145: The Ogre, Alone

on January 28, 2008 in 05: The Weekend Shift

In Which Mackenzie Is Unceremoniously Dropped

When we got to her room on the fourth floor, Steff stuck her key in the lock and then stepped back, waiting at attention. When nothing happened, she gave a coded knock on the door, two quick soft raps and then one harder one. She waited again and when there was no reply, she turned the key and opened the door, pulling me in by the hand.

The walls and ceiling were draped in thick black cloth. The floor was covered with a plush red carpet. They seemed to have got rid of one of the beds and one of the desks. The remaining desk had a skull and several other bones on it. The centerpiece of the display was a mostly intact forearm held in a vise, its fingers twitching. I felt a little sick at the sight of that.

Steff kept hold of my arm while she closed and locked the door, and then grabbed me by both shoulders and marched me a bit away from it.

The room was lit by candles scattered around the room. The flames might very well have been illusionary, though, because none of the candles seemed to be even a little melted and some of them were dangerously close to books, piles of paper, and other hazards.

Viktor the half-ogre was seated at his keyboard, which seemed to have been designed for larger-than-usual musicians as it was both taller and wider across than the desk, with keys sized for thicker fingers. It was a magic model… obviously a full-sized instrument could have been problematic in a dorm room. There was a whole row of candles running along the back of the instrument, lighting Viktor from the front and making the view from the back look a bit… well… demonic, for lack of a better term.

He raised a hand and brought his finger down on a single key, producing the sound of a somber-sounding note being plucked within an imaginary harpsichord.

I saw that he was shirtless, and realized a second later that he was in fact naked. I took this all in, resisting the urge to look around and see everything. I was an object. I wasn’t supposed to move. Even just turning my neck was probably pushing it, though Viktor wasn’t watching. I tried to find a comfortable position to lock my head in place.

I realized that Steff had vanished from my peripheral vision. I turned my head without thinking and saw that she’d got down on her knees, bent over with her head almost touching the ground. I wondered if I was supposed to bow, too… but, no. Steff had been very clear about the proper way for me to show Viktor respect.

I had every reason to want to be on his good side. I needed a chance to talk to him about Steff, if he would listen. Long term, I wanted his permission to date her. I could put up with a little cultural weirdness for that. It would be worth it, to see Steff so happy…

Viktor hit the same note again, waited a little while, and then hit it again. It seemed like Steff hadn’t been exaggerating his lack of skill. He hit it for a fourth time, then moved his hand back and forth over a range of five or six keys before hitting another one. Then he hit that one again.

Was he trying to compose a song one note at a time? I wondered how he managed to pass a music class. Probably the instructors were too afraid to flunk him. He definitely looked more like a warrior than a bard of any kind.

I don’t say that just because he was a half-ogre. He seemed huge, even sitting down… both tall and incredibly broad shouldered. I kind of vaguely remembered having heard that there’s no size difference between male and female ogres, but there was still a noticeable disparity between Viktor and Belinda in bulk. Maybe their human blood affected that in some way… or maybe he was just a larger specimen of his kind.

I hadn’t really noticed his face the first time I’d seen him, back before classes had started. That time, I’d been too busy failing to not look at the massive bulge in his pants. Now I could see his head in profile when he occasionally turned his ear toward the keyboard and I realized he was handsome in a way.

I mean, human-handsome. I’m sure the average ogre looks perfectly acceptable to other ogres. They just look a little… well, lumpy to humans. There used to be a myth that ogres weren’t born, they were hewn by other ogres out of the side of a mountain, which explained their craggy, uneven features. Belinda had some of that going on, though her face was softer and rounder than any full ogre I’d ever seen a picture of.

Viktor was another story. He had long black hair, held up in a very non-girly ponytail at the moment. He didn’t look like he’d been hewn roughly out of rock… he looked like he’d been sculpted. Carved. Chiseled. The kind of gray-brown skin tone helped the impression of being generally statue-like. From what I could tell, his face seemed to be both broader and more angular than would have necessarily been attractive on a human–in fact it probably would have looked like a caricature of masculinity on a human–but he carried it off.

He kept going back and forth between those two notes, playing each one two or three times, pausing, and then going to the other. Steff was still crouched on the floor and I was doing my best imitation of a statue. It felt a little ridiculous, to have been summoned like this and then ignored.

