First aside:

Dear Reader, somewhere there is a magical realm populated by an immortal race, the Wom. When they grow tired of life, they sleep for years where they dream of an existence in a world very much like our own, a life-dream. In those dreams they fight and discover and struggle and love and fret about the day that the dream ends.

<>--+-

“Hello?” Dulce called up to the sturdy metal bars more than three meters above her, where, beyond, the morning light had begun to shine in the ground floor room she shared with her lover, Echo. “Hello? Is there someone there? Lahara?”

She thought that she had heard the door to the house open and close. She waited for a face to appear in the circle of light far above.

There was not enough room at the bottom of the oubliette for Dulce to stretch her legs without standing up. She had to sleep in a fetal position with the cool, stone, dark walls pressing around her naked body.

She had been in the hole for over a month before Lahara first arrived. Echo, who tended to dominate Dulce in all aspects of her life, had bidden her to descend into the hole fifty (or so) days ago. “Collateral for a job, babe,” Echo had explained.

Echo and she had made passionate love that last night. In the morning after sharing a bath, Echo forbade Dulce to don any clothing. She led her pet lover down to the ground floor where the top rungs of a ladder rose above the opening of the dark, deep hole.

“H-how long, Mistress?” Dulce asked, trembling a little as she realized that her Mistress required her to descend.

“Hard time, I’m afraid, my love,” Echo responded, taking Dulce’s hand. She quickly added, “But, it will be so worth it!” Echo’s eyes widened with thoughts of the possibility. “No longer will I be beholden to that evil witch! We can move to the coast! We’ll have money and power. Just like we have always dreamed.”

“What…” Dulce said with a whisper, “what are you going to do?”

“I can’t tell you, babe,” Echo responded. “The less you know, the better. For your own safety. In case things go sidewards.”

“But, why?” Dulce said, looking over the edge of the round hole, letting her eyes follow the rails of the ladder until they vanished into the darkness. She gripped Echo’s hand a little tighter - vertigo made her feel a little off balance like she might fall into the narrow hole.

“Collateral for a job, babe,” Echo pulled Dulce back from the edge of the oubliette and wrapped her arms around her submissive’s trembling, naked body. “It’s the deal that I made with my… uh… business partner. She has to be able to trust me, because I will be holding the goods for a while. She has to know that I will not just disappear with all the… the, uh… loot. She is making me use the thing that I love more than anything else in the world - the PERSON I love more than anything else - to gain her trust. You, my love. You.”

Dulce smiled and some of the tension seemed to dissipate from her shoulders. “Will you make enough to start your own portal business like you always wanted?” she asked.

“Babe, I will, but I probably won’t even need to start a business after this haul,” Echo stated.

Echo was a witch who had a talent of making portals - intradimensional passageways between two distant locations. The development of such a talent was generally frowned upon. Few people trusted portal makers, because they often tended to be thieves.

Acquiring the training to create and maintain a stable portal which led to a specific location for a worthwhile amount of time was an extremely difficult thing to do. Often, a farm full of unfortunate slaves had to be expended in order for a portal witch to hone her skills. The apprentice would build the portal and the poor slave would be pushed through. Sometimes the portal would dissolve before the slave could be retrieved, stranding the slave is some unknown distant place - perhaps the top of a snowy peak, perhaps half embedded in a tree or a stone wall.

Echo had been taken in by the notorious Mistress Axial - a powerful witch and particularly ruthless individual. Axial helped Echo develop her portal skills, but now she expected a repayment on her investment. Echo had been searching for a way to escape Axial’s influence for years.

“After this job, my love, it will just be me and you with a wide open future laying down before us,” Echo said as pulled Dulce’s cheek to her chest, gently stroking her hair. “Now, love, climb down the ladder.”

Dulce looked at the hole for a second, then turned her head back. “We could make love again real quickly. I will make you feel really good. Before you have to go.”

“I have to leave now, babe. Get in the hole.”

