The Pleasure Market of Velra Tharn was not a place of coin.
It was a bazaar of flesh, sin, and sacred perversion, where pain was priced, and pleasure sold itself. Lanterns made of stretched skin swayed gently in the smoke-thick air, glowing with trapped moans. The stalls overflowed with writhing bodies—some begging, some bound, others transformed into living tools for satisfaction.
Kael walked between them, now dressed in crimson silk pants and a collar of black iron that shimmered with sigil-etched power. His wrists were no longer bound by chains, but by expectation.
Eyes followed him—noblewomen veiled in lace and ink, monstrous concubines with too many limbs, priests with forked tongues and hollow eyes. All of them smelled him. Wanted him. Because his brand had opened.
"He's been tasted," whispered a pale-skinned merchant whose body merged with his tent. "Marked by the Seamstress Queen. He bears her bite."
Kael ignored them, but his cock twitched with every breath of the Market. The very air here was an aphrodisiac—heavy with fermented lust and incense distilled from virgin screams.
He reached a square framed by obsidian statues in the shape of lovers locked in impossible positions. At the center was a flesh auction—not for bodies, but for desires. Cages pulsed, alive, containing bottled hunger, nightmare fetishes, cursed orgasms bound in crystal.
And on the black marble stage stood the Seamstress Queen herself.
"You watched him fuck a god-mouth," she purred to the crowd, her blind face lifted toward Kael. "Now you will see him bleed for your pleasure—and rise."
A masked servant handed her a flesh whip, barbed with the teeth of former lovers.
Kael was shoved forward.
---
He expected pain.
He got more.
The whip struck—and entered him. Not skin-deep. Not blood-deep. It lashed his memories, pulling out his darkest fantasies:
His first stolen touch with a priest's wife
The beast he'd once fucked to survive the mountain freeze
The noble man he strangled mid-orgasm for coin
Each lash made the crowd moan. Some came where they stood. Others screamed. The whip fed on Kael's past, and the sigil on his chest expanded, crawling across his ribs like a living spider of ink.
And Kael?
He was getting hard.
---
"He opens fast," the Queen whispered to the crowd. "Faster than any before him. The Throne feels him."
The final lash struck—and Kael came without being touched, spraying across the black stone as his sigil burst into light. The scream he released wasn't human. It wasn't even his. It came from something inside him, old and wet and awake.
---
When it was done, the Market went silent.
Then a sound rolled across the square: a slow, wet clapping.
From the shadows stepped a figure wrapped in black furs, wearing no face—just a mirror where his head should be.
"He's ready," said the Mirrorlord. "I'll take him to the Temple."
The Queen bowed.
Kael collapsed.
---
He had passed the First Trial.
The Second awaited beneath the temple of Obsidian Orgasms.
And Kael no longer feared the path.
He hungered for it.