The following morning was peaceful, thankfully. Liza’s energy was not inexhaustible. After breakfast, Liza gathered wood from the trees near the house, while Martin, Garrick, and Harry loitered by the lakeside. Liza had half a watchful eye over them, but mostly it was the other slaves, who’d holler if they wandered too far away.

“It’s insane, you can’t make sense of time and space,” Harry said, answering one of Martin’s questions of how it was like to be used in Liza’s pussy. “You close your eyes and mouth, tightly, and you just wait it out.”

“I guess getting fucked like that is our new normal,” Martin said, throwing a rock across the water.

Garrick snorted. “I would have contested that a few days ago. But what is there to say now? The time from when we walked towards Eron, it feels like an eternity ago when it was just days. In such a short time, she’s gotten us used to getting fucked, licking her toes, everything. It won’t be long until we call her Mommy like the rest of them, the way they do, and fawn over her. I mean, look…” Garrick didn’t need to shield his eyes from the sun, covered by the clouds. “Hardgum will only dry if the weather allows it, and… Uhh, that entire plan just sounds like a pipedream at this point.”

“Listen to you guys,” Harry said. “It’s as if our roles have reversed and I’m the hopeful one. It hasn’t even been a week of you being here. Did you expect to escape so quickly?”

“I would have liked that, yes.”

“It’ll come. If you’re determined and keep on it, you’ll find a way. Men have escaped the most absurd prisons, in ways you would believe are completely fictional. And yes, it was without magic. She’s keen and smarter than she lets on, but she’s just one mind. It will come.”

Martin chuckled. “That gives me hope. Not just your words, but that you can say it after all the time you’ve spent here.”

“Exactly. And, listen, I may have referred to her behavior as innocent horniness before. But what I mean by that is, if we were to be here for another year, we won’t be starving, we will see the sun and the beautiful skies it inhabits. We will feel the grass under us, hear the waterfall crash. Prisoners would dream of this. The daily life we go through, licking her and all that, see it as a day of work.”

It went quiet at first.

“He’s right,” Martin said. “The painful part about this is imagining a lifetime here, as her slaves. But we’re not spending a bloody lifetime here, are we? We have to escape. But we aren’t in a rush.”

“Slaves!” Liza clapped her hands in the distance. “I want you all at the porch in ten minutes. Mommy needs you to rub some lotion in on her legs.”

“A day of work…” Garrick repeated to his friends beside him. “I suppose.” The puff of clouds shrouding the sun drifted aside, and the rays blared down, the water glimmering underneath it and sitting over Garrick’s skin like a thin, warm veil. There was nothing wrong with this moment, he could appreciate that.

They would escape; Garrick accepted no other future. However, for now, this was the life he had, and that wasn’t the end of the world.