We climbed up a narrow staircase and reached… another dungeon. This was a nicer dungeon, however. There still weren't any windows, but the stone arched ceiling was tall and vaulted, with nicely detailed gothic-style stonework. I was led into a wide, cavernous hall, lit with plentiful oil lamps and charcoal braziers.
It was a huge torture chamber.
It was laid out a bit like a cathedral, with a large vaulted central hall, wide open, and two smaller wings on either side of it, with lower ceilings. Down the very centre of the vaulted hall, chains and shackles hung from the ceiling, connected via pulley to cranks so the victim could be hoisted up. The open central space was otherwise kept nice and clear, probably to keep clients from whipping each other accidentally.
The side sections contained a dozen different pieces of horrifying torture furniture and cruel machinery. Thanks to a night spent surfing Wikipedia on the inquisitional witch hunts, I recognized some of them. There was the Spanish Donkey or Wooden Horse, a sharp wedge that the victim would straddle, the wood digging into their crotch painfully. There was the Judas Chair, a big cruel pyramid the victim would be forced to sit and anally impale themselves on. There was some sort of bench, with a little wooden pillory that kept a person's feet locked in position above a fiery brazier. It was currently unlit, thankfully. There was the famous rack as well ready to slowly pull a person's arms and legs out of their sockets… and some sort of big wheel thing…
Not all of it was obvious torture devices though. There was a wide variety of benches, tables, frames, pillories and other things to hold a person while you did whatever you wanted with them. One corner of the room was set aside for regular old raping, hosting a few straw mattresses and pillows ready for use. Behind the torture devices, there also seemed to be a row of other rooms, much larger than our cells, if the space between the doors was any indication. I assumed those would be private rooms for customers who didn't want to play in plain view of the others.
And of course, there were the slave girls themselves.
The great hall's ceiling was supported by wide stone columns on either side of the arch, forming the boundary between the vaulted central area and the two sides areas with the torture devices. Each of these large stone pillars was decorated with a girl. They stood, back against the stone, with the arms raised above their heads, and wrists shackled to a ring embedded in the column above them.
I was given only a few seconds to take in the sight before I was led to an empty pillar. My arms were unshackled from behind my back, raised above my head and shackled again to the wall. My feet were left free, I debated spitefully kicking the thug who'd been manhandling me, but decided I'd rather not get punched again.
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I looked around at my neighbours, my fellow torture slaves. Each of the girls had a metal collar around their necks. How many of these were legitimately bought? How many were kidnapped or stolen? I saw a few different demihuman species on offer. I didn't see any Aasimar, or purely human looking girls in the lineup.
I counted seventeen slaves on offer, including myself.
About half were beastkin of various flavors: Cat girls, fox girls, puppy girls, mouse girls… and so on. If it was a mammal, there was probably a beastkin version of it. Like the cat and wolf girls I'd seen before, they all looked to be about 80% human, with animal ears, tails, claws, and feet.
Perhaps another quarter were elves, in one of three different colours. There were pale high elves, like Chloe, who had once built their beautiful cities in the mountains, before the Taint destroyed and scattered their civilization. There were tanned low elves, originally hailing from a desert region far to the south, they'd once lived alongside humanity as equals, before the Taint ruined everything. And finally, there were the purple skinned dark elves, who were native to a massive unexplored cave system beneath the surface of the planet. They fled to the surface when their tunnels and cities were overrun by a particularly dangerous type of rape spider that now dominated the area.
Aside from the elves, there were also two halflings, a thick muscular dwarf girl, and myself, the unique and sparkly Aasimar, on offer.
Surprisingly, two of the slaves on display were boys: A mouse boy, and a deer boy. Were they here for the female sadists? or for gay male sadists? Probably the latter, I suspected. I doubted many openly dominant women would emerge in a patriarchal society like this. They were both smaller gentlemen, pretty like Adam, and a bit on the effeminate side. I suspected they'd be the bottom bitches during their eventual rapes. They had modest little dicks, shaved clean, like all the girls, and currently flaccid.
There was one special slave, singled out from the others. I… didn't want to look directly at her. She'd been selected for some sort of special punishment.
This one was a dark elf, with white hair and grey-purple skin. She was set up as a display of sorts, like cruel living art piece. A large wooden cross had been suspended against the side wall of the main vaulted space, opposite the entrance staircase, almost ten feet off the ground. It was a prominent location, in plain sight of any customer entering this hellhole. This wasn't a Jesus style cross, it was more of a big 'X' shape, called a St. Andrew's cross back on Earth. The dark elf had been nailed to it.
Four thick iron spikes, almost an inch wide, had been driven through the poor girl's wrists and ankles pinning her in place. Her entire body weight was supported entirely by only these cruel spikes, there wasn't even a platform for her to rest her feet. And that was only a small part of her tortures. Her body was a gory patchwork of welts, cuts and burns. Stripes, squiggly lines, and pretty little spirals of charred flesh decorated her upper body, almost like tattoos. Her legs, from her upper thighs down to her feet had been flayed, the skin missing entirely, revealing cords of bare muscle to the open air. They were like a pair of horrifying, bloody thigh high stockings.
Whatever she'd been through must have taken hours. It was hard to believe she was still alive. She looked like a corpse, but I could see her chest move with every breath, and fresh tears on her face. She was fully awake, fully lucid, and in horrifying agony.
The cross was held aloft by a rope and pulley, connected to a crank on the dungeon floor. I watched one of the guards tap another on the shoulder, and show him the rope. He gave his fellow a cheeky look, and grabbed the taught line. He pulled it out to the side, hoisting the cross slightly higher. Then, he let it go. The cross fell back down, and stopped with a sudden jerk.
"AaaaaaAAAAAAAGHHHH!!" the dark elf let out a sudden demented shriek of agony that shook me to the core. It rang out long and loud, covering the entire hall. Nothing with a pair of humanlike lungs should have been able to make a sound like that.
That was… genuinely scary. Could that happen to me? To anyone here? That was completely fucked up. This went beyond any sort of sane BDSM play. This wasn't even sexual… it was just raw agony inflicted on a helpless victim.