Susannah Indigo's  fiction has been published in Susie Bright's Best American Erotica 2000, Marcy Sheiner's Best Women's Erotica 2000 and Herotica 6. Her work can be found online as an erotic serial for Erotasy.com. She's been published in many zines, including Black Sheets, Howlings, Libido (fiction winner two years in a row), and her work has been recorded on audio for Passion Press.

Susannah says of the following story: "'The Land of Kink,' is... a hardcore/BDSM fairy tale with meaning."

Correspond with Susannah Indigo.  Visit Susannah Indigo's Home Page.

The Land of Kink
by Susannah Indigo

Once upon a time there was a handsome young prince named Caden Braverman. Prince Caden ruled the immense Land of Kink, a land that became visible through the mist only after midnight. Many a woman from faraway lands tried to reach the Prince during their waking hours, only to wander aimlessly around empty castles on the dusty paths bordered by thistles.

"But he must be in there somewhere," each woman would cry, "I have heard such tales of Prince Caden. That he is kind, though cruel, and knowing, and that he holds the secret." Then they would stumble into the blackthorn thistles and scratch their legs and give up and turn back home.

Prince Caden knew these stories. They did not make him happy. For what worth could a woman be to him who could not bear a simple thistle scratch? Prince Caden knew how to turn the night into day if he so wished, but much preferred to walk only at midnight. He lived in the time of the Thousand Wars, yet he found no reason to use his powers before dark.

Prince Caden wore black silk all the time, from head to toe. No bright colors were allowed in his castle. He held three rooms in his castle sacred: the library; the gallery; his dungeon. No one was allowed in those rooms without meeting his rituals. The Prince never smiled. Many of the people in his own land were afraid of the Prince and avoided him, because of the whispers of the women of Kink who had momentarily passed through his hands. There are traditions, they would say, but he's just gone too far.

One day a woman named Kalianna set out to find Prince Caden. Kalianna was neither a princess nor a peasant . She was of the people who lived near the Crystal Sea, the people who were called Dralas. The Dralas lived in small castles made of emerald green sand and twigs, and it was enough for them. Kalianna was neither very young nor very old and she dressed in long flowing skirts that hid all of her secrets. But she had two features that made her extraordinary, even among the Dralas, who were generous, peaceful, sensual people. First, Kalianna could see right through peoples' words. No matter what they said, she heard only the truth. And then, she knew the power of red.

Kalianna went to find Prince Caden because of some things she had heard. It wasn't because he was said to be a tall, dark-skinned handsome man, or because he was smart and talented, or rich and powerful in the land, although he was all of those things. It wasn't because he wore black silk, though she was quite fond of that too. It was because she had heard that he owned all the honey dust in the world and knew exactly what to do with it, and because she had heard that he also owned all the finest books and art in the land and she craved to be near those things. But even more importantly, she had heard that this was a man who could be cruel. She thought he was a man who could change many things, including her.

Kalianna packed up all the things that mattered : her incense, her oils, the red candles, a thousand yards of satin ribbon and all of her little brushes. Not a single one of the Dralas could understand why she would leave her home. It's the red hair, they whispered, she's always been different.

"There are other lands where I need to be," was all she could tell them. "I have decided to become brave."

Kalianna traveled for many months through the dangerous lands until she finally arrived near the Land of Kink. She walked straight through the thistles, lifting her long full red skirt to better feel the sting. When she arrived at the gates precisely at midnight, the guards held their lanterns high and circled round her. They lifted her skirt and admired her scratched legs and she held perfectly still. They searched her cloth bag and questioned her about all the satin ribbon. She only smiled. 

"I am here for Prince Caden," she finally said, and they laughed. 

"Not in that red dress and hair you're not. You are not of our kind. No bright colors are allowed here." 

"Let her by." The voice came from high above the walls. It was the voice she had traveled to reach.

Prince Caden led her into a dark hallway and stopped her at a high arched door. "Kneel," he commanded. 

Kalianna lifted her skirt and knelt gracefully before him, never taking her eyes off his. He untied her long red hair and let it flow down over her shoulders, keeping his fist twisted hard in her long locks. "This is my library," he said, "It holds all the books in the North. But there are two requirements to enter it." Kalianna looked up into his eyes and could see that she might decide to do anything he asked. 

"First, you must recite some poetry for me, each and every time, and it
must please me. Then you must offer your breasts to me for my pleasure."

"Yes, Prince Caden." 

"Call me 'Sir'. Nothing else. And we'll have to get rid of some of this red."

"Yes, Sir."

"And you have no name. I don't want to know where you come from." 

She nodded. 

"Show me that you can obey." 

She paused for only a second before offering her poem:

           Shadows creep 
            across my bare skin 
            the whip falls.