Dulce frowned, but still tried to stall. “If I resisted, would you paddle me?” She shook her hips back and forth trying to entice Echo with her curves.

“Babe…” Echo cupped Dulce’s cheeks in her palms. She kissed Dulce passionately on the lips. “Go now, slave!”

Dulce frowned and turned to the hole. She reached back and grabbed the bottom of Echo’s shirt for a moment. “I’m scared,” she whispered, but then stepped onto the ladder.

Slowly, Dulce climbed down into the darkness. Every once in a while she would stop and look up at her lover and whimper. “You’re so brave, my love,” Echo would say and Dulce continued down.

With every step of her descent, Dulce could feel her world getting smaller. Quickly, she was engulfed in shadow, and soon after the cold stones of the oubliette muffled the sounds of the world above. Soon, all she heard was the pad of her bare feet on the rungs of the ladder and the sound of her breathing, quickened by a certain anxiety.

Finally, she stepped from the bottom rung onto the smooth stone at the bottom of the hole. Looking up the ladder towards Echo’s distant face made her feel dizzy and she stretched out her arms, easily able to bridge the diameter of her temporary home. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light which filtered its way so deep down, she noticed a small ledge lined with dried blocks of grain. As a divine being, Dulce did not need to eat, but fasting would leave her listless and more apt to slip into a life-dream.

“Okay…” she called up, her voice cracking a little. “I’m at the bottom.”

“Help push the ladder up,” Echo called back.

Dulce knelt and grabbed the bottom rung, lifting as Echo pulled from above. Soon she was on her tiptoes and she released the ladder and watched it slowly scrape up the side of the hole. When Echo finally lifted the ladder clear from the hole, all that remained for Dulce was a distant circle of light. She heard the banging of the ladder being set aside. Then Echo’s face appeared in the circle once more.

“I love you!” Echo called down.

“Come back quickly,” Dulce yelled back.

“A month, babe. Not much more. A month.”

“I love you!” Dulce yelled up.

A heavy grinding sound echoed down the hole as the lid was rolled into position. Dulce’s lover dropped the lid into its slot with a heavy bang. Now the circle of light was decorated by an array of dark lines - each created by a sturdy metal bar.

There was a scraping sound - metal on metal. Echo was grunting from the effort. It was made by a heavy bar through a series of welded tubes. Then bolts slid into place, pushed home by a series of strong springs. And finally the distant sound of locks being engaged.

If Dulce could fly, it no longer would do her any good. She leaned back until she bumped her back against the cool smooth, stone wall. She slowly slid down until her naked butt settled on the floor with her knees pressed up against her chest and her feet wedged against the opposite wall.

“Good bye,” Echo said, and that was the last time Dulce had seen or heard from her.

<>--+-

On the first day in the oubliette, Dulce tried to carve a mark in the stone with her fingernail, but fifteen minutes of scratching left no mark at all. The wall was made of the same stone common to all structures in the town where Dulce lived - a particularly hard stone washed down from the mountains above, heavy with minerals to make it resistant to scratching or chipping or breaking.

In the end, she decided that she should not track the time anyways. This would be her home for as long as it was and no shorter. This thought made her smile and she felt a strange sense of freedom. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. She had been stored for safekeeping by her lover - a precious jewel.

The only thing to track the time was the circle of light far above. She played games with herself to confuse her mind exactly how many times the circle had darkened with the setting of the sun. She slept whenever she felt like it and embraced an utter lack of any schedule.



She made a little song to celebrate her time in the oubliette: Calendars blur, the seasons shift. Days like leaves, they spin and drift. Don't try to count, it's not your task. Don’t hold the moments, let them pass.

“Hmm… Task / pass? Is that the best word?”

She continued to hum her tune.

There was a little hole in the center of the bottom of the oubliette. The hole was too narrow for her fist to fit, but if she kept her fingers straight she could squeeze her arm down to a swift underground stream below with cool water. When she pulled her hand out she could lick the water from her fingers. Any waste she dropped into the hole was quickly washed away.

