Contemplating the divine

Some years ago I wrote a story called The Lovelorn Blacksmith, which quite a few people seem to think is the best thing I’ve ever written. A low bar, but there is no bar so low I can’t try to slither under it, so, like Hollywood, I decided it would be easier to write a sequel than bother to come up with a new idea.

If you liked The Lovelorn Blacksmith you… well, you might like this or you might not. It’s rather different in tone even though it continues the story directly from where ‘Blacksmith 1’ left off. That story was a pure love story, with anything vicious, violent and sadistic happening off-screen, so to speak, and merely hinted at. That’s lovely – same vibe as Turning Points, in some ways – but you can’t maintain that kind of Niles-and-Daphne ambiguity for ever. I can’t anyway. So this one is much more explicit and many times nastier. It is still about the pure flame of true love, very much so, but it also features a lot of other uses for flame, many of them extremely painful. In fact, it’s not at all far off a Serena and Alice story.

Contains images of torture, death and over-uses the word ‘agony’ extensively. If you don’t like that, well…. quite possibly you might not want to spend so much time on this blog that so often features fantasies of extreme non-consensual BDSM? I mean, there are blogs that don’t – some are about golf, for instance, or flower-arranging. I’ve heard there may even be blogs devoted solely to amusing videos of cats, though I can’t say I’ve ever found one. Anyway, just think about it, yeah?

It really is a direct sequel so do go and read the first, if you haven’t.

The blacksmith soon adjusted to his new life.  Melissa and Harriet’s cottage turned out to have an extensive cellar where he was helped into the heavy shackles he had brought and allowed to use his tools to hammer flat the fastenings, rendering them permanent. The young ladies’ lifestyle was unusual, to say the least, involving as it did the enslavement of young males (the blacksmith was pleased to see that the ladies had rescued the missing young lads from the wild beasts of the forest) and frequent use of whips or other implements of chastisement to make them work. The blacksmith felt he needed no such stimulus to work himself to the bone for the divine Melissa, but the ladies – Harriet especially – seemed to believe strongly that males needed frequent beating, which he accepted as stoically as he could at the hands of the vicious Harriet and with joy and pride on the very rare occasions when she was unavailable to apply the lash and Melissa reluctantly took on the task.

The ladies shared a bedroom to which they would happily retire at almost any hour of the day. Harriet often seemed to feel the need to grab the hand of her housemate and drag her away to bed, especially after administering one or more particularly brutal whippings. Despite the hours spent in the bedroom, the two ladies did not seem to get a lot of sleep, giggling and shrieking happily together all through the night, while the chained-up males eyed one another nervously and grunted pointlessly through the gags they habitually wore.

Soon enough the ladies started to put the blacksmith’s skills to use, setting up a miniature forge and anvil for him to create in metal. Their first request was for branding irons, which caused the blacksmith to quail. In his profession he had too often encountered the momentary agony of an accidental burn: the initial, breathtaking searing shock and then afterwards the long burning pain of the injured flesh, seeming to burn on no matter how much water or cream might be applied – sometimes for days. The thought of being subjected to that deliberately – of the hot iron being held against the skin with no possibility of jerking away – was unbearable. He had always been reluctant to construct such things even for farmyard animals but he was in no doubt who would be the recipient of these irons of torture. But Melissa explained to him how much she wanted their marks put on the men they were so proud to possess and this was enough in itself to change his mind – and just to make sure, Harriet applied her own form of persuasion, until he screamed out his acquiescence to his owners’ wishes.

He created a beautiful, curling, intertwined M&H brand to the ladies’ design, well aware that every curliqueue and flourish would further multiply the agony. His fears were fully realised when the brand was first applied to one of the rescued lads, who had been secured very tightly over a bench near the forge where the brand glowed red hot. There was a sizzle and a horrible smell followed almost instantly by a scream that the blacksmith thought must pierce the very heavens (but in fact was confined to the cosy moss-covered cellar, as the ladies had intended when they constructed it), followed by such animal-like howling as almost to justify the abusive treatment of this flesh as belonging to something less than human.

