Category: financial management

 

 

In one of the comments in the last few days, someone was kind enough to say that my little captions sometimes manage to be both witty and erotic.  I mention this, not to show off (but it was a very kind thing to say, as this is usually exactly the combination I aim at) but merely as a segue to allow me to note that the tale below is neither witty nor erotic.  

On the contrary, it is a thoroughly unpleasant story (and not in a ‘good’ way).   Femdom-themed in parts, but not sexy.  Sorry.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

 

Once upon a time there was a poor woodsman.  Every day he would rise with the sun and haul his axe off into the forest to chop trees and branches to sell for a few coppers in town.  It was hard work but he loved being outdoors, whether in the warm sunshine of the summer or even the fresh morning frost of the autumn.  In winter, he holed up in his snug cabin, a fire always burning merrily in the hearth, and rested and dreamed.  He was well-liked in the town for he was known for his bravery and had several times wielded his axe to help clear fallen trees, to rescue townspeople from collapsed buildings and even on one occasion to save a child from her burning home, delivering her safely to her crying, grateful mother.  Yes, although poor, the woodsman was contented with his life.

There was only one shadow over his happiness, one yearning he could not fulfill: the woodsman craved to be humiliated and ruined by a findomme.  Yes, when finally resting exhausted after a day chopping wood, or when snuggled down in his warm winter quarters, the woodsman’s hand would move down to his hardening cock and he would dream of spiteful, vicious young ladies taking everything he owned, on nothing more than a whim, and laughing their golden tinkling laughs at his humiliation and shame.  But the woodsman knew that no findomme would ever be interested in raping his meagre coin-purse for the few coppers it contained, or in demanding nine-tenths of his monthly income to spend on fripperies, as even with the last tenth added, few fripperies indeed can be bought for the proceeds of a woodsman’s labour.  And so the woodsman could only dream, but his dreams at least were rich – with humiliation, cruelty, beauty and disdain in equal measure.

Now, one fine spring morning the woodsman was far from home, seeking out an oak of great girth for a special commission from a rich merchant in town, who wanted a table made from a single tree-trunk.  (How the woodsman envied the merchant the wealth he could glimpse through the gateway of his grand house; how he would have loved to lay the titles to that fine house and all its rich furnishings at the feet of a beautiful and contemptuous young lady, to be picked up and taken without a word of thanks or even acknowledgement!).  After three hours, he came across a clearing, where stood the greatest oak he had seen in all his years of toil: seven yards around at least.  He took his axe from his backpack, took position next to the gnarled wood and prepared for the first of what he knew would be hundreds of hard, biting strokes, when an ethereal voice rang out across the clearing.

‘Woodsman spare my home!’ it called and a shimmering green shape appeared somehow formed from the change movements of the leaves of the tree.  A beautiful young lady, fine featured and elegant, yet with a face formed into a cry of horror and fear.

He knew of such things, although had never before seen one.  A spirit of the tree – a dryad – was here and if he chopped down the oak, she would live the rest of her days stunted and deformed, trapped in the bare and chastened tree trunk that would remain after the glory of the living tree had been lost.  Some woodsmen believed dryads to be evil spirits, others held that they were noble princesses imprisoned by some magic from the deep times, but all respected their power.  Our woodsman simply had no desire to deprive any creature of her home, no matter how humble or exalted, so he put down his axe.

‘Ah, and now you claim your reward! A wish, that I must grant to clear my debt to you.’ the dryad sang out.  But he merely smiled, shook his head and prepared to resume his search for an oak of the size he needed.  He wanted no part of a magical bargain, having read too many fairy tales to believe that any good would come of it.

‘Oh?  Is there nothing you yearn for?  No deepest wish, no secret heart’s desire?’

The woodsman paused, a vision of a shapely foot, clad in a delicate jewel-encrusted shoe that would have cost more than ten generations of woodmen could ever earn, had forced its way to the forefront of his mind.

‘Ah – I see there is!  Tell me, tell all!  By the nine sacred branches of Father Oak, I command it.’

And the woodsman poured out his heart to her – at first reluctantly but then with increasing enthusiasm as the images tumbled one atop the other in his mind’s eye.  He spoke of feminine radiance and contempt, of pay-piggies crushed beneath elegant heels, of priceless gifts spurned, of bodies and souls broken on the wheel of girlish cruelty and indifference.  In short, there in the otherwise empty clearing, he spoke of his dreams of financial domination and sang of the findomme princess of his dreams.

When he had finished the dryad was silent for a moment.

‘I see’ she said at last.  ‘Not quite what I am used to, I have to say.  But I suppose it’s doable.’

