Dark, damp stone. That was the kind of environment that Ludi and Pruna had grown used to over the past few weeks, tucked away in the basement that had come to encompass their entire world. Specifically, a cell hewn into its northeastern corner—and ‘cell’ was definitely the right word for it. It had an iron barred door and all, along with precious little else, lacking even a window to see the outside world by. Its one piece of furniture was a chamber pot.

They weren’t comfortable lodgings, and it wasn’t something that either of them ever really got used to. Wherever they sat, wherever they laid, there was jagged stone digging into them. Scales meant it didn’t pose any risk of serious damage, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t uncomfortable. A constant, physical reminder of their situation.

Which went hand in hand with one other such reminder, the most prominent amongst a dozen smaller things: their collars. Shortly after they’d been moved to the cell, Crius had outfitted both of them with one. They weren’t ostentatious or expensive things, just strips of plain leather with metal clasps, no identifying marks to be seen.

When they’d first gotten them, Pruna had refused to wear hers. The moment Crius left the basement, she’d torn it off her neck and ripped it in half with her teeth, then threw the two halves of it through the bars of the cell door and out of reach.

Crius returned later that evening, and before the sun had even had time to rise, Pruna had been fitted with a new, identical collar. For about five hours in either direction from that point, Pruna was unable to walk or stand. She made no further attempts to remove her collar.

That seemed like an age ago. Time passed very slowly. Their only distractions from the crawl of seconds were feeding times and, of course, the visitors. They came in throughout the day and night, mostly lizardmen, occasionally other races, all of them interested in a single thing.

Sometimes they were interested in Ludi. More often, they went after Pruna. They tended to be nicer than Crius was, given that they were only interested in a quick fuck and not the sort of horrible treatment their owner doled out.

Though not always. Pruna still had marks from one particularly nasty encounter a little over a week before. They’d faded enough that they were now on par with the ones Crius gave to her on a regular basis—at the time, they’d been far worse, to the point where even Crius seemed surprised.

Though not unpleasantly so. As a matter of fact, Crius had made a point of asking the one responsible to come back for a future visit, in front of the cell and well in earshot of the two kobolds. Apparently, he was to return some time next month.

What he was trying to do was transparent, but it didn’t get as strong a reaction out of the two of them as he might’ve hoped, in spite of the near-gruesome state Pruna had been left in. For her, that was just physical pain to deal with, by far the easiest kind. Everything else was the same level of misery as usual, no more or less unbearable than usual.

Their life had taken on something of a routine. They ate, they drank, they slept, they fucked. Every one of those things had its own special blend of pain and struggle, whether it was freezing in the night, choking down filthy rations, or just the assorted agonies of being used.

It was predictable, and there was nothing beyond it, because everything else had been stripped away. They’d been reduced to something like livestock. Pure animalism. They were even bathed like animals, with cold water, stiff brushes, and soap that made their nostrils sting whenever they got wind of its fumes, purely to keep them in prime condition for their duties.

Yet they held on in spite of it all. They held on to some sense of dignity in the face of suffering, some sense of purpose in the face of the irrational and overwhelming pain of existence. Mostly, though, they held on to each other. For both of the kobolds, the other was a physical, tangible presence, not some abstract idea like ‘dignity’ or ‘personhood’. They served to ground each other, to prove to one another that there was something worth living for.

So it was then with Ludi and Pruna wrapped in a tight embrace on the floor of the cell, gripped against one another as they tried to fall asleep. Ludi had stopped sobbing some time ago, which likely meant that he’d fallen asleep. Pruna had taken the opportunity to indulge in some crying of her own, more silent as to not wake up her companion, and was now on the path to unconsciousness herself.

Her thoughts grew fuzzier as she started to drift off. Pruna felt a dim sense of hope. It was vague and implacable, growing more so with every passing day. She was no longer quite sure what it was hope [i]for[/i] anymore, apart from the idea of something else, something other than what she was living.

She clung to it regardless.

---

Pruna wasn’t sure precisely when she fell asleep, but she was acutely aware of when she woke up. She was quite literally pulled back into the waking world by a sharp tug on her shoulder, ripping her free from Ludi’s embrace. 

Blinking to clear her blurry eyes, Pruna looked up and was unsurprised to see Crius staring down at her. He had a tendency to wake them up in the middle of the night—what Pruna assumed was night, anyway. Certainly whenever they slept. If it wasn’t him, then it was someone else. The visitors didn’t stop coming on account of their sleep schedule.

Once they were wide awake and he was sure he’d gotten their attention, Crius spoke, first to Pruna. “You get a break tonight.”

A quick shove and Pruna was sent staggering across the cell, colliding with the wall before tumbling to the floor below. Then, he turned his attention to the other kobold he was holding.

“You don’t.”

Those two words were all that Crius offered before he leaned down and grabbed a hold of Ludi’s tail, hoisting it up into the air and inverting the kobold with only the slightest effort. Ludi let out a squeak as he went head over heels, skull avoiding a collision with the floor by mere inches—not enough to keep his horns from scraping against the stone, drawing a deep wince out of him.

Once the kobold was high enough, Crius shifted his grip from Ludi’s tail to his ankles and spread his legs apart. The position offered Crius a perfect view of Ludi’s backside. To another set of eyes, it probably would’ve seemed a fair bit less than pristine. The kobold’s vibrant scales were dulled and marred by assorted marks and bruises—outright scars, in some places.

But Crius loved it. Each one of those seeming imperfections was a sign, a physical mark of what Crius had been doing to him. That was what was important to him; less preserving beauty, more being able to watch and participate in its destruction.

Though that phrasing might’ve been a bit too poetic. At that moment, Crius mostly just wanted to fuck Ludi in the ass.

Crius lifted Ludi up higher and dipped his head forward, burying his muzzle into the base of Ludi’s tail and the hole that laid there. He took a deep breath through his nostrils, then let his tongue slip free and drag across Ludi’s entrance.

Ludi let out the same sort of squeal that he always did. It didn’t matter how many times he went through it, whenever Crius or anyone else started touching him down there, the mopey silence that he usually exuded was immediately replaced by what seemed like a need to show off just how mouthy he could be.

Pruna hated it. She huddled back against the wall and grit her teeth, hands clamped over the sides of her head. She hated the noises Crius drew out of him, and the lizardman knew that. That was why he made sure to stand facing her, so that she could best hear every whine, whimper, and squeal that came out of Ludi’s mouth.

That was one of Crius’ favourite parts: the pair aspect. It didn’t matter which one of them he decided to use, there were two sides to every interaction: the one he was fucking and the one who was being forced to watch. Usually, he preferred to have Ludi fill that latter role. His crying was nice.

Though as of late, he’d started to grow a fondness for Pruna reactions. She didn’t just look torn up, she looked like she wanted to tear [i]someone[/i] up, maybe even herself. There was a fury there that Ludi simply didn’t possess.

And it helped that having her on the sidelines meant he got to get his hands on Ludi, something he’d been sorely neglecting. On his next lick, Crius pushed in with his tongue hard enough to slip past the ring of Ludi’s tailhole, driving it deep inside his body.

Ludi continued to squeal and even added some thrashing for good measure, but while the way he was being held left him perfectly capable of using his hands to fight back, he made no attempt to do so. He’d tried before. At that point, he still possessed a pair of functional claws. That was no longer the case. It had been a slow, painful, and exceptionally loud process.

Crius pulled his tongue free from Ludi’s backside with a slurp. The underside of the kobold’s tail glistened with saliva, all focused on that hole lying just below his slit, which showed not a hint of life. Unsurprising; no matter what Crius did, Ludi never showed any signs of arousal, and Crius was only ever able to get an orgasm out of him when he got his hands onto and into the kobold and forced it out.

Which was good. Really, that was just the way Crius liked it: pain and discomfort at all times, save for the moments where he felt like forcing Ludi into a shameful orgasm. He had no intention of doing that tonight, though. Tonight was going to be focused purely on his own pleasure.

Crius hoisted Ludi even higher into the air before shifting his hands to the kobold’s chest, flipping him upright and pulling him tight against himself, the smaller male’s back pressed against his front. Crius could feel the rapid shifting of Ludi’s chest, swelling and deflating with panicked breaths, the frantic pounding of his heart from inside.

Terror. Another good thing about Ludi: no matter how often he was used, he never lost that bit of abject terror whenever he was getting touched. Crius wondered if it was something insurmountable, some permanent trauma that he’d inflicted on the kobold. He liked the thought. The idea that he had managed to rake his claws so deep into Ludi that he’d damaged his soul, leaving him irreparable no matter how much his body managed to heal, excited him.

And he did mean it [i]excited[/i] him. He lowered Ludi down, and couldn’t help but grin when he felt the kobold tense up like he’d been struck by lightning. Something hot and firm pressed against the underside of his tail. Nothing that Ludi hadn’t taken before. Nothing that he would ever get used to. Nothing that required any further preamble.

Crius shifted his hips until he had the tip of his cock aligned with Ludi’s asshole, and with no need for lubrication thanks to the earlier work of his tongue, wasted no time in slamming the kobold down.

For all the experience Ludi might’ve accrued, he still had physical limitations, and Crius made sure to push up against them as much as he could. Ludi could feel his insides stretch painfully as they struggled to accommodate Crius’ sudden entry, and with how fast the lizardman was entering, no amount of saliva could eliminate the friction. It burned, and Ludi couldn’t help but scream.

Crius drank in the sound, basked in the way Ludi clamped down around his cock. He took in the sight of Pruna’s grimace deepening, too, the way she clenched down on herself that little bit more. Bracing herself to weather the storm.

She was going to have to brace herself a whole lot more if she hoped to do that. Crius tightened his grip on Ludi and put that extra bit of oomph into his hips, slamming himself in and out of the kobold hard enough to have him spasming with every thrust. It gave a strange, warbling quality to his shrieking, one that Crius quite appreciated. It reminded him of just how small and weak what he was fucking was. How he could tear it to shreds without a second thought if he so chose.

He could tell that Ludi knew that too, and Pruna as well. Both of them were constantly aware of just how much danger they were in every moment, every second that he was around. He could only imagine the kind of stress his presence filled them with, like having a wild beast in the cell with them, never knowing when he might turn on them and try to tear out their throats.

That was exactly the kind of energy he wanted to exude. That was the kind of energy that kept Pruna’s rage bottled up, eating away at her insides, burning up her soul while Crius forced all manner of sounds out of Ludi, his squeals just managing to cut above the slap of scale against scale. Those slaps were growing steadily wetter as Crius pumped pre into Ludi’s tailhole before driving it out with each of his powerful thrusts, sending it drooling down the kobold’s tail and splattering onto the floor below.

The cell was already beginning to reek of sex. It was hardly an uncommon odour to the place; the kobolds’ accommodations were cleaned a good deal less often than the kobolds themselves, meaning that they tended to spend a lot of time breathing in whatever scent the last person to use them had left behind.

The smell led Crius to an important consideration: was he going to cum inside Ludi or not? Or knot, even. He wasn’t quite there yet, but he could feel that familiar pressure starting to build up in his groin. He could jam his knot into the kobold, watch him squirm and cry as he was pumped full. Or he could wrench himself out and let his load splatter all over Ludi’s body, painting his pearly scales white.

Decisions, decisions. Crius let his gaze wander a bit while that dilemma percolated through his mind, though his eyes ended up being drawn back to Pruna, as always—and when they set upon her, he stopped, attention suddenly locked.

It was a subtle thing, so much so that he hadn’t even consciously noticed it at first. It was more as if the sight had triggered some latent impulse inside of him that demanded his attention. Even without being able to visually pinpoint any of the signs, he could tell what he was seeing, feel it in his gut. Though it would, of course, require verification.

So, only stopping his thrusting as much as was physically necessary in order to walk, Crius made his way across the room and over to where Pruna was huddled against the wall. She shrank away as he came close, but with hard stone already at her back, there wasn’t much room for her to retreat.

