sloth with malicious intent

The first thing to note is that...

This is going to Hurt.

That fact cannot be shied away from. Pain, even for masochists, hurts. There is a tolerance to how much someone can take, and ways to engage with that tolerance. You will need to learn how each masochist takes pain, and potentially even teach them how to manage and endure it.

So you've got a paddle and a tied up piece of masochistic meat, or perhaps you're using your hand and it's bent over your knee, or perhaps it's cuffed to a cross and you've got a whip, or perhaps you've got a knife or needles or... well by now I've laboured the point enough.

How do you get the most out of your meat?

Start slow. Hit them slowly and rhythmically, building up in intensity every few hits, and when they tense too much or start struggling to breathe or can't stop themselves from making too much noise, slow down again.

Your aim is to warm up the meat so that it can get used to the pain, and once it's used to the pain you can intensify it. Climb up, drop down, and climb back up again. Vary the strike location, but remember that locations you haven't hit as much will need warming up too. The more skilfully it's done, the more you'll get to hit it.

On the subject of their breathing, tension, and noises, you'll want to pay attention to these as you hit them. As you hit them, their breathing will try to get sharp and shallow. Their muscles will try to contract to harden against the impact, and they'll make noises as reactions to your hits. Encourage them to keep their breathing steady and calm, and they'll take the hits better. Encourage them to relax so that the impact dissipates into their flesh instead of getting caught in their tension and you can hit them harder while hurting them less. Listen for moans of pleasure if they're so inclined, and encourage them to verbalise their pain, intentionally responding to pain verbally will help them endure it. Let them calm themselves between your hits, and they'll feel like they can take it and let you push them harder.

Watch how they react, but be aware that you may need to soothe or goad them. Try different things: Hold your off-hand on their shoulder so that they can brace against you. Praise them for each hit you've delivered. Tell them they can take more for you. Tease them. Rub them while they catch their breath and tell them how happy you are with them for taking it. Be verbal, but don't expect responses unless they enjoy responding. Pay attention to what helps them calm.

Once you've got the hang of these things, you can begin to play with them and challenge them: forbid them from making noise. Blindfold them so that they can't prepare for the pain. Make them watch you hit them so that they can't help but tense up in response, and play with false swings to mess with their minds. You can be cruel, because you know how it works. You know which moving parts can be shifted, and which must stay still.

Consider also what your masochist wants from being hit: some do not want to be overwhelmed, they want to be guided and hit into a meditative place where they can dissolve into the pain: intense but never too much, and then you can hit them until they're bloody and raw. Others want their pain to push right up to the edge of too much and stay there until they break. They want to cry and scream, and your challenge is to see how cathartic you can make it: break them too quickly and they might not find it satisfying, and neither will you.

.

This can’t be happening.

The merman’s mind reeled as agony ripped through his nailed wrists. Iron nails punched clean through the delicate webbing of both hands, pinning him to the rough wooden post like a trophy. Every tiny twitch ground the metal against bone and cartilage.

His head was yanked cruelly backward, scalp burning where the heavy dumbbell bit into his long hair. It dragged him down without mercy, forcing his throat taut and his spine into a vicious arch. He couldn’t even lower his head. Couldn’t hide. Could only stare helplessly up at the face of his abuser while his body screamed.

Mother Sea, make it stop...

Glowing blood poured steadily from the puncture wounds. He felt it running hot down his arms, dripping off his elbows, streaking down the pillar in shining rivulets. More of it bubbled up his throat and leaked from the corner of his mouth, warm and metallic. His own sacred blood glowing mockingly in the dark water.

They’ll see it from afar. Everyone will see how I was broken.

His gills fluttered frantically along his cheek, opening and closing in desperate, useless gasps. Air burned them. His powerful tail hung limp in the sea, only managing weak, pathetic twitches now and then. No strength left. No fight.

A heavy boot slammed down onto his impaled hands, grinding the nails deeper. White-hot pain exploded behind his eyes.

Stop— please—

“So it’s true,” the hunter’s voice sneered from above. “Your kind really bleed liquid light.”

No. Don’t look. Don’t—

The merman’s thoughts fractured as another wave of agony tore through him. Fresh glowing blood surged around the boot sole. He tried to bite back the broken whimper that escaped his lips, but it came out anyway — small, humiliated, pathetic.

“Not so cocky now, are you?” The boot twisted slowly, crushing the mangled webbing. “All that royal bullshit about being untouchable… about dragging men screaming into the deep. Big scary prince of the abyss.” He let out a harsh laugh. “Look at you now. Absolutely fucking pathetic."

The merman’s body shuddered violently. The glow dripped from his chin, before bleeding into the water below.

He'd taken a sailor once. Dragged him down slow, so slow the man had time to scream in bubbles that rose like little pearls toward a sun he'd never see. The merman had laughed around his gills, laughed, while the light in the human's eyes went out long before his heart stopped.

Now his own light was leaving. Drop by glowing drop. And the hunter was watching.

"Please," he whispered.

The word tasted like ash. Like every soft, loud thing he'd ever broken for sport. He thought of his mother's court—how she'd warned him the surface would make corpses of their kind. That air was just another word for ending. He'd sneered. He'd been so fucking bored.

"Please," he said again, because the abyss wasn't answering, because the deep had never felt so far, because his father's voice wasn't rising from the black to strike this mortal down for daring—

"That's the whole point, Your Highness." The hunter leaned in close, close enough that the merman could see himself in the man's eyes—pale, shattered, dimming. "You can't do shit."

Another twist of the boot. Another scream, smaller this time, worn down to nothing.

His head lolled back, hanging off the pier's edge, and through the blur he saw not stars but depths—phosphorescent gardens where he'd played as a spawnling, pressing his small body into anemones that pulsed light back at him. Safe. Known. The memory hurt worse than the impalement, worse than the air burning his gills, because he'd been happy there. Truly happy. In a way his cruelty had never come close to touching.

His tail gave one last twitch in the water, barely disturbing the surface. The glow beneath him faded to embers, then to nothing, and the last thing he felt was the cold settling in—not trench-cold, not clean, but human cold, surface cold, the endless dry dark that came after light.

Somewhere below, something vast turned in its sleep.

It did not wake.

Feel free to what now? To ignore?? Are you kidding me? Aggressively posts