‘You can bring a findomme princess here, to ruin me now?’ he asked eagerly.

The dryad laughed and her laughter was like the breeze moving through autumn leaves.

‘What would be the point in that?  You’re not rich.’

‘Well, you could… make me rich.’ The woodsman replied.  ‘And I could give it to her.’

‘Perhaps’ the dryad remarked.  ‘But there is little humiliation in simply handing over a pile of gold that I magic up here.  In any case, that would be two wishes, technically.  No: leave it to me.’

And she disappeared, leaving only a tree – more massive than any other in the forest but still only a tree – and a very bewildered woodsman.  He waited for an hour to see if she would return, then went off to seek another oak to cut.  He was lucky and soon found one, worked all day, dragged the heavy cut trunk into town and received a small silver coin for his efforts.  Still fired up by his visions from earlier, he immediately went to hand this to one of the town prostitutes hanging around behind the main square who, knowing his desires, slapped his face and threw it down to the ground for him to pick up and offer to her more humbly.  Then she took the coin, kicked him in the face as she knew he liked and walked off, wishing she were young and pretty enough to make a career of this, rather than the blow-jobs and late-night knee-tremblers in the nearby alleys that were her stock in trade.  And the woodsman went home.

Two days later there was a knock on the door of his forest hovel.  On opening it, the woodsman was amazed to see three men dressed in the livery of the local lord.  He was still more amazed when they explained that he was the distant heir of a minor branch of the local nobility and that all the land around – the forest, which covered three valleys and innumerable hills – belonged to him.  One of the men was a ‘financial counselor’ and promised to help the woodsman decide what was best, to manage his newfound estate.

It was all very complicated.  More complicated than chopping wood, the woodsman decided, with bewilderment.  The land itself was valuable enough, worth a greater sum than the woodsman had imagined, but the annual returns were low, since few of the farmers or woodsmen who paid tithes had much income, although their numbers were many.  Better by far – the financial counselor explained – to sell or lease it for ‘development’.  This was a word the woodsman was unfamiliar with, but it seemed to mean bringing in machines and many people to extract the riches that lay beneath the ground.

‘Gold?’ the woodsman asked, eagerly, thinking of grovelling before an indifferent goddess and offering her gleaming jewellery from shaking hands.

But the counselor laughed and shook his head.  Better than that, he explained: there was oil in great profusion, albeit locked inside shale beds that needed fracking to break open, and perhaps veins of heavy metals that could be leached from their deposits with the correct application of the right chemicals, in sufficient quantity.  The woodsman understood little of this, but the counselor mentioned some financial figures ‘Just as a minimum, ball-park estimate’ and the woodsman realised that he could become one of the richest men in the kingdom.  With wealth like that at his disposal, all of the most beautiful women in the kingdom would be queuing up to spurn him and treat him with the contempt he so craved.  He barely paused, before grabbing the proffered pen and signing up to become a 50 % joint venture partner in a company called ‘Deposit Resource Yields – Advancing Development’, which would carry out these exciting plans.

Whoever owned the other 50% seemed not to need the woodsman to do anything, because later that same day a convoy of yellow vehicles and machinery arrived, all emblazoned with ‘DRYAD’ on the side and they began their work.  Great bulldozers cleared trees at a thousand times the rate even an army of woodcutters could have managed.  The lumber was machine-cut and ground into sawdust to make chipboard for cheap furniture, while steamrollers flattened the land for mighty roads laid down by hot, towering asphalt-burners, which lit the sky with their flames while pouring out the sticky black tar that coagulated to form the surface of the roads.  Along these roads came more machines, to construct buildings for the many workers whose shouts and obscene jokes filled the air as they too laboured, to install drilling and injection machines, across the three valleys and the surrounding hills.  The sky darkened with the fumes from their activities.

Then the drilling began, with a roar like ten thousand shrieking banshees, and great vats of chemicals were positioned to be pumped in to the ground, to lubricate the drills, to crack open the seams of slate to liberate the precious oil within and to leach heavy metals from their deep veins, to be collected by mighty open-cast mining rigs.

The trees that had not been turned to sawdust lost their leaves within days, birds died in their hundreds or fled, the streams and rivers first bloomed with sickly algae, which then itself died back leaving nothing but black water stinking of corruption and decay.  After a couple of weeks, the air stank of smoke, of choking chemical fumes, of electrical discharges and of death.

Looking sadly out over the blackened, blasted hillside one day, the woodsman remembered the townspeople, in shock.  He put on the protective rubber boots and respiration mask that the workman respectfully offered to him and hurried down into town.  He walked down the main street, seeing no one.  Most of the houses were boarded up, and when he knocked on those that were not, he was greeted only with cries of hatred and rejection, when the inhabitant realised who it was.  The townspeople knew of his inheritance and how he had delivered their land and their livelihoods over to destruction, for personal gain. 