Sometimes the circle overhead was light; sometimes it was dark. But the dark stripes - the bars - they were always there.

<>--+-

The supply of grain was depleted. Dulce’s skin was gritty. She dipped her hand into the water and rubbed the cool moisture across her face. She rubbed the cool moisture between her legs.

“When there is no time, it’s never too late to curl on the floor and masturbate.”

Light, dark, light, dark, tick, tock. The hands stand frozen, once so quick. No rhythmic tick, no steady tock. Silent gears, a timepiece lost, A heart once beating, no ticks no…?

Dulce tried to enumerate all the positions she could arrange her body. Fetal position. Standing up. “My hands!” She stood and bent over pressing her hands to the floor. She tried to kick her legs up to do a handstand, but her heels collided with the walls of her tiny home and her arms gave away until she collapsed onto her back with her legs sticking up in the air flailing above her. She then laughed and laughed.

Once she calmed down she noticed, bent as she was, how close her sex was to her face. “Hello, pussy!” And laying like that she began to rub.

“Hello?”

Dulce looked up to the light. Between her legs, past her sex, a face was looking back down at her.

“Hello? Is someone down there?” the woman called.

Dulce scrambled around in her hole to reorient herself in a more modest position.

“I can hear you, but it’s too dark,” the woman called.

“Heh… (ahem) hello!” Dulce responded finally. “Are you… Is Echo…”

“I’m Lehara!” the woman called down. “I assume you’re Dulce.”

Dulce’s heart was pounding. “Yes!” she cried. Tears began to spill from her eyes and a great smile blossomed across her face. “Everything went well? Is Echo coming soon?”

“So far,” Lehana called out. “Echo should be here in a couple of hours. Has there been another woman? Did another woman end up here?”

“N… No! I don’t think so. But, I’ve been down here the whole time…” Dulce looked around her small home. “Uh… obviously…”

“Yeah! I see.”

“Can you lower the ladder? Can you let me out?” Dulce asked, hopefully.

“Um… No!” Lahara called down. “I assume Echo has the key to this grill. We have to wait for her. She should be here in an hour or two.”

“Great!” Dulce said. Suddenly, Time was a thing again and it was crawling. Her body buzzed with anticipation of seeing her lover again.

Time passed though. The light in the circle above her was starting to fade. Another night was descending upon her home. “Hello, Lahara? Anything yet?”

After a moment the face appeared above her again. “No! Not yet!” There was a hint of annoyance in the woman’s voice - some kind of anxiety. Something was wrong. “She should be here now! Any minute!”

Night fell and slowly crawled by.

“Where the fuck is your girlfriend?!” Lahara called down. “I thought she was your lover?”

“She is! She is!”

“Well, where the fuck is she? She better not be screwing me over. Screwing us over!”

“No! No! She wouldn’t!” Dulce screamed back up the hole. “Should she be back already? If you get me out of here, maybe I can help find her. Maybe something went wrong. I can go check with Mistress Axial!”

“Oh, fuck you!” Lahara yelled down into the hole. “Axial is the bitch that did this to me!”

“What?” Dulce said, suddenly worried that she was making things worse. “I… I’ve been in the hole for a long time… I don’t know anything…”

Lahara’s silhouette passed through the circle of light back and forth, back and forth. She was pacing.

“Look!” Dulce tried to explain. “Echo and I have been together for a long time. I know her. She wouldn’t… well… she wouldn’t screw people over that she made a deal with…”

There was no answer.

“Hello? What did… what did Axial do to you?” Dulce decided that she needed to develop some kind of rapport with the woman.

Lahara stopped pacing and stared down into the hole. “When they brought me to Mistress Axial’s dungeon, she and Echo and some other bitch locked this chastity belt on me. Then suddenly they pulled Briggs out of a box.”

