And then -

What is the point of having an entire harem of bed-slaves if you keep running out?

The caravan's late, again. Trouble on the road, again. One wonders what the point of guarding the caravans is if they're just going to get robbed anyway. Well, whatever, there are plenty of humans in the palace. He stalks through the back halls looking for a pretty one. Not too valuable, not anyone who'll leave the whole palace worse off if they disappear into his bedchamber and don't come out again, but he doesn't care if they need to replace a cook or a musician or a fighter or, say, a scribe. Like that one with the gorgeous curly black hair, sitting by the cellar stair with a lamp and a lap-desk.

"You, girl," he says. "Stand up and look at me."

...fuck.

She recognizes the voice. You can't not recognize the voice. He sounds the way cats look, all deadly grace.

It takes her a trembling moment to cap her pen and set aside her desk and stand. He said to look at him; she dares to glance at his face. All elves are beautiful, at least by elven standards, but the Emperor is by far the prettiest. Pity he's so fucking terrifying, really.

He steps closer, takes hold of her chin, turns her face a little more into the light. Oh, yes, she'll do.

"What's your name?"

...yeah she's doomed.

"Niamira," she whispers, barely able to breathe under the weight of her fear. He is going to haul her off to his bedchamber and she's going to come out in pieces, she's seen what they cart away when he's done with one of his girls, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Ooh. Maybe he should do this more often. By the time he sees the contents of his harem, the fear is never this fresh.

"If I tell you to follow me," he says, "are you going to annoy me by trying to run instead?"

His eyes are amazing. Big beautiful elven eyes, blue-grey at the edges fading to blue-green and then green-gold and then finally gold in a central ring around the pupil. It's hard to look away from those eyes.

She should not be dwelling on how attractive he is when he's about to drag her off and rape her to death and the only choice she gets is whether to meekly follow him to her doom or try to flee and invite him to make it worse somehow in retaliation.

...but he is very attractive, and there is undeniably a part of her that wants him to drag her off and rape her, maybe not to death, but at least to serious injury. She wants to feel his hands around her neck. She wants him to hold her down and fuck her, violently, mercilessly, while she struggles and cries. She wants -

- and what, really, is the point of being sensible about it, when the best she can possibly hope for is that maybe he'll keep her around for a while before he inevitably gets tired of her and kills her in some horrible agonizing way? If she's suddenly desperate for the Emperor to rape her then fine, she's suddenly desperate for the Emperor to rape her, good for her, at least she'll get something out of it when he does. Or maybe he'll be offended by her eagerness and he'll decide to leave her alone, oh no, how terrible? Or maybe he'll be offended by her eagerness and he'll carry her off to one of his torture chambers and chain her down and violate her with a branding iron, and wow there's a thought she never expected to enjoy, she has got it bad -

She looks up at him with wide wet eyes and says breathlessly, "Please, my lord, I want to suck your cock."

He laughs, surprised. He wasn't expecting that, but hey, it's not like it won't solve his problem.

"All right," he says, and he grabs a fistful of her hair and shoves her down on her knees and gives her what she wants.

She has only a moment to fruitlessly worry that maybe she won't like the reality of imperial rape as much as she liked the idea.

In a sense that's true; she likes it more.

She clutches at the embroidered trim of his open silk overrobe, choking, gasping, moaning. She feels so helpless and it's so good, who cares if she's going to die, the Emperor wants her and there's no surviving that so she might as well enjoy the ride. There are tears running down her face and she mostly can't breathe and she loves every awful glorious second of it.

This is not remotely the first time he's made a girl choke on his cock but it's definitely the first time the girl has enjoyed it this much.

He kind of likes it.

He fucks her mouth until he's satisfied, and then he lifts her up by her hair until her feet dangle several inches above the ground, and he whispers in her ear, "I'm going to remember you."

She whimpers.

He drops her and walks away.

She crumples on the floor in a heap, coughing weakly, and spends several minutes fighting the urge to run after him. She survived this round; now is not the time to get stupid.

He said he would remember her. If she's incredibly lucky, maybe he won't. But she does not think she is that lucky.

Next time he could kill her. He knows her name; he can look her up anytime he likes, find out where she sleeps, collect her at his leisure. If she runs, he will definitely torture her to death. She does not want to die, and she does not want to bet on her ability to enjoy being tortured.

Time to find an even more obscure corner of the palace to do her work in. Making it slightly more inconvenient to find her could mean the difference between life and death. And she does not enjoy the thought of him raping her in public, which he would certainly do if he happened to find her working at one of the desks in the scribes' room. If he bent her over her desk and told her to beg for his cock, she'd do it, and she'd enjoy it, and she'd be horribly humiliated to have other people watching at the time.

The caravan finally arrives, and he takes his pick of the girls, and he can clearly see his harem overseer biting back a comment about how maybe this time he should try not to use them all up inside a week.

It's not like he kills them every time. He didn't kill that scribe.

He thinks of her often over the next few days. Niamira. Pretty name, pretty mouth. She was so deliciously terrified, but she wanted him anyway. It was nice. Different. If he kills that one he's not likely to find a replacement anytime soon.

Well, killing them isn't strictly necessary...

He practices healing. Once he slips and loses the girl anyway, but only once. He's the most powerful mage in the world, and healing is not that hard.

A week after he first saw her, he goes looking for the scribe again.

The scribe has taken her lamp and lap-desk to one of the eastern towers, the ones that haven't been used in a few thousand years because people are superstitious about the beautiful view of the desert. The light coming in the window is bright enough that she barely needs the lamp. She's almost convinced that the Emperor has forgotten about her.

He ascends the turning stair in perfect elven silence, so the first she hears of him is when he says, "I was starting to think you'd run off."

Fuck.

"N-no, my lord," she says, looking up. "I - I like the quiet."

"And the view?"

He crosses the room to stand by the window. The desert is beautiful.

"Dragons are real, you know," he says conversationally. "I saw one when I was just a boy. Everyone said it had to be an illusion, but I've never been fooled by glamour in my life." He rests his hand on top of her head, gently stroking her hair with his fingers. "I think I'd like to be a dragon."

What the fuck do you even say to that.

"I think you'd make a lovely one, my lord," is the first thing that comes to mind.

"I think so too."

He closes his fist in her hair.

"Would you still want me?"

She squeezes her eyes shut and whimpers. "Yes -"

"You want me right now, don't you."

He drags her to her feet. Her lap-desk tumbles to the floor; the ink-bottle shatters, spattering everything nearby with drops of ink and engulfing her papers in a slowly expanding black puddle.

"Take off that dress."

"Yes, my lord."

She unties the laces and shrugs out of the sleeves and lets the dress fall to the floor. Now is not the time to complain about ink stains.

He looks at her approvingly for a moment, and then he forms illusory claws that harden into reality just long enough for him to shred her undergarments with them. A few seconds later she's bleeding heavily from shallow scratches and wearing nothing but a few bloodstained shreds, and the blades on the ends of his fingers fade to light and smoke and nothingness.

"Aren't you beautiful," he says. "You look good in red."

Whimper.

He's still holding her up by her hair; he wrenches her head to one side and bites her neck. Blood wells from the marks of his teeth. He licks it away.