Harriet, who had applied the brand, went white and whispered “Oh my…”. The blacksmith thought for a second that she had finally encountered a cruelty against which even she could find a conscience in opposition, but instead she merely dropped the brand on the stone floor, grabbed Melissa by the wrist and dragged her soundlessly and urgently towards the bedroom.

The others received their marks over the next few weeks. Melissa wanted the branding completed quickly but gave in to her friend’s pleas to “spread it out a bit – pace ourselves.”

When it came to his turn, the blacksmith was surprised to hear a shrieking wail of despair as the letters burned his flesh and still more surprised to realise it was his own. Then he spent several hours bellowing like a bull, and struggling pointlessly against the restraints, at the agony he could not escape, while the ladies busied themselves in the neighbouring bedroom.  It had been as bad – worse – than his fears. But a few days later, when the pain had dulled to a bearable throb, he caught sight of his backside in a mirror and experienced a surge of pride at seeing the ‘M’ so prominently emblazoned there (he would have preferred it without the H, but had had little choice in the matter).

He also fashioned intricate and ingenious cages for each of the captive males’ penises, to a design by Melissa, as Harriet preferred not to think about such male organs, except as opportunities to inflict pain. He had initially been sceptical, as these steel creations were considerably smaller than the leather restraints which the ladies had been using, but with some skill and much determination, each of the lads’ members was finally forced into its rigid container. His own such device was heavy, wrought of thick crude iron, as the ladies considered it more appropriate for his (admittedly impressive) organ. It weighed down his every move and constantly pulled, but the blacksmith simply told himself that this was the aching tug of his love Melissa and came to accept this, too, with pride.

***

Now, one night when the ladies were sleeping peacefully in their bed and the slaves were sleeping less comfortably shackled to the stone floor of their pen, there came a terrible shouting and smashing sound from outside the cottage. The ladies quickly pulled on gowns and hurried upstairs and looked out, to see flames lighting the sky and agricultural implements being waved by a mob of townsfolk outside.

“Witches!  Burn the witches!” they heard, across of a cacophony of yells and cries.  Three burly men from the village were busy pounding on the cottage door with hammers, while all around the ladies could see faces distorted with yells of hatred and fear, as flaming torches dimly illuminated placards demanding the deaths of the foul witches of the forest.

There was no time to resist, as almost before the ladies could think about what to do, the cottage door burst open with a splintering crash and the mob were inside – and held Harriet and Melissa, vainly protesting that they were not witches, fast.  They had left the hatch down to the cellar open, so very soon some intrepid villagers ventured down, then returned to report grimly on their enslaved compatriots and the torture chamber (not to mention a bedchamber of thoroughly perverted female lust) that they had seen.  The lads were joyously freed but when it came to the blacksmith’s turn, he roared in rage, smiting the village-folk around him with his dangling chains and his burly arms felled strong men to left and to right as he tried to force his way through the yelling, stampeding crowd to where Melissa was being carried off.  But eventually sheer weight of numbers subdued even this mighty warrior and he full unconscious beneath the blows of the crowd, as they shouted that he must have been bewitched by the foul sorceresses.

He awoke in tighter restraints than ever, standing but unable to move his wrists, arms, ankles or legs, so firmly had the villagers wrapped leather cords around him, to keep him from harming them under the spell by which they so firmly believed he had been enraptured. To his horror, in front of him Melissa was staggering as she was pulled to and fro by angry villagers, her white cotton shift torn and her face streaked with tears as she frantically proclaimed their innocence.

“I’m not a witch – we’re not witches!  There’s no such thing as witches, that’s all just a folk tale used by the patriarchy to oppress independent and creative women!”

She paused, gulped back tears, and her pure blue eyes shone as she stared straight into the face of the ringleader – whom the blacksmith recognised as the village cobbler – and asked plaintively “Do I look like a witch?”

The cobbler stared back at her golden locks and angelic visage.

“No, mayhap not.” He growled.

Then he cast his gaze over to the raven-haired Harriet, dressed all in black and standing upright in silence, glaring malevolently around her. She seemed somehow to chill the air and the villagers holding her did so at a distance, as if handling a poisonous snake.

“But she does. Burn her!”

