At first Sip led the mare through the crowds without any particular goal in mind. She followed him willingly – he didn’t even have to pull on the leash – and when he looked back he could see a funny little smile play on her muzzle. He remembered her saying she hadn’t found any dom to claim her yet. Perhaps she was as proud to be led as he was to lead?

As he neared the back end of the main street of the dungeons, he began worrying that he wasn’t actually doing a lot. Even though he felt he could keep walking around with the slave in tow for hours, he would soon have to double back towards places they’ve already been. And then she would know that he didn’t really have a destination, and was just parading her about for no reason. He couldn’t let that happen.

Up ahead were the master stairs leading down to the lower levels of the dungeons. Sip was not allowed there yet – he would need more experience and then pass some kind of test; he wasn’t sure yet how it worked. But he remembered there was group of training rooms right by the top of the stairs. He could pretend they had been his goal all the time.

Fortunately one of those rooms was vacant. He told the mare to stand in the middle of the floor while he grabbed some tools from one of the hardware closets.

Like most subs in the Clocktower, she wore padded cuffs around each of her fetlocks, color-coordinated with her slave collar. He clipped a snap hook into each of the cuffs and stuck its flat outer end into the gap between the floorboards, where it latched onto a restraining grid below. It took him only seconds to strap each of her hooves down to the floor.

The other thing he had gotten from the closet was a blindfold. He pulled it around her head, covering up the upper half of her small expectant smile with it. He desperately hoped he would be able to live up to that smile.

This was about as far as he had planned what to do if he ever managed to get a sub into a training room. He stepped back a bit and looked her over. What next?

Her wings, of course. She wasn’t going to fly anywhere with her hooves tied to the floor, but Daring Do had taught him how important wings were to a pegasus’s sense of freedom. She wouldn’t feel properly trapped unless he did something about the wings.

He wasn’t sure exactly what that would be, though. He had never looked very carefully at the wings of a pegasus – they had them, he didn’t, end of story. But now that he did, he thought they looked impossibly fragile for something that could supposedly carry her weight in flight. There were big feathers and little feathers arranged in a precise, confusing order, and if she spread out the wings, the feathers would be attached to strangely articulated body parts that he didn’t even have words for. He couldn’t possibly attempt to tie that up with rope, like Ahuizotl’s minions would routinely do without spending even half a paragraph on how. She would just end with a broken something.

He would have to read the instructions. Somewhere in the Society’s sprawling organization diagram was a committee that decided which toys and equipment a standard training room would be stocked with. And this committee also edited a loose-leaf manual where all that was documented, indexed and cross-referenced. There was a copy of it standing on a work table, leaning casually against the side of the linen closet, as if any self-respecting dom would be ill-prepared enough to need to refer to it in the middle of a session.

At least the index was easy to use. He quickly found a page dedicated to options for wing restraints and scanned the names for something where the symbols promised it could be applied without prior practice and would have the right severity – restrictive without being uncomfortable in itself. He selected a ‘strait-cover’ originally designed for asylum play.

On the way over to the right closet, he looked over at the mare, worried that she’d be bored with the wait. She was leaning over slightly, trying in vain to pull her right hooves off the ground, breathing heavily.

The strait-cover was a small maze of white fabric and pockets and triple-stitched straps. Fortunately the step-by-step illustrations in the manual were pretty good. The mare became calmer when he began working on her, and meekly let him lift up her wings to to get them around and into the garment.

She finally spoke up while he was tightening the buckle on the last of the straps that went around her barrel. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice a bit unsteady. It was the first thing she had said since she he put the leash on her.

He almost answered that it was part of the scene, she had agreed to it herself, they were only roleplaying. Fortunately he was using his mouth to pull the strap taut when she asked, so he had time to realize that would be stupid. What she was really saying was that she wanted a story to be part of, not just have things done to her.

That was fair. If only he had a story ready to give her.

“Do you really not know what you’ve done wrong?” he asked, stalling for time while he came up with something. Meanwhile he slid a hoof up along her tail and shook its end gently, hoping this would remind her of the safety bell tied to it in case she wasn’t just after a story. The bell didn’t make a noise; a routine enchantment kept it from ringing until its wearer willed it to.

