One moment I was at home, relaxing in the bath. The next, everything around me fuzzed, and I was plopped down into a field of wild grass along with the entire tub’s worth of water. The event was so abrupt, so alien, that I just lay flat on my back, staring at the sky while a single word looped in my head: what.

A breeze swept over me, sunlight chasing away the chill it brought and eventually making everything feel warm and fuzzy. The water evaporated, and I finally noticed the sharp prickling of the grass against my back. I sneezed and sat up.

Stranded alone in a random field, without even any clothes on my back. There was no probable reason for any person or group to do this. What then was the alternative? Where was I? How long would it take to get back, and when I did, would Cindy still be waiting for me?

Find a way back.

With a simple, straightforward goal, the gradual quakes that had crept up on me stopped and I looked around, taking in any landmarks that might be helpful. The field terminated in a wild-looking forest that ended in a strangely even semicircle. I turned around and found that the field was actually a large clearing, and the circle wasn’t semi. But the thing that caught my immediate attention was the tower. Large enough at the base to fit my house inside, the thing went up far enough to seem slender instead of squat. If it really was made out of light-brown stone and not supported internally by modern construction methods than I had no doubt it would collapse in on itself.

I found the door and knocked, flinching back at the disproportionately loud boom that followed. The structure loomed, and I shifted uncomfortably while I waited. If there were any large leaves around I would’ve pulled one over to cover myself with, but there was nothing but wild grass and a frankly evil-looking forest. I distracted myself with the doorknob, which had some sort of novel design likely meant for a handicapped person, though what a handicapped person would be doing all the way out here I had no idea. Maybe this was some rich person’s home, and they had an army of workers with axes and weed whackers making sure the forest didn’t encroach on it.

Just when I’d been there long enough to consider wandering into the forest and finding a sizable rock to bash against the door, it clicked open and I was faced with … an edgy unicorn. She, I was pretty sure she was a female, had huge orange eyes, white fur streaked with black, and a twisted horn. Looking a little closer I could see her joints didn’t move the way a horse’s would. They seemed to have far freer degrees of motion.

“Well? Come in already, you’ve set me back days with your interruption. Giving me your body to study is the least you can do in return. Don’t worry, I’ll explore it gently.”

Ignoring the way her mouth didn’t line up with her words, and the whole talking unicorn thing, as I was pretty sure I was in some state of shock, I faintly said, “Oh. Okay.”

The foyer was wide-open, a sourceless glow illuminating the area. The floor was made of some transparent material, and beneath it was what looked like a roiling sea of blood. Tendrils of it snapped against the barrier beneath our feet—and hooves—and there was a faint red mist creeping along the ground. Lanterns, a few sofas, and some bookshelves were arrayed to the sides. Much of the furniture seemed to have been decorated by someone with a love of skulls. I walked forward in a daze, following a purple carpet that appeared between blinks.

We were in the middle of the room when the unicorn stopped, giving me a look that made me instantly wary.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you approach any of the more delicate experiments without any insurance. I wasn’t expecting thieves or whatever you are, but I suppose legends of the great Sable Dire have spread to wherever halfbreed minotaurs live.”

A purple-ish glow gathered around her horn, breaking me out of my apathetic shock.

“Hey, hey wait. I’m not a thief, I don’t even know where I am! I’m just Joel, I work in accounting, I’ve got no need or reason to go to some random tower and loot it.”

The glow’s intensity stabilized and Sable frowned, bringing up a hoof and rubbing her chin in a very human gesture. “Your name is … Joe-ail? What sort of twisted language are you using that causes my spell to try translating it phonetically? No, don’t answer that, it doesn’t matter. You’ll be going to sleep for a while, I need to study your mana map.”

Sable’s horn pulsed and a bright light flung itself at me at the speed of a bullet.

---

I groaned, feeling terrible. There was a sensation of cold and weight at my neck, and my fingers quested at the object before I was fully awake. Then memory flooded back into my awareness and I sat bolt-upright clawing at the collar on me. Of course, fingernails can’t really pry apart metal, so I soon stopped and looked around for a tool I could use.

There was a view of the field and the forest outside a completely transparent pane of some material, so I was pretty high up. The bed, which I examined once I clambered off it to look for screws or something attached to the frame, wasn’t supported by anything at all—it floated. It was a similar story with the rest of the objects in the room. A brass, skull-shaped lamp had a shiny stand, but there were no detachable parts. The bright light it emanated came from an orb suspended inside, and I was unable to pry it out. Last was a bookshelf, which might be interesting, and the door. The thing wasn’t made of wood like the tower’s entrance, but some plane of black metal that was impossibly smooth and unnaturally dark. It slid open.

I blinked, wondering if my eyes had the power of telekinesis for a split-second before I saw the unicorn behind it. She grinned.

“Excited to see me?” she said, looking down at … oh.

I blushed and covered my dick, which was still suffering from morning wood. No, wait, I wasn’t supposed to be embarrassed, she’d knocked me out, kidnapped and collared me, and implied … things. This was a time for righteous fury.

“What the fuck is all this for?” I said, mustering up all my rage, but all I managed to do was sound petulant.

“Training. I can’t let you go until I find a way to modify memory that works on halfbreed minotaurs and doesn’t leave you a mindless husk. In the meantime, I’ve implanted some suggestions with that collar. It will tell you where you can go, and which things are forbidden to touch. If you try to ignore it, things will become quite unpleasant.”

“I don’t need this! I’ll keep your secrets or whatever, I don’t care, I just want to go home.”

She nodded. “That may be, but I cannot take the risk that your view will change. Unfortunately, something has come up and I will be too busy for the next week to develop the spell. And, if you decide to stay, I have an intriguing little experiment that I might like to run on one of your kind. Your mana map is so undeveloped that with a little effort, I believe I could prod it into mirroring that of nearly any creature.”

I fumed silently. She seemed to expect my anger and unspoken refusal, giving me a wry smile before leaving. “Don’t break anything. I’d be very upset if I found some of my more delicate experiments tampered with.”

Yeah, no, fuck that. She was leaving me away for a week? I was no engineer, but I knew my way around a computer, and the way she’d described the collar seemed at least superficially similar. I was going to find the bugs in its magical code. I had a week to break it, steal whatever I needed to travel through the forest, and find my way home. It was time to get started.

---

I quickly learned the rules, using what appeared to be a small workroom filled with shapes of light and tiny crystals as a sort of training area. Anything she didn’t want me to touch gave me a feeling of foreboding, as if someone had walked over my grave. If I persisted in getting closer, the feeling got more intense until it turned into pain, at which point it quickly ramped up until I was twitching, paralyzed on the floor. The experience quickly turned me off experimenting and I tried just walking out of the tower, but as soon as I found my way back to the foyer and opened the outer door, an invisible hand seemed to grab me around the middle and fling me back inside where I lay, gasping, and watched as the door slammed shut with a boom.

Then it was back to tinkering with the collar.

It took two more days before I found the flaw in the … magic, I guess. It didn’t seem to care all that much about nonmagical stuff unless I tried to break it, and very unimportant magical components only gave me a feeling of dread, which I quickly got used to as I held a small glass bead in my left hand. Once I did that, the pain effect failed to trigger even when I picked up a piece of rune-inscribed crystal that had given me a headache just by walking too close. I smiled. It looked like the collar only ran on one thread. If the punishment mechanism was already called, it couldn’t interrupt that with a more intense one. So long as I kept hold of the bead I could do anything.

…Anything except leave. Apparently, that invisible hand thing was completely separate from the anti-touching method. I gathered anything that looked sharp and ground it against the collar, but the collar either won and slowly disintegrated whatever I used, or, like when I tried stabbing it with a spear of solidified light, the two objects repelled each other with an explosion of force. I lost count of the items I broke and annihilated over the rest of the week, getting more and more desperate as the deadline grew closer that I spent the last few hours getting myself thrown back into the foyer.