The woodsman came to the place where the prostitute had plied her trade, but there was nothing but a bare stretch of ground, worn and marked by the high heels of generations of prostitutes but now unoccupied. He caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye, and looked up to see a haggard shopkeeper, grimly winding down his store-front blind, eying him with contempt.

‘Wait!’ the woodsman called.  ‘Did she… I mean where has…?’ and he gestured helplessly at the empty pavement.

The shopkeeper shook his head, slowly.  ‘Syphilis’  he replied, hoarsely.  ‘The workers who came with the machines… soon enough all the working girls got it.  Not a pretty death.  But then – what death is?’

And he resumed winding down the blind, keeping eye contact until he disappeared from view behind the blank screen that left the woodsman feeling utterly alone.

He wandered back towards his home, meeting on the way a cart piled with the meagre possessions of what must have been at least three families: the children and infirm grandparents clinging grimly to it, while adults walked and took turns to push, alongside.

‘Hey’ he called out desperately.  ‘Hey there!’

The sad little procession paused, and all turned to look at him.  One of the women lifted her chin slightly, staring straight at him as if to appoint herself spokeswoman for them all.  But none said a word.

‘I… I can help!’ he cried out.  ‘See – see I have money!  I can help.’  And he drew out a soft kid leather bag of thick gold coins and started to untie the cord, with shaking hands.

The woman stepped forward, lowered her head and spat, once, at his feet.  Then she turned away and the group resumed their trudging, all without speaking or even looking back.

Back at his hut the woodsman looked out at the blackened, poisoned hillside where once had been trees and flowers, butterflies and birdsong, life and laughter.  Beyond it, in the valley, huge machines rumbled and roared, shaking the ground and blackening the sky.

‘What have I done?’ the woodsman cried out in horror at the ugliness of the outside and his sudden realisation of the ugliness of the soul inside him that had created it. ‘Oh, what have I done?’

And he collapsed to the ground, sobbing helplessly in his shame and his chagrin.  His tears fell from his hot, quivering cheeks and splashed onto…

…a shapely foot of greenish but flawless complexion, girt with an ankle strap of golden twine.

He looked up in shock, at the beautiful face of the dryad, gazing down on him with an indecipherable expression on her face.

‘I… I only wanted to be rich!’ he gasped.  ‘So I could… you know, be ruined by a callous female.’

‘But you were rich’ smiled the dryad.  ‘You were rich in the forests that surrounded you with beauty; you were rich in the gratitude of the people whom you had helped; and, above all, you were rich in the contentment you enjoyed, in a life that you knew to be worth living.  You were rich beyond the dreams of kings and emperors.’

‘And now…’ the woodsman groaned, slowly, the dawning realisation in his reddened eyes…‘Now I have…’

‘Nothing.’ replied the dryad.  ‘You have nothing.’

‘Nothing’ he acknowledged, hollowly.

There was silence for a moment.

‘Would you like me to put things back how they were?’ the dryad asked, sweetly.  ‘Before you visited my clearing, before you made your wish, before you destroyed everything in your desire for a findomme princess?’

‘Yes – yes, put it back how it was!’ the woodsman cried desperately.

‘Hmm’ the dryad replied.  ‘Maybe.’

‘Beg.’

The woodsman kissed the ground before her feet frantically, piteously begging with all the humility and desperation that filled his otherwise empty existence.  He pleaded and beseeched with all his soul, shaking with the guilt and the helpless self-loathing that was all he felt inside.

‘Hmm’ she said again.

He paused, the despair within him somehow burning still more painfully now there was a tiny flicker of hope in his aching chest.

‘I don’t think so’ he heard, and then felt an explosion of pain that blotted out his vision.  She had kicked him in the face, harder than anyone had ever kicked him before.

And when he came to, she was gone and the woodsman lay alone, spots of blood from his nose and tears from his eyes discolouring the ground beneath him, surrounded by the blackened hell that was the world he had chosen for himself. The flicker of hope in him had died, leaving nothing but darkness and despair.

He was ruined.

 

 

I did warn you. Unpleasant, not ‘unpleasant in a good way, full of vicious but exciting femdom torture like Serena and Alice‘.  Just nasty and mean-spirited – and predictable too, right?  

 Here’s another very unpleasant story that my readers hated, if you want something else to dislike.

 

When I write nicer stories I try to illustrate them with pictures of pretty ladies that are at least somewhat relevant to the plot but for this one… well, I only found this and I think we can all agree this is not how the dryad looks: