tidal wave. She was in for a day of total hell, the girl knew. Laboring in the salt mines was one of the five major types of fates the human and elf slavegirls of Mantius generally faced, along with working in metal mines, stone quarries, construction camps, and on the ocean galleys. The slaves were put to work digging out layers of rock with pickaxes to get at the salt, cutting out the salt itself with axes and shovels, operating the pulley systems to bring the salt loads to the surface, and transporting these by hand carts to the horses that would bring them to the cities. The mine at Masi was one of the largest with well over a thousand girls working in dozens of separate pits dotted around an area of several miles. Being in the lee of the great Mineku Mountains, which acted as a shield to stop hot air escaping north, the desert camp was fearfully hot, often reaching almost 45 degrees in the middle of the day while plunging to below zero at night. The girls slept in open air pens at night, chained together by their necks, so they had no respite whatsoever from the extreme temperatures of their hellish prison.
For the dark elves, the mines were about more than just profit and productivity. Like all dark creatures, or amarok, they gained physical energy as well as huge pleasure from the pain of the women, and so punishment and torture were just as much a pair of the slaves’ lives as work. The women were naked save for a thin loincloth around their waist and subject to constant harassment from the drak overseers, who wielded rhino whips, bamboo canes, pain sticks and lightning staffs to torment them as they worked. There were also whipping posts and stocks at regular intervals throughout the camp and an extensive network of dungeons dug out by the women themselves beneath the living quarters of the guards. These were in constant use both day and night, with the muffled screams of tortured women wafting over the extensive camp like the whistle of the wind on the plains.
The four draks ordered Alina to her feet. Along with the manacles on her wrists, they added another tight chain to her ankles before dragging her to the nearest salt pit and literally throwing her down. She fell forty meters down, banging and scraping her naked body on the sloping rocky sides, until she hit the bottom with a sickening crunch. There were around thirty women swinging pickaxes into the rock, facing several hundred more meters of backbreaking digging before they reached the salt layer. A pair of pulley systems hauled the rock up to the surface, operated by two slavegirls arduously turning a winch. There were also rope ladders where every now and then a girl was forced to ascend in order to receive punishment on the surface. For lesser punishments, a simple whipping post had been jammed into the rock where, at the moment Alina was pushed into the pit, a young girl of around eighteen years of age was being whipped with a bamboo cane across her bare back.
Six guards were in charge of the pit. They tormented the girls mercilessly with whip strikes, blows and pain sticks while demanding ever more efforts of work.
The chief of the pit on the ground was a drak named Kerym. He regarded the bleeding young Alina with utter distaste. He ordered a guard to lift the girl to her feet and then drove a mailed fist hard into her belly.
“You good-for-nothing whore, you think you can just lie around all day? Pick up an ax and get to work. You’re the princess of these worthless bitches, so you’re responsible for them now. If they don’t work, you’ll get punished too. You got that?”
Alina could not react before another fist slammed into her guts. Her body was lacerated, bruised and burned from head to toe but there was no mercy from the guards. Pain sticks jabbed into her and she was shoved toward a pile of pick axes and beaten to the ground.
“Get to work, slave.”
She had no choice but to obey, though every muscle in her body screamed at her for rest. In her mouth the wolf nettles stung her relentlessly, while the salty air of the mine raked her parched throat and made her almost mad with thirst. Kerym took a pain stick and jammed it between her legs as she picked up the ax while one of the guards cracked a cane across her back. There was nothing Alina could do to prevent her fate for the rest of the morning. The guards would not stop whipping, beating and torturing her no matter how hard she worked, but if she, or her fellow slaves, slacked off even for a moment, she would undoubtedly be punished in other ways, perhaps nailed again to the whipping post and flogged or burned with red-hot irons from the brazier the guards kept kindled at one side. For the other thirty slavegirls in the pit, there was only one potential upside from the princess’s appearance – the fact that the amarok were so busy torturing her, they might gain a little relief at least for the day. But then Lathrak and Beluar climbed down into the pit and added themselves to the overseers, and whatever tiny hope the women had was gone.
Lathrak added his pain stick to Kerym’s, pressing it into the girl’s lacerated breasts as she bent down to drive the ax into the rock for the first time. Alina could not flinch from the agony coursing through her body or the consequences would be brutal. Eight years of slavery taught a woman everything she needed to know about the cruelty of the dark elves. So, though exhaustion and pain tore through her naked body, she continued to swing the pick ax into the rock, the shockwaves of each strike ripping agony through her bones. Around her the other slaves did the same, their voices raised in anguish as whips fell on their backs and pain sticks tormented their private parts and breasts. They had already been at work for three hours, woken from their pens at the first light of dawn and sent to the pits with only a single cup of water to sustain them. Meals were given only at midday and dusk, with just enough water to keep them healthy enough to work. There were no water breaks in between these times, and it took only minutes for the salt of the mines to parch their throats and sting their many wounds. After three hours, they were in a desperate state, covered with bruises and lacerations, burned by the sun, parched with thirst, and exhausted beyond every limit. But they were still only halfway to the short break they were permitted at midday, and their pain and suffering would only grow from here.
Whatever Princess Alina did, she was damned. If she worked hard, she was giving in to the slavers’ demands and showing her submission to the draks. But if she tried to show her resistance by refusing to work, she would be brutally tortured and so would her compatriots. So she did the only thing she could and followed the example of the other women, methodically beating the pick ax against the hard rock and trying to endure the endless torments being inflicted on her by the guards. To her left, the eighteen-year-old being flogged by the guard was finally being let down from the whipping post. Now she was closer, Alina suddenly had a flash of recognition. The girl was known to her, intimately known. Her own amazon weapons-bearer who had lined up beside her at the Battle of Ection. Almost all the amazons had been killed in the battle, but this young girl must have survived. Her name was Elise.
The amazons were unique in many ways. It was not only that they were blessed with unnaturally strong, athletic bodies, remarkable martial skills and an ability to heal quickly, they also aged five times more slowly than normal humans. Nobody knew how this had come to pass – like the disappearance of men from the Eight Kingdoms and the evolution of female-only reproduction, the mystery had been lost to the mists of time and myth. Alina did not know whether the dark elves realized Elise was an amazon. She hoped for the girl’s sake that they had not. But they would still have treated her with abominable cruelty, noticing surely that she could endure far more punishment than a normal girl her age.