And then Sable came back.

‘Unhappy’ didn’t begin to describe her. When she first saw me sprawled on the floor, she only smirked. But when my aches started to feel a bit better and I was stumbling around drunkenly trying to run outside again, ‘livid’ seemed more apt. The unicorn who’d at first looked like an edgy but cute pony with a horn on top now resembled a combination of Death, Satan, and one of those old-school angels that were just a bunch of disapproving eyes and wings, except more terrifying. She was all roars and threats, and then she threw me with a crushing telekinetic grip and I got very dizzy. She kept yelling and smacking me, and at one point she even set herself aflame. It went on so long that I actually gathered my wits enough to catch the tail-end of her rant.

“—useless, the whole thing was supposed to be insurance in the first place, you help me and at the end of it I give you what you were seeking, do you not know the legends or did you just ignore them in your blind, arrogant stupidity, you pigheaded foal, you’re going to beg and you’d better hope I find another crystallized dragon heart that old or you’ll—”

The words started fading in and out, and when I started swaying she finally noticed and sent me to sleep like she had before, except this bolt was darker and sent a jolt of pain through me before I was knocked out.

---

The air stuttered, static-like. I was slow, too slow, and then I fell into—

“Finally. You were trapped in that slowed time for so long, I was getting worried until I remembered you’d have basically no innate magic resistance.”

Red characters circled me, glowing ominously. Faint yellow dust appeared around the symbols and drifted down only to wink out before they could settle to the floor. Outside the arrangement was Sable, facing me with a malicious grin. I pushed against the ground to leap out, but it was like swimming through quicksand. Every movement I made was swiftly reverted. I was trapped in a loop, unable to take any action that would require more than a half-second before being reset to my initial position. I took short jabs at the runes, but the circle was just far enough that I reset before reaching them, no matter how fast I moved. The looping effect seemed to reset my exhaustion as well, letting me make as many attempts as I wanted, but it was a matter of physics. My muscles just weren’t developed enough to propel me through all that space in time.

Then the characters started drifting toward me, and I decided maybe touching them wasn’t the smartest idea. Sable was still grinning, not ranting like she would be if I’d broken whatever this ritual was.

A symbol hit, and I was pain.

I knew some people with chronic pain. They went about their lives normally, leading me to believe they’d just gotten used to it. If it was anything like this, I knew instantly they’d been putting up a front. There was no way I could get used to this, there just wasn’t. My capacity to feel expanded somehow, and then every bit of me was lit on fire.

And through it all, I knew I was changing. Parts were reshaped, others sprouted, some shrank, it didn’t matter, I was screaming, and that might have made it better, a little, or not.

I slumped to the ground, the red symbols gone, Sable in front of me. She smirked and held up a mirror.

For a while, I thought it was magical, a portal or vision of somewhere else. It showed a small green pegasus. The face bones and muscles were defined in a way that made me think he was male. He looked at me with light violet eyes. They were lost, confused. Then he blinked, I blinked and the illusion was broken. I backed away, sat on my haunches, held up a hoof, and screamed.

“Yes, yes, you’re a pony. I’m sure that’s traumatizing. But we’re nowhere near done yet.” Her voice was cruel and cutting.

“Please,” I whimpered, scrambling to get my four legs under me. Everything was strange, sensations slightly muted through a coating of fur.

“A … modified prison. I’m good at those,” she said, her attention now on a piece of parchment held in her telekinetic grip. “Isolation alone isn’t enough, there should be more elements. As for motivation, let’s make that … sexual. Yes, a basic version first, I’ll build in the supporting spells then, and after that add on all the little details.”

The parchment snapped into a scroll and a blast of light headed my way, almost as an afterthought. Darkness embraced me.

Next Chapter: Imprisoned [C] Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 54 Minutes