“No . . . please,” she answered.

“Well . . . perhaps your only error was to be acquired by me. But don’t worry: By the time I’m done with you –” then what? He wasn’t sure what to promise her. That she would beg him to be taken? No, too cliché. He let his mouth freewheel on. “– you won’t even remember what it’s like to be your own creature.” Not bad.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“Why, I’m going to make you mine. Your body already belongs to me,” – her tail still raised, he put a hoof against her marehood and ground a little, amazing himself by how brash that felt – “but if I’m not mistaken, you think your mind is still your own, don’t you?”

“I –” She stopped herself, pausing for what felt like a long time. “I know my place, sir,” she muttered at last. It wasn’t much of an answer, but he didn’t press the matter because he wasn’t sure where he had been going with that question.

Here she was, then, helpless before him by her own choice, a canvas for him to paint an experience on. But he couldn’t think of what to paint. He had imagined this moment so often, but now that he found himself in the middle of it, nothing of what he remembered thinking felt like he could actually start doing it.

He held up his forehoof before him, looking at the sticky spot on the frog where he had pressed it against her marehood. In porn this would be where she was forced to lick it clean, but he wasn’t sure that was how it worked in reality, and didn’t want to risk grossing her out. He sighed and put the hoof down again.

Come on, at least doodle some, he told himself. Making little damp marks on the floor, he walked over to the tool wall and picked down a plain riding crop from its place among the neatly arranged whips and paddles. He knew how to use that one from his volunteer jobs.

She gave a startled yelp when he hit her one shoulder with the crop.

“That got your attention, my pretty?” he asked, moving along and hitting her flank.

“Ow!”

“Better get used to it. I can do that whenever I want, you know.” He stuck the crop in behind her tail to tickle the folds where he had touched her. It would all end there, inevitably. In fact he could rear up and take her right now if he wanted to, and she wouldn’t be able to resist, wouldn’t even use a safeword to stop him, he was almost sure. The thought made his member drop down, but he brushed the idea away for now. That would be too much like the cum dumps, and she hadn’t sounded very enthusiastic about those when they talked about them earlier. He wanted to, if not own, then at least touch her mind before he got there.

Walking around her hind end, he continued talking. “But I will do it less if you’re a good filly. Understand?” He whacked her other flank, so low that the flap of the crop bent under her belly when it hit.

“Ah! Yes,” she gasped.

“Good.” He put his muzzle to her chest and drew a bold, broad line up the side of her neck with his lips. Her fur was soft and smelled of something nice that he had no name for. But near the end of his stroke she twisted her head to the side, away from him.

“Keep still, my pretty,” he chided gently, and she steeled her jaws and slowly turned her head straight ahead again.

He wondered if he should have cropped her for shying away. But it was only fair to give her a chance to obey first. They like it when they can hope for a kinder master, the chief slaver had told him. That was him now.

He moved his head up and blew softly into one of her ears for one long slow exhalation. The ear twitched a couple of times, but she did not budge. A quick learner.

He stuck out his tongue and licked the inside of the ear. He had worried a bit about the taste of ear, but the cute little yip the gave made him forget all about taste. It wasn’t that bad anyway. He bit down on the ear very carefully, coming up warm and rubbery between his front teeth. Then he pulled, twisting her neck and head around.

“You – you won’t get away with this!” she gasped, suddenly defiant.

Ah, but I already have, he thought. Not out loud, of course. But – very well, she wanted him to be a villain? He could work with that. “I won’t?” he purred, letting go of the ear. “Tell me, who’s going to stop me?”

“I . . . somepony –”

“Do you think the Royal Guard is going to show up out of nowhere and save you?”

“No –”

“Or perhaps somepony else?” He swung the crop suddenly, hitting her cheek with a slap. “Who do you work for?”

“What? I don’t –” She sounded confused, but he forged on.