“What are Briggs?” Dulce interrupted.

“Briggs! My girlfriend! My lover!” Lahara yelled down. “That’s her name! Briggs!”

“Oh, okay,” Dulce said.

“They bound the key to Briggs. The key to this chastity belt. Then Echo pushed Briggs through a portal. They said that the other end was thousands of miles away. Somewhere… Some unknown where… They said that we would have to find each other for me to get the chastity belt off.”

“I don’t understand. Echo did that?” Dulce asked.

“Echo was supposed to secretly fix the portal to send Briggs here,” Lahara said. “But she’s not here! How am I supposed to get this fucking chastity belt off without the key. And more importantly where the fuck is my girlfriend?”

“Oh!” Dulce said. “Something must have gone wrong… Give Echo some time…”

“I’ll fucking say that something has gone wrong!” Lahara screamed. “Your bitch of a girlfriend has screwed me over and run off with the Bag.”

“The bag?” Dulce asked. Lahara seemed to be getting more and more angry. Dulce had to calm her down. Give time for Echo to show up…

“Do you know what this lever does?” Lahara yelled down.

Dulce’s blood turned cold. She began to tremble. “N… No! No! Please! Don’t pull that lever! Please!” Tears began to fall from Dulce’s eyes.

“That’s what Echo said to do in this situation,” Lahara said. “I asked for collateral. She said that she would lock you in the oubliette. I said I needed something more. Something that would really hurt her if she screwed me over. She said to pull the lever.”

“Please! Don’t!” Dulce cried. She looked up the smooth walls of the oubliette frantically looking for a way to climb out and somehow slip through the metal bars at the top. She did this knowing quite well that there was no escape. “Don’t pull the lever! Please! Echo wouldn’t want that! Give her some time! She wouldn’t do that to me!”

Dulce could hear Lahara cursing loudly up above her. There was a crash of some kind like she was angrily throwing things around.

“Please!”

After a while, Lahara’s face appeared in the light. “I’ll give her a week. Then I’ve got to leave and go look for Briggs.”

“Thank you! Thank you! She’ll show up! Believe me! I promise!” Dulce cried, as she slowly collapsed back to the bottom of her hole.

<>--+-

Dulce could no longer trick her brain into ignoring the passage of time. Every second that dragged past felt like an eternity. Where was Echo? Was she in trouble? Would Echo really allow Lahara to pull the lever? No way! They had been lovers for years! Dulce knew Echo! Something was wrong!

Three days passed. Still, there was no Briggs and no Echo.

“Do you know what is going to happen when I pull the lever?” Lahara asked as the evening began to fall.

“Yes! Please don’t! I can help you look for Echo and your girlfriend!” Dulce said. “Help me get out of here and I can help you!”

Lahara’s silhouette shuffled around through the circle of dimming light. There was a loud clanging sound of metal on metal. “Sorry. It would take an army to break this lock.”

“Find a blacksmith. I know one. She’s a friend. I can help you!” Dulce cried. “I’m a loyal submissive. Look what I sacrificed for Echo. I’m a great lover! I can make you feel good. I could be your slave. I like being spanked!”

“I’m still stuck in a chastity belt. Besides, I have a girlfriend,” Lahara yelled down.

“Ohhh,” Dulce quailed.

Dulce tried to engage Lahara in conversation over the next few days. She talked about her relationship with Echo. She asked about Lahara’s home town. She talked about the time she won the grand prize at the town’s Foreplay Festival with a first place award in tongue skills and a third in dancing and storytelling.

“All the buildings in this town look similar. They seem to use the same building materials,” Lahara commented on the seventh day.

Dulce gulped. “Yeah… we are famous, in this town, for the strength and hardness of the clay that washes down the mountains here.”

“I’ve heard of it!” Lahara said. “The Three Crows River silt.”

“Mmmm hmm…” Dulce said dejectedly.

“It’s been seven days,” Lahara said. “I like you, but you know I’m going to have to pull the lever.”