The mob yelled in righteous fury and seized the grimly unresisting Harriet and dragged her over to what the blacksmith realised was a pile of dry wood with a small wooden platform atop, not two yards from where he himself stood bound. Melissa’s shrieks of horror as her unresisting friend was bound to the stake by her wrists were like a dagger in his heart.

“No – no let her go!  She’s done nothing! What proof do you have – you have no proof, you cannot have proof because there’s no such thing as witches!” Melissa was pleading, as her delicate body struggled helplessly in the grip of three strong villagers.

Soon enough, the horrible spectacle was ready and torches were thrust forward, causing flames to spring up from the dry wood. Through the crackling flames and smoke the blacksmith could see that Harriet had somehow worked her wrists free, but she was surrounded by a curtain of flame, with no hope of escape. Tears welled up in his eyes as he heard Melissa’s frantic and exhausted cries for help for her dear friend… and he made a decision.

He could not move his arms and legs, but he could shake himself free of the post to which he was loosely tied, to topple over. And he could not do much directly to help poor Harriet but he could at least provide… a bridge across the flames. Leaving himself no time at all to think of the consequences of what he was doing, he lurched his great form in the direction of the now furiously-burning pyre and fell sideways, the flaming embers of the glowing and burning wood rushing up to meet him as he threw the only thing he had – himself – over the flames to provide Harriet with a means of escape.

In these same few split seconds, when the blacksmith’s attention was focused solely on his imminent self-immolation, many other things happened. Had he been able to hear, over the shouting of the mob and the crackling of the terrible flames, he would have heard his beloved Melissa say “Right then” quietly and he might have seen her calmly raise her head.

If he had, he might have noticed that her cool blue eyes had become a fiery red, outshining the flames themselves in crimson fury. He might have observed her flesh start to glow with an eerie golden light and he certainly would have noticed the fifty-foot high phantom in Melissa’s own image that appeared in the sky above them.

The possessed fury that Melissa had become began to chant and around her flashes of lightning sparked.  The three men who had lit the fire with their torches seemed transfixed and then found themselves slowly rising into the air, before descending onto their own pitchforks, skewered from anus to mouth and yet somehow – and obviously agonisingly – still alive.

The rest of the villagers ran, with the exception of the cobbler, whose boots, which he himself had made, were suddenly transfixed with large iron nails, literally nailing his feet into the ground.  In the sky, the phantom Melissa turned in the direction of the village, which seemed to be undergoing a bombardment of flaming rocks, and cast a wispy arm in the direction of the fleeing mob, each of whom gradually stopped, unable to move first his feet, then his legs, then his torso, as a gradual, creeping petrification turned their twisted, horrified forms to immobile stone. Melissa’s chanting, although quiet, somehow seemed also to be the loudest thing in the universe, as the power she channelled electrified and froze the world for miles around.

The blacksmith perceived none of this; he was feeling nothing but an agony which made the branding he had so unwillingly received some months before seem as nothing. His body lay fully stretched out on the furiously-burning pyre, his head lying above a crackling white-hot log just next to the platform where stood Harriet. Despite the overwhelming assault on his senses from the pain, he could smell the same acrid odour of charring flesh that he had during the brandings: he knew he was being cooked alive. Then he felt Harriet’s bare foot daintily feeling out his head, as she tested this bridge across the flames that had so unexpectedly appeared. Satisfied, she put all her weight onto it, pressing his head firmly down onto the burning log and blinding him instantly in a right eye that was forced against the red-hot embers with a terrible squelching hissing sound. Then her other foot stepped on his back, impelling his rapidly-blackening chest deeper into the nest of flames, and so on down his body as she walked deliberately, without panic, across her human bridge, then ran over to where Melissa was standing in the centre of a swirling mist of occult matter, lit by unearthly flashes of arcane power, her eyes still burning crimson.

Harriet took Melissa’s glowing hands in her own and whispered. “Come back now, Melissa, my love. It’s OK. I’m all right. Everything’s all right now. Please don’t leave me.”

The figure that had been her lover stared back at her through opaque flaming eyes. Harriet tried again, gazing anxiously into the pools of liquid fire that had been the eyes of her lover. “Come back” she murmured again, “Come back to me.” And she squeezed her friend’s hands tighter.