“You don’t intend to tell me you’ve come all the way out here all by yourself, do you?” Shifting sides, he hit her other cheek to. He hoped she could think of something ‘out here’ could mean; he couldn’t just pause everything to explain what he imagined had gone before the scene. He didn’t really know himself anyway.

“I did! I came alone!” the mare insisted.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to lie?” He went back to the wall he had gotten the crop from and picked down a slim cane of the kind he had used on uppity waitresses in his volunteer job. “Do you know what happens to fillies who lie? They get punished.”

The mare didn’t answer him. She was breathing out and in noisily while he walked slowly towards her hind end. “Lift up your tail!” he commanded.

Slowly and a bit jerkily she pulled her tail away and to the side. He took aim and swung the cane so it hit her buttocks with a loud crack.

The mare screamed.

It wasn’t a shrill scream, or a long one, or even particularly loud, but a scream it was all the same. Sip suddenly realized that in all his time in the Clocktower he had never heard a pony scream close by. Sometimes muffled screams wafted out from closed doors or around corners, but those were ones of ecstasy or surprise. This was unmistakably a scream of pain.

The waitresses he caned had not screamed, at most whimpered quietly under their breath. He didn’t think he had used more force now – but perhaps this mare had less experience than those waitresses. She had even told him she was a beginner.

He put the cane down and tried to figure out what to do now. Had he gone too far? Should he stop everything and try again another time, when he was more in control of himself? Or, on the other hoof, was he supposed to continue from here, unyielding?

The mare’s quick heavy breathing was the loudest sound in the room. Presently it slowed down slightly. “St-staircase,” she whispered.

That settled it. He had promised her not to apologize if she used a safeword. It told him what to do, too: Slow down. Not stop.

He moved close to her and put his muzzle up close to her ear. “Had enough already?” he sneered softly.

She shied away from his voice, and he let her. “I got a map,” she said quietly between breaths, “from . . . Professor, um, Kleinpferd.”

“Kleinpferd is a fool!” he shouted. It should have been a dismissive growl, but he had to raise his voice to hide his relief that not only was she still in the game, she was building onto the story by herself. “She’s no match for me, and she knows it. We won’t see any of her here.”

The mare kept her head turned away from him. He walked around towards her other side.

“For a moment I actually thought you might be a threat. Perhaps I ought to punish you again, just for trusting the likes of ‘Professor’ Kleinpferd . . .”

She shivered. “No – please . . .”

He ran a hoof up along her neck, raising her head. “Do I own you?”

With only a moment’s hesitation, she nodded against his hoof.

“It’s time you started showing it, don’t you think?”

It looked like she was frowning beneath the blindfold. “What do you want me to do?” She pulled on her ties with a hind leg, as if to show there was not much she could to.

He moved up to her ear again, and whispered into it: “I want you to beg.”

She nodded slowly and lowered her head a bit. “Um. Please don’t –”

“Stop!” he barked. “When I tell you to beg, it goes ‘please do’.”

She tossed her head and tried again. “Please . . . let me go?”

He picked up the crop he had left on the floor and bapped her on the flank. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Please . . . uh, please take me?”

“Better,” he said, though he wasn’t quite sure he could follow through on that. The boner he was sure he’d had earlier had gone, lost in the stress of coming up with a story for her on the spot. “Be specific,” he ordered. If worst came to worst, he would have to call her something nasty, claim she wasn’t worthy of his cock. He didn’t much like that.

“Stick – put your throbbing stallion-rod into me and fuck me like the cheap slut I am!”

It took all his strength not to burst out laughing. Fortunately she couldn’t see his desperate grimaces. He flailed in her general direction with the crop, hitting her somewhere.

“Good,” he finally managed to say. He put both a foreleg and his neck around her withers, resting his head against her neck. “And now with feeling.”

“Please, please fuck me, sir. Just once. Or many times, if you want.”

“Really?” he teased. She was warm and soft under him; he could feel her barrel expanding and contracting while she breathed. He nibbled lazily at the skin of her neck, felt his penis drop down again.

“Yes, really. Please, I need it. Show this slave her place.”

