At first it was Daring Do.

Sip got his first Daring Do book for his twelfth birthday, and he was hooked immediately. Over the next several months he plowed through the whole series – most of it borrowed from the library – and his every waking thought was of Daring exploring forbidden temples, Daring saving the day, Daring discovering age-old secrets, Daring being captured by the bad guys and tied up . . . Especially Daring being tied up. He found that endlessly fascinating, but didn’t fully understand why.

When Sip was thirteen, his language arts teacher assigned Daring Do and the Rites of the Zebric Sisterhood as class reading, an example of genre fiction. The teacher explained to the class that the reason Daring Do’s wings were bound or bandaged for most of the story was so that earth or unicorn readers could better immerse themselves in it. The point was to remove her wings from consideration.

Sip knew in his bones this was bunk. He was only an earth pony, but he could vividly imagine how it must be to have wings, to fly – and how dreadful it was for Daring to lose that freedom, to function without a capability she was used to taking for granted. It would be as if he was forced to go through an adventure with his hind legs tied. Remove the wings from consideration? No and no! Daring losing her wings was the most important thing about the story.

He didn’t say any of this aloud because the teacher, a pegasus fresh out of the academy, was firmly convinced that because she was the teacher, nothing a mere student said could possibly have value against her. Sip already knew she brooked no corrections or contradictions.

New Daring Do books came out at unbearably long intervals, so Sip expanded his literary horizon towards other books – preferably ones with a plucky heroine who would be captured by henchponies and struggle vainly against her bonds while the villain explained how the rest of her days would be spent in helpless servitude. Sip was getting old enough to recognize innuendo and know that ‘helpless servitude’ would involve a range of things that were not said explicitly on the book’s pages. That didn’t stop him from imagining them.

When Sip was fifteen, an excited rumor among the colts at his school told of a bookstore in a different part of Baltimare that would sell porn to minors. Sip went there together with a gaggle of his friends and found that the rumors were right. They pooled the bits they had and bought three issues of a magazine with pictures of mares baring their behinds to the camera, mares being covered by stallions, and mares doing implausibly obscene things with their mouths and a stallion’s appendage.

The bookstore also had half a shelf with magazines that promised mares who were tied up, some of them wearing blindfolds or bridles. Sip followed his friends in denouncing those as gross, and sick, and abusive – but he made a note of what they cost, and as soon as he had saved up enough from his allowance he was back there, alone, to buy an issue. He told himself it was really not abusive; the mares in the pictures would be models who were paid to appear and set free as soon as the picture was taken. And just because the stories those pictures told were not real didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy them.

He held on to that one for several weeks, until the risk that his parents would find it became unbearable, and he discreetly disposed of it.

When Sip was almost seventeen, he got a part-time job at The Hayburger. Earning his own bits meant he could afford fresh porn more often, though he still couldn’t risk to have it lying around at home. But he also found that work carried its own reward – building burgers might not be the most glamorous of devotions, but it was something he could do with his hooves that brought immediate satisfaction to the ‘guests’, as management insisted on calling the customers. It was an infinitely better way to spend his time than smashing his brain into the brick walls of Algebra or Geography or Communicative Skills. And his bosses liked him; after he graduated from school they happily let him go full time.

His father began dropping unsubtle hints that he ought to start laying some concrete plans for his life, or else move out. He stared at the numbers for some time and concluded he could just about afford a room of his own, in an apartment block not too far from work, and have some bits left over for himself. That was not quite the response his parents had hoped for, but fair’s fair, and they helped him move and assured him that he would always be welcome for dinner if cooking for himself became too bland or too expensive.

Finally going to bed in a household of his own was exciting, a bit scary, and lonelier than he had expected. But the next day he went to the porn shop and bought an issue of Rope Review to keep, the first item in a real stash.

By the time he turned eighteen, that stash had already grown to a respectable size.

“Sip, can I talk to you for a moment?”

Sip didn’t like the sound of that. He had just worked through a slow morning shift with Beating Heart, and anything she wanted to bring up with him that she couldn’t have said while waiting for customers must mean he was in trouble. She rarely pulled rank with him, but she was the shift supervisor after all.

“I just clocked out,” he said, stalling.

“It’s not for work. Just wait a moment while I finish up, alright?”

He waited while she hung up her uniform and filed their balancing slip. With most of the fillies he worked with, getting invited to a not-for-work talk might have gotten his hopes up, but Beating was openly dating an ever-shifting constellation of marefriends and seemed to be entirely uninterested in stallions. Perhaps that was why he felt so comfortable with her; he had nothing to mess up, nothing to fail at.

