#adrik

um helo im adrik and im a rusian drumer i plae a lot of instromens 2 ummmm i liak hors rideing with my hors luka i fawt in the rusian army and plaed my drum i keped the tempo for the marchrs and sang at nite for them

thats it i think

im sory my dad nevr tawt me how to rite i nevr lerned how to rite as a kid

I may have gone a bit overboard for a badge for @artfight Sprout Fight: Secret Garden + May Flowers

More horses! (and bat)

Had the urge to return to the roots as it were and draw some horses. Don't get to draw them terribly often despite having characters that have them but I made a point of just doing it anyway. Mounts can be an important thing to many adventurers and I love them dearly.

Please do not trace or reupload my art

CW: fear of punishment, cleaning up remains of body parts/blood, whumpee think he's being punished, former whumpee having a crisis at current whumperee, slavery whump, mentions of torture, brief mention of female whumperee, multiple whumpers mentioned, yelling, crying, begging

Masterlist: Here

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Rolan was grateful. It was rare that Master Adrik summoned him for anything other than well-deserved but truly hated punishment, but something about today was clearly different.

He’d been called here to clean up what the master called the Interrogation Room: there was dark blood all over the floor and splattered on a few of the walls, seeping into the cracks like it wanted to become part of the stone forever, and a few small human parts like finger and ear tips were lying on the many tables lining the wall. Those tables also happened to be covered with torture instruments of various types, many of which had various fluids or skin tissue attached to them. 

Once, the sight would have made even a hardened bio-engineering scientist gag, but now Rolan simply knelt, placed his bucket filled with water and lemon, and got to work clearing it all away with barely a wrinkle of his nose. It smelled better than the dungeons, that was for certain. And there was no way he was switching his temporal position as janitor to torture subject by accidentally offending the creature that was his master.

Master Adrik watched him work from the corner of the room that held a simple desk. Covering the desk were a few neat stacks of white papers and a yellow lamp that illuminated the man’s monstrous form, casting most of the room in his shadow. It was a little hard to see the blood in said shadow, but Rolan made do. 

He’d gotten about halfway done with the floor and had actually finished one wall when an irritated scoff made him pause. He looked up and to his right out of the corner of his eye to see if it was a summons. Master Adrik’s eyes were normally gleefully cruel or frantically furious, but right now they only seemed to hold a quiet frustration. 

Rolan bit his lip and kept cleaning. It was unusual for Master Adrik to be quiet for very long. He’d been forced to stay quiet for most of his life, and maintain controlled, and now that he was free he preferred to be the exact opposite. At least in his slave’s presence. 

Still, he said nothing. Master Adrik wasn’t like his four siblings. Unless he made a promise of his volition, as he took those more seriously than even torture, there was no reasoning with him. No better nature to appeal to, nor anything Rolan could do that he liked as a baragaing tool. Except scream, perhaps, and bleed. Oh, and grovel and cry and–

“Stand up.”

Rolan jumped violently, almost knocking over his twice-refilled bucket of water, and stood up on quaking legs. He realized a moment later that he’d too quickly; his head was pounding and his ears popped, so while the master padded over to him on his pawed feet he closed his eyes and prayed the pain would end quickly. 

He was almost relieved. It really had been too quiet without his master’s rough voice filling the cell. This was better. He knew what to expect now, at least.

“Look at me,” Master Adrik ordered. Rolan looked. Gods, he was just so tall. It hurt Rolan’s neck to look all the way up like this, but it hurt even more to tamp down his instinctive panic at seeing the master’s eyes boring into the remnants of Rolan’s broken self.

After a few moments of silence, the creature muttered, “Where are you?”

Rolan tried to swallow past his parched throat but opened his mouth to answer, even after it didn’t work. Ignoring one’s owner was far worse a crime than speaking when not spoken to.

“T-The…In-t-terrogation Room…” he answered, realizing once he’d spoken just how loud even his whispers sounded to him in the stillness of this place, away from the rest of the R-Tower.