The erection growing under him hit something unfamiliar, which he realized was her side. Her fur tickled a bit, spurring it to grow faster and larger. For a moment all he wanted was to stay where he was, feeling her warmth and breathing, hearing her plead. But it would be cruel to make her keep coming up with things to say. He stifled a sigh and let go of her, putting both forelegs back on the ground.

He put a hoof back onto her marehood. It was wetter than it had been before. On impulse, he turned the hoof around so its tip pressed in between the folds, slid it up and down. “Hard?” he asked.

“Yes, hard. Please?”

He had gotten himself maneuvered around her, so he could put his forehooves up on her rump and point his now throbbing stallion-rod at her slit. After weeks of practice in the cum dumps, aiming was not a problem for him. With the head a hoofwidth inside her, he forced himself to pause for a moment. “Now count,” he said.

“Um, one?” she said uncertainly as he slowly pushed all the way in.

“Good.” He pulled out again and suddenly thrust back in.

“Two.”

He tried to listen for clues in her tone for whether she was enjoying what he did or only playing along, to get it over with. But it was difficult; he had no good idea what to expect.

“Three.”

Her voice was quavering a bit. Was that excitement? It was too late to worry about now. He tried to allow himself just to enjoy the act.

“. . . five . . . six . . . seven . . .”

He closed his eyes and let the sound of her counting fill his mind.

“. . . nine . . . ten, eleven, twelve, thirteeenfourteenfifteensixteen–”

His body took over, and when it was done he let himself flump down on her back, hugging her like a blanket while the afterglow wore off. “Now you’re mine,” he whispered. Part of him worried she would notice how often he kept coming back to that. But he couldn’t help it – it was what his mind was full of, a real mare that kept being his. That could end soon enough; he had to savor it while it was true.

Was that it? He was fairly sure he could declare the scene to be done now without being a failure. But he didn’t really want to – he wanted to keep doing things to the mare, to go on being important to her.

He got another idea. He went to the supplies closet again and got out two more items. The first was a dock ring that he clamped to the small of her tail and tied to up to the strait-cover so she couldn’t let the tail hang straight down, but had to keep it either raised or out to one side.

Next was a bridle with an integrated ball gag for a bit. “Test your bell, slave,” he commanded. She froze for a second and slowly swallowed before she flicked her tail to the side and her safety bell filled the room with a single brilliant ding.

When the instructors first taught Sip about the bell rules – never, ever, block a pony’s mouth without first hearing that their bell still works! – he had worried that it would a horrible distraction to interrupt a scene with such safety instructions. But now the ritual actually felt oddly comforting. Not only did he know she was safe – he knew she still knew she was here of her own free will and could stop him at any time. Her silence alone would tell him she was still okay with what he was doing.

“Say ah.” He pulled the bridle over her head, making sure the gag settled right in her mouth, and began tightening the various straps. They would go on top of the blindfold she was still wearing, but that was alright.

“What I’m going to do now,” he explained while he worked, “is let your hooves free, and then we’re going for a walk. I want everypony to see that you belong to me, from your muzzle to your pretty little snatch. Do you understand that?”

She nodded slowly, and he kissed her forehead before he bent down to release the hooks he had tied her hooves down with.

At first it was slow going. She followed him only hesitantly, not being able to see where she stepped. It helped a bit after he got the idea to clip the leash to one of the bit rings on the bridle instead of her collar; then he could show her more precisely which way to go. But it still took half the length of the dungeons before she began trusting him to warn her of sudden steps and curbs, and stopped walking like she expected to drop into a hole with every step.

He noticed it was getting late. There were fewer ponies milling about than there had been when he first led her to the training room. He took her on a circuit through the slave pits before doubling back along the main corridor, and there too several of the booths were closing down for the night. Reluctantly he decided he couldn’t keep her much longer, not when he didn’t know when she had intended to leave.

There was a cluster of aftercare rooms by the entrance to the slave market. He guided her into one of them and began freeing her of the bondage gear. Dock ring, strait-cover, bridle, and finally the blindfold all were dumped into the toy hopper by the door. Later the maid staff would wheel them away to be steam cleaned before they went back into circulation.

“Well, that’s all,” he said to her, afraid that the awkward would come back now.

She shook her head to get her mane back into shape. “Thanks for owning me,” she said with a small blush.

“No problem.” His mind felt blank for a moment. “What now?”

“If that was a scene, I think we’re supposed to do aftercare.”

“Right. Well, this is an aftercare room.” Immediately he felt stupid for stating the obvious, but she looked around the room with a new interest. Perhaps it was the first time she had seen one? It looked a bit like the the safeword room they had been in earlier in the evening, but was not quite as brightly lit and had a bed in addition to the armchairs. In the back of the room, a doorway led off to a shower.

Sip’s intro course had had a lot to say about aftercare, but he still wasn’t sure exactly what to do. Hug her, comfort her, make sure she feels safe and loved and valued, yes. But the last part was also what the established subs who presented had said they got out of a good scene itself. Should he ask her what she needed? Would she know?

She was still looking around, smiling, but she also seemed nervous or bothered by something, making little steps in place. “Are you alright?” he asked.

She snapped her attention back to him. “What? Yes.” She blushed again. “It’s just, that part at the end? Where I couldn’t see and you dragged me around everywhere? That was really hot.”

“It was?” He felt suddenly buoyant at the thought that he had done something right, at least.

“Yes. And it’s not because I don’t want – but I also really want just to go home and, you know –” She blushed even harder than before and turned her face away, breathing heavily.

Sip wasn’t sure he knew. If he were to run home now, it would be to whack off, but surely that couldn’t be what she was talking about. He wasn’t even fully sure how that worked for mares.

“D-do you want to watch?” she asked suddenly, a bit louder than she had been talking so far. She had stopped fidgeting and stood looking at him with a nervous grin, eyes shining.

Sip had no idea what was going on. “Yeah, sure.”

“Okay.” She walked unsteadily over to the bed and slowly lay down on her side with her hind end towards him, shaking visibly. Sip almost stopped her – she didn’t have to do whatever she was about to – but then he saw the look on her face and concluded she was shaking with excitement rather than fear or discomfort.

She lay still for a moment, and then, glancing quickly at Sip to make sure he was watching, stuck a forehoof in between her hind legs and began grinding it against her marehood.

In a way this wasn’t much different from what the desperate freebie mares in the slave pits had done – but they didn’t count, he was only a passer-by to them. And he had done his best not to look at them; that would just have encouraged them. This mare, though, he wanted to encourage. But he didn’t know how, so he just stared.

He stole a peek at her face, but she had shut her eyes and was turning her head from side to side, silently mouthing something.

Looking back to the main show, he noticed the was concentrating her efforts on a point at the bottom end of her slit. Oh, right, he realized, clitoris. He knew that, of course, but it was one thing to have it pointed out in an anatomy lecture, another thing entirely to to have it happen right in front of him. He kept watching, mesmerized –

“You can help,” she suddenly said. She had stopped working her hoof, and when he looked up he saw her looking right at him. “With your, uh, throbbing stallion-rod.” She grinned puckishly.

Throbbing indeed – he didn’t think he had been that hard all night. He had not ordered her to invite him in, this time. He couldn’t even tell her what to do at all, now that the scene was over. But there she was, asking him to cover her, him in particular. He walked towards her, trying to recall whether ‘mare lying on her side, stallion upright’ was an official authorized position, but finding he couldn’t remember and didn’t care.

She emitted a long content hum when he pushed into her, unfolding her wing and wrapping it around him. He let her drag him down to her body, surrounded by her on all sides, warm body around his cock, wing around the rest of him. He stretched his forelegs out in an attempt to do the same to her, weaving them in between hers and pulling on her chest.

He was surprised by how soft the underside of her wing was. It had a curious smell too, dusty and slightly sour and yet somehow intoxicating. He squirmed around a bit to tease out more of whatever it was, jiggling his cock around inside her as he did so. The position didn’t allow him to make the bold forceful thrusts porn had taught him stallions were supposed to do, but the jiggles must have worked anyway; she was whimpering first quietly but then louder, and her wing started twitching erratically above him, and all he wanted was for her to keep doing that.