He followed her out the back door, and she turned left, along the path by the river. There were not many ponies around at this time of the day.

“So, um, Sip . . .” she started, not at all acting like the brash, confident unicorn he used to joke around with on the job. “You know I’m a fillyfooler, right?”

“It’s hard to miss,” he agreed cautiously.

“So what I’m going to tell you now is definitely not me coming on to you, okay?”

Curiouser and curiouser. “Okay.”

“Okay. Do the letters B, D, S, M mean anything to you?”

He knew BDSM was the general heading of the kind of porn he liked, but surely that wouldn’t be the meaning Beating Heart was talking about. “Not in particular,” he lied.

She sighed. “Well, that would have been easier.” She picked a piece of paper out of her bag and held it out towards him. “What do you get out of this picture?”

He took it. It was a glossy photograph of an earth mare lying on a stone floor, trussed up with rope and looking fearfully at the camera with the one of her eyes that wasn’t half-closed and bruised. It was clear from the welts and scratches on her face and forebody that she had taken quite a beating. The picture wasn’t explicit in the way his porn was, but he could see from the way the mare lay that anyone who looked at her from a few steps further to the right would be getting quite an eyeful.

“Umm . . . it’s a m–, a pony who has been assaulted somehow. Where are you going with that?”

“Right,” said Beating with a teasing smile. “And I suppose it’s a total coincidence that you suddenly need to go pee?”

Of course that picture had made his wang come out. Damn damn damn. Beating Heart usually had tact enough not to call out such a mishap; it happened to all stallions from time to time. What was with her? “Now listen –”

“This is Fluffy, one of my marefriends,” she said, pointing to the picture.

He fought between excitement that the mare in the picture was somepony he almost knew in reality, and horror that something like that had happened to somepony he almost knew. “Who did that to her?” he croaked.

“I did,” she said plainly. “Don’t worry, she likes it that way. Said after this session it was the best sex she’d had in moons.” She took the photo back from him, sliding it into her saddlebag.

He could only stand there, gaping like a guppy.

“The thing is, we have this kind of club, dedicated to doing that kind of things. Not just clobbering, of course, but also plain old bondage, spanking, slave training, anything you can imagine. But always, and strictly, only to ponies who want to have it done to them. We’re very big on that.

“And now I’m kinda supposed to invite you to join . . .”

“Me?” His head swam. “Why do you think I’d be interested in that?”

She pointed silently at a point beneath his barrel, where the hardest boner he had ever sported in public had grown during her explanation.

“Yes, but – I mean, I probably can’t really deny it sounds kinda hot, but how did you already know I was, you know –”

“Magic,” she said, with finality. “And that’s all you’re gonna get. That’s all they tell me.”

She often teased him about how, being an earth pony, he would never understand the real workings of the world. But somehow it didn’t sound like she was teasing now.

“So, are you in? I can set you up with a visitor’s tour whenever you’d like.”

“Well, I dunno,” he said, scraping uneasily at the dirt with a forehoof. It did sound somewhat exciting, alright. But it also sounded fundamentally unbelievable. And even if it was right, if he joined would he be expected to do to somepony what Beating said she had done to the mare in her picture? Or – even worse – would they expect him to have it done to him? “It sounds a bit overwhelming, you know. Can I think about it?”

She let out a small sigh. “Of course. If you decide you want in, just tell me. But I sure as sunrise ain’t gonna bring this up with you again if you don’t, because it turns out I feel a lot less comfortable talking about this here than I am when I’m at the Society and wearing a mask. Okay?”

“Okay,” he repeated.

“I also have to tell you, then, that if you don’t choose to join now, the Society will never bother you again. But if you change your mind later and want to contact us, there’s a way to do that. But you get only this one chance to memorize it, so listen carefully. You know Love Song, the author, right?”

He nodded, recognizing Love Song as a prolific author of steamy, if a bit repetitive, BDSM romances.

“Buy any one of her books, cut page 69 out from it with scissors, and burn that page, but only that page. That sends some kind of magical signal, and then somepony will be sent out to contact you. Got that?”

“Think so. Page 69, huh?”

She shrugged. “Not my idea. But at least it’s memorable, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“Good. Now, I’ll give you some time to think.” She started walking away, the way they had come, but after a few steps she turned halfway back for a few last words. “Oh, and sorry for the picture trick. It seemed like a cool idea when I planned it.”

She turned around again and went away.

Sip thought about that for a day, and then for another day and a week and more weeks. Eventually he wasn’t even sure if the conversation had actually taken place or he had imagined it all.

