Pierre could feel his heartbeat thumping in his mouth. Scattered memories drifted through his mind like petals shaken by the harsh wind, elusive and impossible to catch with your own hands even if they seemed within reach.
He heard voices. Unknown yet oddly familiar.
“…awake?…”
“…hours…passed…limit…”
“…another…do it…”
A warmthless light enveloped him. Suddenly, he felt weightless, coursing through a stream of light while a strong wind blew all the memories far out of his reach.
When the last petal was out of sight, Pierre felt tranquil. He closed his eyes and fell asleep twice.
“Can ya hear me, dragon? Now, don’t you dare pass out on me before we even started!” Pierre opened his eyes to an angry-looking minotaur staring down at him. The man was shirtless and had a single ragged loincloth doing a very poor job of preserving his modesty. “Hey! Pay attention! The boys musta roughed you up good before they brought you to my dungeon, that’s what ya get for attacking our city.”
He was lying naked on a rack, tied by his wrists and ankles to the machine’s stretching mechanism. With a turn of the wheel, the machine stretched his limbs to their limits.
“Hng! Stop!” groaned Pierre.
“I’ll stop as soon as ya tell me what I want ta’ know. Why did the Dragon Tribe attack Avven? The hell did we do to deserve it?”
A sudden fury welled up inside Pierre – like a fiery eruption of his dragon pride. “Fuck off! I’m not telling you shit. You can skin me alive if you want to.”
“I don’t think I’ll need to go that far,” said the minotaur as he walked towards the end of the end of the rack. “You dragons… really aren’t so tough, you know?” On the floor near Pierre’s feet was a wooden bowl containing a sweet-smelling liquid. The minotaur dipped a paintbrush into the bowl and began painting the bottoms of the dragon’s feet.
“H-Hehey! Pfft!”
“Now don’t even try pretending you ain’t ticklish. You’re not the first dragon I’ve reduced into a giggling little lizard.”
“L-Leave my f-feet aha-! Alone!”
“Sure. As soon as you tell me why your tribe attacked us.” He paused, waiting for an answer, but continued tickling the dragon’s feet when one didn’t come. “More tickles for you, then.”
The paintbrush was only the beginning. Only after Pierre’s large feet were coated in that substance did he find out it’s purpose.
“Hahaha! Oh! Oh, gods, please make it stop!” he begged as a pair of goats licked his soles, enthusiastically searching every nook and cranny for more of that delicious liquid. Whenever they cleaned his soles of it the minotaur would just apply another coat, to the goat’s enjoyment and Pierre’s dismay. And every time the bowl became empty, he simply ordered a servant to refill it while he personally toyed with Pierre’s feet in the meantime, ensuring his captive never got to enjoy an unearned break from the torture.
Dragon feet were large, wide, and typically possessed three toes or more, in shapes and dispositions specific to the each dragon’s subspecies. As a member of the mountain-dwelling Se’erra race of dragons, Pierre’s feet counted eight digits in total. Three main toes on each foot plus a small vestigial dewclaw from ages past, when dragons were not yet bipedal and relied on their claws to climb.
But now they served no purpose other than being the two most unfathomably ticklish objects in the private universe of Pierre’s mind.
After what must’ve been at least twenty bowl refills, the minotaur finally called off the goats. He stood over the sweating, panting, sobbing and flashed him a wicked grin.
“Alright, so you’re a bit tougher than most of your friends. Ah… but don’t you worry, dragon. You will break.”
That was the first day of Pierre’s torture. Normally, the following days would’ve been easier as the dragon got accustomed to having his feet tickled for hours on end with no breaks. But the minotaur was well aware of this effect and worked to minimize it by ensuring Pierre never knew what to expect.
On the second day, Pierre was taken to the city square and put in stocks where the citizens politely informed him of their displeasure with the Dragon Tribe attack on their city by lining up and taking turns tickling the daylights out of him.
The hungry goats from the day before were nothing compared to the wrath of a thousand angry people taking out their frustrations on his ticklish feet from sunrise to sunset.