“No, you moron,” the fifth snapped, eyes narrowing. “Where are you? Where the fuck did you go?”

He was raising his voice with every word but wasn’t quite shouting, yet Rolan shrank away, barely remembering he was not allowed to kneel. 

“I’m s-sorry, I-I don’t…I don’t u-understand, M-Master,” he whimpered, not trying in the slightest to keep the fear out of his voice. Master Adrik liked when he was afraid. He liked when Rolan pleaded for mercy. So why did he only look angrier?

“Stop fucking sniveling! Why the hell– ugh, okay. Okay! Okay…” He retreated a few steps and then turned his back on Rolan, muttering things to himself in a language Rolan hadn’t practiced enough in recent years to understand anymore.

Rolan stood there and shivered. Was this some type of mind game? Master Adrik liked mind games, true, but he seemed genuinely upset today. There was no coyness in his body language, nor his expression.

Rolan wrapped his arms around his naked body in a weak hug. He wished he could just go back to cleaning up the blood and parts remaining in the room. But that wasn’t up to him.

The master turned back around, eyes set with determination, annoyance and…desperation? That was…Rolan blinked, and whatever he had seen in his master’s eyes was gone. 

“Rolan,” the creature said more calmly. “Explain the process of my creation. Which animals did I come from?”

Alarm bells had been ringing since that first scoff in Rolan’s head, but now they were more like sirens. But he tried to shut his brain up, shut it off – Master was going to hurt him no matter what Rolan said or tried. Rolan was human. He was weak and stupid compared to each one of his creations, and all he could do now was obey them as best he could. 

“A-Armadillo,” he said, voice quavering as he squeezed his eyes shut to try to remember. It was information from a life he’d left behind long ago, and parts of it that hadn’t mattered for too long. “Hedgehog…c-c-coyote? Um…”

Master Adrik listened to him stumble over himself in silence, furry arms folded over his chest and long ears twitching the more Rolan rambled on. Gods, why had Rolan decided to add so many creatures to his last subject’s biology!?

When he was finally done, he breathed a sigh of relief and braced for a punch, stab, or slash for getting one of the creatures wrong – he was sure at least two were off – but nothing happened. After a moment, he peeked, but Master Adrik’s expression hadn’t changed.

“You’re still afraid,” he thought he heard him mutter before he said, more clearly, “Divide three hundred by twenty four.”

What? Now Rolan was really confused and he honestly didn’t think he could even do it. 

“M-May I use p-paper, Master?” he asked timidly. No way in any hell could he do this just in his mind. Was this meant to be a humiliation type of game? Master Adrik knew how much he had once both excelled and enjoyed mathematics and used them for everything in his day to day life. It was different from the animal types.

The creature sighed but nodded, and Rolan thanked him gratefully before scurrying over to the desk and finding an empty sheet amongst the stacks. Holding a pencil in his hands felt strange and forced, and he was still shaking, but something curled in his chest in satisfaction at the sight of his wet, messy hands scratching out numbers on parchment.

He wrote out the division problem without having to think about it and sighed in relief at the realization that all his early years of practice had paid off; it was hard to forget something he spent years of his life memorizing. 

Still, the process of writing and working it all was slow, and he couldn’t forget his annoyed master waiting just a few feet away, with all the weapons in the world that could be used to hurt him lining the still blood covered walls.

Eventually, though, he managed it. Twelve point five, the paper told him. That was right. He knew it was. It had to be. It felt so good to do something like this again. He turned and knelt before remembering he was supposed to be standing and answered his master dutifully with his a respectfully bowed head.

“Three hundred divided by twenty four is twelve point five, M-Master Adrik,” he said. He realized with a bit of shock that he wasn’t stammering as much as he normally did when around his fifth master. His heart wasn’t hammering quite as hard. He was…less afraid?

The master took a few steps closer to him, large, cruel, and powerful. Oh, and there was the old fear, like an old friend who wanted to keep him safe using any means necessary.

“Look at me,” the master said again.