True to her word, Beating Heart never brought up the subject again. They stayed friendly and professional, with just a slight tinge of awkwardness to their banter on slow mornings, which was probably all in his head anyway. Sometimes when Beating was met by one of her marefriends at the end of her shift, touching muzzles and hugging, he wondered whether they were going somewhere where the marefriend would be tied up and beaten and it would be the best sex she had in moons.

When spring came, Beating quit her job at Hayburger and moved to Manehattan to work as a photographer’s assistant. Sip got a new supervisor, and got a lot of masturbation done to the idea that there was a secret club of ponies doing BDSM things in real life, one he could have joined if he had wanted to. He sold burgers. He turned nineteen.

One day when he was just finishing a forgettable Love Song novel, he remembered the weird ritual Beating had told him about. It couldn’t hurt to try, could it?

He got out a pair of scissors and carefully cut out page 69 of the book, crumbled it into a ball and set it on fire on a dinner plate. When it had burned into little black flakes, he felt slightly silly about ruining the book for this strange daydream.

But the thought that it just might work kept him occupied for most of the night. After all, magic was real.

Two days later, a middle-aged unicorn stallion knocked on his door.

“Are you Silent Pride?” the stranger asked.

“Um, yes.” It had been years since anypony had called Sip by his full name. That was for tax forms and other paperwork. Come to think of it, this pony did look a bit like Sip’s idea of a tax accountant, down to wearing a little grey mustache and a knitted vest with a cream and maroon diamond pattern.

“Glad to meet you; my name is Pencil Note. I understand you may wish to join the Clocktower Society?”

“Join the what?”

Pencil Note raised his eyebrows. “Am I in the wrong place? You have recently, hmm, defaced a Love Song book, haven’t you?”

“Um – y-you’re real?” Sip stammered. He had fantasized about Beating Heart’s BDSM club being real, but never in the form of a pony like this. “Better come inside.” He could not talk about this out in the hallway where anypony might come across them.

“Of course we are,” chuckled the visitor as Sip showed him in.

“And this society, I was told it’s for . . .?”

“For the promotion and protection of sexual dominance, discipline, punishment, and devotion, as practiced strictly between mutually consenting adults,” said the older pony, as if he was laying out a plan for maintaining the city’s water supply.

“Wow.” Sip sat down on his bed. “I’m sorry, I kinda assumed it was just a joke.”

“That’s not uncommon.” Pencil Note smiled knowingly. “We are a secret society after all. But given that we’re real, do you still want to pursue membership?”

He wanted to ask for time to think about it, but that was what he’d told Beating Heart, and now he was supposed to have thought about it already. “Uh . . . what exactly would I be agreeing to?”

“At first, just to come on a tour of the society. All, or most, of your questions can hopefully be answered there. But it will be easier after you see a bit for yourself.”

“And, um, during this tour, am I supposed to –”

“You can’t participate in anything during the tour – you don’t know the safety rules yet. There will be breaks for taking care of personal matters, though, if you need them.” The accountantish pony winked. “Many do.”

Sip sighed. “Okay. What do I do?”

Pencil Note pulled out a piece of paper. “First of all, you need to sign this non-disclosure agreement. It’s legally binding, of course, but we’ll give you better reasons to keep secrecy later.”

The tour was all a blur to him. Pencil Note met him at Civic Square and led him down a side street and through an unmarked door, behind which a magic portal – or so he claimed – transported them to the Society’s main facility at an undisclosed place in Equestria. Certainly the forest clearing where they emerged could not be anywhere near Baltimare; there were mountains rising behind the trees. The big mansion-like building at the other side of the clearing was guarded by bouncers dressed up as Royal Guards, who let them through after Pencil Note flashed an access badge.

Inside, Sip joined a small group of other inductees on a guided tour. The mansion, it turned out, was just the entrance to a vast underground complex of play rooms, lounges, meeting halls, workshops, plazas, boulevards . . . more of a not-so-small city than a mere ‘society’ or ‘club’, Sip thought. The sheer scale of the place was overwhelming, and seemingly everywhere there were mares in cages, mares in chains, mares wearing gags, blindfolds, tack, prostrating themselves before stallions or other mares, being flogged, spanked, fucked forwards and backwards, or just paraded about –

“Why are they all mares?” asked one of Sip’s fellow inductees sharply, a pegasus mare from Whinnyapolis with a severe straight manestyle and a perpetual scowl.

“The Society’s main sites are split by submissive gender,” explained their guide. “Here in Clocktower Equestria East we have all the mare subs. If you want a stallion underhoof, you’ll find plenty of those at Clocktower Equestria West in San Fransiscolt.”