Suddenly, the occult swirling began to dissipate and a moment later, Melissa shook her head and looked straight back into her friend’s eyes, her own eyes their normal shade of blue.

“What happened… did I… did She…?”

Harriet nodded and embraced her friend. “Yes, but it’s all right now.  It’s all all right.” She glanced up. The monstrous apparition had gone and a few brave birds were beginning to venture their song.

“Oh” screamed Melissa, at the sight of the blacksmith’s charring, twitching body atop the still-burning pyre.

“Oh yes.” Harriet said. “ That happened too. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out.”

“You and you!” she pointed to the formerly enslaved, then freed, now re-enslaved lads who had been cowering against the wall while all this was happening.  “Pull him out!”

Not without difficulty, the blacksmith’s smoking form was dragged from the flames and turned to face upwards. Much of his ragged remnants of clothing was on fire, but when those had been torn off or stamped out, Melissa leaned over him and gazed into what remained of his face, her eyes brimming with tears.

The blacksmith was, remarkably, still conscious. The pain had grown so great as almost to separate his mind from reality, and yet he had held on. He knew he was dying. He welcomed it, as release from his agony and as a triumph of his love for Melissa, as he had so willingly given his life to save her friend. Yes, he thought, as his beloved mistress’s tearful face was swallowed up by the encroaching blackness of eternity… death in this moment of ecstasy is a sweet, sweet release from this unbearable pain… it is all that I desire…

Then he sensed a sharp, bitter taste in his mouth. Some liquid was being poured in, from a little vial. “This won’t ease his pain, but it will at least save his life” he heard Melissa say.

“That’s good” he heard Harriet reply and that was the last thing the blacksmith heard for a while, as the pain returned, washing over his body like a flood and drowning him in agony.

***

The ladies were busy in the weeks that followed. Firstly, there were the skewered villagers who had lit Harriet’s pyre to be dealt with.  Harriet set up a turning spit above a bed of embers, and roasted them each very slowly, occasionally paring off a delicate body part too. Each took about three days, before succumbing to blissful death, to Harriet’s annoyance. Three days of roasting, screaming and pleading – and of course three days during which an increasingly giggly Melissa was led off to the bedroom by a wildly excited Harriet. Harriet tried to pace herself, as she put it, but could only hold out a few days before hoisting the next culprit up onto the spit and beginning the process again.

Then it was the cobbler’s turn.  Harriet was more careful with him. He had, undoubtedly, been the instigator of the whole thing, so his culpability was much greater than that of his accomplices – and his punishment should be correspondingly more severe.  Harriet used every trick she knew to exact the maximum in agony, while keeping her subject alive as long as possible – if the state of pleading, shrieking horror in which the cobbler spent his days could be called ‘living’. But after about three weeks, the blackened, bruised scraps of remaining flesh and exposed bone finally gave the cobbler’s spirit its longed-for release.

Harriet was disconsolate for a day or two. The blacksmith, through his one partially-functioning ear, could hear her occasionally wheedling to her (and his) beloved Melissa. “Please ?  Pleasepleaseplease…?”

Eventually, Melissa must have relented, because she curled her fingers slightly, her eyes very briefly took on the merest hint of crimson, and the cobbler was back, healthy and hale, chained naked to the wall.  He glanced down at his unmarked, unharmed body in shock, then looked up, saw Harriet smiling at him and began to scream in uncontrollable terror.

And so it went on.  Harriet had never been able to work on a victim over multiple lives before and gradually learnt everything there was to know about the cobbler’s body and how it experienced pain. Over hundreds, then thousands of resurrections (because, once the villainous man had expired a second time, Melissa knew better than to try to resist her lover’s pleading looks) the cobbler discovered not only that the dread of known, repeated, expected tortures was almost as bad as the pain itself, he also discovered that clever Harriet’s capacity for inventing entirely new ways to make him suffer seemed inexhaustible.

