The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Gargaz had known for some time that this day was inevitable, he told me. Over the years the Strangers had become better and better at breaking through the many barriers around the Tower, and he, Gargaz, had found them ever more difficult to deal with when they came, although he had yet to be defeated.

Not that the Strangers came very often, in the great scheme of things. But they came often enough, and ever more frequently these days. Today there was another Stranger at the gate, and the Script must be followed.

The Script dictated that I, Eleni, must be secreted again in the highest room of the highest tower—for the purposes of protection, Gargaz said. The heavy door must be locked. Then, in the cavernous room below, according to the Script, Gargaz must sharpen his sword, and take his place on the Throne of Being, and prepare for battle. And once he’d inevitably won, and despatched the Stranger back to wherever he had come from, life would return to normal.

Until the next time.

The Algori had mapped our World thoroughly, and I knew its shape and contours as intimately as those of my own body. The World itself was clear and observable. However, there were several competing schools of thought amongst the Algori about the more intangible mysteries: the significance of the Script, and the exact nature of the Strangers.

One school—the fatalists—believed that the Script embodied the predestination of the World; that if studied closely enough then the whole fate of the World and each individual therein could be discerned. When pressed, they admitted this could never be proven, because there was so much material in the Script that such a study would have been the work of a thousand lifetimes for a thousand Algori. There were also those (and Gargaz was one of them) who argued that because people felt and experienced free will, and mostly lived their lives without any sense of the Script looking over their shoulders, this theory was refuted by definition.

Another school of Algori believed that Occam’s Razor must obtain, and that the existence of the Script was simply evidence, if evidence was needed, of the existence of the Great Designer; his signature on the world. Gargaz had snorted at this assertion, and, indicating me, had replied that if evidence was needed for the existence of the Great Designer, just look at Eleni’s body, her breasts, her face; here was evidence in abundance.

But another school of Algori, poring away in their deep basements, held that the Script was a prescient gift from the Great Designer; a form of protection against these mysterious Strangers. Otherwise, argued this school, why would the Script cause placid herbivores like the Orcs to suddenly become insanely vicious when a Stranger approached, and to attack on sight? Why else would men feel compelled, faced with a Stranger, to conduct certain actions in a certain very specific way, often out of character, and always designed to hurt the Strangers? Certainly the Strangers were outlandishly aggressive, but nonetheless all this was at odds with the generally peaceable times we lived in. And this theory of Script-as-strategic-defence seemed to tie in with a number of other observations.

For example, every day an increasing number—thousands, now—of Strangers appeared at the opposite pole of the World, and began to make their way laboriously, methodically north in an uncoordinated invasion. Nobody knew exactly what or who the Strangers were, or where they came from. The Algori had learned, by tracking and correlating their paths and progress, that all routes suggested a single common objective: the Tower at the high north, and thus by implication me, Eleni, the Maiden in the Tower. And as and when an individual Stranger died, in one concentric zone or another, they often came back stronger and more cunning, negotiating their way slowly but surely north, latitude by latitude, their paths inexorably converging on our home.

They wanted something, and the Algori believed that something was me. But I wasn’t so easy to get to.

Gargaz was my Master, of course, and I belonged to him entirely now. I was naïve, beautiful, ruthless, ambiguous, passionate, wise, crazy, complex, powerful, vulnerable, strange, unique and wonderful. These were his words. He was the only man who knew who I truly was, he said.

He’d captured me deep in the Wilderness of Becoming, and brought me back here, to his high tower at the northern pole. He explained in words that brooked no argument or contradiction that I was both his prize and his property. I screamed and struggled, but once he had locked his silver chain around my neck, the laws of the land were clear. Once he had taken me, I was his.

He had taken me immediately, there in the forest. “No! Please!” I had squealed and wriggled, in some strange mixture of terror and joy, and I’d craned my neck to try to bite him. But in a way I must have loved him at once, even as he entered me for the first time. I can see that now, although I couldn’t see it then.