“But… no… You don’t need to…” Dulce wept. “Maybe another week… Or, maybe you can just leave me here in the oubliette… It’s not like I’m going anywhere!”

“No,” Lahara said softly. “I have to go through with the agreement. I can’t just sit here and wait any longer. I have to find Briggs. I have to pull the lever. Sorry.”

Dulce looked up and saw Lahara’s shadow pass across the circle of light and the dark stripes of the bars of the oubliette’s lid. “No! Please!”

There was a thumping sound from up above. “There! I did it,” Lahara said.

Dulce held her breath waiting. Nothing happened for a few moments. Then the floor seemed to shake. The air in the oubliette began to stir. A breeze began to flow from the small hole in the floor. Dulce stood up and pressed her back against the wall. There was a solid, deep boom then a gurgling sound bubbling up from the small hole.

Suddenly a thick brown spray of muddy silt shot up from the hole higher than Dulce’s head, splattering her as it rained down. After the initial burst, the fountain of silt settled down a bit so it only bubbled up to about Dulce’s thigh. The silt quickly filled in the bottom of the oubliette around Dulce’s feet and ankles - the level was climbing up her calves.

“Oh fuck!” Dulce screamed and began clawing at the walls around her trying to escape.

By the time the level of the silt was at her waist, Dulce realized that she could no longer feel the solid floor beneath her feet. Her body was buoyant and the silt was lifting her up towards the opening of her oubliette.

She kicked with her legs, but the silt was so heavy that, already, she could barely move them. She hadn’t eaten for several days, so she did not have the energy to fight for long. The silt was smooth and soft and pressed firmly against her skin.

“Turn it off!” she screamed.

The silt washed up under her breasts. She had been holding her arms up above her head, but now she tried to use them to push down. The bars of the oubliette’s lid were getting closer and closer.

Dulce pressed down with her arms in an attempt to lunge faster toward the lid. Her arms disappeared beneath the rising, wet, muddy silt and she no longer had the strength to pull them back up.

When the silt was up to her neck, she tilted her head back. The bars across the top of the oubliette were only a few feet above her.

“Mercy!” Dulce screamed. “I’ll tell you everything. I’ll tell you what Echo is doing with the loot! Please! Just reset the lever! We have the key to your chastity belt!”

There was a loud thump, then, after a few wet bubbles popped around Dulce’s face, everything was quiet. Dulce struggled to move, but made no headway at all.

Lahara appeared above her. They were able to see each other clearly for the first time.

“Please!” Dulce said. “Help me out of here and I can show you.”

“Tell me!” Lahara said.

“The desk upstairs… the top drawer… there is a false bottom… the key is there. Plans written down…”

Lahara frowned at Dulce. “We’ll see.” Then she left to go investigate the upstairs office.

Dulce couldn’t move at all. Still since she was so much closer to the entrance of the oubliette she could see so much more of the world than she had for the past month. She felt the light touching her face!

There was a crash of wood upstairs. Lahara was probably tearing the desk apart.

Dulce had lied. There was no key. No plans. There wasn’t even a false bottom in the drawer. Lahara was probably going to be pissed.

Dulce was surprised at how calm she felt. The silt was warm and soft. It was like a loving embrace. She was swaddled - a full body hug. She realized that she WAS being hugged by her true mother - the one mother - Mother Earth.

Dulce heard footsteps on the floor in the room. She could only barely turn her head. The silt was pressing against her cheeks. Lahara appeared above her again, but she didn’t look mad at all.

“I had to try,” Dulce said calmly, knowing that denying her lie was ridiculous.

“I know,” Lahara said.

“And it’s given me a moment to prepare, I guess,” Dulce said.

Lahara stood silent for a moment. “Well… at least Echo will know where to find you…”

Dulce laughed and a few tears squeezed out her eyes.”Yeah…”

“Maybe she’s just run into a minor roadblock and she’ll get here within the next week or two,” Lahara said. “She’ll be able to chip you out before you succumb to a life-dream.”