Crius dropped down to his knees next to her, setting Ludi face-down onto the floor. Without any sort of strength in his limbs to support himself, he collapsed down onto it, rear held up only by the cock still embedded deep inside him. Having freed up his hands, Crius reached forward, grabbing Pruna by the knees and ignoring the way she tensed up in response. He wrenched them apart, exposing her stomach before grabbing a hold of it, squeezing the flesh there.

There was something hard just underneath the surface.

Crius couldn’t keep a laugh from tearing through him, a sharp, barking sound. There it was, the inevitable, what he’d been waiting for from the first night he brought the two kobolds back to his hideout.

“So you [i]can[/i] carry!” Crius said, continuing to knead at Pruna’s stomach. “I have to admit, I was starting to doubt you had it in you. If you were infertile, I have no idea what I’d do with you.”

Pruna wasn’t listening to what he was saying; even if she wanted to, his words were being drowned out by the sounds of Ludi’s screeching. He’d sharply increased in volume about halfway through Crius’ second sentence. Evidently, Ludi was not making as much of an effort to ignore Crius was Pruna was. Even though Crius’ thrusting had become slower and more bearable, distracted as he was by Pruna, Ludi had started screaming loud enough that Pruna wondered if he wasn’t going to tear his vocal chords.

Which meant that Pruna’s efforts had been completely in vain. What Crius was saying wasn’t any sort of grand revelation to her. She’d known for some time already—it was [i]her[/i] body, after all, and big things like that didn’t tend to slip under her radar.

But she hadn’t addressed it. Partially because she didn’t want to think about what it entailed, more so because she didn’t want Ludi to know about it. He’d always been sensitive, but since their capture, that trait of his had become pronounced, exaggerated, an instability right at the core of who he was. Pruna didn’t want to be the one who blew that instability wide open and sent him toppling down.

And now Crius had. Those increasingly hoarse screams were the sounds of whatever structure Ludi had collapsing out from under him. The noise tore at Pruna’s foundations, too; she clenched down on herself, fingers digging into her skull as she clamped her hands over her ears as if she were trying to crush her skull between them, trying to steady herself.

An effort which was thwarted by Crius squeezing down on her belly even harder, jerking her back to the present moment. Her face twisted in a grimace so deep it looked like she’d just been stabbed, and Crius laughed at the sight, the sound managing to cut above the din of Ludi’s screaming.

“Do you two not have half a brain between you?” Crius said. “I [i]told[/i] you this was going to happen. I [i]told[/i] you I was going to stick some eggs in that belly of yours, first night here. How are you surprised by this?”

No response to that, but that was fine. The reactions they were giving to the situation alone were more than sufficient; Ludi running his throat ragged, though he hadn’t decreased his volume one bit in spite of that fact, and Pruna had clamped down on herself so hard that Crius wondered if she was going to tear something. Two diametrically opposed reactions, one trying their hardest to internalize their pain, the other externalizing it as much as possible. It was funny to see those reactions coming from the exact opposite sources he’d expect.

But if he wasn’t going to be able to goad the two of them any further verbally, there was no point in him putting off the primary reason he’d come down any longer. He pulled his hand away from Pruna’s stomach and grabbed a hold of Ludi from around the hips, refocusing his attention on pounding the kobold’s ass as hard as he could.

Every thrust made Ludi’s voice jump, and given that his screams were more or less constant combined with the breakneck pace of Crius’ hips, it wound up giving the sounds he was making a kind of warbling quality. Crius found it amusing, and for awhile he tried varying the speed of his thrusts, seeing what sort of noises he could draw out of the kobold.

It was a pleasant bit of silly fun, surprisingly lighthearted in the face of the situation—from his end of things, anyway—but Crius didn’t keep at it for long. Seeing the pain he’d sown in the two kobolds, deeper and sharper than the usual, like he’d managed to push the dagger between their ribs those few inches deeper—all that had already gotten him dangerously close to the edge.

Sometimes, Crius did find it a bit absurd just how much satisfaction he was able to get out of hurting people. Hurting these two, especially. Sometimes, it was so intense that it barely felt like he needed the physical component at all. Like fucking them the way he doing was served no other purpose than another means of inflicting pain. Like he’d be able to get off solely by seeing the spirit and life get crushed out of them, ground out by the crushing pressure of what had become their day-to-day life.

But he wasn’t quite at that level, so he carried out the motions to get his release. His thrusts became shorter and harder, each one slamming his knot against the ring of Ludi’s asshole. The urge to shove it inside and tie the kobold was strong, stronger than usual. He’d grown adept at dealing with it; there were so many times where he’d had to suppress that urge just so he could conform to the demands of his busy schedule.

Ah, it seemed strange to deny himself that pleasure so often, but it just so frequently turned out to be the best course of action. He was often so busy that he couldn’t spare the however-long it’d take for his knot to go down. This time, though, he had no such obligations, and all that denial had built up inside him. It demanded a release. He was keen to provide it.

So when Crius felt that pressure inside him finally reach a peak and his knot began to inflate, he swung his hips forward and moved into shorter, harder thrusts. That bulge at the base of his cock battered against the ring of Ludi’s asshole with each one, and while it wasn’t in yet, the pace Crius had set made just trying to get it inside almost as painful as insertion in its own right. The throbbing of the lizardman’s cock made up for the anything that might’ve been lacking on account of his knot’s absence; Ludi could feel it inside him, pulsing in time with the beat of Crius’ heart, each time swelling and stretching his insides.

That absence didn’t last for long, though. It only took a few more thrusts before Ludi simply didn’t have the muscle strength to keep Crius out anymore, and the lizardman was quick to seize upon that weakness. He pulled Ludi tight against himself, forcing that knot into the kobold’s asshole a fraction of an inch at a time.

Up until Crius reached the widest point of his knot, a point that was growing ever larger as his knot continued to swell to its full size. Once he was that far, it was just a matter of giving one last push before the rest of it came rushing in, Ludi’s asshole clenching down as it came to grip to root of Crius’ cock.

Crius and Ludi let out a moan and a scream in tandem, one of pleasure, one of pain. Taking Crius’ knot wasn’t something that Ludi did often, but even if he did, he doubted that he’d ever get used to it. There was only so much he could adapt to before the limitations of his body made themselves known; Crius was big, he was not. That was what it boiled down to.

Crius knew that fact, and he revelled in it. He loved abusing things that were smaller than him. Some people struggled to admit that to themselves, and went their whole lives hurting those weaker than them while trying to maintain the illusion of being a ‘good person’. Crius didn’t know how people did it. Feeling his knot grow to its full size inside Ludi, larger and larger until the kobold’s body was straining to accommodate his girth, Crius found it difficult to think of how he’d enjoy himself even half as much as he was if he had to worry about maintaining that sort of double standard.

As it was, Crius could focus all of his attention on the way Ludi was clenching around him as his knot swelled, locking them together at the hip. Once he was at that point, it didn’t take much longer before Ludi’s crying and squirming, every movement making Crius’ knot shift around inside the kobold, pushed him over the edge.

With a throb more powerful than any that’d come before, Crius erupted. Ludi could feel it, a blast of wet heat surging into his guts, warmth seeping into raw flesh and setting it stinging. It wasn’t anything that Ludi hadn’t felt dozens of times before, but it never seemed to get much easier to endure. Less the physical sensations of it, more from the feeling, the knowledge, of being filled with the lizardman’s seed. Of having it inside him. Marking him.

It made him want to puke. Early on, he had, regularly. When he’d started feeling the effects of malnourishment, he cut it down to dry heaving. Now, he had enough control over himself that he didn’t even do that. He felt the nausea churning in his stomach, and he did nothing. Nothing but scream, anyhow.

But regardless of how well he could control his physical reactions, that sicking feeling was just as intense as it ever was, and only getting worse with every rope of cum Ludi felt shooting into his guts. There was no ignoring something like that; even if he had the ability, Crius planting a hand on his stomach made sure that Ludi’s attention was firmly fixed on what was being done to him. Crius’ fingers pressed and kneaded at the flesh there, making the feeling of the knot lodged just inside his tailhole and the seed sloshing inside him even more prominent.

Crius could feel a slight impression in Ludi’s stomach from where his cock was pressing through, bringing the size difference between them into stark focus. He could even feel the force of his own cumshots through Ludi’s scales, adding just the slightest bit of softness to the kobold’s middle with each one. He had to wonder: just how much would he have to use Ludi before he ended up looking like his companion across the cell, as if the signs of pregnancy were just starting to rear their head?

Ludi’s thoughts were running along a similar track, but unsurprisingly, his feelings were quite diametrically opposed. He stared at Pruna on the other end of the cell, staring back at him with a mixture of horror and what seemed to be some attempt at sympathy, but he didn’t really take in any of it. His attention was focused on her body, that hint of roundness around her middle. Before, it was imperceptible. Ever since Crius had pointed it out, it was all he could focus on.

It reminded him of the knot plugging him up and keeping him packed full of Crius’ seed. It reminded him of all the pain and abuse that he went through at the lizardman’s hands every day. It, her body, was a reminder of [i]him[/i]. Ludi couldn’t look at Pruna without thinking of Crius.

That line of thought lent a shuddering note to Ludi’s screams as his body waffled between the options of keeping up the ear-splitting shriek or bursting into tears. Crius couldn’t have asked for a better sort of noise to finish to. With those sounds in his ears and the feeling of Ludi’s tight ass wrapped around his knot, he was in heaven until the last of his release had left him and packed its way into Ludi’s guts.

Then, it was onto the afterglow—which would unfortunately have to be cut short. This time, it wasn’t business calling him away, but more of a tactical decision. He didn’t want to stick around for the fallout of his actions.

Not that he wouldn’t enjoy seeing it; he’d drink in every second of pain that the two kobolds could provide. But Crius knew that stepping away and allowing the two of them to dwell in that tide alone, let it wash over their heads and consume them, would gnaw at them in places that he couldn’t reach himself.

So Crius started working to extricate himself from Ludi’s asshole. He jerked his hips back while simultaneously lifting Ludi upwards, knot pulling back against Ludi’s insides. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation, with his knot still fully inflated as it was; it was meant to stay locked inside, not be yanked free before it’d had a chance to go down on its own. The sensitivity of it was enough to make Crius grit his teeth and growl.

Though no doubt that discomfort was nothing in comparison to what Ludi was feeling. The sounds the kobold was making completely overshadowed anything Crius had to offer, even more so than what he’d been putting out up to that point. The way Crius was working his knot drew hitching gasps and sobs out of Ludi, spiking in volume with every jerk and tug.

Ludi’s body seemed determined to stay clamped onto his knot, but Crius had long since demonstrated that he wasn’t one to come second in a battle of wills, and he’d loosened the kobold up enough that there was no way he’d be able to keep himself clenched tight enough to hold onto Crius’ cock. With agonizing slowness, Crius drew his knot back out of Ludi’s ass, the kobold’s tailhole clinging to it with every millimetre he managed to move.

Until he finally managed to tug that last bit of his knot free and the whole thing came out of Ludi at once. Crius relaxed his jaw and let out a sigh of relief. Yanking his knot out prematurely was not his favourite thing to do with a partner, that was for sure.

Though it did offer Crius a certain opportunity that didn’t present itself often. It allowed Crius to see just how absurdly large the thing looked in comparison to the place it’d just been lodged. He didn’t know how Ludi managed it; his knot had to be larger than a fist, yet Ludi was somehow able of taking it both ways, in and out. Even if he couldn’t make any eggs, something had to be said for just how stretchy Ludi was.

With his knot having already done most of the heavy lifting, Crius found little difficulty drawing the rest of his cock back out of Ludi’s body. The kobold’s tailhole clung to his cock as he went, making a wet sort of squelching sound until he pulled the last few inches of himself free with a schlorp.

