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Arwin sighed as the door in front of him creaked open. A cloud of dust drifted out from the dark room. The storage space likely hadn’t been accessed for many years. For as long as he had been at the University, it had always just been one of those many unassuming doors that never opened. The building where he was working, the Institute for Aetherics, was one of the old halls. The first generation of buildings constructed after the founding of the University. It was probably two centuries old by this point. But, like all the old buildings still in use today, it had gone through countless renovations throughout the years. Likely this storage space had once been the primary archive for the students and researchers in the department, but when some renovation or another added something bigger and better to the building, everything important had been moved out, and the room was completely forgotten.
A key to the room had only just been found. Judging by its semi-modern lock, the space had probably only been abandoned within the last decade or so. Probably when the building got its fancy new wing seven years ago. They’d found the key shoved in the back of one of the shelves of the front reception desk, and his boss had sent him to go and figure out what lock the key was for. His boss was always too curious. He always had to know what things were for. This door had been one of the last things Arwin had found to try and unlock, being buried at the end of a hallway in the old, musty basement.
He wasn’t too upset at the excuse to walk. He was fascinated by the old building. Working reception in the building of the department he was also writing his thesis in was quite convenient. He could go straight from researching in the lab to making money to fund his research. But it did make his days blend together, always just walking back and forth between a handful of rooms in the same building. Scouring the entire institute for a lock that matched the wayward key was at least something to break up the monotony, even if it was an infuriating task.
However, now that task was done. He could probably just lock the door back up and go tell his boss the exciting news. But… there was no reason he couldn’t take a look around. He was certainly curious to see what old things were abandoned in the darkness of the old room. He stepped into the room, and then fumbled around for a light switch.
Eventually he found one, annoyingly placed next to the hinges of the door, so that it was blocked by the door while it was open. But when he flipped it, after a moment, the lights in the room blinked on, and the room was filled with that familiar arcane hum.
Looking around, Arwin found that the room was far more cluttered than he had expected it to be. For an abandoned room, there appeared to be a lot of old tools and projects left behind. Shelves lined the walls of the room, and they were packed with all manner of musty old books and folders. The room itself was surprisingly large, extending back quite a way. There were rows of large racks cutting through the center of the room, each four shelves high, and at least double his height, creating aisles of storage room. It was like a miniature warehouse. Quite large for an academic building, he thought. Many of the spaces on the racks were empty, leaving gaps that he could see through, but there were still a fair number of esoteric devices and wooden crates stacked there.
It was a slow day, he figured, and even on a busy day it wasn’t as if he was particularly necessary at the front desk, and so he decided to take some more time to just poke around. He began to make his way down the aisles, thumbing along the spines of the old books, and peeking into the abandoned boxes and crates on the racks. Many of the crates were shut tightly fastened, and even the stuff he could see was mostly beyond him.
Even after nine years of study, there was still so much he didn’t know. That was a large part of what drew him to Aetherics, also known as the study of generating arcane energy. The field was filled with many branches, since the arcane could be found in anything, from plants to rocks to clouds. Granted, those branches all bickered among themselves constantly, but there was a kind of charm to their passion. Even the rock scientists (he couldn’t quite remember what they called themselves) were fiercely loyal to their different subfields. He remembered his roommate, one of the aforementioned rock scientists, giving him an impassioned speech (rant) on the superiority of igneous rocks to sedimentary rocks for powering arcane engines.
Most of that had gone over Arwin’s head. He was a bit of an oddball in the department. His interest in Aetherics was one of conservation, and ethical resource management. It was really more of a humanities field, nestled in an engineering field. But it was important. Or at least, he thought it was important. All of his peers treated magic as if it were an infinite resource, but it was far from it. He was currently tracking the overuse of precious gemstones in aether production plants, and the unethical mining practices that facilitated it. When he found a box filled to the brim with spent amethyst crystals, he allowed himself a small, smug smile. Seeing that was validating to him.
