Welcome to Layman-upon-Waters. This story takes place in the same timeframe as my Laymen series with the same central protagonist. However, my hope is to have this be a stand-alone narrative that doesn’t require readers to be familiar with the main series. It can take place at almost any point on the timeline (provided you ignore the weather!), and it doesn’t develop the series’ underlying narrative. You’ll have to let me know if I’ve succeeded in that!
This is also a novel-in-a-month challenge, so chapters will release much quicker than the main series. On the flip side, I won’t have time to edit chapters to the same standard, so you can expect errors here and there. Wish me luck!
Delilah let out a devilish giggle as she ran her gloved hands down the grain of the wooden rack she had just assembled. The beams were fresh oak and the leather straps still smelled of oil. She was no craftswoman, preferring to conjure with spells instead of work with her own hands. But maybe her goblin servants were right to tinker as they did, if it was always this satisfying.
Delilah, regarding her work with an intimate stroke of her fingers, felt a rush of perverse pride for the torture frame she had constructed out of simple wood, iron and leather. She even allowed herself a lascivious run of her hand down the front of her fitted, black dress, over the modest swell of her bust and into the valley between her legs. Who would have thought that carpentry was so exciting?
Or perhaps it was the unspoken inference of her new equipment drawing her mind in lewd directions. Delilah tucked a finger into one of the ankle restraints and noted again how the device had been designed to hold its victim’s legs apart. She stroked the cotton cushioning that had been bound to the central beam where a prisoner’s head would rest, as if their comfort was in any way important. And she recalled the bundled outfit that had been delivered to her along with the materials for these six racks, the way the goblins had snickered as they’d handed it over. Tight, black leather replete with aesthetic spikes all the way down to the dangerous, knife-point heels on the boots. The whip with its gentle, blunted edge. Delilah had asked her horde for devices of pain, but the lusty little minxes had instead turned this place into a den of pleasure.
But there was one item in this chamber that was fulfilling its intended purpose. Delilah stepped to the centre of the room with a swish of dark silk and placed her hands on the grand orb of rose quartz resting on its slate pedestal. Cold and inert for now, but only until this room was filled. It wouldn’t reflect Delilah, her short, black hair, her fawn skin and the looping facial tattoos that marked her lineage, when it was brimming with power. Even her solid black eyes with their sacrilegious, red irises would be obscured in the eldritch glare. She couldn’t wait!
This stone-lined chamber represented the deepest layer of the Old Saint’s Dungeon, as it was known in the modern era. In centuries past, these chill cells with their iron cages would have held political prisoners from one side of the myriad civil wars that had plagued this stretch of the continent. It was no longer clear exactly which flag or ideology had owned this charming piece of real estate in its heyday, since none of the new members of the Accord of Regents, even the one who legally owned this land, wanted anything to do with its sordid history. There was a town eight days’ ride to the north called St. Argan, perhaps that was related in some way.
But the dungeon’s past didn’t concern Delilah. In its current state, built into the foothills of the western mountains and with only dirt roads left to connect it to civilisation, it was a withdrawn, defensible position. A firm foundation on which to build a new world order. On which to challenge the suffocating might of the Accord of Regents. When Delilah and her cohort had first arrived, much of the interior of the dungeon had been unfit for purpose. Rusted bars, rotten wood, eroded stonework. But now, after months of labour, it had been reborn. The watchtowers stood tall in the shadow of the mountain, the dens were cosy enough to push back the winter chill, and they had enough food to last until the first supply line was established in just a few days’ time.
All was in place. After so much searching, everything was exactly where it needed to be.
Delilah jumped as a figure moved across the open chamber doorway, and a pair of big, bright eyes peered in at her. Poor Yudeka was taller than the arched doors of the dungeon even before considering her curved, ebony horns. Her broad shoulders made every corridor a bit of a squeeze. But the ogre preferred the cold subterranea of the dungeon to the open sunlight, and she apparently quite liked the cramped underground. Maybe it reminded her of home.
Yudeka’s glowing, yellow eyes were wide, her lips tight between the curve of her twin tusks, and Delilah laughed at the big woman’s anxious expression.
“I was simply elsewhere, dear. You didn’t startle me.”
The ogre nodded, scratching at her greenish skin under the hemp dress she liked to wear. Delilah did wish the goblins could find something for her that was more fitting, more glamourous, perhaps a little more fearsome. The thick rope she used as a belt made her look like a serf from an old kingdom, when it could have been used to highlight the woman’s grand curves.
“Was there something you needed?” Delilah asked.
Yudeka nodded again, then pointed a finger upwards.
“They are assembled? Ready to hear the address? I hadn’t realised it was so…”
Delilah raised a hand and opened her palm. She whispered a few keen words into the ether. And a hazy orb of orange light spun to life before her eyes. It was a reflection of the sun from up on the surface, and it told her the hour was later than she’d realised. She’d gotten too lost in the excitement of her craftwork.
“I shall be right up,” she told the ogre.
Yudeka nodded once again, then turned and departed up the corridor. Delilah could hear her bare feet thudding on the stone, growing softer as the woman reached the stairs.
It was time. She’d wallowed in her pride for long enough. Delilah returned her hand to the quartz orb and gave her own reflection a smile. When the reflection didn’t meet her needs, she forced her expression to harden. Brow tight, eyes sharp, lips taut. Just like the charcoal illustration of her father that she kept under her pillow.
“Are you proud of me?” she whispered into the orb. “I hope so. I hope you’d be doing the same thing in my place.”
Delilah pulled her silk wrap over her nose and hair, leaving only her eyes visible. She grabbed her black yew staff from where it had been leaning beside the door. She took the steel crown she’d rested on the staff’s head and slipped it onto her own head instead. And she laid to rest in the cold earth the girl Delilah, the lost orphan and wayward adventurer.
The woman who left the dungeon, cackling with grim mirth, was known only as the Demon Sorceress.
laymenstory
Ewan Stone 
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