Chapter 1

She waited in the gloom of her subterranean place of captivity. Today (or was it night? there was no way to tell) he had devised a new torment for her. In chains, she hung from the cave roof like a living stalactite, a feature of the weeping earth. The weight of her heavily pregnant body tugged down on her arms and her shackled wrists. Almost as unbearable was the wait, for her captor to return. At least he might let her down, but then what... His inhuman eyes haunted her memory. She could remember little else, the word she had lost... even her own name seemed lost to her, she had despaired of hearing it ever again. The fear, the sickness coiled in her stomach, adjacent to where something else curled in her womb, growing, drawing life from her tormented body. She wondered whether they would let her live long enough to give it a name, and whether she would want to.
And now he has come, the hideous one, he who keeps her like this, he whose clawlike hands first clasped the circlet of slavery about her throat.
His flesh is hard and rough, barbed and reptilian. The usual revulsion and dismay seize her.
Suddenly he is clutching at her abdomen, pressing his ear against her swollen womb, a mouth full of razor teeth grinning with fiendish delight and keen awareness. The taut chains, running up from her wrists and down from her ankles to the iron ring set below her feet, render her helpless to resist his diabolical touch.

All hope seemed gone in this dark place where only more horrors await, and perhaps some release in death. She had often wished herself dead to end the torment, but such was her nature, even now, that she had seldom wished death or suffering on her tormentors. She had even pitied them, and sought some trace of humanity in them even as they had stripped her of hers…

But now she hears a manly cry of righteous fury, and now the fiend's piercing cry of pain. She gasps, partly in pain as the beast's claws scrape her side, partly in wonder at the new sight that greets her moistening eyes. For now she sees that a white knight has come, a Knight of Esa! And his gleaming sword has plunged deep into the beast's shoulder, towards his black heart, and black blood spurts from the wound.
The chivalrous knight, having wrapped his white cloak about her trembling shoulders, carefully releases the last of the damsel's bonds. The beast is no-more. She looks away, bewildered, from the ghastly severed head to the more reassuring spectacle of her liberator's face. The knight speaks to her with earnest tenderness. Her lip quivers. She is almost overwhelmed with conflicting emotions; relief, disbelief, gratitude, embarrassment, grief, shame... a raw sting that could be love... and sorrow. However he has come here, she fears for him deeply.
Release... Much time has passed since she was last touched with anything other than roughness, or last felt her neck free of that collar....