As he was contemplating the amethysts, he heard an odd, muffled sound an aisle over. It sounded maybe like dripping water, but it was so faint he couldn’t be sure. He quickly hurried over to investigate. As he crossed over to the aisle, his attention was immediately drawn to a large wooden crate sitting on the bottom row of the rack. Its front face had fallen open slightly, so that there was a slight gap. He walked over to the crate. Sitting on the floor, it reached almost up to his shoulders, and it was a good couple of steps wide. He had to know what was inside. He worked his fingers into the gap and gave the heavy wooden panel a solid yank. With a crack, it wrenched open.
Arwin gasped, stumbling back in shock as he saw what was inside. Kneeling bound within the crate, was a humanoid figure. There were a lot of details for him to process all at once. The crate itself was padded with some kind of black cushioning. Of the figure in the crate, there were a number of things that immediately drew Arwin’s attention. The figure’s upper half appeared to be bound in some kind of tight-fitting, thick leather straitjacket, with stitching that looked too durable to be comfortable. Its head was wrapped tight in a leather hood, gagging and blinding it. Two curled rams horns sprouted from the top of the hood. Restraints, fastened to a collar around its neck and to the roof of the crate, kept its posture upright. Its lower half was unclothed, but covered in brown fur, almost like a pair of pants. The figure’s legs ended in hooves, and its kneeling legs appeared to be bent like a goat’s leg. Sprouting obscenely from the fur between its legs, it sported a lengthy, glistening erection that was tapered, certainly not human. In fact, it appeared quite slick. For a moment, Arwin thought he had perhaps uncovered some kind of perverse taxidermy sculpture, but as his initial shock cleared, he observed that the figure’s chest was subtly rising and falling, and, though he tried not to stare, the erection was gently bobbing. And when he listened very closely, he could hear, faintly, something that sounded like soft moans. It was certainly a living creature.
The figure in the crate was a satyr, that much was clear to Arwin once he gathered himself enough to actually consider what was in front of him. And, with a sickening dread in his stomach, he realized he already knew what he was looking at. Satyr were not a common sight. In fact, Arwin had only ever seen one satyr. Back in his freshman year at the University, when he was still an undergraduate, his year had included a satyr boy. He had been a foreign exchange student from the Fae Realm. It had been the talk of the class. At the time, the satyr had represented the first step forward in the warming of relations between humanity and the fae.
At first, all of his peers had found the satyr's presence very exciting, but gradually that excitement gave way to jealousy. Academia was a very competitive environment, and no small number of his peers had expressed bitterness that a satyr was taking up all of the school's attention. And it didn’t help that the boy just didn’t fit in well with the class. He had been very enthusiastic, but too much so. He was always so chipper and eager, but in a grating way. His accent had been difficult to understand, and he was always asking so many questions. It was frustrating. After the initial novelty of his attendance wore off, no one really wanted anything to do with him. Everyone just found him to be a bit annoying. Arwin, regrettably, had been no exception. Whenever he saw him in the halls of the freshman dorm, he remembered he always felt that twinge of annoyance. The clopping his hooves made on the floors was just so loud, especially on the hard wood floors of the dorm, and he was constantly tripping over nothing, and dropping things, and apologizing. The satyr boy quickly became an outcast. It was petty and juvenile, but they had all basically still been kids back then, just learning to be adults.
He remembered, halfway through the year, there had been a plan among the students on his dorm floor to prank the satyr. The Fae Studies department had been pestering the satyr to participate in all manner of experiments. Having a fae on campus was probably the biggest deal to that particular department. Over the first couple of months, he had agreed to participate every now and then, and so occasionally he’d be out of everyone’s way for a day or two. But then, a handful of his classmates had caught wind of one experiment that they described as ‘really messed up’, proposed by a professor that ‘must be totally out of his mind’. Arwin didn’t know too many of the details, only that the satyr had already turned it down, and that it would have kept the satyr out of their dorm for an entire month. He remembered that the pranksters had planned to fake a letter from the satyr accepting the request to participate. They didn’t expect him to actually participate; they were mostly just looking to cause some chaos and force the satyr to turn down the professor a second time.
But now that Arwin thought about it, that had been around the last time he had seen the satyr. This had occurred near the end of the semester, and he ended up moving into a different building when he returned after the break. He remembered hearing that there had been a bit of a diplomatic kerfuffle with the Fae regarding the satyr, but he had been under the impression that the satyr just decided to drop out or something like that. None of his peers made much of a deal about it, and so Arwin sort of just forgot about it. But he had many questions now. That had all been nine years ago.
