Chapter 2 The Blackgoat Prince is HUNGRY! Time for a Meal!

“Kshhhhht! Ladies an-shht-entlemen!” The speakers in the corners of the wagons cabin blared.

Akane flinched at the harsh sound. This was not the first time the cabins speakers had gone off. Many times a mocking, falsely hearty and jovial voice had rung out, mostly to mock them or berate them or simply tell them in a voice deeply colored in irritation to ‘Shut up!’. But this was the first time the voice talking through them was so broken up and staticky.

Was there some sort of interference? That would be… odd, to say the least. The technology in this world was fueled and developed with magic. What could possibly interfere with that?

“If you ca-tsshhht-anage to maneuver those comfy lit-ssst-rist bracelets we provided you with, free of charge I might add,” The speaker, one of the guards riding in the front cabin of the carriage, paused his jovial monologue to laugh at his own joke. “You can jus-ssshhht-manage to make out the grand walls of your fabulous new home!”

Akane strained her neck, heartbeat running rampant in her chest, making it feel as though it was fit to burst, to peak out of the window.

Her heart, which moments earlier had been in a frenzy, stopped cold at her first glimpse of their ominous destination.

Seeing what awaited them in the distance, she felt like she was a deer seeing death’s white light approaching and unable to do anything to alter her fate.

[Punishment]’s Holy City Chastening loomed massive and ominous in the distance. It was a fearsome place that somehow managed to draw similarities to both the fortresses and prisons of earth, as well as being a massive city that dwarfed even the biggest metropolis in her original world.

Great walls of steal stood defiant against the preposterous notion of intrusion. Or the more likely attempt, escape. Though how anyone would achieve either objective was a mystery.

Since the carriage approached Chastening from a hill, the new prisoners could see all five of the Holy City’s layers. Five levels of barriers separated the captives in the interior from the freedom of the outside. Even though they were still some distance away, all of the passengers doomed to become residents of the prison city could tell just how impenetrable those gates were.

Tremendous towers loomed towards the bleakening sky, reaching nearly high enough to pierce the clouds. They seared away the approaching dark with blazing lights that scoured the grounds searching for any who dared disobedience.

The irony in this place being dubbed “Holy City” was its apparent absence of anything Holy. Even the vegetation surrounding it seemed to reject the notion. There was nothing that grew from the ground approaching the walls. None of the majesty that was rampant in this world of fantasy could reach Chastening. Only the corpses of trees remained.

Corpses and the ashes of vegetation that had since turned to dust, which created a perpetual fog around the city. A miasma that reeked with the scent of death and doom.

This was a place of misery. The Divinity implied by the title of “Holy” upon Chastening seemed to be nothing more than a mockery of its meaning. Or rather it would be if only…

“Beautiful…” Akane unintentionally spoke aloud, or perhaps it was drawn from her by the sheer awesomeness of the city.

It was entrancing enough to momentarily distract her from the terror that was Chastening. Her mouth had frozen jaw dropped, and her eyes were so wide open they threatened to leap from their sockets.

“Almost out of place, isn’t it?” The kind old man said with a bitter smile.

They were speaking of the temple that loomed atop of Chastening. Sitting higher than even the watchtowers, the temple of [Punishment] actually did broach the territory of the heavens. Clouds swam through its pillars ethereally clinging to solid structures and giving the temple a spectral visage.

This was not the first time Akane had seen a temple of the gods in this world, but they never failed to stagger her. None of them were the same, but she could draw similarities from many different cultures of her original world.

The pillars of the greek temples that bore the weight of the roof. The great gates and winding stairs popular in the shrines of her homeland, Japan. The totem-like faces similar to what could be found in the original tribes of the Americas or the easter island. And even Great statues of the god himself with his back fused to the wall like what remained in the ruins of ancient Egypt.

It was like the kind uncle said. The temple did seem almost out of place. Almost, but not quite. For the temple was indeed beautiful, but it terrible in equal measure.

It’s pillars covered in cruel spikes, hooked and barbed to both plunge into flesh and pull out what lay beneath. From the great gates hung cages designed to keep any inhabitant from having a moment of peace, and the winding stairs were formed of thorns that would savage the feet of any who walked upon it. The totems were twisted in various expressions of anguish, and some of them wore replicas of the devices of torture that were terrible enough to make Akane’s meager lunch threaten to come back up. Most terrible of all were the statues of the god himself…

As far as Akane knew there was not a single god that was anything less than gorgeous. From what she could see of Lord [Punishment]’s face, he was no different.