When Crius relaxed his grip, Ludi slipped free from his hands, falling flat on the ground with cum already starting to drool out of his well-used hole. He used what little energy he had left in his body to curl up into a ball, arms hugging his legs close to his chest, tail curling up to obscure the view of his gaping entrance. The evidence of what had happened was still clear, though, leaking out of him and forming a puddle below.

He wasn’t screaming as much anymore. A relative quiet had fallen over the cell, and Pruna wasn’t clutching her ears quite so hard. She seemed to have reentered the moment, and was looking at the shivering ball that was Ludi with a look that made it clear how much she wanted to help—though she kept herself in check, for fear of attracting Crius’ attention.

Crius considered giving it to her anyway, but he was tired, and he had things to attend to. Best to leave the two be and let the rot spread as it would. Still, he’d give them one last gift before parting. Dredging up the phlegm necessary from the back of his throat, he leaned down and let loose a wad of spit. It streaked down and splattered against Ludi’s side, rolling down his back in thick droplets.

“See you two in the morning,” he said. No need for any witty, biting one-liner to part on; he’d done what he came to do, and that was biting enough. So he just turned, stepped out of the cell, locked the door behind himself, and left.

Pruna waited until she heard the lizardman’s footsteps work their way up the stairs and fade to nothing before the moved. She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled across the floor over to where Ludi laid, then leaned down towards him, setting a hand down onto his shoulder.

In the process, her body pressed against Ludi’s back. He could feel it, that hardness inside her. The eggs. That fact was at the forefront of his mind, blaring in his skull like a siren. There was no sound, though, only associations, fear, disgust, everything flaring up at once.

Inside her. They were inside her. [i]Crius[/i] was inside her. Feeling that hardness there, a physical presence in her, it dragged up memories. Some of them stretching back weeks, the most recent of which only just formed. Crius inside him. The feeling of his knot jammed inside whatever hole the lizardman desired of him at the time. Presence.

That presence wasn’t ever going to leave, now. When it was in him, it only lingered as long as Crius was there. When he left, it was gone. Painful memories might’ve stayed, but those weren’t Crius, they were just echoes of what he’d done. They could be overcome, at least to an extent.

This wasn’t that. This was him, him, him. Those eggs were his. Those eggs were him. They were his presence and they were there and they were in Pruna and Ludi couldn’t stand it.

Ludi screamed again, this time not out of pain, but a primal noise of fear. His body was suddenly surging with energy as he scrambled to his feet and shoved Pruna away from himself, sprinting to the other side of the room. Pruna fell to the floor, taken completely aback, barely managing to catch herself before mashing her face into the stone.

Pruna looked up at him. He was staring at her from across the room, tail held between him and her like a barrier. His breath was fast and shallow, and his pupils had turned to thin slits. He was [i]afraid[/i] of her.

She tried approaching, and he started screaming again. Pruna instinctively took a step back, and he stopped. Ludi stared at her on high alert for a few seconds more, and when he was sure that she wasn’t going to try to approach again, he buried his face into the crook of his arm and started to cry. He slumped down the wall and onto the floor, collapsing into a heap as his crying increased in strength until he was banging a fist against the floor while sobs visibly wracked his body.

Pruna moved over to the far corner of the cell and gripped at her horns, yanking on them hard enough to hurt. She clawed at the scales of her face. She banged her head against the wall. There were no words in her mind to describe the sort of pain she was feeling; there was only deep, soul twisting agony.

She’d never wanted to die more than she did in that single moment.

---

Time passed. It hadn’t done so at a quick rate before, and it certainly wasn’t getting any faster with the turn the atmosphere had taken. Pruna had hoped that Ludi’s reactions, whatever lingering hurt they might’ve left, would be passing. That they were borne purely of stress, and given time, he’d get over them and return to something resembling normalcy.

He didn’t. Ludi now spent his hours holed up on the far side of the cell—far side being defined as whichever side was farthest from Pruna. He tried his best to avoid even looking at her. He said nothing, such that the only noises Pruna heard out of him were the occasional bouts of crying.

Except for when she tried to get close to him. When that happened, he’d start screaming again. That was a tactic he’d started to cling to quite quickly after his experience with Crius. It got louder and more aggressive the closer she got, though ‘aggressive’ was a tricky word. ‘Defensive’ might’ve been more accurate. It put in mind a frightened animal, cornered, making use of the only option to protect itself it had left.

And it worked. Pruna couldn’t stand making Ludi feel that way, so she didn’t approach. She said nothing to him, because talking to him just resulted in him ignoring her at best or bursting into tears at worst. Staring at him just made him squirm.

So she did nothing, and that was how they spent their days. Curled up on opposite sides of the cell, passing the time in silence without exchanging a word or a glance. Occasionally, someone would enter the cell, usually Crius, and violate one or both of them in whatever manner struck their fancy before leaving. Sometimes they’d be fed, bathed, their physical needs attended to. They were kept in good condition, yet Pruna could still feel herself rotting.

Rotting. Festering. Growing. Pruna’s stomach had started to visibly swell since the encounter, the eggs inside her coming into their full potential. Given the lizardman blood in them on their father’s side, that potential was a fair bit more than Pruna’s body was built to handle. There were unlikely to be any problems—as frosty as their relations might’ve been, hybrids of kobolds and lizardmen weren’t uncommon, and the mothers tended to survive the birthing process regardless of species. Kobolds were hardy things.

But she was being pushed to her limits. Her belly jutted out in front of her, not quite double the size of a typical kobold pregnancy, but maybe halfway there. It sounded unimpressive phrased as such, but a kobold pregnant with its own kind was already a sight, given their tendency towards large clutches. Increasing that size by even a half threatened to cross over into the absurd.

Which only served to make it even more difficult for Pruna to move around and make her more of a spectacle for Ludi. He still tried to ignore her, but it had become more difficult, and when he failed to do so, he looked even more pained at the sight of her. Occasionally, she’d hear him retch. It made her grind her teeth.

Pruna could feel herself starting to grow unhinged. The need for companionship that she’d once been able to satisfy by comforting Ludi was now going unfulfilled, and regardless of how long it went ignored, it wasn’t going away. Instead, it was accumulating, sublimating into a kind of frantic energy which she had no way to release.

Which meant it was only growing harder to contain, caustic and bubbling inside her, burning and stinging at her guts. A wild desperation, trying its hardest to materialize itself into action, but unable to do so without being met with screaming, tears, and rejection.

Pruna hated it, and manic as she was becoming, that hatred was growing and expanding to encompass more than the feeling that had birthed it. She hated the eggs inside her, what they had caused, the one who had put them in her. She hated the body that carried them and nurtured them. She hated things that she dared not name but felt disdain for all the same, disdain that she couldn’t acknowledge for fear of somehow legitimizing it.

It was during one of those stints of marinating in those feelings that she heard it. Footsteps, working their way down the stairs around the corner and towards their cell. Hardly unusual; visitors came and went on a regular basis, though given Pruna’s state, attention had tended more towards Ludi than her. She didn’t know how much of that was from the natural lack of interest in a pregnant kobold and how much was Crius trying to keep her clutch in good condition.

Right on cue with that thought, Crius rounded the corner, unlocking the cell door and slipping inside with practised, easy movements. He came in and out of their cell frequently; he’d gotten familiar with it, and with them. When he entered, both of the kobolds’ eyes were drawn to him like moths to a flame, helpless to offer him their attention.

“I’ve gotten word back from my professional on you,” Crius said, looking down at Pruna.

Pruna hadn’t been informed of any sort of professional, but even so, she knew exactly who he was talking about. Most of the people who came into the cell who weren’t Crius were relatively similar; appearances might’ve been varied, but behaviour remained a constant. They had their fun, and they left.

There’d only been one exception to that trend. A skinny, pale looking human, dressed in clean linens that matched perfectly with the aura he exuded. A sort of cool, clinical detachment. Most of the people who came in felt some sort of lust, desire towards them. Some felt more aggressive feelings, but they were still passionate about them, seeing the kobolds as a way to unleash them.

The human didn’t give off any of that. He seemed to view them only with a very mild sort of disgust. That made the way he’d touched Pruna all the more uncomfortable. She was used to being handled like she was a piece of meat; this man handled her like she was an [i]object[/i], working his hands over her belly and probing her with his fingers while looking right through her.

He’d done his work in silence, apart from the occasional hum when he discovered something that apparently piqued his interest, and then he’d left. That was a few days ago, now. A few inches on her waistline ago.

“I went out of my way to get his services. Not that I’m gonna be doing it every time you get knocked up, but the first lay is special.” Crius leaned over Pruna and leered, flashing her a toothy grin. “After all, it’s going to determine what quality of product I can be expecting, meaning whether or not you two are worth keeping as an investment.”

The moment was horrendous. Ludi was huddled in on himself across the room, taking advantage the attention being away from him to make himself as small as possible. Pruna had no such recourse; even if Crius’ eyes weren’t fixed on her, there was no way that she would be able to make herself anything that could even generously be described as small. She was gravid, swollen, obscene. There was no escape for her, and though she’d trained herself not to think the words, she couldn’t help but think the concept behind them: could things get any worse?

As it turned out, they could. The idea hadn’t even had time to percolate through her mind before the physical sensations hit: a wave of painful pressure, originating somewhere in her back and moving through her body until it reached the bottom of her stomach. It wasn’t just an empty sensation, either; she could feel her body shifting, insides tensing up, clenching down.

Another first for Pruna, among the many that Crius had already forced upon her. Even with her lack of experience, it didn’t take her long to pinpoint what it was she was going through—contractions. Pruna winced and instinctively widened her thighs, letting out a low groan.

Crius straightened and looked down at Pruna with a look that teetered on the border of surprise before settling down into amusement. “He [i]said[/i] to start keeping an eye on you this week, but I didn’t think his guess would be so accurate! Seems fortune smiles on us tonight, eh? Gods, I’m downright impressed.”

Almost impressed enough to toss a few extra coins the physician’s way—though not quite. Crius wasn’t really the tipping type. If he were, he wouldn’t be a thief. Maybe one of those roguish adventurers that stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but given that he was in the company of two kobolds he’d raped and abused for weeks on end, he’d strayed more than a bit from anything resembling that sort of path.

Crius was getting distracted. A thief had to consider everything, and unfortunately, that had given itself towards a tendency for tangents. But a thief also had to be able to focus, and right now, he was going to focus his efforts on assisting with the process of Pruna’s laying. With his own special methods of assistance, of course.

Crius walked around to Pruna’s side and grabbed her by the shoulders, shoving her forward so that he could place himself between her and the wall, then dropped into a sitting position behind her that left his knees pressed up against her shoulders. Pruna felt like she was being enveloped by him; if her stomach wasn’t already churning with the effort of trying to push out the eggs inside her, then it definitely would’ve started at that.

He was well aware of that. Crius could feel the disgust coursing through her at his touch, muscles tensing up, shoulders moving inwards in a futile attempt to avoid touching him any more than was necessary. It was amusing to him, as so many things that he did to the two kobolds were. He grabbed Pruna’s shoulders and squeezed at them as if to calm her, and relished the way the gesture managed to achieve the exact opposite effect.

“Not to worry, dear,” Crius whispered to Pruna, voice dripping with saccharinity. “I’ll be right behind you every step of the way.”

A pang of nausea rolled through Pruna’s body that coincided so perfectly with the word ‘dear’ that she had to wonder what’d caused it, her own body or what Crius was saying to her. Oh, she was certain he’d be behind her, alright. After all, that was the easiest position from which to stab someone in the back.

Though that turn of phrase implied betrayal, which was simply inaccurate. As much of a criminal and a thief as Crius was, he’d only lied the very first night they’d met, purely in order to capture her. Once he’d accomplished that, there’d been nothing but truth and honesty; his cruelty and depravity were undisguised, completely open.