He searched around the back of the crate. Normally, papers documenting what a project was were kept somewhere nearby the prototype in storage. He found a folder slid partially underneath the crate and pulled it out. He opened it up and scanned the first page. The paper was brittle. It laid out the basic timeframe for whatever the experiment was intended to be, and Arwin saw that it was in fact only supposed to be one month. Then he saw the name of the professor behind the project, and it all clicked into place.
It was Dr. Barrett’s. He had always been an odd man, but he wasn’t in Arwin’s field, and so he wouldn’t have recognized his name except that his death had been big news across the campus. He’d died very unexpectedly in Arwin’s first year, around the time of the prank now that he thought about it. His office would have been cleaned out, and all of his projects either discontinued or transferred to another researcher, but if he had been running something in an old storage room in the facilities of another department… it could have slipped through the cracks.
Arwin flipped through the rest of the documents. It was titled vaguely: “Preliminary Exploration into the Practical Applications of Fae Creatures as Conduits of Arcana”. The project likely would have received a more specific name if Dr. Barrett had lived long enough to actually publish it, Arwin figured. However, as he read, he began to piece it together. The professor seemed to have been interested in the problem of siphoning magic from the Fae Realm. The Fae Realm possessed a natural wealth of magic, far greater than the Material Realm had access to, but it was nigh impossible to bring that magic across the boundary between realms. Practically everyone knew that. The one exception to that restriction had always been living beings. Being native to the realm, Fae creatures that crossed into the Material Realm retained a connection to their home realm, and that planar link allowed them to draw the arcana of the Fae into the Material Realm. In early human history, fae creatures had been hunted for their magic. The replenishment of magic was something innate and unconscious to a fae creature. They did it by nature. And it was human nature to exploit such things. Many ancient texts described numerous techniques for harvesting magic from a captured fae creature. When it came to taking their magic, any material would suffice, from their hair to their skin to their blood.
But Arwin knew from some introductory classes he’d taken that, in humanity’s history of hunting fae, prized among all materials harvested from the Fae was their semen. His more immature classmates had been quite rowdy after hearing that, but after the lecturer restored order, he had explained it properly. Blood was quite effective, but Fae were unusually prone to bleeding out while they were in the Material Realm, and ultimately nothing held as much concentrated magic as a male’s semen. Humanity had observed that phenomenon early on, but the reason for it was a moderately recent discovery for humanity. As meaningful and symbolic as sex had always been to humans, it was even more so to the Fae.
Accounts from the handful of humans who had so far managed to integrate into native Fae communities described sex amongst the Fae as highly metaphorical and very difficult for a human to comprehend. Writings from those explorers' expeditions and observations in that regard had made waves when they were first published, as the Fae that crossed over to the Material Realm appeared quite biologically standard in terms of reproduction. The most popular contemporary theory had subsequently become that, in order to exist in the Material Realm, Fae had to ‘fold’ the symbolic aspects of their being into their physical body. It was currently thought that that was an unintentional process, as no Fae had ever indicated to a human that they did it on purpose. But maybe they had a reason to be secretive about it. Arwin wasn’t sure either way. The overall result was thought to be that sexual matter was imparted a significantly higher degree of arcana relative to all other physical substances as the intrinsically magical nature of their sex was transmuted whole cloth into the baser, animal sex of the Material Realm, in order to conform with the nature of the world. It was ultimately just a theory, but it was at this point widely accepted as the best explanation.
However, semen was, of course, always rather difficult for ancient hunters to obtain, and they had few qualms about killing their quarry, and so blood was the most common Fae reagent. The finer materials were more often harvested by nobility, who could afford the necessary space, manpower, and time, to make it worth it. Kingdoms had been built on this. With a handful of Fae at your disposal, and the resources and skill to keep them alive and productive, a seemingly limitless amount of magic could be accessed (theoretically limitless. No one knew for sure how much magic the Fae Realm held, but it felt unlikely that humanity could ever deplete it). However, the practice of capturing Fae and harvesting them for their magic had been outlawed as part of the treaty that ended the Last Realm War.