Though the lower half of his face hid behind grinning steel jaws that looked like a closed bear trap, everything exposed above it was nothing short of glorious. Sharp eyebrows, a hairline that sang of ever-impeccable youth, and haughty eyes that looked down upon the sinners approaching his gates with a grandeur that proclaimed his divinity for any who dared to meet them.

Akane thought she would fall for such a man the moment those eyes caught her up in their depths… She did think that but…

There was also an air about this god. She had gotten pretty good at reading people over the week-long life she had been desperately struggling to sustain; there was an aura of oppression she could feel by just looking at the statue.

An aura of oppressive cruelty that saturated Lord [Punishment]’s eyes. So much so that it felt like those eyes of his, though no more than stone, had gripped her heart and squeezed it until it felt as though her heart would burst.

The other passengers felt that way as well. After having their bravado torn away by the inferno of mad hatred brewing within the cabin's walls, the arrogant visage of Lord [Punishment] bearing down upon them, looming closer with every turn of the wagon’s wheels, decimated any spirit they had managed to maintain.

Many of them were rocking back and forth, some were clutching their faces their fingernails digging shallow furrows into their skin, and a few were even shedding silent tears of despair.

There was a tiny portion of them that managed a face like stone. Somehow ignoring the calls of fate by sheer force of will, brutally crushing the tendrils of fear relentlessly attempting to strangle their will.

They would endure; they had been born into the very depths of this shitty world after all, right? They had struggled, and survived, and killed, and betrayed, all for the sake of seeing another day.

This would be just one more passing twilight. They were simply traversing from one hell where the odds of their survival were slim to another. They would cross this bridge just like they had all the others before now.

It wasn’t as though they would die the moment they stepped through the doors, right? The Night Guilds they belonged to were already established there. They would welcome these legends of the underworld with open arms. This was just another city. It was simply a new place to carve out their slice of the pie.

This is what sustained the most hardy of them, what kept their will intact…

Then that will was shattered like an egg that suffered the force of a blacksmith’s hammer.

It felt as though all of Alotha’s gravity had suddenly crammed itself inside their cabin. The force was dismal enough that their nerves cried out to them in agony as their bones threatened to be ground into dust.

“T-this… pressure…” Akane managed to gasp as her back bowed beneath the strain.

“Ksssssshhhhht-Ah-shhhht-at you fol-kst-are feeling rig-sssss-now is the benevolent-sssshhhhkt-aura of Lord [Punishement].” the radio blared cheerfully.

“C-could it be the god’s aura if causing the interference?” the kind uncle had managed to keep his back planted firmly against the cabin wall though the veins in his neck bulged so much with the effort, they looked as though they might tear out of his skin. “But that doesn’t make any sense?!”

“Enjoy-ssssss-Lord [Punishment]’s love. Pleasant in’t it?” the speaker sang in joyful mockery.

The speakers were even more overrun by static now. It was hard to discern a cruel word being spat out through them; not only was the serpent-like mysterious hissing interfering with the magic wavelength, beneath it all was a deep malevolent bass beat thrumming steadily with the rhyme of a savage hateful heart.

“Don’ worry, luvs-sssst.” the speakers jeered. “They say-sssssst-it only tak-ssst-a few weeks ta get-sssst-sed to it. If-sst ya can survi-kssshhh-that long that is! -Kssssssst-AHAHAHAHAHA!”

The words chilled Akane made Akane's skin prickle. It didn’t help that the speakers had enough of the abuse of whatever tormented the signal, and begin to simply hiss.

That would have been a welcome relief if alone, but somehow the mocking laughter of the guard had been left on a loop as if some cruel Dj had hijacked the wavelength. The simile only striking closer to the heart when Akane realized that the deep bass beat kept pumping away, merciless in the pressure it added to the already dismal scenario.

“How did this happen?” Akane moaned, clutching her head, her beautiful face twisted into a distraught mask. “Why did things turn out this way? This kind of punishment over a loaf of bread?”

“I-is that what landed you here?” the kind uncle said, both eyebrows shooting towards his forehead, propelled by pure incredulity. “Stealing bread?”

“W-well… not quite.” Akane said, tears welling up at the corners of her eyes until they spilled over onto her face.