And they were put on display yet again when Crius moved his hands from Pruna’s shoulders down the front of her body, trailing his palms across the flat of her chest, over the round of her belly, until they reached their goal down between her legs. He rubbed one of his hands across the puffy folds of her vulva, feeling the heat radiating off of it, the way the muscles there tightened and relaxed in rhythm with the contractions rolling through her.

“Need some help loosening up?” Crius mumbled into her ear, though he made sure to keep his voice loud enough for Ludi to hear, even across the room as he was.

The question was rhetorical. It didn’t matter what Pruna thought; Crius was going to do what he wanted with her. It was hardly even a matter of loosening her up. He didn’t care how tight she was, how painful laying was going to be, so long as she didn’t tear herself wide open. It was purely a matter of him getting to indulge himself in her.

As such, he made no show of waiting for an answer. The second the words had left his lips, his fingers were moving, positioning themselves against Pruna’s entrance as he shifted from a open-palmed rubbing motion to something more digitally focused.

Someone focused on pacing things and providing as much comfort as possible—putting aside that someone like that wouldn’t have tried making a move like Crius was doing at all—would’ve started with one finger, inserted with gentleness and care. Given that fact, Crius made his debut with two fingers jammed inside Pruna as roughly as he pleased, which happened to be quite a bit.

Pruna didn’t scream, though. Ludi might’ve been prone to bursting out into shrieks whenever Crius so much as touched him, but Pruna had built up a bit more endurance than that. The nonstop stream of sexual abuse, as much as it might’ve slowed since her pregnancy became apparent, had seen to that.

If he was being perfectly honest, that was a trait that Crius liked. Sure, he liked just how easy it was to get Ludi squealing, but there was a level of attraction to be found in having to work for it. In having to break through a tough exterior to get at a soft inside, like cracking a nut.

Pruna was proving to be a particularly tricky nut to crack. Not that he hadn’t gotten her to break down before—he had, on a number of occasions—but there was a difference between individual, moment-to-moment breakdowns and crippling the core of who someone was. Crius had accomplished that with Ludi some time ago. Pruna had yet to relent.

But the strain of having to hold on through everything Crius was doing to her, the physical abuse, the day-in day-out strings of rape, the pregnancy that had come as a direct result of that, all of that meant strain was starting to show. She was fraying at the edges, like a piece of rope stressed past its limits, ready to snap.

And as much as he would’ve liked to claim sole responsibility for that, Crius had to admit that he’d had assistance. Specifically, in the form of Ludi. His efforts had worked out even better than he’d dreamed. From the moment he’d announced Pruna’s pregnancy, Crius had noticed a change in Ludi’s behaviour. Where normally they’d sleep together, now they slept apart. Before, he’d hear comforting words being shared between them throughout the night; now, silence reigned.

Ludi had abandoned Pruna. In doing so, she’d lost the only support structure she had. Now, the kobold had to stand purely on her own, and Crius could see that she didn’t have the strength to do so. Not with all the weight he was heaping onto her.

That meant that all it would take to bring her crashing down to the same depths as her companion would be a few choice words and a bit of pressure in just the right places. And with his fingers probing deep into Pruna, her muscles clamping down around him in sync with her contractions, Crius had an idea of just where to apply that pressure. With his fingers still embedded up to the knuckle in her cunt, Crius twisted his hand and dragged his thumb upwards, grinding it right over top of where Pruna’s clit was hiding.

Pruna outright gasped at that. She hadn’t known Crius for giving any sort of consideration to her pleasure, but that wasn’t because he was incapable of it. It was simply because he got joy from hurting her, so that was where he focused his efforts, no thought about making her feel good required.

Now, though, he was showing off those rarely used skills, and it wasn’t out of a sudden change of heart. It was simply that now he’d had an idea on how to cause so much more pain—and all it took was some strategic application of the exact opposite.

While continuing to rub his thumb in tight circles over the hood of Pruna’s clit, the sensation keeping her muscles locked–save for the spasms forced through her by her contractions–Crius spoke. “Isn’t it funny that now [i]I’m[/i] the one making you feel better?”

Pruna didn’t find that very funny. Absurd, yes, but not in any sort of way that was amusing. More in the way that made her want to gouge her own eyes out. Really, ‘better’ wasn’t even an accurate descriptor. Even ‘good’ only fit on the most basic, physical level, certainly nothing to rival the emotional pain she felt just from having him touch her.

But in spite of that, the unspoken implication behind Crius’ words rang true; it was more than Ludi was doing. Ludi couldn’t even bring himself to look at her, much less touch her in any sort of comforting way. What Crius was doing was a far cry from any sort of comfort, but it was still some form of contact—and after having endured the isolation Ludi was imposing on her for so long, even that sort of attention, however much she might’ve disliked it, was doing something for her.

It was patently obvious that she was being manipulated, even to Pruna. The problem was that, in spite of knowing that, she was in no state to use that knowledge to defend herself. Physically, she was trying not to come apart as waves of contractions rolled through her; emotionally, she was doing the same as a boiling cauldron of disgust and detest raged inside of her, not all of it directed at Crius.

That was a difficult thought to acknowledge, but even more difficult to ignore. Pruna had been managing to do so up to that point, but as Crius’ thumb ground against her emerging clit with steady, unchanging circles, there was no way for her to keep it out of her mind. It was funny: usually when he touched her, words seemed to fail in the face of the pain, but now the floodgates had opened.

Well, not funny. Like before, it was less funny and more detestable, but a more appropriate word didn’t readily spring to mind. It seemed that only the words she didn’t want were the ones granted entry into her thoughts; doubts, anxiety, and a creeping, latent hatred trickled through her mind like a drip of boiling acid.

And that internal struggle was manifesting itself through Pruna’s body language. Not just the way her face twisted, but in the clenching of her body, her muscles contracting out of rhythm with her contractions as they reacted to spikes of emotional pain. Crius could tell these things. He’d had more than enough experience tugging the strings of people to see how they reacted that he could recognize what reactions went with what sorts of pressures, particularly in regards to the kobold he had his fingers buried in.

The fact that she hadn’t immediately snapped and started denying what he was saying was a good sign. Even if that was purely from the effort of labour stealing her breath away, which he was rather certain it wasn’t, just her listening to him talk without contradicting him would be enough for him to worm his way into her mind. To keep mounting that pressure.

So he pushed his advantage. “It makes you wonder if anyone else really cares about you at all.”

And there it was, the earlier implication now outright stated. Crius had made sure to heighten his volume when he said it, too—not out of any fear that Ludi wouldn’t be able to hear it if he hadn’t, since he was sure the other kobold could hear every word he was saying, but he wanted to make sure that [i]Pruna[/i] knew that Ludi had heard it. The thought definitely ran through her mind; Crius could see her half-turn towards Ludi, trying to see if there was any sort of reaction out of him without looking right at him.

Crius didn’t feel any such kind of hesitation and instead chose to openly stare at Ludi, examining him. The kobold seemed to wince a bit, huddle in on himself a bit tighter—but apart from that, he didn’t voice any sort of objection, didn’t say a word.

And that was the real nail in the coffin. Crius knew Ludi well enough to know that he did care about Pruna, cared about her a great deal, even if Crius had managed to warp him so severely that he was now giving her the cold shoulder. That kind of connection between two people was very difficult to sever.

But he also knew that Pruna was going to take his silence as a tacit admission that Crius’ words were true. That Ludi really had given up on her. He could feel the realisation roll through her with the same reaction that she’d probably give to a knife between the ribs. Her worst fears realised, brought to life while Crius continued to work his fingers in and out of her cunt.

It was hard to imagine how the situation could get much worse, but there was no need to imagine, as it was made reality just a few seconds later. Pruna’s contractions finally bore fruit, in the form of an egg shifting inside of her and starting on the path out of her body.

Pruna sucked in a breath through her teeth. Crius let out a pleased hum and moved his free hand to her belly, rubbing his palm across its rounded surface, feeling the movement happening just under the surface. “Took you a minute, eh? Now we can start in on the real fun.”

None of that fun was going to be experienced by Pruna, of that she was certain. The pain was already ramping up at a frighteningly quick pace; the contractions had been bad enough, but actually feeling that egg moving through her body, stretching her wide, that was immeasurably worse.

The first lay was always the most unbearable. Every female kobold knew that much. The thing was that the ones who distributed that knowledge were basing it on what a regular, single-species pregnancy was like. It was true in that case. With a cross between a kobold and a lizardman, it was worse by an order of magnitude; all the warnings in the world wouldn’t have been able to prepare Pruna for the reality.

Especially considering the fact that, all the while, Crius was continuing to work his hand between her legs with all the dexterity that his years as a rogue had afforded him. His thumb ground against her clit while his fingers pistoned in and out of her cunt, soaking him with ever increasing amounts of fluid. Most of it had to be amniotic, but much to her shame, she couldn’t say that all of it was so.

That spark of pleasure burning inside her, drawn out by the work of Crius’ fingers—it was maddening, even more so than the pain of the egg moving through her. The birthing process had let loose all kinds of hormones, running through her body like liquid heat in her veins. Nothing in her body was working as she’d come to expect; everything felt too intense, too many parts of her were following their own agenda.

With the prime fault in that regard being the part of her Crius was embedded up to the knuckle in. Under normal circumstances, she didn’t feel the slightest hint of arousal when Crius touched her. Mentally, she still didn’t, but laying seemed to have done the exact opposite of what she’d expected and made her sensitive to his ministrations.

So now she could feel herself slowly but surely being pushed towards orgasm, even as the first egg of her clutch was pushed through her body at a snail’s pace, prying open her insides so that it felt like every nerve inside her was lighting up at once.

Pruna felt like letting out a scream to put any that Ludi had done before to shame. If her jaw wasn’t clamped tight and her vocal chords paralyzed by all the sensations shooting down her legs and up her spine, she just might’ve. Instead, she settled for letting out a low, strangled groan, steadily ramping up in volume.

It had just reached its peak when Crius felt something press against the tips of his fingers, hard and smooth. There it was: the result of all of Pruna’s hard work and the work that Crius had done himself months prior. The first sample of it, anyway. Plenty more were sure to follow, both right then and in the far flung future.

He removed his fingers from Pruna’s entrance, though he kept his thumb working along her clit, allowing the egg the space it needed to exit. He was treated to the sight of the egg’s narrower end pushing its way past the folds of Pruna’s cunt with a gush of fluid that rolled down along the base of her tail to join the growing puddle beneath her.

Pearly white shell, with the slightest hint of bluish mottling. Even with the majority of it yet to emerge from Pruna’s body, Crius couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride at the sight. Perhaps not the same pride that another father would’ve felt; there was no attachment there, only the satisfaction at having conquered a woman, made her his. The egg itself, he didn’t care whether it was hatched or sunny side up. Depending on who ended up buying it, it was a coin flip which it’d end up being.

But that was business, and Crius wasn’t trying to think about business right then. He was immersed in the moment, listening to Pruna’s struggling grunts as the egg split her open wider and wider as it approached its midpoint. Her face was scrunched so tight in effort that Crius wondered if she was going to be able to pull it off after all. Pruna did, too, horrified fantasies of the egg sticking inside her and forcing her to live in that singular moment of agony for the rest of eternity flashing through her mind.

But those were just the absurd fantasies of a mind overwhelmed by the pain of birth, and as focused as she was on the pain, they failed to take into account the unwilling pleasure still being forced upon her. Maybe the concept of it bothered her so much that she was unwilling to entertain it even in her most dreadful state.

That didn’t stop its effects in the reality she was in, though. Her clit felt sensitive and raw from the relentless attention it was receiving from Crius, but overuse and overstimulation weren’t stopping it from doing it’s job. If anything, it was doing the opposite; combined with the feeling of being stretched open around the egg, it was doing it all too well. That pressure inside her, unfamiliar after so long of seeing sex as nothing more than mandatory and painful, was finally reaching its peak.

It coincided perfectly with her laying. Once she reached the egg’s widest point and the rest of it slid out of her, climax shot through her and gripped her muscles with all the subtlety of a lightning bolt. Her whole body clenched up, squeezing the egg clean out of her body, leaving her cunt to clench down around the unfamiliar emptiness it had been replaced by.

Crius continued to abuse her clit through the whole process, feeling it throb under his fingers as Pruna shook in the throes of orgasm, but his other hand shifted from its place on her belly and scooped up the egg before it could roll off her tail and smash on the floor.

He held it up to the light, examining it. Far smaller than a lizardman egg, but definitely bigger than the typical kobold egg. Maybe a hand across, a hand and a quarter long—going by typical human hands, anyway, as funny a measurement as that was. He supposed someone’s hand had to set the benchmark.

“Looks good,” Crius said, laying the egg to the side with just enough care as not to crack the shell. Then, he returned his hand to its place on Pruna’s stomach, running his palm over it, feeling how the shape had changed. “How many do you have left in there? Five? Six? Can’t be more than eight. I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Only just coming off of both the pain of her first egg and the shock of her first orgasm in months, Pruna coughed and whined as she felt the contractions for the next start rolling through her. At the same time, Crius’ hand moved down her body and took back its place between her legs, fingers pushing their way into her body. They were certainly going to find out the answer to that question, whether she liked it or not.

---

The number turned out to be five. Six, if you were counting the one that Crius was keeping from being laid, one of his hands laid over the half of it that Pruna had managed to push out to keep it from moving any further. His other hand was a few inches higher, fingers busy tugging her clit as he’d been doing near continuously since she’d first started to lay.

For each egg, he’d managed to draw an orgasm out of her, each one leaving her feeling more drained and ragged than the last. It was a wonder that her body managed the energy needed to keep the birthing process going when even the involuntary shuddering that wracked her with every climax felt like it required drawing on her last reserves of strength, but somehow, it continued on at its steady pace.

Up until the egg she was currently trying to lay, the last of the clutch. Every orgasm that Crius had wrung out of her previously came with greater and greater difficulty, the rage of hormones that came with birth not quite enough to combat her rapidly mounting fatigue. By the last of the six, Pruna wondered whether she was going to be able to make it through without enduring one at all.

And it seemed that Crius thought the same thing, but wasn’t willing to give up quite so easily. Sensing that he wasn’t going to be able to push her over the edge before the egg was free and unwilling to take the chance of failure that came with trying to finish her off afterwards, he took the only reasonable course of action: he simply wouldn’t let Pruna push the egg out until he was finished.

It was strikingly effective. The pain of laying had gone down considerably with each egg as Pruna gradually loosened and numbed to the endless onslaught of sensation, but being stopped at that most pivotal, intense moment undid all of that adjustment. She was plunged right back into the thick of it, all the burning and stretching pushed to the forefront of her mind once her body realised that it wasn’t going to end.

And along with that came other sensations that she’d been trying to ignore. What could barely even be called pleasure anymore, just the firing of nerves whose purpose had been shifted from making her feel good to pushing her even further into shame by stealing control over her body from her. It hurt, more than anything. Her clit felt raw, inflamed. But as Crius rolled it between his fingers, it did its job, the same as ever.

So it was that Pruna, stretched open around the widest point of her final egg, was brought to orgasm one final time. She didn’t shake as much as the other times. She gave a few spasmodic jerks, clenching around the egg and dribbling some small measure of fluids, then fell slack against Crius’ chest. She was too exhausted to cry or scream, though she did let out a low wheeze.

Pruna felt completely and utterly drained. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually, if there was such a thing—and if she still possessed one after all she’d been through. It hadn’t just been the process of birthing the eggs; it had been all the things that Crius had been saying to her throughout the process, while she was alternately straining too hard or too exhausted to be able to offer any sort of reply, meaning that all she could do was soak in his words.

He told her that this was going to be her life from now on. That her fate was to be his plaything, no other purpose than to be there to satisfy whatever whim or desire crossed his mind. None of that was anything new. Those were all things that she’d heard a thousand times before.

What he said that really bothered her were the things relating to Ludi. That was a fresh approach, and it got to her because unlike all the other things he said that she could deny and push aside just by clinging to some sense of self worth, it was difficult to find fault in his accusations.

Crius said that Ludi didn’t care for her. He said that he’d turned on her, that he was disgusted by the sight of her, that he’d readily tear her throat out in a moment if he thought that it’d earn him his own freedom. That the only reason he hadn’t done so yet was because of his own snivelling cowardice.

Pruna didn’t want to believe any of that, but when she turned her heavy, teary eyes over to Ludi, still huddled in the same spot across the room as he’d been when all everything first started, it was difficult not to. He hadn’t said a word, hardly even made a sound, just cried quietly while watching the two of them. His arms were wrapped around his legs and his knees up in front of his snout, so that all she could see of his face were those eyes.

They made a show of sadness. Without any sort of noise or action to back them up, she couldn’t perceive them as any more than that: a show. Everything about Ludi seemed paper-thin, febrile, a farce. A poor facade of pity-seeking vulnerability to disguise a far worse weakness, a lack of the strength necessary to truly connect or care about anyone, only the ability to feed on their generosity like a parasite.

A sense of nausea gripped Pruna, and she couldn’t tell whether it was directed towards the thoughts themselves or the subject of them. Ludi the old companion. Ludi the leech. Ludi the observer, out of a refusal to act. Ludi the distant, the one who’d pushed her away for no fault of her own, only his own twisted paranoia. Ludi, Ludi, Ludi.

Then, back to the present. Crius was shifting his hips, pressing his erection against the small of Pruna’s back. She’d been dimly aware of it for some time, but it was easy to ignore when her attention was focused solely on what he was doing with his hands and on pushing the eggs inside of her out; now, it had become the new focus of her attention.

“You know,” Crius said, grinding himself against her scales as he spoke, “you really ought to thank me. You know. For everything I’ve done for you.”

Pruna couldn’t help but be taken aback by the sheer audacity of that statement. Thank him? For what he had done for her? And what was that, lock her in a dank cell, rape her day after day, strip her personhood away from her and reduce her to nothing more than a slave, an animal? Certainly nothing that she could feel anything approaching gratitude for.

Those were her first thoughts, an initial whiplash reaction at the ridiculousness of what he was suggesting. Her next thoughts came later, when she glanced over at Ludi once again. He’d long since stopped trying to avert his eyes, just watched on with that hollow stare of his.

Disgust and rage flared up again. Her thoughts took an alternate path, bitter, one that she typically only trod deep in the night when she was just on the verge of falling asleep and whatever inhibitions she might’ve had in place were weakened by fatigue. Had Ludi done anything more worthy of thanks than Crius?

Certainly not recently. Even before that, though; what had Ludi done for her? Merely being a presence wasn’t really providing any sort of service or benefit to her. He didn’t bring any special set of skills to the table. Throughout their travels, most of what he did was soak up gold and rations. And for what? What had it all amounted to? This. This was where her travels with Ludi had led her: a living death.

Framed as such, she hated him for that. She [i]hated[/i] him for that. She’d been taken advantage of and then rejected and double-crossed for her trouble. Looking at things through that lens, she couldn’t help but thirst for some sort of retribution.

But out of some nostalgia for the good times they’d shared, however sour they might’ve seemed in hindsight, Pruna made one last effort to reach out. She fixed Ludi with a look in the same vein as the ones she’d given him at the start of their unwanted feud, the only difference being this one wasn’t just filled with the need for support, the need to connect with another person, but also a burning, almost threatening desperation.

Ludi met her eyes for a moment, and in that moment, it almost seemed as if he’d understood what she was trying to convey. Almost like he’d learn the lesson he needed to learn in that last second, right before everything was lost, and set forward to be the friend that she needed him to be.

Then, he looked away. All of that desperation and need immediately dissipated and reformed as an equal amount of rage. Visceral. Untamed. Uncontrollable. It felt like a physical thing, flowing through her and restoring some energy to her aching body, though it did nothing to numb the pain. It didn’t need to; she wanted the pain, clung to it. It was the only way that she’d be able to externalize it, return it to the one who’d given it to her in the first place.

“Thank you!” Pruna said, springing into the words with an enthusiasm that was only marred by the hoarseness that’d come to grip her voice over the course of her laying. “Thank you! Thank you!”

She said it, shouted it, over and over. Her throat felt ragged and it hurt to speak at even a normal volume, let alone a scream, but she did it anyway. The tears that streaked down her cheeks over the tracks of their dried precessors were entirely unrelated to that pain, as were the sobs that grew in intensity until her words were nigh unintelligible.

It hurt to say such things on a deeper level than physical, but she kept saying them, because the pain didn’t feel like the pointless suffering that she’d been enduring day in and day out for the past however-many weeks she’d spent in the cell. It felt cleansing, purifying, like the sting of disinfectant or the burn of cauterization. She was excising something.

But more important than cutting into herself, she was cutting into someone else. Pruna wasn’t looking at him and wouldn’t be able to see him through the veil of tears even if she had, but she could hear the noises Ludi was making in between her own words. The hiss of breath, choked and fast, hyperventilating through a clenched throat.

Crius gave a wide grin, sharp as any he ever gave—a mouthful of teeth fit to rip flesh from bone made it hard to do otherwise—but far more pleased than the ones that’d come before. It wasn’t pleasant, though; nobody else would find any sort of joy in seeing it. The greed and cruelty that fuelled it shone through, and it imparted the same comforting feelings as a coyote bearing its fangs.

He’d done it. He’d like to say that it’d been a difficult thing, that him managing to break Pruna’s spirit had been some sort of challenge or triumph, but it really wasn’t. His technique had been perfected down to a science, and the conditions he’d kept the two kobolds in were enough to snuff out the firmest of wills. The outcome was practically predetermined.

That wasn’t to say he didn’t feel a sense of pride of accomplishment. He was plenty satisfied, he simply felt no need to whoop and cheer to celebrate his victory. Getting this far had been one step. Now it was time to take another.

“Good girl,” Crius cooed, stroking a hand along Pruna’s arm and feeling her tense up at his touch. He didn’t comment, because it didn’t matter. She’d still do what he wanted even if her body recoiled from him—even if her mind did, at that. She had higher motivations than disgust could shake. “I think behaviour like that deserves a reward.”

Pruna gave no coherent answer to his words, just continued repeating the words ‘thank you’ over and over, now interspersed with hiccups from how violent her crying had become. She was a complete and utter mess, and Crius loved the sight of it. He couldn’t wait to make it that much worse.

Crius grabbed Pruna from under the shoulders and lifted her up high, using a leg to shift her tail to the side so that he could position the head of his cock against the hole that laid just underneath. While her cunt might’ve been quite a bit worse for wear after having to pass six eggs, her asshole was just as tight as ever, and already lubricated thanks to all the fluids that had been drooling over it.

Crius was rarely in the mood to take things slow. He’d pace himself if it meant he could most drag out the suffering of his two favourite kobolds, but apart from that, he took what he wanted at the pace he enjoyed. He’d already spent more than enough time setting the scene; he was going to get the most bang for his buck by speeding things up, both in terms of his own physical pleasure and the sheer amount of pain he’d wring out of both kobolds.

Following that line of thought, Crius shifted his hands to the top of Pruna’s shoulders and shoved her down, sinking a good third of his cock into her in a single stroke. It wasn’t her first time being penetrated in such a way, but it wasn’t something she experienced frequently, let alone with such violence. It was more than enough to drive her near-incomprehensible gibbering out of the realm of language entirely, replaced with a sharp shriek.

Crius wasn’t going to stop on account of any discomfort on her end, though—the very idea was absurd. He kept up the pressure, sinking Pruna down onto his cock at as fast a pace as her body could endure, filling her with a pain almost enough to rival that of passing her eggs.

She was screaming just as loud as she had then, but now, there was a different quality to it. Her heart wasn’t in those screams. They were purely a physical response; in her mind, she revelled in the friction, the burning of being stretched too wide, too fast. It felt awful, but Crius had made [i]her[/i] awful. That was a quality of hers, now. Feeling bad validated her existence.

Glancing to the side, Pruna could see that Ludi had slumped over onto his side, hands clamped over the side of his head in an attempt to block out the sounds of what was happening. She was making him awful, too. It hurt. It felt good. Like plunging into boiling water after freezing half to death.

“More, please,” Pruna croaked. A request, but considering what she was asking for, it might as well have been a command. It was nice to be able to ask for something and have it come to be. It was nice to be able to have some control over her life, even if it was a farce. Even if it was through participating in her own dissolution.

Crius was more than happy to oblige her. Letting out a growl from the back of his throat, Crius abandoned even that slight bit of caution that he held to keep from damaging his toys. Damaging them too much, anyway. If she said she wanted it, then he’d be damned if he didn’t try to give it to her.

With a buck of his hips and all the strength his arms could muster, he rammed her down into his lap, sinking over half of his cock into her until he could feel her ring pressing against the start of his knot. Her ass gripped tight around every inch of him, muscles clenching instinctively from the intrusion in some vain attempt to keep him out when he’d already penetrated her so utterly.

Though not quite completely. His knot remained outside, pulsing against her tailhole with the beat of his heart. It wasn’t time to shove it inside, not yet. Would he, when he was ready? He wasn’t quite sure. Sparing Pruna that experience would feel like too much of a mercy, but at the same time, would it be practical?

Ah, well. There’d be plenty of time for him to consider that. In the meantime, there were more pressing matters to attend to. 

Crius ignored the spasmodic jerking and soundless jaw-flapping that Pruna had taken up as her body struggled to take what he was dishing out. Instead, he tightened his grip around her shoulders and yanked her up again, drawing halfway out of her ass and exposing his shaft to the open air once again.

None of the three were in a position to see it, but had they been, they might’ve picked up on the slight tinge of red that had come to coat Crius’ cock. A subtle thing, but a clear indicator of having gone too far—to anyone but Crius, anyway. He could smell the stuff, and it wasn’t stopping him. It made him salivate. The coppery tang didn’t mean ‘stop’; it made his blood run hot with the desire to take things even further, signalled that things had just begun.

Crius slammed Pruna down again, and this time, the shock was enough to jerk her free from the paralysis that’d gripped her. She let out another scream, loud, piercing, ringing off the stone walls of the cell. It was supported by a low, mournful moan from Ludi as his hands failed to block out the sounds of his companion being violated, being hurt, hurting him.

Then Crius was raising her up again and slamming her down again. Up and down, up and down, every motion varying the volume and pitch of Pruna’s screams. It wouldn’t be the first time Crius had thought to compare one of the kobolds to an instrument, not even that night. Probably wouldn’t be the last, either. The comparison was just too fitting; they were objects there to be played, to be used, and were perfectly suited to that purpose. It was enough to make him wonder if he shouldn’t have become a bard instead of a thief.

Crius was working at a breakneck tempo. He was working Pruna up and down as fast as his arms could move her, slamming his hips up to meet her for good measure. Each time, his knot slammed against her tailhole hard enough to leave it stinging, and he could feel beads of fluid splatter across his thighs and roll down his scales. Some of it was what was continuing to ooze from her abused cunt; some of it was what his frantic pace had drawn out of her ass.

It didn’t matter to him, and it didn’t seem like it mattered to Pruna, either. She was lost in the sensations of what he was doing to her, none of them positive and without even an ounce of pleasure to be found in that pain. Pruna wasn’t a masochist as such. Being hurt brought her no sort of sexual high. There was satisfaction, but it was of a different breed.

Crius could see that, feel that. She was trying her best to grit and bear it, though without the ability to stop her screaming long enough to do any sort of gritting, the phrase lost a bit of its meaning. But the point was the same; she wasn’t struggling.

Did he want to go further? Make her crave his touch, actually enjoy it? Crius wasn’t sure. That possibility had to contend against keeping her in this state, willing yet loathing what he did to her. More for him to think on—[i]after[/i] he was finished with what he was doing.

Which wasn’t going to take much longer. Watching her squirm under his touch and cum over and over as she laid her clutch, him grinding his erection against her back, all of that had gotten Crius quite excited. When he was excited, he fucked hard and fast, to put it as plain a thing as it was. He could already feel his knot starting to swell, ringing out with ever greater pleasure each time it slammed against Pruna’s asshole, each time bigger than before.

His indecision from before was gone: he wanted to stick it in her. At the same time, he didn’t want to be stuck [i]to[/i] her, which meant that ramming it into her ass was out of the question. That wasn’t going to be an issue, though. He had an idea.

With only the slightest twinge of regret, Crius lifted Pruna up and pulled himself free of her ass with a wet sucking noise, cock shiny and slick with a layer of pink tinged fluids. That twinge didn’t last long, though, because he didn’t waste a second before aligning the head of his dick with the kobold’s other hole.

Then, with no more effort than a quick press on her shoulders, he sank himself inside her. She was still so loose from all the eggs she’d laid that Crius felt only the barest hint of resistance, not even enough to slow him until he was deep enough to butt up against her cervix, his knot pressed up against her swollen vulva.

As accepting as her body might’ve been, it still felt just as bad as usual, if not worse. The numbness she’d started to feel while she was laying was gone; now, there was aching tenderness as her body tried to recover. The feeling of Crius’ cock sliding along her insides turned that aching into fresh pain, raw flesh crying out in agony.

Not for long, though. Crius had already been on the edge, and even if he hadn’t, the high screech that Pruna let out as she was penetrated probably would’ve been enough to bring him there. He let out a pleasured growl from deep in his chest and thrust his hips up into her, forcing his knot past the lips of her pussy.

This time, there was a bit more pressure to overcome, but it didn’t come from around his knot. Deeper inside, the entrance to her womb was struggling to withstand the press of his cock, the only thing standing between her and complete, utter penetration.

It didn’t stand in the way for long. Already loosened from the eggs that’d passed through it and unable to withstand Crius’ advances even in the best of situations, it was only a few seconds before her cervix buckled and allowed his cock to spear through. That was followed in tandem by his knot, sliding past the lips of her cunt until they were wrapped around the root of his dick.

Feeling that squeeze around his knot was more than enough to send him to his peak. Digging his claws into Pruna’s shoulders, Crius let the growl he was letting out transform into a moan. It was a sound that was easily overshadowed by Pruna’s continual shriek, but that was fine. Crius liked to hear what he was doing to his partner.

His knot swelled to its full size inside her, locking the two of them together as best as Pruna’s loose cunt would allow, and the feeling of her muscles trying to clench around it brought Crius the rest of the way to his release. His cock throbbed inside her, a pulse travelling through every inch of her all the way up to her womb before exploding as a wave of liquid heat deep inside her body.

That was the first. It was followed on its heels by another, then another, spurt after spurt of cum being shot directly into the deepest reaches of Pruna’s womb. In all likelihood, she was going to get pregnant again right then and there.

She didn’t really care. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel strongly about that fact, but now she was being pulled in two different directions: hatred at having such a thing done to her, and the urge to satiate her need to hurt Ludi by letting it happen to her. They were diametrically opposed feelings that cancelled each other out entirely, leaving her listless and empty, numbly accepting the treatment she was being given.

Not quietly, though. She made as much of a fuss as her ragged throat would permit, screaming her lungs out while she felt herself being packed full enough to leave her feeling bloated, as if Crius was trying to make up for the absence once filled by her eggs. In a sense, she supposed he was; this was the first step of filling her with a fresh batch of them, after all.

But Crius didn’t seem willing to let things pass by so smoothly, because Pruna felt the warmth of his breath on her neck just a second before he felt his muzzle clamp down on the back of it. His teeth dug into her scales, not anywhere that would pose any danger to her, but that just meant there was even less need for Crius to show any sort of caution or restraint. Pruna could feel blood running down her back from where he’d bitten her.

Crius had hurt her in all manner of ways, but biting wasn’t one of them, and with good reason. Kobolds and lizardmen both shared a very particular tradition, one that endured despite so many from both their species abandoning it to appear more ‘civilized’: the mating bite. The name left little to the imagination. There were no hard and fast rules, but it tended to be on the neck or shoulder, had to be severe enough to leave a mark, and by dint of that mark made it clear to the world at large that whoever had received such a bite had been claimed as a mate.

It was no small gesture, which was why Crius had refrained from making it until the situation had warranted it. With Pruna finally under his thumb after so many weeks of slowly chipping away at her mind, he felt that the time was appropriate.

Perhaps even more appropriate than Crius had intended. As his teeth sunk into the scales of her neck, Pruna let out an even higher shriek, accompanied by the feeling of her body clenching down around him. Her body shook, and her muscles tightened around his cock like they were trying to milk it for all it was worth. Crius knew an orgasm when he saw one, or in this case, felt one; apparently, that added bit of stimulation had been enough to push Pruna over the edge.

Crius had to wonder if that was because of some primal connection in her brain between receiving a mating bite and submitting to a partner, or if he’d just broken her on such a deep level that him causing her pain had become enough to incite pleasure in her as well. Both thoughts were appealing in their own right; manipulating her base instincts on one hand, rewiring them on another. A nice thought to mull over while Crius rode out his orgasm in the midst of hers.

Then, it was over. Sometimes that moment at the end of things seemed to drag on for an age. Right then, it didn’t; everything up to that point had been an endless slog of misery, pain, and emotional turmoil, and all of it had been capped off with a bellyful of seed. Just like every other night. Nothing was any different. She was the only thing that had changed.

Once Crius had finished, he yanked himself back, tugging his knot free from her cunt. The rest of him quickly followed, sliding out of her womb and then the rest of her, a gush of cum ready to cap off his exit. Unable to stop herself from gaping, that gush quickly turned into a flood, all the seed that Crius had shot into her drooling back out of her and rolling down her thighs, across her tail, all running down along her body and onto the floor.

Crius released his grip around Pruna’s shoulders and she flopped limp to the floor below, landing against the stone without making even the slightest effort to catch herself. It had to hurt, but funnily enough, she didn’t make a sound. From the moment Crius had finished inside her, she’d been silent, standing in stark difference to her earlier screaming. She was like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

That wasn’t going to do. Crius shifted his gaze up, glancing at Ludi still curled up on himself across the room, in quite a similar state himself. Tears streaked down his face in silence. Neither of them would do. Crius’ physical desires had been satisfied, but that wasn’t even half the equation. There was more he needed to do to the two of them, much more then just have a quick fuck and leave them to their devices.

Crius pushed himself to his feet and then leaned down, grabbing Pruna by the neck and jerking her upright. “Get up. You’re not done.”

Pruna at least had enough energy in her to get her feet planted on the floor so that she didn’t have to support herself by Crius’ grip around her neck. Just in time, too, because he started moving across the room, pulling her along for the ride. She stumbled along, trying to match his pace so that she didn’t get her feet dragged out from under her.

He led her over to Ludi, who curled up on himself a bit tighter when Crius took up a spot next to him, tall and looming. A gesture that wasn’t going to do much to protect him; Crius just leaned down and grabbed him by the end of his tail, giving it a hard yank upwards before releasing.

Ludi let out a yelp and splayed out his limbs to catch himself as he dropped back to the ground, and he managed it, leaving him unsteadily balanced on his hands and knees. Before he could move into a more stable position, Crius planted a foot onto his side and pushed, sending him rolling flat onto his back.

Crius moved that foot to the kobold’s chest, keeping him pinned and unable to get up or curl back up into the fetal position like he seemed to be so fond of doing. That gave Crius a bit of time to think.

He’d come down intending to do things to both Pruna and Ludi, but it seemed that the breakneck pace he’d set had finally caught up with him. Crius simply didn’t have the stamina left in him for another go. Typically, he would, but it seemed that he’d given just a bit too much of himself when he was having his fun with Pruna. But he [i]wanted[/i] another go, refractory period be damned.

An annoying situation, but he was a thief. His entire job description was getting things that he couldn’t have. Greediness was his raison d'être. He had an idea. A couple ideas, in fact. Before he could implement any of them, though, he’d need to deal with the problem of Ludi’s squirming. The kobold had apparently decided that right then was the time to abandon his earlier strategy of being quiet and still in favour of whining and trying to wriggle his way free of Crius’ pin.

There was no hope of him actually doing so, of course. Crius was bigger, stronger, and heavier than him, on top of the plethora of experience he had in regards to dealing with small and unruly partners. But everything would be a lot easier if he just nipped that in the bud right away regardless.

Crius released his grip on Pruna’s neck, letting her finally drop down from her tip toes and stand comfortably, as well as raise her own hands up to rub at the area Crius had been gripping–made especially sore from the bite he’d made prior. “Stand still and wait.”

He didn’t bother looking to see if Pruna did as she was told. Crius was confident enough in his work. Instead, he turned his attention to his waist, reaching down to his belt and dipping his hand into a bag hanging off of his left side.

The bag of holding. One of Crius’ most valuable possessions, and the prime reason that he’d managed to acquire his two favourite kobolds for his own in the first place, alongside the assorted other achievements it had enabled. At its core, it was just a sack that was bigger on the inside than the outside, but the utility that offered couldn’t be overstated.

Crius dug around inside and, as usual, found that it took only a few moments to get his hands on what he wanted. Another one of its useful enchantments: however big it might’ve been inside, it was never difficult to find exactly what you were looking for. This time, what he was looking for was a clump of half a dozen leather strips, each thick and around three feet long.

He drew them out of the bag and looked down at Ludi, still kicking and thrashing away. That was going to be a bit of an issue. “Pruna, would you be a dear and get his arms?”

Crius had given that command almost as a throwaway comment. He’d mainly been flexing his new power, trying to see just how far he could push things, what results he’d get. He hadn’t really expected it to be obeyed.

But to his surprise, there was movement in his peripheral vision. When he looked up, Pruna had looped around Ludi’s side and taken up a position by Ludi’s top half, dropping down to her knees before grabbing a hold of the other kobold’s wrists. With an impressive amount of strength, considering everything she’d gone through up to that point, she wrenched them back until Ludi’s arms were straight and held them in place.

Ludi craned his neck back to look up at her, staring into her eyes. The feelings he poured into that look were enough to make the scales on the back of Pruna’s neck crawl. Most potent among them was a sense of betrayal, like a dagger in his back the pain of which he was trying to convey to her through his eyes. His mouth worked silently, forming silent syllables, half words, nothing that amounted to anything coherent but which conveyed a certain meaning nonetheless.

A meaning that was entirely lost on Pruna, not from lack of understanding, but from a lack of consideration. Even with her face still streaked with fresh tears, Ludi saw no sort of sadness in her face. There was only fierceness. Hatred. For him.

While Pruna held Ludi’s arms in place, Crius shifted his foot off of the kobold’s chest and quickly knelt down, grabbing a hold of his ankles before he could take advantage of the situation to squirm his way to freedom. Crius was big enough that he only required one hand to hold both of them secure, which left his other hand free to loop one of the leather straps around Ludi’s ankles, cinch it tight, then tie it off.

Once that part of him was restrained, Crius shuffled around to Ludi’s other side, grabbing another strap in one hand and a grip on the kobold’s wrists with the other. Pruna let her own hands fall away and shuffled back, allowing Crius to do his work.

It didn’t take long before Ludi’s wrists were tied just as well as his ankles, though Crius refrained from tying him any further than that. That meant Ludi was still well and able to struggle against his restraints, thrashing around in a maneuver that brought to mind images of beached fish. Amusing, but still a threat to Crius’ plans if the kobold managed to bend in and get his hands down to his ankles to work at the straps there.

So as a momentary fix, Crius stood back up and planted his foot on Ludi’s chest once again, holding him flat on his back. Then, he turned his attention over to Pruna, standing and watching silently from a few feet away. His eyes trailed down her body, settling on the trickle of white dripping out from between her legs and running down her thighs.

“Why don’t you have your friend clean you up a bit?” Crius said, gesturing towards Ludi with a hand as if there were any doubt as to exactly who he was referring to. Perhaps there was some ambiguity; it was unlikely that Pruna still considered Ludi to be a friend even in the loosest sense of the word.

Regardless, Pruna obeyed the command she was given just as readily as the last. Without saying anything or giving a single sign of acknowledgement, apart from a furrowing of her brow when Crius said the word ‘friend’, she walked forward until her feet were planted on either side of Ludi’s head. He stared up, getting an eyeful of exactly what Crius had done to her, of her gaping, cum drooling pussy and her equally slick tailhole.

Then, she dropped down, planting herself directly onto Ludi’s face. She straddled his head, grinding her cunt against the front of his muzzle with big, sweeping motions that reached far enough to bring her asshole into the equation as well. When she felt his snout press against it, she ground herself down, making sure to really dig his nostrils into it.

Every motion brought more of Crius’ cum onto his face, great globs of the stuff dribbling out from between Pruna’s folds and onto his muzzle when she drew her hips back, what was already there being smeared across his scales when she pushed them forward again. It clogged his nose, filling it with the scent of the lizardman’s musk, mixed in with Pruna’s own.

Ludi choked and spluttered into Pruna’s cunt, trying to clear his nostrils of the mixed fluids being smeared into them so that he could breathe, yet found his attempts ruined with every motion of Pruna’s hips. With Crius keeping him pinned at the chest, there was no way he could escape it, only lay there and endure the abuse he was being given.

It was an entertaining scene, to be sure. Crius almost felt like just standing there and watching it, for once just taking a backseat and enjoying the sights on offer without having to lift a finger of his own. It was a tempting idea.

But, no. Crius simply wasn’t enough of a voyeur for that kind of hands-off approach. He needed to get his hands [i]dirty[/i]. So, he removed his foot from Ludi’s chest and dropped down to his knees, grabbing a hold of the kobold’s ankles in his left hand before jerking them up high. With Pruna still keeping his head pinned to the ground underneath herself, that kept Ludi restrained just as effectively.

It also offered him access to all the fun that Ludi had hidden under his own tail. Crius might not have been in a state to take advantage of it in the most direct way, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have fun with it regardless. Sure, it wouldn’t be quite as stimulating to him, but that didn’t matter so much. It was all about Ludi’s reaction, anyway.

And Crius was sure he was going to get plenty on that front. He moved his free hand to the base of Ludi’s tail, pressing his fingers against the entrance he found there.

“So, you can’t make eggs,” Crius said, punctuating his words with a firm press against Ludi’s asshole before shifting his fingers up higher, trailing them along the kobold’s slit. “And gods know you aren’t going to use what you got tucked in here for anything. So what good are you, really?”

Ludi wasn’t in any position to offer a response, given Pruna’s continued, dutiful grinding against his face, though Crius could feel the kobold jerk against his grip. He took that as acknowledgement enough, though even if Ludi wasn’t hearing anything he was saying, Crius was going to continue anyway. Pruna could hear it, after all, which was just as good. Crius was sure that she’d repeat whatever he said to Ludi throughout the night over and over, drilling it into his skull.

Crius moved his fingers down from Ludi’s slit, trailing them down along the kobold’s tail, moving towards its end. “I’ll tell you what you’re good for. Two things: cleanup, and whatever entertainment I can eke out of you.”

Once his hand was about two-thirds of the way down Ludi’s tail, Crius grabbed a hold of it, wrenching it forward and bending it back on itself towards the kobold’s body. At first, it wasn’t clear to Ludi exactly what Crius was doing—until he felt the tip of tail press up against his own asshole.

Crius didn’t stop there. With a push and a shove, he fed what had to be half a foot of Ludi’s tail into his own body, the tapered end of it only slightly easing its entry. It didn’t matter how tapered it was, though; what was entering him was still thick, scaly flesh without a hint of lubrication to speak of. Combined with the discomfort of his tail being bent into such an unnatural position, Ludi was experiencing some of the worse of what Crius had to offer. Not the worst, because he’d experienced Crius’ worst and knew that this paled in comparison, but certainly worse than usual.

Bad enough to have him screaming into the legs wrapped around his head by the seventh inch. Crius didn’t stop there, though. He kept Ludi held securely in place while he continued to feed the kobold’s tail into his own body, bit by bit, working at the same steady pace while Ludi was stretched wider and wider around his own girth.

It only stopped by the time Ludi was a foot deep in himself, a deep plunge for a human made to feel even deeper when it was applied to a body as small as Ludi’s, stacked on top of the pain of his tail being forced into such an awkward position. Chafing, friction, stretching, contortion; it was all coming together to form a thoroughly awful combination of sensations, bearable only because of the relative lack of motion. Crius seemed satisfied just jamming it inside him.

Though bearable didn’t mean not painful, only not [i]un[/i]bearable. Nothing Crius had ever done to him had been truly unbearable, because Ludi had always come out of it in one piece. But he was never unscathed, and it was never a pleasant experience. This was no exception. He screamed, and the sound was muffled by Pruna’s cunt. He tried to thrash his tail, and his attempt was readily ruined by dint of it being lodged inside himself, and the loop it formed offered Crius a place to grab him and stifle any struggle he might’ve hoped to mount.

The hand that Crius wasn’t using to keep Ludi’s tail in place moved between the kobold’s legs, two fingers outstretched and quick to press against his genital slit. Once they touched down onto it, the pressure started to mount behind them, focused right on the centre of Ludi’s slit.

“I’m sticking these inside of you, and I’m not taking them back out until you’ve packed yourself full,” Crius growled, the force behind his fingers finally reaching a point where Ludi’s muscles couldn’t clench hard enough to keep them out. “By that time, I expect you to have made your friend spotless down there.”

The end of Crius’ sentence coincided perfectly with a sharp thrust of his fingers, more than enough to force them past the lips of Ludi’s slit and sink them up to the second knuckle into his body. Ludi shrieked, still muffled, but with a definite higher pitch than before.

Crius didn’t make it a habit to make regular use of Ludi’s slit, but that wasn’t because he didn’t like doing it. On the contrary, he was quite the fan of using the kobold in such a demeaning manner, watching him squirm, hearing the noises he made in response. Each of the few times he’d done it had been a joy.

But Crius felt that it was a special thing, that kind of abuse, and that it would’ve been devalued if he chose to pursue it every time he decided to have some fun with the kobold. So he kept it a rarity, mainly restricting himself to whatever fun he could draw out of Ludi’s mouth and tailhole—along with the assorted non-sexual abuse, of course. He had no hangups about hitting Ludi any time the urge to strike him struck. The claw marks littering Ludi’s scales in various states of fading spoke to that.

This, however, was definitely a special time. Like popping open a bottle of fine wine, this was an occasion that called, maybe even demanded that he make use of Ludi’s slit. And if that was what he was going to do, then he was going to do it to the best of his ability, to the utmost satisfaction, with absolutely no restraint to be seen.

Crius pushed his fingers in deeper, working them past Ludi’s clenching knuckles until the palm of his hand was butting up against the lips of the kobold’s slit, the shape of his hand finally stopping from progressing further. He would’ve liked to go deeper, but Crius doubted he could manage to fit a whole fist into Ludi’s slit without completely destroying the poor thing.

Two fingers was more than enough, anyway. Crius avoiding using Ludi’s slit meant that it had stayed well and sensitive for when he did decide to use it, and when it came to a male’s slit, sensitivity was already at a high. The other hole didn’t even compare in that regard; a slit was meant to have exactly one thing inside of it, and that was the manhood of the person it was attached to. Having anything else inserted was an exercise in an agony of overstimulation.