He nodded in approval. She watched his face as she began to lower the red satin just below her breasts and she almost thought she saw a glint of pleasure flash in his eyes. Kalianna cupped her breasts gently in her hands and held them up for his inspection. The sight of her nipples silenced him for the moment. Each nipple was pierced through with a tiny silver bar and each silver bar had a pea-sized ruby on either end of it. The rubies were a part of her only inheritance in the world and she kept them in the safest place possible.

"This red may stay, Sir?"

Prince Caden touched the rubies carefully, then he began to twist the silver bars back and forth. "Yes," he said. "Yes. And I will agree to stroke your breasts carefully when I do, all around them."

He led her on her knees into his library. She gazed in awe at the twenty foot high ceilings and all of the books covering every inch of every wall. She thought that perhaps if she begged later he might let her live in this room.

Prince Caden guided her, his hand on her nipples, out the library and toward another room. "This is my gallery. I have only the finest art in the land. In order to enter here you must come to me and tell me something I don't know. And then you must bend over and offer your ass for my pleasure."

"Something you don't know, Sir? There may be so many things. Do you know that outside of your land there are shores made of emerald green sand, extraordinary sand that not only makes a sturdy castle, but that has the magical power to lighten the heart of anyone who steps in it?" He watched her intently and wondered if she was the woman who could tell him the truth. "Perhaps I must visit there," he said. He turned her around and lifted her skirt. "Bend over."

This was why she came to him. She came for force and she came for sex and she came for peace. She came for the man who could lift her skirt and keep her begging at his feet, a man who could teach her things and make her behave. She knew that when he gave her this she might be able to give him the things he needed in return. She bent over and he caressed her bare ass, admiring the rubies sewn into a tattoo of a little heart on her left cheek. "These won't stop me," he said, and he brought out his bag of honey dust and painted her bottom and the backs of her legs gently with it. The aroma of honey filled her with joy. 

"I'm going to take the honey dust off you, all of it, slowly, with my whip." He gave her a rock to lean against; he put his black silk handkerchief in her mouth to bite down upon. And then he gave her his whip, over and over again, up and down her legs, across her ass, smacking her harder then softer, then harder again, creating a rhythm that let her move into him and want to ask for more. 

When he stopped she fell to her knees and thanked him and kissed his boots.

"You may only do that if you ask first," he said.

She laughed. Nobody ever laughed at Prince Caden But she could hear the truth behind his words and the truth was that he craved her submission exactly in the same way that she craved his power.

"Yes, Sir," she murmured. "May I kiss your feet, Sir?" It was difficult to imagine him saying 'no.' 

"Yes, you may," he said, and she felt a little tiny surge of power running from her heart to her pussy. She thought that maybe, just maybe, given time with this man, she could make him smile, and laugh, and even cry.
She pressed her lips to the black leather of his boots, held her hands behind her back, and began to kiss his feet until he finally made her stop.

After the tour of Prince Caden's art gallery, Kalianna knew that this was a place where she would paint and sing and write and play and that all of these things would matter in the world. She would go to the library and the gallery every day after making up a poem and a story for him. She would offer her breasts and her ass for his pleasure. She would look forward to these rituals, and she would eventually find what she had to know.

The final room was down a long flight of stone steps. "This is my dungeon," Prince Caden said. "This is where you may live." It was cold and bare and not lovely like the other rooms. 

"Your red dress must go. All the way off. Now."

She turned to him and removed her long satin dress, untying the tight waist, letting it fall in a heap around her ankles. He ran his hand over her smooth belly, feeling the ruby that was embedded in her navel. She sighed as his hand slid down to her pussy and began to rub slowly over the tiny rubies that were pierced through both sides of her lips. He knelt to examine them. 

"This red may stay?" she asked quietly. She knew their beauty, and her power, even in this cold hard room.

"Yes." His fingers were deep inside of her as he examined her. She stood naked except for her rubies in the center of the dungeon and he finally rose and walked around her.

"Emerald green sand, you say?" he asked quizzically.

"Yes, Sir. In a land of peace that is so lovely that people never leave. I am the first. I have traveled through many lands to get here. Emerald sands are only the beginning of what I know."

"You will know even more when I am through with you tonight."

She watched as he burned her red dress in the black iron fireplace. He brought out the chains and dropped them at her feet. 

"This is all you will wear every night," he said. "You will be cold, except for the warmth I bring you." He began to lock the chains around her waist, around her wrists, and pulled her toward the wall with all of the iron bolts on it. "I will do things to you in the middle of the night that neither of us will believe happened in the morning. You will feel me on you always. Even when you're reading the finest books in my library, you will have to pause and shift your bottom because you will never, ever, be completely comfortable again."

She wondered. She liked this rather frightening dungeon, but she thought perhaps all she would have to do was to see through his truths and tell him the secrets of her world and she would be sleeping under the black comforter in his big bedroom whenever she wanted to. And she wondered if maybe that was not a good idea.

"There are no words that will make you safe in my dungeon. Most of the time I will put this gag in your mouth or this hood over your head." He paused. "No, not the hood, I think I will like to see these beautiful eyes and this outrageous red hair every time I hurt you. Only the gag."