“Hmm. It’s tempting,” said the mare drily, staring the guide down. “But I think I’ll pass.”

Sip tried to keep himself in the other end of the group from her for the rest of the tour.

Afterwards they ended up in a businesslike meeting room back in the mansion, and a couple they had previously observed in a ‘slave training scene’ arrived to take questions. The mare, who half an hour earlier had been begging tearfully (and in vain) for mercy, was now relaxed, smiling, and outspoken.

“Yes, in some ways it is all make-believe,” she explained. “But at the same time it’s also very real. The toys are real, our bodies are real, and the pain doesn’t suddenly disappear just because we end the scene and turn on the lights – you’ll notice that I’m not sitting down.”

Awkward chuckles from Sip and his fellow candidates.

“But the point is, I let him do all that because I want to. I could stop him at any point just by using a safeword, but I choose not to. Some of my fellow subs consider that a necessary evil and try not to think too much about it – and if you think it’ll be like that for you, that’s completely okay; you can still have a quite wonderful time, far as I can see. But I like having that choice and not taking it. That’s how you keep giving yourself up, every second. What love is really about, I think.” She looked over at her partner, who blushed and smiled back at her.

A stallion in the back of the room raised his hoof for a question. “So, if you sign up, do you have to, like, start out as a submissive and work your way up from there?”

“Good heavens, no! You’re not allowed to sub unless it’s because you want to. You can choose to join either as a submissive or as a dominant, and then you get placed into the right kind of welcome class based on that. If you want to try the other side later on, it’s just a matter of taking a few more safety classes.”

At the end, they passed around membership applications. Sip felt dizzy from discovering that so many ponies apparently shared the forbidden desires he had thought were his alone, but was pretty sure he was sold already. He filled out the form and turned it in then and there, having chosen Dominant for himself with not a moment’s hesitation.

Actually joining the society took three weeks of night classes, mostly in the upper part of the mansion but with occasional chaperoned visits down to the underground dungeon levels. Sip learned about the society’s standard safewords, how to read its color-coded collars and straps, a safeword refresher, common social conventions in the Clocktower, reproductive anatomy (‘because you were too busy giggling when they taught you this in school’), a safeword pop quiz, . . .

By the time they reached weird subjects like The Physiology of Pain or Slaveholding Economics, Sip had figured out that the topics were not actually important. They were just there to keep his attention occupied until the instructor sort of off-hoof slipped one of the safewords into the presentation, at which point the entire class would jump to their feet and chant, “Stop, drop, unknot, and comfort!” – or whatever the meaning of that safeword was – in unison.

The physiology-of-pain lecturer happily admitted as much when he confronted her with this epiphany after her talk. “You need the practice,” she said. “But we do make it as entertaining as we can along the way. Once you do get a safeword sprung on you for reals, you’ll probably be focusing on something entirely different, too.”

Sip had to agree with that. He decided to lean back and enjoy the ride – and do his best to be first on his feet when one of the surprise safewords popped up.

And finally the day came when he could take his attendance records to the Membership Services desk, pay his first dues, and be issued a full-member badge and his very own dominant mask. He had expected more ceremony, but he would have to make that for himself.

He did manage to feel solemn and expectant as he put on his mask and strode down the grand staircase (slower pace!) for his first unsupervised romp through the dungeons.

The first place he went was a block of slave-training rooms, just to make sure he knew where to find them. He didn’t have any submissive to bring there yet, but he marked one of the rooms as occupied, locked the door and spent some time taking possession of the room, familiarizing himself with the racks and other furniture and the tools in the supply closets.

He did the same in an aftercare and safeword room, before he realized that he was just dithering. He took a deep breath and made his way towards the slave markets.

The slave pits were a big cavernous hall, lit by torches hung from rough-hewn pillars that stretched into the darkness above. According to his introduction course, it was the Clocktower’s principal matchmaking institution, full of stalls where caged and chained mares waited to be picked up by doms who could give them what they craved. Some could be bought for the Society’s play money, others could just be claimed and dragged away by anypony, unless they found the claimant so objectionable that they sprung a safeword. Sip was still a bit unsure how that worked, and decided to start out slow. Today he would just be window shopping.

One mare whose cage he passed didn’t agree with that. “Please claim this slave, kind master,” she called out to him. “Make me your cocksleeve, your cleaning rag, your hoofrest –”

“No, take me,” cried her neighbor. “I’ll be the best little slut you ever had, just make me yours!” She hugged the bars of her cage, grinding against them obscenely.