That meant it’d take only half the effort on Crius’ part to bring Ludi to the same level of pain that he’d get from using his rear. Crius wasn’t stopping at half the effort, though; he was going to use Ludi as thoroughly and as harshly as he could, in both holes. Crius was all about pushing and expanding limits, particularly when those limits belonged to someone else.

Ludi was in no position to think about the expansion of his limits, but he could certainly feel them being exceeded. Crius’ fingers had not only gone knuckle-deep into his slit, but had spent no time holding that position before they started thrusting in and out of him, moving halfway out before plunging back in hard enough to send the rest of the lizardman’s hand smacking against his groin. Each plunge brought Crius’ fingers smacking against the tip of his cock, buried deep inside his slit, sending a wave of electric pain shooting up through his body as sensitive nerves not meant to be stimulated were suddenly battered against.

He screamed again, this time finding the sound cut off by a glob of cum dripping past his lips and into his open mouth, catching in his throat. That sent him spiralling into a coughing fit, drawing a growl of displeasure from Pruna above, who pressed herself even harder against his face until he could feel the back of his head grinding into the floor.

Once Ludi caught his breath and recovered from that, moving from open-mouthed screams into something with more gritted teeth, his brain finally managed to process what it was that Crius had said to him immediately prior to jamming his fingers into his slit. He wanted Ludi to make Pruna spotless. Given the position he was in, he presumably wanted Ludi to do that using his tongue.

Ludi wasn’t eager to do something like that, to say the least, but the way Crius had treated him had definitely left its mark on the way he thought. Now, the disgust that he felt at the idea was tempered by the fear of what Crius would do to him if he refused to obey. What he was going through right then was bad, but it was nothing in comparison to what Crius could do if he was well and truly enraged. If he wanted to hurt Ludi not for entertainment, but to actually punish him.

So, motivated by that fear, Ludi somehow found the strength necessary to push his tongue out past his lips and into the folds of the pussy pressed up against his face. It wasn’t a slow motion, but a fast and sharp one, as if Ludi hoped that if he just plunged into it that he’d be able to get it over with faster.

Unfortunately, it seemed that neither approach was going to help him very much in that regard. It was going to be an arduous process regardless of how he went about it; all going fast meant was that he was plunged right into the thick of things instead of dragging things out.

That was arguably the better way of doing things, but that was a difficult fact for Ludi to realise when he was in the thick of the consequences of his decision. The taste of lizardman cum was suddenly all that he could taste, coating every inch of his tongue while Pruna’s walls gripped it, intermittently clenching around him.

Ludi gagged. It wasn’t his first time having to swallow Crius’ cum, not even the dozenth, but doing it however many times before didn’t make it any more enjoyable of a process. Particularly when Crius was continuing to jam his fingers in and out of his slit and his own tail remained in its place lodged up his own ass, resulting in a mixture of sensations down between his legs that made it difficult to focus on doing what he’d been ordered to do.

He tried his best. Despite Crius’ fingers thrusting in and out of his slit, he tried to collect the cum oozing out of Pruna’s cunt. It was thick, stuck in his throat when he tried to swallow it, and had a far more bitter taste to it than Ludi was used to. He assumed that was a result of Pruna’s laying, but whatever it was, it made things just unpalatable enough that Ludi could barely force himself to choke it down.

So Ludi sat there, choking, gagging, and spluttering, tears running down his face as he kept trying his hardest to lap at Pruna’s cunt. All the while, Crius watched, grinning while he worked his hand between the kobold’s legs.

Crius could feel the slickness starting to build on his fingers. However rough or unwanted the treatment he was giving might’ve been, Ludi was responding to it. Such direct stimulation to the sensitive insides of his slit meant he had no choice.

Yet at the same time, his fingers taking up all the room that his slit had to offer meant there was no way for Ludi’s body to respond to that stimulation. Ludi’s cock swelled with blood inside him and tried to push its way out, but whenever it did, it was met by a thrust from Crius’ fingers that jabbed it back into his body. He felt like a bottle of wine with a cork shoved halfway down its neck; getting an erection was utterly impossible.

And yet in spite of that, his dick was still reacting, trapped inside him as it might’ve been. It was throbbing inside him, leaking precum drawn out of him by the aggressive probing of Crius’ fingers, which only served to lubricate them and let them work in and out of him at even higher speeds. 

As the speed of things increased, so did Ludi’s difficulty in performing his task. It didn’t take long before he wasn’t doing much at all, besides letting out various muffled squeaks and shrieks into Pruna’s cunt and shivering as Crius continued to make use of both of his holes, his sounds only stopping when he was choking on whatever cum had dripped down into his mouth. Ludi was barrelling towards an orgasm that he’d never asked for, and he didn’t even have a hint of pleasure to show for it, only the pain of overly sensitive flesh being abused and stretched wide.

For Ludi, it felt like an age. For Crius, it was a pleasant but ultimately rather short experience. That sensitivity that made Ludi so easy to torment also meant he was quick to approach his peak. The slickness continued to build in Ludi’s slit until globs of clear pre were oozing out from around Crius’ fingers with every thrust, making wet squishing noises.

Once that point had been reached, it wasn’t long until they reached the inevitable. With a shriek longer and higher pitched than anything that’d come before it, Ludi tensed up, clenching down on both his own tail and the fingers buried up to the knuckle in his slit. Crius could feel Ludi’s muscles trembling, and deep inside, the head of his cock throbbing against the tips of his fingers.

Then, a spurt of something hot and wet against Crius’ fingers, shooting into the gaps between them. That was followed by another, building the pressure inside Ludi’s slit, then another. By the fourth, that pressure had increased to the point where it was enough to force it back out, and Crius saw the white of cum forcing its way out from the edges of Ludi’s slit and drooling down his scales in thick globs.

Crius held his fingers there until he felt Ludi stop clenching, and only then did he pull them free, watching the rest of the cum trapped inside him start oozing free of his slit. He held his hand up to the light, watching the way his white-soaked fingers glittered. Then, he brought them to his muzzle, sticking them into his mouth and dragging them out slowly to clean every drop of cum off of them.

Not terrible. If his mouth hadn’t been otherwise engaged, Crius would’ve had Ludi do it. But he supposed that would’ve probably made it a bit harder to tell just how good of a job he’d done with the task Crius had given him.

And on that thought, it seemed that it was right about time to see just how well Ludi had done on that front. Crius pushed himself up to his feet and looked down at the two kobolds, Pruna continuing to grind herself against Ludi’s face. “Alright, come on. Off him, stand up.”

Pruna stiffened, then moved to obey the order she’d been given, though not before making one last grind against Ludi’s face with a roll of her hips. Only then did she lift herself up and off of him, pushing herself to a standing position.

As she went, strings of cum stretched out between Ludi’s face and Pruna’s crotch, thinner and thinner until they snapped back against his muzzle. The whole of his face was covered in the stuff, from the underside of his chin all the way to his forehead, impressively enough. Unfortunately, so was Pruna. The stuff coated the inside of her thighs and continued to drool out of her, dripping onto the ground below. Not even close to the sort of performance that Crius would consider acceptable.

Crius shook his head and tutted. “Terrible job. If you can’t even do that much, what good are you?” He turned to face Pruna. “Do try to teach your friend something useful. Pretty looks and crying are only going to get him so far.”

Pruna gave the same steely look that she’d given the last time Crius had used that particular word. ‘Friend’. She turned to look down at Ludi, and he saw the disdain burning in her eyes. The contempt. The undisguised disgust. He couldn’t help but cringe at the sight.

The sight of that exchange put a smile on Crius’ face. He’d made all the progress he’d expected, and then some. The moment seemed prime to exit and leave the two kobolds to their own devices.

Though not without retrieving what he’d come down for in the first place. Crius looked down at the pile of eggs a few feet away, right where he’d left them. Turning his back on the kobolds, he moved over to them and leaned down, picking them up one by one and dropping them into the mouth of his bag of holding, each of them disappearing as soon as they slipped past the mouth of the sack.

Pruna looked on blankly as her young were gathered up, each one winking out of her sight for what was certain to be the last time. There was some inkling of maternal instinct deep inside her that cried out at the sight, at what ought to have been seen as the ultimate transgression against her. She suppressed it. That sort of attachment wasn’t going to do her any good where she was, even if it was her own children in question. She’d gotten attached to Ludi, after all, and it’d gotten her where she was then.

Once Crius had finished, he stood back up, turned around, and walked out of the cell without a single glance back at the kobolds until he was outside and sliding the door closed behind him. He snapped the lock shut, then gave the two of them a big smile through the bars.

“See you tomorrow.”

And those were his parting words. Three simple words, as casual a farewell as one would give to a coworker, before he turned around and walked out of sight. His footsteps faded from hearing, eventually capping off with the slamming of some unseen door. Then, there was silence.

Ludi, still tied up as he was, laid there on the floor where he’d been left. He was only bound at the wrists and ankles, so he’d probably be able to work his way free, given enough time.

He didn’t start to do that, though, because that would require him to move. Pruna was still standing over him; he could see her feet in his peripheral vision, though he was making a pointed attempt not to look at her. Ludi would’ve been hard pressed to describe Crius’ presence as being anything close to enabling, but without him there, just having Pruna next to him felt paralyzing.

Seconds passed. She wasn’t moving, and neither was he. Both of them were completely still. Ludi could feel himself growing steadily more uncomfortable from the position he was having to maintain on the hard stone. It wasn’t a tenable situation; he couldn’t just lie there forever, and while he didn’t know what it was Pruna was trying to pull, he had to do something.

So as much as he loathed the idea of looking her in the eye, Ludi craned his head up, and was greeted to the sight of Pruna already staring down at him. Her eyes were still filled with the same cold hatred as before, but now, her muzzle was spread wide in a toothy grin. The same sort of grin that Crius seemed to be so fond of flashing. On her, it looked at once out of place, utterly perverse, yet completely in-line with the feeling her eyes conveyed.

Once she saw that she’d gotten his attention, she went further than just staring at him. Her eyes scrunched up from the bottom as her grin widened further, still without a hint of happiness in it. Then, she started to laugh. 

It didn’t fit, and it didn’t have any of the natural buildup that he’d expect a laugh to have. It was instant, roaring laughter, like a switch had been flipped. Cackling, really. Downright howling.

Had Ludi’s hands not been lashed together, he would’ve clamped them over his ears to drown out the sound. In the absence of that ability, he chose to start screaming instead. It sounded hoarse and it hurt his throat to do, but he did it anyway, because that sort of pain was better than bearing the full brunt of that laughter. It wasn’t a happy sound; there was no joy in it, only anger. It was meant to hurt him, and it was doing an effective job of it.

Usually if Crius left one of them tied up, the other would be quick to help, but that clearly wasn’t going to be the case here. Pruna was taking full advantage of Ludi’s bondage to laugh at him, at how filthy, exposed, and vulnerable he was. At all the pain and indignity he’d been forced to suffer. All of that, and he couldn’t even move to escape it, couldn’t huddle in on himself in some corner for the small amount of solitude each of those four spots provided.

Listening that laughter, muscles clamping down as he screamed in protest against it, Ludi came to a realisation. It was trite, and it came far too late, but he came to it anyway. He’d pushed Pruna away and turned in on himself because seeing her pregnant made him think of Crius, reminded him of the mark he’d left on her with every glance. He couldn’t bear to see it.

Now, she wasn’t pregnant, and yet that mark was more present than ever before. Burned into her. He’d say that she wasn’t even the same person if it wasn’t a selfish and inaccurate statement; just because he’d pushed her away and she’d adapted didn’t mean that she’d become something other. She was still Pruna, but now Pruna was something separate from him. Disparate.

He was well and truly alone, something made all the worse for having company.