The Peaceful City

Heartsease like all its neighbouring city states was a peaceful city where dwelt humans and centaurs. The two had lived and crafted side by side for at least three millennia. Mostly they married their own, but there had always been a degree of cross marriage, and most adolescents had had dealing with members of the opposite sex of both species before they settled down. It wasn’t frowned upon, it was just the youngsters finding themselves.

None knew where the invaders had come from, nor ever heard of the so called Overlords before, but as the Bürgermeister of the city of Stahlschmidt some hundred and fifty miles away from Heartsease had said, “They couldn’t have been from anywhere near here. I believe they came from over the sea, and if we look on the banks of the rivers and the coast we’ll find their ship. If they came from anywhere within a thousand miles they’d have known that the Heartsease people are good neighbours, but you’d have to be insane to even threaten them never mind invade them, for they are far too dangerous.

He’d said that ten days after the invasion of Heartsease by which time the invaders were history. Out of nowhere Heartsease was invaded and taken over by the Overlords and their troops, who were all supposedly human. They raped, pillaged and looted before quickly setting up to rule a brutalised people. The centaurs they ill used as beasts of burden. None was ever to find out why they’d chosen Heartsease to invade. It was absolutely the worst choice of city they could have chosen.

The Heartsease response was less than a week coming and it was brutal, far more so than the Overlords could ever have imagined. The peaceful folk whom they forced to cook and toil for them and serve as body and bed servants had all been a part of a city wide trade as pharmacists. Even the city was named after a particularly efficacious herb for the elderly with cardiac problems. Their knowledge of herbs and other sources of medicines was vast. It was what the wealth of their society was founded on. They knew of many fungi that if taken with other plants they could safely ingest that would make their skins potent contact poisons. Some of the fungi were benign, that is they painlessly put the recipient into a sleep from which they did not awake. Some were very different and took time to take effect, but once they did the poisoned were in for twenty-four to forty-eight hours of agony before they died with every bodily system gradually shutting down. The toxins of such tended to be more concentrated in bodily fluids than in perspiration which meant rapists suffered even more badly than most, but it still took them twenty-four to forty-eight hours to die. The survivors of the poison purge who had not physically touched any, other than with whips and the like, were rounded up to be dealt with.

The surviving Overlords were all gelded and the lucky ones died in captivity of wounds sustained in the fighting when they’d been rounded up. The unlucky were tied to stakes in the shade and died slowly of thirst.

The Overlords’ troops were gelded and flogged almost to death before being put out from the city to die in agony, hungry and shelterless over the next three days. They’d all had their manhoods caressed by nubile, lush looking young women with ripe full breasts and toxic hands just prior to their emasculation. An experience they had enjoyed, for a while. Their emasculation had been done without benefit of anaesthesia and that agony was far more enjoyable than what followed as a result of the caressing they’d enjoyed.

Quent the huge and massively muscled procurer and panderer to the Overlords had not been touched by anyone’s skin, though he had been gelded, flogged and tied naked over a barrel for any to use as they saw fit. He’d been beaten viciously and raped many thousands of times, often with what he’d been beaten with, and was still cursing till the end came.

Belladonna a diminutive seventeen year old human said to her friend Rosemary a strawberry roan filly who was several times her size and in her pharmacy class at school, “I’d believed that Quent should have lasted much longer than that, for he was fed and watered. Those troops obviously weren’t as tough as they believed.”

Rosemary had said, “Maybe, maybe not. What saw him off was being taken by Hornbeam the centaur fighting force leader. He been particularly badly used by the invaders, so he had a score to settle. He’s twenty-five hands at the withers and is bi so doubtless it was multiplely enjoyable for him. I heard that Quent expired before Hornbeam had barely started, but he just kept going anyway till he’d powered his way through to the sweet end. Well it was sweet for Hornbeam anyway, though I doubt any of it was fun for Quent.” She smiled at a fond memory and said, “Hornbeam took me to the summer dance at the end of last school year. I’m a lot bigger than Quent and I enjoyed nearly dying of it too because Hornbeam was well named. He has a four inch thick, two and a half foot tool.”