Sip backed slowly away from both mares, uncertain what their deal was. Were they that desperate to get out of the cages? No, that couldn’t be it – the way things were set up here, freedom would only be a safeword away for them. They must want something from him, and he didn’t know what it was. But he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to give it to them.

He turned and fled towards the posher parts of the slave market.

Several hours later he thought he had seen most of what there was to see, and he set off home to process his impressions and lay a plan for actually engaging with one of those subs.

Halfway from the slave pits to the exit stairs, there was a commotion out in the main thoroughfare, a cluster of ponies cheering and hooting. Sip walked closer to see what it was, inching his way through the crowd towards the performance in the middle. It was two ponies mating. Just as Sip reached the open space around them, the stallion was climbing down off the mare’s back.

“Okay, next!” shouted somepony. A different stallion came out from the crowd and reared up to mount the mare.

Sip saw she was wearing a gimp hood. At the top of her head it was latched to a wooden beam that had been fastened between two of the dungeon’s supporting columns, keeping her head firmly raised and in place. She wore a Society slave collar too, of course, and Sip put his recent training classes to use and decoded its colors – this sub is in a relationship, into objectification and abuse, homosexual. Wait a moment, homosexual? Sip looked in confusion between the collar and the stallion pounding away on top of her.

The stallion’s determined expression gave way to a goofy smile, and his rutting became a bit slower. Sip guessed he must be ejaculating. She raised her tail beside him and gave a single piercing ding with the small bell tied to its end. The safety bell was standard equipment for subs who were not able to say the safewords out loud, but a single ding didn’t count for a safeword.

At the ring of the bell, a unicorn mare stepped up to the sub’s head and unzipped the mouth opening on the gimp hood. She was wearing a dom mask in the same colors as the sub’s collar; they must be the real couple here.

The sub, now free to open her mouth, drew breath eagerly. “Twenty. Six,” she gasped hoarsely. Her dom patted her withers tenderly and allowed her a few more breaths before zipping her mouth back shut.

By now the stallion had finished his business and was backing off the mare, but none of the spectators were coming forward to replace him.

“Next!” shouted the dom again. “Anyone? Come on, ponies, this bitch ain’t gonna fuck herself. How about you, sir?” She held out a hoof, pointing straight at Sip.

Sip hadn’t thought of himself as more than a spectator, but suddenly everypony’s eyes were upon him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be part of the show – but he was even less sure how he could get out of it with with his honor intact. At least he was physically ready; what he had seen already had given him a hard erection even before the dom had pointed at him.

With a feeling of having no choice he hurried over to the the hind end of the sub and put his forehooves up on her rump. He could feel her shifting around under them, moving her legs a bit apart and swishing her tail out to the side. So this was it, no way back. He raised up his body until he thought the flare of his penis must be about level with her opening, and pushed in.

He was afraid he wouldn’t even be able to hit, and it did briefly feel like he was hitting against something that wasn’t a hole. But somehow that fixed itself before he had time to think of pulling back and trying again (had she moved to catch him?) and then he found himself sliding into her: warm, smooth, living flesh enveloping his dick. He lost himself in that feeling – wondrous, consuming, indescribable – and the jeering crowd faded to a remote whisper in his mind as he wiggled back and forth to savor the experience, make it keep feeling that way, stretch the moment –

And then his body took over for him. It started pumping inside him, and it felt like a firehose of cum erupting from him into the mare. He lost his footing on her back and flumped down on his belly on top of her while he pumped and pumped.

Her bell rang again, out to the side, making the outside world rush back to him. He found he had forgotten to breathe, and felt a touch of solidarity with the mare as she had her mouth unzipped and they gasped for breath in synchrony.

“Twen . . . ty. Seven”.

Hearing the count reminded him that he was just one number in a whole parade of . . . somethings . . . and that he had better make space for the next one. Somehow he got himself maneuvered down from the mare, and the crowd parted to let him through as he walked away in a daze.

“We’re at twenty-seven, fillies and gentlecolts,” brayed the dom behind him. “Remember, we have a loaner strap-on ready if any of you ladies want a turn. Don’t fall over yourselves; there’s a long way to a hundred . . .”

Sip climbed the stairs up to the lobby level slowly, trying to collect his thoughts. The more he calmed down from the excitement of the moment, the more he began thinking this had been a terrible way to lose his virginity. He didn’t even know the hooded mare’s name. But what could he do? It wasn’t as if he could have told anypony here that he had a virginity to lose in the first place.

Back below him, the mare’s safety bell sounded three times in quick succession – the ‘slower pace’ signal. Perhaps she had finally run out of air.

Sip went home and dreamt confused dreams.