On day three he was brought up to the highest tower in the castle, where the king’s wizard spent the better part of the morning casting all manner of spells, hexes and curses on him.
“Feather Touch!” the flamboyantly dressed greyhound commanded as a bolt of energy shot from his staff straight to Pierre’s soles. Suddenly everything below his ankles tickled. The whole surface of his soles, including the nooks around his toes and even the tops felt as if they had been thrown into a pit of perpetually wriggling feathers.
“Petrification!”
His feet stopped moving – what little relief he could still get from paddling them around and wiggling his toes was taken away by the wizard’s spell. Now there was truly nothing he could do while the invisible feathers assaulted his soles.
“Loose Lips!”
Pierre started talking. About anything and everything. He found that he could no longer stay quiet or even limit his vocalizations to laughter and begging. He was overcome by an overwhelming urge to speak. He told everything to the wizard. His strengths, his weaknesses, his story, his fears, his pleasures. Everything but what the wizard wanted to know. Everything but the reason he and his tribe attacked the city.
Weeks passed. Every day brought with it new, excruciating tickle torture to Pierre and his abused soles. He came close to cracking a number of times, but always managed to hold firm. His dragon pride was his refuge. The noble lineage of the Dragon Tribe was the bastion they could not break. The one comfort they couldn’t take away from him.
Then the day came when he was brought before the king.
He was taken in chains to the throne room where the king and his court awaited him with an entourage of guests that made Pierre’s heart sink.
Dragons. His tribesmen.
They were all there in the throne room, all of the dragons that got captured in the attack. Naked. In bonds. Tortured. To the left of the throne, the minotaur toyed with the stocked feet of two muzzled dragons as they leaned on one another for a modicum of comfort. To the right, the wizard cast a mind-control spell on a dragon and forced him to brush the feet of another with soapy water.
But the worst was happening right in the throne, where the regally dressed leonine king had blindfolded red dragon worship his feet with his tongue while another licked and sucked his barbed cock and yet another presented his feet for the king to idly poke and prod.
None of those three dragons were in chains, and every one of them was erect.
“Congratulations, dragon,” the king spoke. “It appears you are the strongest of your tribe.”
The days of endless torture didn’t break Pierre. The sight of his brothers, broken and subservient, did. All the chants, all the mantras, all the the prayers to the dragon gods had not strengthened his spirit enough to resist that demented spectacle unfolding in front of him.
With a desperate wail, he collapsed on the floor.
The lithe fox let out a disappointed sigh as she read the computer screen on the pod.
“Told you he wouldn’t make it.”
“That’s a shame. He had potential,” shrugged the sharply dressed jackal.
“With all due respect, Dr. Locke. I told you we were going dangerously past his limit. That was his fifth simulation in a row. Now he’ll be lucky if he can form a coherent sentence. If we keep breaking their minds like this we’ll run out of subjects.”
Dr. Locke contemplated the dragon in the simulation pod and noticed a trail of tears rolling down from beneath the virtual reality headset. He shook his head.
“There is no room for weakness in the next generation of super-soldiers, Sasaki. If they can’t get through the simulations then they stand no chance against the enemy.”
“Right, but these simulations… some of them are just downright cruel. Who even comes up with these things?”
“History does. Most of these are recreations of real historical events which I’ve personally transcribed into interactive sims.” The jackal smiled proudly. “They’re extremely accurate to our enemy’s torture methods. That’s why we’re using them over the standard psychological training sims.”
“I see.”
Dr. Locke paced through the row of simulation pods, eyeing the naked men of every species imaginable within – some of them awake, most of them unconscious. He paused when he came across a muscular wolf, peering inside his pod to have a look at his feet – large, and his toes curled fearfully. The wolf’s chest heaved, as if he’d just performed a physically demanding task.
“This one arrived today,” informed Sasaki. “He just got through his second sim.”
“Load up another one.”
“Yes, sir. Which one should I put him in?”
“The medieval one with the minotaur.”