(That introductory class had been odd to Arwin. For as much as he found Kiri, Khairi, Kaa—he couldn’t remember the satyr’s name; it was something like that—insufferable, he did find it odd how the introductory Fae Studies class sometimes talked about the Fae like they weren’t as sentient as humans. Especially with the changing relationships between the realms, it felt outdated to him. They had just fought a war for goodness' sake. So, he’d bounced off of the subject, although the Fae Realm still held interest to him as a potential source of renewable magic.)
Dr. Barrett’s idea appeared to be a revival of the practice, but with modern technology applied to the goal of automating the process and reducing the cost. Arwin frowned as he flipped through the paper. He had never been the most gifted at reading technical writeups, but the doctor appeared to have been decently thorough and clear with his descriptions of his contraption. The primary function was, in fact, to harvest Fae semen, and according to one sketch... Arwin reached over to the wood panel he had wrenched off of the crate and flipped it over. Sure enough, it was cushioned like the rest of the crate, but set into the cushion was a hole. He knelt down to get a closer look at it. It appeared quite narrow, forming a pucker in the cushion that Arwin couldn’t actually see into. But he could assume that it had some depth, given the trickle of cum that began leaking from it as he tilted the panel to get a better look.
Curiosity got the best of him, so he reached out a finger and prodded at the hole. The cushion yielded as he pressed against it, and more cum trickled out. It was still quite warm. Hot even. Arwin began to ease his finger into it, pushing against the unexpectedly tight entrance, until his finger suddenly popped through and slid into the slick hole down to his last knuckle. He gasped when, after a moment, the already firm grip around his finger tightened further as the hole seemed to begin to suck hard against him, seemingly trying to draw him in deeper. The first inch of the hole was smooth, but past that Arwin could feel what felt like thousands of cilia pressing into his finger all around, swirling around it. They felt thin, but not delicate, forcefully digging into him as they rubbed against his finger. And the hole was almost uncomfortably warm. The sensation made him shiver. As he stared at his finger buried in the hole, his attention shifted to the satyr kneeling in his periphery, or more specifically, his cock, which was still hard, and seemed to be flexing and contracting rhythmically even though it was just jutting out in the air, untouched. Arwin shuddered as he considered it; the sensation of the hole around his finger was already verging on unbearable, and so he could barely imagine what it would feel like around something as sensitive as a penis…
Then the hole pumped, contracting down to slide its walls along Arwin’s finger until he felt his fingertip press against the soft wall at the end of its length. He yelped, startled from his thoughts, and wrenched his finger from the hole. Rivulets of cum squelched out the hole with it. The puckered entrance of the hole winked as it continued to pump.
Arwin shook his hand off and then stood up to continue reading the writeup. According to the methodological proposal, the box was intended primarily to extract semen from the satyr, but it was also designed to, as the professor phrased it, ‘capture the other less potent, yet nonetheless useful, byproducts of the primary procedure’. That meant, apparently, that the leather jacket and hood the satyr was wearing wicked away the incidental sweat, tears, and drool that the satyr produced as a consequence of the harvesting stimulation, and used them to further supplement the efficiency of the entire machine. According to the writeup, the expected aetheric output from the entire procedure would be so great that a portion of it could be cycled back to sustain the operations of the entire box, and the remaining excess would comprise a respectable output. Besides the harvesting, it seemed that the majority of the cycled mana went to a variety of maintenance runes stitched into the leather binding him, mainly runes that kept the satyr nourished and hydrated (mana hungry runes that were only sustainable due to the substantial amount of mana expected from the fae), runes that dealt with waste (rather, prevented, as urine would hamper the efficiency of machine by diluting the collection of semen, and solid waste was a Material byproduct, and carried only a small amount of incidental magic), and runes that sustained his physical body (mostly via the gentle electrocution of his muscles, to counteract atrophy). Arwin felt a small amount of relief as he continued to read. Dr. Barrett appeared to recognize the aesthetic abhorrence of subjecting another sentient being to something like this, even if they weren’t human, and so part of the design of the leather hood wrapping the satyr’s head were runes which kept him in a coma-like state, so that while the contraption tormented his body, he was mercifully asleep. Still, great pains appeared to have been taken to completely suppress the satyr’s movements, both through physical restraints and also various magical means, in order to eliminate the possibility of his injuring himself with any unconscious struggling.