And what of the blacksmith?  His body had been ruined beyond all repair by his noble act. Of course, once he had seen the first resurrection of the doomed cobbler, he had wanted to know whether the same could be done for him (without the ensuing torture, of course) and once his parched, shrivelled vocal chords had managed to croak that out enough to be understood, his beloved Melissa had had to explain that to make him whole would cheapen what was for her the most cherished memory of his sacrifice to save her friend.  She could not bring herself to change what was, for her, the most inspiring possession she owned: his blackened, twisted and ruined form that so perfectly embodied his noble sacrifice.  To have restored him would have removed a symbol of the two people in this world she loved, she explained tearfully.

Two people she loved, the blacksmith thought, in the depths of his damaged consciousness. Two. And he felt happier than he had felt in all his life.

They made use of him as a table, one of the other slaves rigging up a sort of wooden frame on which his broken body was fixed. It wasn’t a very good table, being knobbly rather than flat and prone to shuddering as the aches and pains from that long-ago self-sacrifice racked the blacksmith’s shattered nervous system. Yet Melissa loved to spend her evenings sitting before him, sewing and mending, while her lover tortured the cobbler on the other side of the room and he felt a sense of total fulfillment and contentment in supporting her thread, cloth and sewing instruments as she did so.

Once he felt Harriet sit before him and he heard her say “Oooh – pins!” delightedly. He steeled himself as he felt her fingers exploring some of his few remaining areas of unblackened flesh but then, to his surprise, he felt no sharp jabbing.

“Oh all right, I suppose you did save my life” he heard her grumble, and she patted him absent-mindedly then wandered off, gently rattling the box of pins. A few moments later, a series of shrieks from outside told him that she was trying out her needlework skills on one of the house slaves instead.

And so the happy trio – Harriet, Melissa and the table that used to be a blacksmith – endured.  So too, did the unlucky cobbler. The months became years, the years decades… perhaps the decades even centuries. Yet all four of them stayed youthful as ever.  The house slaves got older and occasionally Melissa and Harriet would set off with their hunting gear and rescue a few more lads from wild beasts to replenish the herd. But they all lived happily ever after – except the cobbler, obviously, who hated and regretted every second of his infinitely prolonged existence. The ladies stopped thinking of the blacksmith as a blacksmith, he was just Melissa’s favourite sewing table. But she never forgot why it was her favourite table, and would occasionally stroke the burnt stubs of his hair on his scorched scalp, while the blacksmith, for his part, rejoiced at his luck in being the happiest remnant of a man (still just about) alive.

THE END

Epilogue

What of the neighbouring village, you might ask? Well, having been subjected to a bombardment of flaming rocks and brimstone, and having had about half of its men turned to stone, it endured a few difficult years, it’s true. It had been cursed for eternity: the few children born were stunted and deformed, no crops would grow and all the animals… well, they did not die, since the author of the curse loved animals too much, but they wandered off to live happy lives elsewhere. Worst of all, every so often, one male inhabitant over the age of 16 – apparently selected at random – would wake up screaming as the words “There’s no such thing as witches” appeared on his back, burned into his flesh one slow and agonising letter at a time from an unseen, invisible brand. So the menfolk went to bed each night in perpetual terror. In all these ways, the remaining villagers had ample opportunity to regret their rallying to the cobbler’s cause.  However, no recourse to the ladies of the forest was possible, as the village was surrounded by a shimmering dome of magical light, which prevented the villagers leaving, although anyone else could come and go.

However, the human spirit is resilient and the villagers soon found a way to profit from their self-induced misfortune. The towering mystical figure dispensing firebolts that night, as well as the continuing shimmering dome, had attracted considerable interest in the region, so the villagers established a tourism business.  The stone villagers fleeing Melissa’s wrath, the impact craters and burnt-out dwellings all over the village and the male villagers showing off their scorched backs all became attractions in the ‘No Such Thing as Witches Experience’, for which visitors willingly paid. 

And so the villagers, after a day spent recounting the horrors of the encounter in the forest to their rapt visitors, would retire to their vulnerable hovels and regard the skies warily. “There’s no such thing as witches” they told each other. “There’s no such thing as witches” they told their children. And each huddled up alone on their bed each night, whispering “There’s no such thing as witches” over and over again until they fell into an exhausted, nervous sleep.

For there is no such thing as witches, and it is very, very important to remember that.

REALLY THE END