He wrapped his hand in her hair and stuffed the gag in her mouth, fastening it tightly behind her head. Standing only inches from her face he whispered, "I am going to change you permanently. Your body, your mind, your heart. How you think, what you know, what you feel. You belong to me. By the time of the High Summer Festival, you will be a different woman. You will forget where you came from. You will be wearing me, my desires, my power, my force, from the inside out."

Kalianna was glad she was gagged for she would have cried out. He might not have known whether it was from fear or from joy, but she knew. She felt the fog moving into her head, the fog that covered everything else in the world except for her need to lie down and say 'yes' and to beg for him and to shift the pain everywhere it needed to be in her soul so that she could store it up and use it later in time.

"Tonight," he said, "only one thing."

Prince Caden placed a high bench beneath her belly and finished shackling her ankles to the floor and stood back to admire his work. He looked at the beautiful woman bent over and chained tight to the wall and the floor, her ass high in the air, still red from her earlier whipping. He realized that all he could see was red -- her ass, her heart of rubies, her scratched legs, tiny rubies hanging down from her nipples, and that hair. 

She could hear him moving around the dungeon and saw him near the fireplace and she closed her eyes and she traveled in her mind 

     ...the power of red is strong and in control, 
     I have the magic and the roses deep within my soul...

until she heard him next to her, telling her that she would be marked forever for him after tonight, that she would wear the brand of Prince Caden burned into her skin right next to her ruby heart.

He ran his hands over her body again and again, caressing her ass and her pussy, fingers digging hard into her wetness, stroking her with something that almost felt like love, making her need to move and spread her legs but she could not move an inch. "Soon," he would say quietly and she would wait for the pain and it would not come, only his fingers would be there, everywhere on her body, exploring, digging, pinching, stroking, knowing. "Soon," he said, and she thought he might have said it a hundred times and that she would go mad if he did not do what he was going to do soon and let her go beyond her fears and begin to absorb his power into her soul.

He paused and put his fist in her hair and turned her head to show her his hot branding iron, an intricate C intertwined across blackthorn thistles. He held it very close to her face and she could feel the heat. Then he put it back in the fire. "Not yet," he said. 

     ...the power of red is strong and in control, 
     I have the magic and the roses deep within my soul...

Over and over again she repeated it until there was nothing else in the world but this thought and his hands on her body and desire that grew in the room higher than any fire that had ever existed. His hand came and went and then ran hard across her pussy one last time, with four fingers deep inside of her and his thumb rubbing her clit and she was lost deep inside of pleasure and she was coming into the gag and crying from the release and he said, "Now." 

He pressed the branding iron hard into the soft skin of her ass and she tried to scream but could not. He counted. At 'four' he released it and bent down to watch the steam rise from her skin, to watch the burn take place and form his perfect initial, to take his own pleasure from the change in her body that would last forever. He stroked himself through his black silk as he watched, but thought he would let the rest of his own pleasure wait until later that night. 

He released her shackles and watched her eyes, the eyes that now looked different, like they had finally known something never imagined. "It's just the beginning," he whispered, removing her gag and kissing her deeply.

Prince Caden left Kalianna curled up on the cold cement floor and went for his midnight walk. When the Prince returned down the steps to the dungeon hours later to wake her, he could see a glow coming from beneath the door. He entered and stopped. The bag Kalianna had brought with her was emptied and there were dozens of tiny red candles lit in one big circle around the room. There was incense that smelled like roses burning in every corner. The fire was roaring in the fireplace. Satin ribbons were draped everywhere -- around the fireplace, the walls, and around her. The entire room glowed red. 

Kalianna stood in the middle of the circle of flames and she laughed and she danced, barely moving her feet, twirling red satin ribbons around her body, spinning so that Prince Caden could admire the red of her body, a body that now glistened with the oils she had spent forever gently brushing onto herself. She looked half-crazy; she looked completely satisfied. And she beckoned to the Prince to come into her circle of fire. 

He walked to her slowly and let her remove all of his clothes and toss them into the fire. She wrapped the ribbons around his body and they danced. She whispered to him and told him the shape she would take for him next. When he finally laid her down across the circle and forced his way into her, past the rubies and past the pain, the flames of the tiny candles grew taller and taller until they reached the ceiling and the dungeon was entirely filled with fire and with heat and with the passion of a perfect match.

* * * *

No one enters the Land of Kink anymore. Some say it went up in flames many years ago. Some say it is still there, buried behind the forest of thistles that grew out of control after peace began to spread across the lands. But at least one explorer reports having glimpsed a tall, strange-looking man walking in the forests of the North, dressed entirely in red, with a beautiful woman wrapped only in ribbons tied to his leg by her long red hair, and, he reports, their laughter filled the air. 

Copyright © 2000 Susannah Indigo. All rights reserved.