She told her confidant about everything--well not everything, she very much doubted that he would believe she was from another world after all--but everything that had happened to her since arriving. How she had wandered, almost falling victim to the traps hidden beneath the kind smiles of strangers in the city.

She had almost been sold into slavery, assaulted, and lived each day eating what scraps she could scavenge from the garbage tossed out by markets and vendors. How she had spent every night huddled in the dark corners of alleys scared to submit to the temptations of exhaustion. The terror of what could be waiting to snatch her the moment she closed her eyes, forcing them to stay open.

One day her stomach had been churning so painfully, it threatened to drive her to her knees. She was desperate, her hunger overwhelming her fear and sense of caution, forcing her to pilfer a loaf of bread from a stall with an unwary attendee.

She hadn’t even gotten a chance to sink her teeth into the still-warm crust when a vice-like grip snatched her wrist. She could only stare in dismay as the bread spiralled down into the dust of the street.

The eyes of the vendor might have been elsewhere but it appeared that a city watchman had been following her with his eyes for some time.

Dragged off into the watch-station with only the morbid hope of them providing her food in her cell, keeping her from falling to her knees. She trudged forward expecting the worst. After all, that’s all that had befallen her since coming here.

She sat before the watchmen barely noticing his finger-wagging long-winded lecture, with shadows of defeat beneath her eyes and a face as pale as a week old corpse. She likely would have stayed that way until she faded away from hunger if one of the guardsman's words had not cut through the shroud of despondency that imprisoned her in that zombified state.

“...eh? I’m to work off my debt for the bread at the stall?”

The blustery old guardsman nodded with a stern, but not unkind expression. He explained that while Akane had languished in her stupor, arrangements had been made to work at the very stall she had attempted to steal from.

Apparently the stall owner had happily agreed even offering her a permanent job exclaiming, ‘With that pretty sis working here my profits will go through the roof!’

With tears and snot flowing freely down her face Akane lept sobbing into the stern, yet secretly soft-hearted guardsman’s arms, saturating his uniform with tears and mucus. As he awkwardly patted her back with a crimson tent to his cheeks, Akane thought her trails in this world were finally over.

But that was when one of the Priests of [Love] walked through the door.

‘I heard there was a beautiful sinner being detained here? Ah!’ He said his ice-hued eyes landed upon her.

The corners of his mouth curled up exposing the whitest teeth Akane had ever seen. They fit perfectly onto his well-sculpted face. On earth, he would have been a super-model but in this world all the servants of [Love] were gorgeous. Nevertheless, Akane was immediately swept up in his charm.

He stepped up to her. ‘Close! Too close!’. Akane had thought as blood rushed to her face, making it feel like it had caught on fire. He cupped the small of her back with a strong hand and Akane felt like she was going to melt into the ground, when he brought his lips close enough for her to feel his warm breath lapping against her face.

‘I cannot let you leave here without chastising you at least a little, now can I.” he asked her mischievously in a melodious voice, ignoring the loud ‘harumph’ of the guard.

Akane had already been swallowed by his charisma, he could lead her where he willed. She could feel hear her heart throbbing all the way up to her eyes. But he had other things in mind.

Akane’s eyes almost bugged out of her head as his hands wandered to places that they should not stray!

‘No’ she screamed pushing the man away with all her strength, which wasn’t much, but he must not have been expecting it. The push made him stumble back where he fell over a low table and gashed his forehead on its corner.

“Lock her away!” His melodious voice had warped into a malicious shrill.

He stood, blood leaking from the gaping wound on his head, as he pointed a vindictive finger that shook with rage at Akane.

He drowned out the protests of the old guardsman, while he looked at her with eyes that lacked a single ember of warmth. “Let’s see if a trip to Lord [Punishment’s] Chastening will teach her manners.”

“The priests are often accustomed to… taking what they want.” the uncle looked down, to avoid Akane’s embarrassed expression. “But, lass… there is something I don’t understand. When I first saw you here I had assumed you were the mistress of some noble. One whose jealous wife had you banished to Chastening.”

He shook his head with his lips turned downward in a confused grimace. “It is a scenario that has played out more than you would think. I cannot imagine a girl with looks like yours would live anything other than a pampered life no matter what social station they were born to. You may not be fond of the Church of Lord [Love], but they would have gladly welcomed you into their ranks. You probably noticed, but they believe that beauty is the purest form of love and your beauty could rival even that goddess [Love].

"Even the adventurers guild would have hired you to be a receptionist as long as you can read and write. To find yourself in that state when blessed with your looks… It’s just hard to believe.