Arwin took a step back and took in the situation. A fae creature at the center of an arcane cell, small and stable enough to sit on a shelf in some university store room for years. Such a thing was quite remarkable. And to the satyr, it would feel as though not a second had passed.
The satyr tried to thrash, yelling against the hard metal bit that filled his mouth, his jaw unable to rest around the protrusions of metal that poked against his gums and tongue and hard palette so that he could not close his mouth comfortably. He could only scream between the gasping, labored breaths that he was able to draw against the thick, stuffy leather covering his face. Someone had opened the box! The agonizing friction of the tight hole slipping quickly off of his cock had stunned him into overstimulated stupor for a moment, but as his mind began to register the sudden and unexpected pause in his eternal torment, he realized that he could hear something. Someone!
He attempted to squirm and struggle against the magic that had sealed his body away long ago, to make any sort of sound or movement. But the leather jacket binding his arms tightly hugging his chest was just as unforgiving as it had been for years, and among the many hexes laid into the stitching were some that numbed his muscles, so that even if he were strong enough to tear himself free, he could hardly muster the impulse to strain against the thick cocoon. Tears streamed down his worn and filthy face, stained and red from years of tears and drool. The sound he heard was like a mumble, but it was closer than anything else he had heard in ages! He continued to try and scream and beg, but not a sound made it out of the leather hood. The only thing that signaled his desperation to the outside world was his member. Free for the first time in years, it flexed erratically in the air. A careful observer might have realized how its strong contractions belied the vain attempts of the satyr to wriggle his entire body free from its restraints.
In the Fae Realm, the satyr were the most naturally inclined towards the human notion of sex. But on their home plane, sex was as whimsical as anything else. A poet might write about a satyr chasing a nymph for days through a forest, and then when he finally catches his prize, the human will merely say, 'finally, they laid together'. While the writer is merely eliding the gross, carnal details of sex, that omission happens to be a more accurate description of what sex means in the Fae Realm. To say that it happened is enough, and all of the spirits in the Fae Realm live in the satisfaction of abstract pleasure that simply is.
When Dr. Barrett had proposed this experiment to the satyr all those years ago, the naïve fae still held many of those assumptions. He hadn’t been popular enough with his classmates for anyone to teach him otherwise yet. And besides, he had been told that he would just blink, and the next thing he knew he would be back awake in the lab, having provided invaluable research to the department. And he had felt at the time that he badly needed to be useful to someone. Unfortunately, the stasis runes had failed immediately—likely due to just a single sloppy line stroke somewhere—and doubly unfortunately, nothing else failed, preventing the satyr from communicating the issue. He had woken up, not at the end of the experiment, but still bound tightly within the box, unsure of how long he had been left inside, and if anyone was still keeping track of him. And so, the satyr was introduced to the horrors of Material sex.
With the lid on his coffin, the hole in it pressed tightly against his crotch. Even if he had the freedom to twist and turn, the physical dimensions of the space enforced that there was simply no where else that his cock could be except buried deep within its plush, wet interior. He had awoken mid-orgasm, his balls pulled so tight against him that they ached as his cock throbbed violently, jet after jet of cum pulled from him as he struggled to understand what was happening. Then, just as he began to feel the rising nausea that comes from a particularly violent ejaculation, struggling to catch his breath against the thick, stuffy leather pressed against his face, the hole contracted firmly around his length. His body attempted to react to that before his mind had even processed the signal from his cock, but once he had, he began his first lesson of many on the thousands of sensitive nerves that ran along each square inch of his length. Each of the multitude of cilia lining the hole dragged its own track along the surface of his penis, lighting up each overstimulated nerve along their path. This was the satyr boy's introduction to the male refractory period, a burden unknown to the men of his home. The involuntary struggles and convulsions that each stroke induced in him were not evident externally, suppressed by the magic binding him and hidden in part by the shaggy fur that clad his legs, but it was an unbearable, mind-breaking torment to him.