Finally, after what seemed like forever he gave an exasperated grunt and brought both hands down on the keyboard, mashing the keys and producing a twangily discordant cacophony. He pushed the stool back and swung around, getting to his feet. I shrank back as he strode towards us, the candle light reflecting on his eyes and catching on his bone-white, tiny tusk-like canines.

I couldn’t help it. When he lunged forward, I jumped back half a step and let out a shriek. Okay, he could no more have harmed me unarmed than Belinda could have but when there’s a big and legitimately scary looking half-ogre guy coming at you, you don’t think about things like that.

Viktor hadn’t been reaching for me, though. He was reaching for Steff. He grabbed her by the hair and hauled her up on her feet. I’d already broken my statue routine, so I watched him haul her over to the bed and yank her skirt off before throwing her onto it. Steff had been going ranger beneath it… I looked away before I caught more than a glimpse.

Viktor turned around and crossed the room back towards me in two strides. Granted it wasn’t a very big room, of course, but it was still impressive. He grabbed a big handful of my hair, yanked me off my feet, and then slammed me down back more or less where I had been with enough force that I felt a bit like an accordion. It had been a purely symbolic action… my feet weren’t any more in the exact spot I’d been standing in than before he’d moved me.

The message was clear, though: it was okay for him to move me, but not for me to move myself.

He put a hand under my chin and the other on top of my head and twisted my head painfully to the side with a quick jerk. If I’d had mortal bones, it probably would have either killed me or paralyzed me. Lucky me, I got to live and keep feeling the pain.

He’d turned my gaze away from the bed, a fact which I appreciated when he rejoined Steff. The sound track was plenty graphic enough. “Ogre men can go for half an hour to forty-five minutes on average” is one of those little known facts that everybody knows because it gets forwarded all over the ethernet, even though nobody’s really sure if it’s true or not.

I wasn’t exactly facing a timepiece, but if somebody told me that Viktor lasted an hour I would believe them.

What did I think about during that time, however long it actually lasted?

At first I tried to tune out the sounds from behind my field of vision. Viktor was… surprisingly restrained, at least in that department. If I’d ever spent even a moment trying to imagine what a big manly dominant half-ogre would sound like while presumably sodomizing a half-elf, I would have imagined a lot of grunting and growling.

The sort of noises Ian had made, but… a lot more so.

He was apparently tight-lipped in the sack, though, because aside from an occasional puff of breath through his nose, all I heard was the bed moving, and Steff.

She was whimpering, crying, gasping, and moaning… and every so often, crying out in something between anguish and pleasure. I tried to tune it out, but I really couldn’t because there was nothing else to listen to.

They were having sex while I was in the room, yards away, and acting like I wasn’t even there… or wasn’t worth noticing. I remembered my dream of the previous night, of being used as a coffee table… Amaranth and Ian fucking on top of me like I wasn’t even there.

I felt heat rushing into my cheeks… liquid fire swirling down below.

As it went on, I found I couldn’t stop from picturing what was happening. From a tasteful angle, like from behind where I could maybe only see Viktor’s back and glimpses of Steff. Then, my mind drifted further and imagined myself as a part of their rough love… not as participant but as accessory.

Me laying lengthwise across a large bed while Steff rested her head on my stomach like a pillow. Me on the floor like a footstool, Steff bent over me while Viktor had his way. It was bizarre stuff. I had no idea where it came from.

The longer the sex went on, though, the more pointedly it felt like Viktor was ignoring me, and the hotter it became.

That didn’t make it any easier to try to stand in place, though.

Finally, Steff gave out a protracted “Aaah… aaah… aaah!” and then a single, unmistakably orgasmic scream. A minute or so later, the sound of movement stopped.

There was a long silence after that.

“Who had you today?” Viktor asked finally.

“Jay,” Steff said.

“You went to his room?”

“Yes.”

“Where else did you go?”

“Nowhere,” Steff said. While I wasn’t permitted to speak unless ordered, it seemed like she was limited to one word answers by default.

“Where… else?”

“Nowhere,” Steff said again. She gave out a gasp, which turned into a yell and then a scream.

“Where else did you go?” Viktor asked again.

“Fin’s!” Steff sobbed.

“What did he sell you?” Viktor asked.

“Nothing!” Steff said.