But then something happened with her body, clamping down firmly on his cock, and he came like he’d never come before, a great wave of warmth and bliss that seemed to start everywhere in his body at once and radiated out towards the end of his legs, his tail, his ears . . . She was whinnying wordlessly, and he discovered he was too, clutched tightly beneath her wing, not entirely sure where he ended and she began.

Afterwards he lay on top of her, still hugging with his forelegs, trying to contain what had happened.

“That was a good ending,” she whispered at last.

He nodded silently against her neck, nibbling gently at her skin to punctuate his agreement. His member had retracted back into himself, so he rolled off her, out from under the wing, to get a better look at her face.

She was smiling. “I liked the Caballeron act too,” she said.

“The what act?”

“Sorry – Doctor Caballeron is a character in the Daring Do books. I always –”

“You read Daring Do?” At once he felt wide awake.

She nodded. “It’s kind of why I’m here, in a way.”

“Which one is your favorite?” he couldn’t help ask.

“Hmmm. I think, Daring Do, Mystery Mare.”

“Oh, that one.” Sip remembered that book – the only way for Daring to reach the Lost Quarter of Camelistan without attracting troublesome attention had been to be captured by slave traders who marched her there, chained to a column of other unfortunates. There had been about a hundred pages of whips and cages and clinking manacles, and Sip had never dared check it out of the library a second time, afraid that it would reveal he was interested in that kind of things.

“And what is yours?” asked the mare.

“Uh. Daring Do in the Mines of Mareia, perhaps?” He didn’t really have a single favorite, but Mareia was usually a safe choice.

“Oh, that’s not bad either,” she said –

An hour passed. Or more; Sip wasn’t sure. It was a long time since he had talked to anypony about Daring Do, and he almost forgot to feel awkward because it was a mare he was talking to, one he had just been intimate with. It was nice to recall his favorite scenes together with someone who liked them for the same reasons he did.

When they ran out of Daring Do memories to share, they shared some silence instead, and the silence felt meaningful and close and relaxed. Sip watched the mare’s face. She was smiling faintly, looking comfortable and safe and valued. It must have worked while he wasn’t thinking about it, though he had never imagined aftercare would be like that.

She sat up halfway, pulling them back to the present. “I’m sorry I staircased on you again,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said, holding out a hoof to touch her shoulder. “Actually, I was glad you did,” he added after some time.

“You were?”

“Yes. It made me sure that . . . you were still there, you know? That you could stop me if I went wrong. Bucking noob.”

She laughed softly. “I think we did alright.”

“Yeah.”

“But . . .” She looked away from him for a moment. “Next time, I think I can take that. If you just give me some time to prepare.”

“Next time?” He hadn’t dared think about whether there would be one.

She turned back to him with a suddenly vulnerable expression. “If you want to meet again, that is.”

“Yes! When?” He probably ought to play it cooler, but he couldn’t find it in himself. And the way she brightened up was worth it anyway.

“How about next Tuesday? At seven, perhaps?”

He nodded. Tuesday was a whole week away, but of course she’d want some time to try other doms too. It was her right, anyway – he couldn’t expect to get her for himself after just one scene.

“Suppose I’ll be for sale at Honest Bram’s – you know where that is?”

He nodded again. “Deal!”

She stood up from the bed. “It’s been nice, but I think I need to get home now. See you Tuesday?”

“See you.” He sat up. “Wait – I don’t think I got your name?”

She turned back towards him, halfway to the door. “I’m Society Slave C-557,” she said carefully and sighed. “Look, it’s nothing personal, but I promised myself not to give out my details to the first dom I fall in with. I mean, I think you’re all right, but . . . I’d hate myself if I couldn’t even stick to that.” She looked worriedly back at him.

“Sounds fair,” he said. “Then I’ll just call you George.”

She looked confused, but then smiled and shook her head. And left.

Sip was only an earth pony. But walking home from Civic Square that night he felt like he might be flying all the same.