But there was nowhere he could go to escape it. Combined with the frequent stray sparks of magic across his body, the box kept him awake and aware. Over a period of days, he was tortured with orgasms, overstimulation, and isolation, until his body grew too worn to keep his eyes open, and he would fall briefly into a stupor that was something like sleep, only to be shocked awake by some shoddily drawn rune, and he was back in his body again, screaming and sobbing, his cock being rubbed and sucked, until his throat grew too worn and his tears dried up, and he slipped off of consciousness once more.
After years of this, his agony had not lessened. Whenever he felt his mind going fuzzy, drifting away from the macabre reality of his fate, yet another brutal orgasm yanked the boy back into the physical sensation of his torment. Losing his mind was no escape when the torture never ended. The sparks and the ‘pleasure’ (a sensation too intense, too agonizing to really deserve the word) kept him anchored firmly in place, so that agony suffused the entirety of his being, and he was reduced to nothing more than an overstimulated cock and a mind to suffer over it.
Until something different! A sound! A hope! A break. Freedom, soon. A new emotion crested over his despair. He had not felt anything but despair for so long, he could hardly even understand what he felt now. But he needed to be free, although he hardly remembered what that meant after all these years, only that it would mean to not be trapped in hell any longer. A break from the mind rending contractions of his cock that forced his eyes to roll back into his head surfaced a part of his mind that had been buried for so long, but had clearly been struggling still, after all this time.
But then he heard another clunk, of wood on wood, and then he felt his cock pressed against the warm entrance of the hole, bending slightly before sinking in. He screamed louder than ever before, sobbing and futilely trying to thrash his body to and fro. But there was nothing he could do, and soon the lid of the box was set back in place, and he was back where he had been all those years ago, when he had first woken up. The brief respite he had been given only serving to redouble the sensitivity of his cock as the hole began to pump around it once again.
Arwin sat back, panting, as he examined his work. The lid of the box was put back in its place, more secure than when he had found it. Arwin felt a little ill, but… he thought he had made the wisest decision. Ethics were complicated. His first instinct had, naturally, been to pull the satyr free from the box. But then he really considered that decision. It had been nine years since the satyr boy had gone missing. That disappearance had put immense strain on the relationship between realms. Only in the last couple years had that relationship begun to recover its footing. A new batch of Fae exchange students would be graduating in a year. But if he were to reveal the missing satyr, in such a horrifying state, that would undo all of that once again. Wouldn’t it be more responsible to let it lie, to let the secret rest with him? He couldn’t be the one to jeopardize all of the excellent diplomatic work that had been done. Maybe further in the future, when the relationship was more solidified, he could come back and undo this mistake. But it would be far too soon now.
And besides, the paper was clear: the satyr was in a peaceful stasis. To him, it would be as if he had been asleep for a single moment, regardless of whether it had actually been a month, nine years, or even a couple decades. As long as Arwin remembered he was here, and came back to get him, he could wait until the moment was right and there would be no difference. It didn’t feel like the most obvious moral decision, but when he weighed the pros and cons against each other, when he considered the ultimate impact of his available decisions, there was really only one choice he could make. The only one that would suffer at all would be Arwin, burdened as he was with the knowledge of what was hidden here in this storage room. But that was certainly something that he could endure, if it meant peace between worlds.
(Besides, there was something fascinatingly promising here. Given the box's state, it seemed that it met Dr. Barrett's predictions, at least in that it could sustain itself with its own aetheric output. That alone was phenomenal. It would be worth it, perhaps, to measure its surplus. If the rest of the late professor's predictions were correct, his little power cell could mark the beginning of a technological revolution. The Fae Realm was such a rich source of magic that, compared to sieving the ocean or mining the earth, it would be like taking light directly from the sun. Humanity could thrive off of that for millennia. Such an abundance might end all war...)
Arwin left the room, making sure to turn off the lights and lock the door behind him. And so the crate sat alone once again, sealed tight among a number of other similar boxes, its silent, screaming prisoner even more hidden from the world than before.