“I will break your skull if you go back there again,” Viktor said. “Do you understand me? I will grind it into dust beneath my heel.”

I fought not to move, not to act. This was play. He didn’t mean it. It was hyperbole. It might even have been ogre pillow talk, for all I knew. Steff had a safeword.

Steff choked on her reply.

“Do you understand me?” Viktor said. “You swore you were finished. That was your present for being clean. If you are not clean, I will take it back and you will watch me destroy it. Do you understand?”

Steff must have nodded, because Viktor made what sounded like a satisfied grunt. My brain had only just caught hold of the fact that Viktor hadn’t been threatening Steff’s life, in play or otherwise… he’d been talking about her ghastly paperweight.

“The whole third floor is off limits now,” Viktor said. “You are private property until I tell you otherwise. Get dressed and go wait outside the door. I need to be alone.”

I expected to feel Steff’s hands on me, but then I heard the door open, close, and lock. Had she forgotten about me? No. Viktor hadn’t said to take me, though, and “alone” didn’t seem to preclude my presence as a nonentity.

He sat back down heavily on the stool in front of the keyboard and began to alternate monotonously between the same two notes. Was this ogre-style music?

Then I heard him get up. His bare feet made no sound against the plush carpet, but I felt it moving as he walked towards me. A strong hand grabbed my ankle, and I was hoisted upside down into the air, dangling by one foot. I let out a little yip, but bit my lip to keep from screaming. Steff had said it was okay, but I figured it was better not to, all the same.

He pinched my legs, prodded my ass through my jeans. He squeezed my breast. I was turned away from him, but he reached down and stuck his big, meaty fingers in my mouth, prying it open painfully wide. I beat back the urge to whip my head away. It was almost too intrusive, almost a violation. If I hadn’t ever tried oral sex, it might not have felt that way.

“What is so special about you?” he asked as he withdrew them, right before dropping me to the floor. I cried out as I landed on my head and fell in a heap.

He went back to his magic harpsichord and played the first note again. Without moving from where I’d landed, I was looking at his feet and the base of the stool. I had just made up my mind to say something, to get up, to move, to leave… to do anything to get a response from him, when he started speaking.

“The place where I am from is called Kilrest,” he said, repeating the two notes irregularly as he spoke like it was some bizarre high-concept spoken word album. “It is a mountain fortress, ruled by my mother. She is a full ogre, one of the last remaining ones in the holding. Ogres do not discriminate by sex, you see. There is weak,” he said, playing the slightly higher note as if for emphasis, “and there is strong.” He played the lower note. “My mother is very strong. Some decades ago, a human war band tried to take the keep so they could control the trade route it guards. They were defeated. My mother kept the leader for herself.”

He lapsed into broody silence and played the two notes, now alternating directly between them, but still with no fixed interval. After several repetitions he spoke again.

“This man was my father, and he was strong for a man,” Viktor said. “My mother made him wear a collar that was meant for an ogre. He bore up under it well, and with his knowledge of human arts like tactics and planning, logistics… the strength of Kilrest increased.”

Silence again, while he twiddled back and forth between the two notes.

“Human slaves do not last long among ogres,” he said. “Sometimes, they are ransomed or released for diplomatic reasons, but our laws say that those who are in our territory without permission are ours to take. However, they are too fragile to keep for long. They are bred, if that is desired, and then they are put to work until they give out, or else tortured to death or killed for sport.”

He paused again, and this time even the music… if that’s what it was… came to a stop. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. Tortured to death. Of course I knew that a half-ogre was, well, half ogre, but that intellectual knowledge wasn’t the same thing as listening to one sitting there and coldly talking about torturing somebody to death.

“The bodies are not wasted. Ogres do not distinguish between higher orders of life and lower. All living creatures are animals. All are meat.”

He began playing the notes again.

“The man who was my father lasted fifteen years,” Viktor said. “Partly because he was strong, but mostly because my mother wanted him to. He finally died under torture.” He played another note, lower than the other two, and it sounded sour and out of place after I’d become so used to the other two. “If she had stopped sooner, he could have been saved, but ogre healing is not the same as human healing. We did not know he had a weak heart. No one could tell. As strong as he looked on the outside, he was weak on the inside, where nobody could see.”