Rolan obeyed while his hands fiddled on his bare thighs. He felt so vulnerable now, kneeling in his master’s shadow, so aware of how easily his skin could be scratched, bruised, sliced, and pierced. He tried to regain the semi-numbness he’d felt when he’d first been summoned here but it was difficult. Why was it so hard to feel numb when you wanted to?

Whatever the master had seen this time while searching his eyes again had not pleased him. Master Adrik sighed, bent his big head, and shook it like his slave had disappointed him.

 Then he looked at Rolan again with the anger the human recognized, and both hated and feared. It was a reminder of all he had done in the past, that anger, and a vision into his future. His last creation, his final master, would hate and hurt him forever for what he had done.

“Why aren’t you there anymore?” his creation asked him angrily, but to Rolan’s surprise, partway through his question, the man’s rough voice broke. “You– where are you? Where the fuck are you?”

“I-I don’t–”

“Don’t fucking say you don’t understand me!” Master Adrik roared. Rolan put his hands over his ears, stricken with fear, but the everything was quiet again a moment later. 

“Who even are you?” he demanded of the human kneeling at his feet. “Where’s that arrogant bastard who did this to me? I know you’re still in there!”

Rolan began to cry. This made no sense. Master Adrik wouldn’t have mistaken him as one of the other slaves; no other had this brand seared into their stomach. Rolan alone was branded in so obvious and open a place. Did his master want another confession?

“I-I…I did thi–” he started, but before he could even blink the creature had come close enough to touch and yanked him to his feet by the arm, his sharp claws digging painfully into Rolan’s bare skin, and glared furiously down into his eyes. Rolan cried out, then clamped a desperate hand over his mouth.

“Scream at me!” the master yelled at him. Rolan shook his head, bewildered, and sobbed. “Swear at me! Insult me– tell me I’m nothing compared to you!”

“I ca– I-I c-c-can’t,” Rolan blubbered. He really couldn’t. He didn’t think it was even possible for him to try. What was this? Why did Master want this?

“P-Please,” he begged. He just wanted this to stop. This weird mind game was too much for him to handle, as usual, but he didn’t even understand the point of this one, unlike the others. Master needed no reason to punish him. He had done so many bad things in his life that nothing could ever make him not worthy of punishment.

“I know you’re in there somewhere!” the master shouted furiously. “You think I won’t hurt you as badly because you’re hiding behind this sniveling mask? You know I will. So come. Out!”

Rolan just bawled. He wanted Master Érik. Master Érik would help him, wouldn’t he? Or Mistress Sascha! She would stop this insanity, even if only for her youngest brother’s sake. Rolan wanted to cry out for them. He wanted to call them to save him, but he didn’t. No one in the R-Tower would come to save him, even if they heard him screams, and Master Adrik would only hurt him more for trying to escape his dues.

But to his utter disbelief, he wasn’t punished in the way he should have been. The master released his arm, and streams of blood fell to the floor along with Rolan’s shivering body, adding to the old, dark fluid now dried the ground. He curled up and continued to sob, but his fifth and final creation’s voice was louder than Rolan’s fear.

“Get out! Just get the fuck out! Go away!”

And as Rolan’s masters had taught and trained him to, Rolan’s mind and body obeyed orders.

He crawled, stumbled, and then ran out of the room, down the hall, and up the stairs. He ran around and around the spiral staircases, past other slaves who merely moved out of his way without looking at him, avoiding every elevator or closed door because he knew instinctively that stopping would mean his body would drop and not get up again on its own. He ran, hands over his face, until he’d made it to one of the tallest rooms in the tower.

He ran through an open door. There was a window, tall and large enough to cover an entire wall, and through it shone the pale sun. So, was what he ludicrously thought, it’s morning. And then he collapsed. His body was still wracked with sobs, his head hurt so much it felt like he was going to die, and he could barely drag quick, ragged breaths in to his lungs.

“Rolan?”

And on top of everything, he felt his heart seize. It was Master Yuri.

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