"Ah! But of course, there must be some reason that you were not able to do so!”

“...Ah!” Akane said, slamming her fist into her palm with a wide-eyed expression that conveyed she had realized something profound.

“...”

Akane turned slowly towards the uncle, her lip twitching. “Ah! Please don’t look at me with that expression!”

The uncle stared at her with an expression so frozen that it was almost as if his face had turned to stone. To Akane, his thoughts were plainly written on his face. He was definitely thinking, ‘This person is an idiot’! Definitely!

“W-well, I suppose there is no use in trying to change the past.” the uncle said after he hacked out a nervous cough to break up the awkward moment. “There is no changing the fact that we are here right now. May as well figure out how to survive in our new home. Ah! I think I’n starting to get used to Lord [Punishment]’s ether now.”

“R-really?” Akane said, glancing at his shaking shoulders quickly before she cast her eyes down to her own trembling fingers.

“Hahaha! No, but perhaps if I endure with a smile, things will work out!” he said.

With his eyes squeezed shut Akane couldn’t see his fear. But the man borr his teeth in a defiant smile that she couldn’t help but match.

“-ehehe. It would have been hard enough to endure even without this creepy music.” Akane said.

As Chastening loomed ever closer the baneful bass’ solo had turned into a duet with an equally ominous violin number set to a loop.

Everyone in the carriage thought this to be some kind of prelude to the torture they were to face inside. It was quite effective working in concert with Lord [Punishment]’s ether.

Not a single prisoner had been able to maintain color in their faces; instead of maintaining they were using everything they could muster from their ether to keep from collapsing.

“Akane lass… if you don’t mind me asking… How did you manage to develop your ether so well?”

“...Ether?”

“Your spirit… Your, ah, magic power...”

Akane’s expression was like a void. The old-timer could search for the rest of the trip and he would still find as much understanding in her gaze as he would on a freshly wiped whiteboard.

“If… If you haven’t developed your ether how is it that you can stay conscious? No, how is it that your heart hasn’t stopped?!”

“Well even though you say that…” Akane did feel as though the atmosphere was a bit troublesome.

It made her feel like something that delighted in cruelty had wrapped itself around her ribs and squeezed; that was a far cry from the quesy diseased spirit suffered by the others.

WREEEEEK!

The first gates of Chastening groaned as they parted, almost as though the act of unbarring themselves caused them unseen torment. As the carriage passed through them they were first greeted by two looming statues of Lord [Punishment] that towered to such heights that they rivaled the first walls containing the city.

Those cruel eyes glared down at them with an almost hungry hostility. That made it hard to believe they were formed of lifeless rock. The finely etched details of his long, torn, collarless jacket made it seem as though the wind could catch the tattered edges of his coat at any moment and send it flapping like magnificent wings. Cruel hooked spines burst from his flesh forming an x across his lean abdomen.

Those spines didn’t limit themselves to the borders of his jacket. They pierced through them all the way to his broad shoulders; the large slopes were topped with tremendous spikes that sought to pierce the heavens up above.

“Ah! New playmates!” A voice that could be called cheerful had it not been dripping with poisonous anticipation, called out, freeing them from the entrapping gaze of the god’s statue.

The prisoners strained to glance out the tiny windows of the carriage and found themselves shuddering in regret for the action.

“Acolytes of Lord [Punishment].” the uncle said with a wry twist to his lips. “Most of them used to be prisoners themselves before they were converted by the priests of the Holy Order of Penitence.”

Akane trembled. It was like they had just crossed over into an S&M dungeon. Risque black leather seemed to be the uniform of those that followed Lord [Punishment].

The priests and priestesses ran their tongues hungrily over their lips while watching the passing carriage. They caressed tools that even Akane could tell were developed with nothing but causing pain in mind.

“There is Pain in Penitence.” The speakers blared from the prison walls; they were even more potent than the sinister beat brewing in the carriage”.

CRACK!

“AH!”

The prisoners all flinched when they saw a man in a hood, covered only in the black leathers that clung tight to his nethers, convulse in pain. A woman who was scantily clad in similar material, which struggled to contain her voluptuous form, lashed his back with a braided cord. Every stroke made red bubbles well up through shallow wounds.

“There is Pleasure in Pain.”

Clink. Clink. Clink.

“A-Ahn!”