He stopped playing. His legs folded up beneath him, and his hand fell into view. I thought he must be slumped over, his whole body contracting. Then, he straightened and resumed his methodical, tuneless playing.

“I lost my taste for torture then,” he continued. “It would have been remarked on as I grew into adulthood, but my mother had already arranged for me to go to a human boarding school the next year, and young humans do not torture each other in the same way that ogres do. At least, most do not.”

He played the higher note a few times in a row.

“At school, I learned many things in my lessons, but I learned outside of the classroom as well. I learned about sadomasochism, and dominance as it is practiced by humans… as both a game and a lifestyle,” Viktor said. “I learned about safewords.”

Now that he wasn’t talking about torturing people to death, I was starting to become aware of how uncomfortable it was to lie crumpled on the floor, with one arm stuck beneath me.

“I never regained my youthful stomach for torture, but I learned a… sort of framework… in which I could function,” the half-ogre said. “I learned something of my father, too, even though he was dead. I had long suspected he gained something from my mother’s attentions, but I had never understood how this could be. Learning of masochistic pleasure brought me comprehension, and a measure of peace.”

He stopped playing again. It was hard to tell from looking at his legs, but it seemed like he drew himself up a bit. The silence seemed reflective. Then, he relaxed a bit and started back up again.

“When I was accepted into the university, I made up my mind not to return to Kilrest until I had a found a masochist to be my willing partner… a receptacle for my darkest impulses, a showpiece to demonstrate my true ogrish nature. When I came here last year and met Steff, I thought she was nothing short of miraculous. She enjoys the sort of treatment my slave will be expected to endure, and her heart will not give out,” Viktor said. “It is half-elven, and far less prone to mortal failings than any human’s. She is weak, but her tiny body is exactly as fragile as it looks. I will not overestimate her and damage her unnecessarily. In addition, she loves inflicting pain as a full-blooded ogre does… and when I would rather not torture, she will happily do it for me.”

He paused and swung around on the stool to face me. His legs were spread out wide. I could see his massive dick hanging down, rock-like and imposing even in its flaccidity. I went tight and loose at the same time. He leaned forward and I moved my eyes up and lifted my head a little so I could see his face. It was grim, expressionless.

The only emotion was in his eyes, which seemed to glow red in the candle light. They were intense, focused.

“I want you to understand that I am very much in love with my Steff,” Viktor said. “I want you to understand that I am very serious about this, so you will trust I am not kidding when I tell you that if you ever hurt her… if you raise a hand against her… I will lose my distaste for the traditional ogre arts. You will come to curse your invulnerability, and then you will die the slowest death ever conceived of by ogre, demon, or man.”

He stared into me as if he could see directly into my soul, whatever that must have looked like, and then he whirled around and began to play.

This time, he played for real.

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3 Responses to “145: The Ogre, Alone”

  1. pedestrian says:

    Viktor reminds me, many years ago when I was an impassioned
    activist of a gang boss I had to deal with for this & that.
    The few times i had to meet with him did leave me wondering if
    I was the dull & boring, plain vanilla heterosexual.

    It could of been interesting if I had ever cared enough or dared enough to explore that submerged part of my libido.

    Current score: 0
  2. Mickey says:

    Typo note: “…not to return to Kilrest until I had a found a masochist…” should be “…not to return to Kilrest until I had found a masochist…”

    I feel…kind of horrified by Viktor, and kind of sad for him.

    Current score: 1
  3. Anon says:

    I remember thinking before this chapter that I was going to hate Victor.

    Is he evil? Yeah, probably. But less so than the culture which produced him. And that just might be the best thing a person can be; not inherently “perfect”, not middle of the road in a mostly decent culture, but somebody who has through their own choices and personal growth become better than they were, making things better within their own generation.

    On top of that, everything he does is purposeful. No mindless cruelty, no casual and pointless sadism, but rather very deliberate and calculated acts through which he efficiently achieves his motives. He’s not nice, he’s not good, he’s not your standard ‘affably evil’… but he’s efficient, he’s clean, he’s totally controlled, and that comes with its own sort of classiness. For some reason the mental image I get of him is less of a naked, powerful brute, and more of a man in a huge perfectly tailored suit coldly staring down monsters thrice his size.

    And in the end, the strongest of those motives seems to be a genuine and powerful love for Steff. Can’t fault that.

    Current score: 10