Once I had been wild and wilful and unpredictable. Stories were told about me: don’t go down to the woods after dark or the Maiden will get you. Wives wouldn’t let their husbands ride past my forest, and with good reason. The stories said the men were always drawn deeper into the woods, something irresistible pulling them on into the darkness, and when they were finally, irredeemably lost, the Maiden would come to them. The stories said that I would give them the Maiden’s Kiss, and they would never return; or if they did, their minds would be emptied of all thought. The Maiden was an unfathomable wild creature, the stories went, and the one thing in the World that was not part of the Script. The Maiden was untameable.

Gargaz told me he had methods for overcoming this, to make me more docile. More ‘maidenly’, he said, with an ironic grin. His mind was strong: the first time I felt it touch mine, I recoiled at its power. But I couldn’t have stopped him, even if I wanted to. He is the strongest man in the World. Even the Algori do his bidding. Some say this was how he had come to rule, not just by strength but by sheer force of willpower over all others. Some say his mind is almost as powerful in its dominion as the Script itself.

Once he’d brought me to the Tower, he needed to tame me, he said, rewrite my character for my new role, whatever that meant. He would even give me my own Script.

I spent long days chained to the wall in the Tower, pining for the wilderness. The Algori told Gargaz that it would never work, that I was too wild, that even he could not change the Script. Even Gargaz could not alter nature itself. He told them to slink back to their wretched basement, go play with their abaci, and stop bothering him while he was working.

Gradually he worked on me, and things did change. Gradually, my willpower tired and his probing thoughts became mine. Old fierce instincts were adjusted, softened, made more ‘maidenly’, as he delighted in telling me. After a while, I could no longer remember what had been there before. He worked on my mind carefully, lovingly, as a sculptor works with precious wood.

After a while, it became inevitable. After a while, I just wanted to serve him, to service him, and to draw my own sweet pleasure from him too. I learned just how to pleasure him forever, if he would only let me. I learned his needs and invented new ones every day. I learned maidenly obedience, and I was glad of it. I was happy. How could I not be? Happiness with my new state of being was one of his mental edicts, and very soon I forgot that it had ever been an edict at all.

One day I looked around my mind, and found something new, an inaccessible place of unknown memory. A blank spot. A few lines of Script, he explained, which he’d written himself. For the purposes of protection, he said.

When I was finally tamed, he told me I was the most beautiful object in the world, and still the most dangerous. I could almost believe the former, when he said it, because he, Gargaz, my Master, said it. I did not understand the rest until later.

The first time Gargaz had displayed me at his court, tamed, he’d led me into the throne room on my silver chain, and the room had hushed at once. Looking around, I saw everybody was staring at me. I raised my head proudly. Now, I was proud to belong to Gargaz, to wear his chain.

“This is Eleni,” he’d said. “A rare and precious creature. She is mine, and nobody but I may touch her.” The room had murmured its assent, but I noticed that all eyes were still upon me.

I sat beside him, that first evening. He had secured my chain to a ring on the wall behind us. I, Eleni, was as demure as my new role demanded. As we ate, I kept my eyes downcast, and I said nothing unless spoken to by my Master. But whenever I raised my gaze to the room, always there were eyes staring back, the eyes of men, covetous, and my cheeks burned. I knew what they wanted, and I was afraid. Once, I knew, I would willingly have bestowed the Maiden’s Kiss on them, and the consequences would have been dire, but I was a better person now.

Gargaz glanced at me sideways. He knew too, and I knew he knew.

The next time I was presented in the throne room, I was wheeled into the room in a cage. For protection, Gargaz said. But within seconds, his men had surrounded me, pressing against the bars of the cage, reaching through, grasping like wild animals, shouting their desires. Gargaz was incensed. That very day, he banished some of his disobedient men to the southern latitudes, wiping their memories so they’d never find their way home, and replaced them with a battalion of Warrior Women.

After that, the room at the top of the tower became more or less my permanent home. But even in the high tower, very occasionally a man from outside would claw his way through the Forest of Thorns, evade the Warrior Women, climb the staircase, and—driven insane by something beyond logic—try to reach me, there in the highest room. And Gargaz would have to kill again.

It was not only to do with my flawless, beautiful face (as Gargaz described it). Nor was it to do with my long raven black hair, or my sumptuous body (Gargaz’s words again). No, it was something to do with my scent on the wind that brought them, according to the Algori, who were of course immune to such things.

For a while time passed peacefully, until the Strangers began to arrive.