A woman panted in a manner that fell somewhere between agony and orgasmic ecstasy. The mechanism that was pulling her limbs apart until her joints were screaming clinked as her tongue hung out of her gaping mouth.

“Therefore, Penitence is Pleasure.”

After each thunder of the speakers roared from their place on the prison walls, an act of torment was inflicted upon one of the leather-clad acolytes. There was such harmony between their screams of throe and bliss, that there was no telling them apart.

“This is where they practice their methods, “salvation”,” The old man said, his face a mask of bitterness. “That’s what they call it. This is how the prisoners who survive Lord [Punishment]’s prison earn their repentance. This is how he secures them to his faith.”

“They choose to go through this?” Akane’s face went slack as belief drained out of it.

“Lass,” the old man said, sadly shaking his head. “They beg for it. And if we are fortunate enough to survive… we will too.”

“Is this where they live… the guards?” Akane said as she watched a woman lick a pointed device that made her shudder purely off the implications of its use.

The thought came to Akane when she saw the houses built into the walls, humble buildings that she could believe were prison cells if they were further in.

“Yes. The outer walls belong to the children of Lord [Punishment].” The uncle said with lifeless eyes that would look more in place on a gutted fish than on a man. “This is where they perfect their ‘art’.”

Akane could only smile wryly as she watched what the Acolytes of [Punishment] called art; all she saw was torture. She waged a war against imagination itself. The battle was constant in keeping it from running away and filling her head with every horrible thing she could imagine.

Already the gates leading into the second zone were groaning open, almost as if they were crying out their regret. The soulless iron guilty for admitting the poor doomed souls to what awaited them beyond.

If only the walls were sheer. If only the endless height of stone before them signified the end of their journey…

But before them were the loading docks to their new home; the markings above it declaring the entrance for new arrivals.

“Almost at our stop.” The kind uncle said. Cold sweat ran in rivulets down his face as he fought to smother the fear in his heart before it bubbled over to his expression or his tone. “I… I cannot bring myself to say… that I hope you are prepared. It would be… hypocritical of me. I am not prepared. I don’t think any of us are, though for what it is worth… I will stand with you for as long as I can.”

Akane reached out towards his hand which was showing the earliest stages of wrinkles and gripped it tightly to still his trembling. “And I will stand with you.”

They became pillars for each other as the carriage slowed and began to turn. The older man’s lips twitched just enough to be perceptible, if anyone had been watching him with eyes astute as a hawk’s, Akane’s grip had become that tight on his hand.

Who could blame her? The carriage’s movements had finally come to a shuddering end. Unseen latches clicked so loudly in piercing notes of finality, it tore through the haunting melody that had gripped the interior of the cabin for so long.

Akane’s face could have been the picture next to terror in the dictionary. Lines that seemed so foreign on such a stunning face, warped her appearance to a different kind of beauty; one that is fleeting, fragile, and approaching its end like a flower wilting upon the cruel breaths of approaching fall.

Her reaction was normal; the older man felt as though her natural fear gave him the presence of mind to not only feel her dread, but share it.

They had come to the most horrible place known to man, beyond Apocolypze. A fate of nothing but torture and brainwashing awaited them. And that was only if they were able to escape the finality of death at the hands of their eager persecuters, for whom torture was a religion.

Perhaps death would be a better fate?

But they were the only ones who stared at the doors to the carriage with mounting trepidation; their cellmates were nothing more than zombies.

Those with life in their eyes, in fact, stared at the doors with implausible expressions akin to hope. The music that had snarled them was so oppressive, they eyed the entrance into Alotha’s most terrible bastille as a chance for salvation.

Their eyes even began to fill with hope that shone like stars sparkling in their eyes as the doors to the carriage creaked open.

The smell obliterated all of that though.

Blood polluted the air. Excrement, offal, and disease permeated with a reek thick enough to be called a miasma; The smell was terrible enough for the prisoners to forget the melody that had been eating away at their sanity long enough to gag and vomit. The putrid aroma won its battle against their stomachs.

Some of the braver souls made their unsteady way towards the open doors. Their eyes unshielded not for the chains that bound them, but because the light awaiting them in their new home was even duller than what they left behind.

The screams tested the mettle of those brave souls that shambled out of the carriage. There was no pattern to the sounds of abuse in the inner walls of the prison. Though the mantra of Lord [Punishment]’s Penitence sang out from speakers all around them, the terror and agony around them amounted to nothing more than chaos.