“Yeah,” Dulce smiled. “I think so.”

“...And then you and Echo can come to find me,” Lahara said. “I’ll leave a trail.”

“We will. I promise,” Dulce said.

“Um… I guess I’ve got to get going…” Lahara sighed. “I… I found this attached on the underside of that desk upstairs. They look like commitment bands. One for your neck, I suppose, and one for a finger. I think that Echo means for you to have them.”

Dulce was speechless.

“Well… I think that I will hold onto the collar… I’ll return it when you and Echo track me down,” Lahara said as she slipped the collar in a bag across her shoulder. “But, this ring… I think that you should keep hold of this.” Dulce struggled unsuccessfully to pull an arm from the muck to take the ring. Still, Lahara leant down towards Dulce’s face. “Open up.”

Dulce obediently opened her mouth and Lahara dropped the ring on her tongue.

“Good-bye.”

Lahara stepped over to the lever and pushed it back to the “open” position. Shortly, large bubbles of silt began to pop around Dulce’s face. Liquid began to fill her ears. She shut her mouth and eyes as the silt began to slip up around her face. Behind her eyelids the light of the room slowly faded as the height of the silt expanded further and further over her head. She flipped the ring around in her mouth until she was able to slide her tongue through the middle, then she opened her lips a little and welcomed the silt as it forced its way into her mouth and to the back of her throat joining the slit sliding in through her nose.

“It’s just a mental trick,” she thought to herself. “I just need to make my mind forget about the passage of time. Then Echo will arrive to save me. I’ll make a song… In laughter's thrall, the clock ticks slow. Forgotten hands on faces blurred. We chase the sun, let moments flow. Forever young, in joy unheard.”

Final aside:

Dear noble reader, if you are, like me, a mere mortal, perhaps you too felt a bit claustrophobic at the end of this tale. The inability to breathe fills me with an utter and very physical horror and the thought is particularly distasteful. Please remember that Dulce is divine and immortal so her relationship to breathing is much different. She will be perfectly fine buried as she is and for however long she remains buried.

I can only report the research I have conducted to relate this story. I cannot know what the future holds for Dulce. I assume Lahara reset the lever to the “closed” position so that fresh silt no longer bubbled up from the portal that Echo had implanted at the bottom of the oubliette. The silt from the Three Crows River dries quickly and creates a hard, solid brick. Chipping Dulce out would take a sculptor some amount of muscle work.

And what of Dulce? Well, she seems determined and hopeful that Echo would arrive soon. Still, with enough time, Dulce will slip into a life-dream. In that dream she would be born as a mortal woman and live in a universe much like our own. Perhaps she will be a princess or maybe a prostitute or maybe both at the same time. The life-dream will run its course and eventually Dulce would reawaken. If she is still encased in a block of stone, she will probably quickly drop into another life-dream. Perhaps of a strong woman with an unlucky birthplace, forced by cruel gangs to flee for her life, north to a more welcoming land, fording rivers and razor wire. We must all admire her commitment to survive and provide a better life for her children.

What ever happened to Echo? If she were never to return to dig Dulce free, what would become of our immobile heroine? Time is an unknowable thing for mortals like us. We cannot conceive of the forces that work on a geologic time scale. Perhaps Dulce’s town falls into disrepair and the inhabitants abandon the place. Rain and wind and vine eventually pull the buildings apart, twisting and cracking the stone.  Maybe one day a million years on, Dulce will awaken half exposed in the warm sunshine of a beautiful day, smiling as she spits the token of love from her mouth into the palm of her hand.

Once again, this is all conjecture. There are so many questions left to answer. What was Echo trying to steal? What happened to Echo? What happened to Lahara’s girlfriend, Briggs? My research will carry on…

Let me know if you, dear reader, find any information regarding this event! Any and all sources are appreciated.